Tag: Jesus

A Clear Case of Forgiveness

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When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?”

Luke 7:42, ESV

 We are all in debt.  Some owe $10,000.  Others owe $500,000.  But we are all in debt.  And believe me, things are pretty grim.  Many lament our huge national debt, they have figured out that each individual owes thousands of dollars.  It seems very unfair that so much is owed by just a single person.  However, our debt with God and His law is far beyond our ability to pay.

The Father’s intention and focus is to forgive us, it may seem confusing, but He has kicked off a plan that leads to total and comprehensive forgiveness for anyone who will simply believe.  It’s amazing, and fantastical, but He has decided to forgive our debt.  It doesn’t matter in the slightest what we have done.  We may be a mass murdering Satanist, but when we turn at Him, everything is forgiven and then quickly forgotten.

Everyone who looks to Him, and clings to Him, has their debt forgiven.  The debt has been cancelled, and we have been released completely.  There is no liability, nothing is incurred.  We have been incredibily released.  Absolutely forgiven.  There can be no rebuttal.  No one can state otherwise.

There is one solitary issue that remains, although many would argue about its significance.  That issue is reciprocal love.  In your heart of hearts, you fully know your debt.  And you understand its implications.  The scripture states that you will love according to your forgiven debt.  If you’ve been forgiven much, you will love much.

The degree and severity of your iniquity can be forgiven.  But love should fill the vacancy.  He looks and anticipates your response to His offer.  But love really should be your only response.  We love Him and the amazing things He has set in motion.  We should be astounded at His incredibly deep generosity.  Especially when it concerns us so profoundly.

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Upgrading to Joy

by Julie Anne Fidler, BB Weekly Contributor

I don’t know about you, but when I’m feeling ill – particularly with depression – I don’t want to do anything. Getting out of bed is a chore, tackling business or housework is excruciating, and when it’s all over we are twice as exhausted as we were when we started. Church seems out of the question. Reading the Bible seems impossible. Joy is a far-away star hurtling through the cosmos that you can’t grasp and reign in. Your world shuts down and you have no desire to grant access to anyone or anything. Sadness is a great isolator.

One of my favorite websites is www.dictionary.com (a writer’s best friend!) It defines joy as “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying.” The primary words here are “caused by.”  We don’t always feel joy. Heck, nobody does. But if you battle mental illness, that statement is especially true. Satan comes to steal, kill, and destroy and he uses our brain chemistry to do so. He’s so, so good at stealing our joy. But knowing that joy is caused by something should give us a lot of hope!

Maybe the Enemy can snatch our joy, but we can snatch it back. How do we do that? We decide to go against our feelings of despair and exhaustion and pursue it. Job’s suffering makes ours seem almost laughable by comparison and yet even he was able to find the cause of joy and run to it.

“let their flesh be renewed like a child’s;
   let them be restored as in the days of their youth’—
26 then that person can pray to God and find favor with him,
   they will see God’s face and shout for joy;
   he will restore them to full well-being.
27 And they will go to others and say,
   ‘I have sinned, I have perverted what is right,
   but I did not get what I deserved.”

-Job 33:25-27

Job, a man who lost everything and was abandoned by everyone he ever cared for, understood what unlocks joy, and that was God himself.  Jesus, of course, understood the same concept.

“Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” –John 16:24

 

During a very dark period in my life, I started visiting my current church with friends who were already members there. My church is a rather Pentecostal church (no snake-handling or anything crazy like that, I promise) and at the time I was visiting, I was a member of a much more subdued church. I was in so much emotional pain that I opted out of worship altogether. I sat in my seat and cried as others raised their hands and shouted praise and I wondered how they could be so happy when we live in a world that is so cold.

But a funny thing happened as I sat there in tears – the little layer of ice around my heart began to melt. I wasn’t on my feet dancing, but I felt warm peace seep into the frigid hopelessness. I had found a tiny bit of joy, CAUSED by getting out of bed, getting dressed, and sitting in that church pew.

Say the word “joy” and two different pictures come to mind. In the first image, I see someone jumping up and down, pumping their fist in the air, shouting praise to God. In the second image, I see someone quiet and reserved, eyes closed, a tiny, peaceful smile on their lips. I believe that both of these images apply to us. Sometimes joy is all-consuming and we can’t help but shout. Other times, joy is a quiet whisper of hope in our ear, a flicker of happiness that says “take heart, God loves you.”

And I am learning that if we have no joy, whether it’s because we’re suffering a rough bout with our disease or because life is just hard in general, it’s because we’re not close enough to the cause of joy. Often, our minds say there is no hope or joy in this world, so we have to make a decision – are we going to listen to our messed-up emotions, or live by fact, which translates into walking by faith? If we want joy, we have find it.

One of the associate pastors at my church once said something that stuck with me. He said, “I want to be under the spout where the stuff of Heaven comes out.” It may be a little bit cheesy but it’s true. Corporate worship, quiet time alone with God, reading the Word, private worship and surrounding ourselves with people who compliment and encourage our faith are all “the stuff of Heaven” that cause joy. We have to get to the spout.

If you feel the walls closing in around you today, deny your pain, get up, and go find joy.  The joy of the Lord is so powerful that a tiny drop is more than enough, I challenge you today to believe for an outpouring of it. Get up and get under that spout.

 *** 

Julie Anne Fidler is a contributing writer for Brokenbelievers.com.  She comes with a humble and understanding heart for those with a mental illness.  Her writing gift is valued greatly.  Look for her post weekly, on this blog.
She keeps a personal ministry blog at www.mymentalhealthday.blogspot.com.  Read more there.

Julie–From the Heart

by Julie Anne Fidler, Contributor to BB

I accepted Christ as my Savior the day before my thirteenth birthday on May 4, 1992. Some people get saved and don’t feel any different than they did in the moments before they said the ‘Sinner’s Prayer‘, but I sensed that my decision was a huge one. I walked around for the next several months in a state of giddiness not unlike what I experienced on Christmas Eve or the night before my big birthday party. My parents enrolled me in a Jewish day camp that summer where I taught swimming to younger children and the staff and campers were kind enough to endure my ‘Jesus t-shirts’, Amy Grant music, and talk of salvation without objection.

I knew nothing about theology, having only gone to church a small handful of times in my life. I read the Bible verses given to me by the woman who said the Sinner’s Prayer with me. Most of them were about God answering prayer and how all we needed to do was ask Him for what we wanted, and believe He would give it to us. At thirteen years old, it seemed like a pretty good theology to me. I went about my life believing that God was a giant vending machine in the sky; just put your wish in the slot, and out comes your answered prayer!

Although I had wrestled with depression as a young child, it didn’t really hit me full-force until the eighth grade. I had been sexually abused by a family friend until I was eleven years old, and my family was troubled. I had reason to be depressed, but that was the year that my depression became so overwhelming that I wasn’t sure I wanted to live life anymore. The hopelessness and despair only worsened as I made my way through high school, a very brief stint in college, and eventually married life.

I have met countless people who credit their faith with getting them through the darkest times in their lives. I credit my faith for the same thing, only, for me, it wasn’t quite so simple. My faith gave me hope to carry on at times, and confused me to no end at others. I was a Christian, but I was not experiencing joy. I was experiencing crushing sadness, wondering how other Christians could be so happy.  I knew the difference between right and wrong. I knew what sin was, and I knew that sin tempted even the best Christians. What I didn’t grasp was why I desperately wanted to do the right things, why I wanted to have a rich relationship with God, but I was so drawn to self-destruction at every turn.

Somewhere in my late teens or early twenties, I had convinced myself that I simply wasn’t holy enough. I was a bad person who didn’t want God enough. I was somehow spiritually flawed, I decided. I questioned the validity of my own salvation. I concluded that someone who really knew Jesus wouldn’t be so miserable or confused all the time.

When I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder at twenty-three years old, it was in a last-ditch effort to figure out if my problems really were the result of spiritual deficit. I felt like a failure for having to take medication. But after my diagnosis, I started looking back on my old journals to track how far back my problems went. As I read through hopeless page after hopeless page, I began to see a pattern emerge – periods of days or weeks when I felt on fire for God, followed by weeks or days of being too depressed to make the effort. I began to realize that my walk with God had always followed the patterns of my cycles.

I went through many medications before I finally found Seroquel in 2006. Seroquel all but wiped out my rages and helped me sleep. One beautiful Saturday morning in May of 2006, as I sat beside my husband watching my nephew play his Little League game, I looked around at the budding trees and realized I had joy for the first time in recent memory. The longer I took my meds, the easier my walk with God became.

I worked for a good friend of mine several years ago at a ministry for mentally ill adults. He was well aware of my issues, and I told him how hard it was to follow God when all I wanted to do was hurt myself, or sleep for weeks at a time. He told me, “God will not judge you for what goes on in your bipolar brain.” I don’t know what to make of that theology, whether I agree with it or not. But I got the point – God understands our pain and knows that we have limits.

But does that mean we can just dismiss God when we feel crappy?

The older I get, the more I begin to realized that God will not judge us for being tempted, or for feeling a certain way. Jesus was tempted and He felt everything that you and I feel today. It’s what we do with those things that matter. I have a mental illness, but I still have choices. I can choose to go to church and worship God when I’d rather sleep in and cry all Sunday. I can reach out to a friend for support instead of becoming a hermit until the sun shines again. I can read my Bible instead of wallowing in misery.

What my misfiring brain tells me to do and what I CHOOSE to do are often two different things.

We must choose to seek God when everything in us would rather be sick, lonely, and alone. I realize that some people have very severe mental illness and truly cannot choose these things. But for those of you who are like me – we still have options, and we need to exercise them.

We can’t always choose our circumstances, but even in our sickness, we can choose how we respond to them, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

*** 

Julie Anne Fidler is now a contributing writer for Brokenbelievers.com.  She comes with a humble and understanding heart for those with a mental illness.  Her writing gift is valued greatly.  Look for her post weekly, on this blog.
She keeps a personal ministry blog at mymentalhealthday.blogspot.com.  Read more there.

A Gospel That Just May Confuse Us

 

My people have been lost sheep.
      Their shepherds have led them astray
      and turned them loose in the mountains.
   They have lost their way
      and can’t remember how to get back to the sheepfold.                                                  

                                                                                      Jer. 50:6

 

Christians who wander away, or led away away, is a frequent issue with the Lord.  It’s hard to watch someone you love go in a way that brings them pain and destruction.  It hurts doubly when they get turned in the wrong direction.  Jeremiah suggests that there is a personal disobedience as well as a pastoral influence from a shepherd.

Influence from confused shepherds runs rampant through the flock of the Church.  Voices speak and men posture themselves to lure the sheep.  Programs are always percolating and brought out at an opportune time to develop and maintain a momentum and to give the sense of direction and purpose.  This sounds confusing but its not.

The prophet sees and perceives.  There is grief and pain in his words.  He witnesses of a coming judgement.  In our time, the necessity of being ‘pastored‘ has been a less of an issue because of the Holy Spirit’s contact with the believer.  We have the Spirit and His presence.  Now we can turn towards a superintending understanding of the functioning of the Holy Spirit.  But the Holy Spirit doesn’t need our pathetic attempts at pointing out our crudeness and foolishness at the situation.

Jesus Christ loves us, and comes at us through the self-generated issues that could move us to a less then a desirable condition.  But our “pastor” is Jesus, He pastors us through our confusion and sin.  His heart is looking to us.  We are to come to Him, not through a man, but through the presence of God, that envelopes us and adjusts our understanding.

We cannot pretend anymore that our issues of redemption and healing can be understood through anyone else but through the direction of our Lord except Jesus. We do not think that our intervention of a pastor, or healer will bring us any closer.  We connect through Jesus.  He has made himself the only connection of God and myself.

We dare not trust ourselves when it comes at us through so much.  He heals and strengthens through His active and present awareness of us.  We must turn from ‘deceptive noise’ and grab ahold of the promises of an authoritative voice. He rules over us with authority, and a loving voice of guidance.  He comes to us in a very real and definite way.  For He is “one on one” to us in a real recognition to us in our personal connection to the Father.

This needs to become our way that we connect.  We rest in His plan.  Nothing else will placate.  Jesus advances Himself to becoming our Lord and Saviour. We turn to Him to save us, and no one else.