Tag: wisdom

Making a List

This is a scary list. We’re told repeatedly that love is the evidence that disciples are to be identified. Love is the blood of the body. It’s that necessary. It’s critical. We’re called to love (one another) that proves we’re real and authentic.

Some of us are handicapped, either mentally or physically. Our issues are truly formidable, very few understand.

I pretty much live in physical pain now. I struggle with depression. I have some battles that few understand. And I get terribly self-absorbed by all of it. If love is the blood of the Christian then I absolutely need a transfusion. I’m anemic. I’m the proverbial 95 pound spiritual weakling! 😁

“Love one another.” I believe I’m missing this in my spiritual walk. For the most part I operate as “to tolerate one another.” It’s easy to love those who love me, but that’s not how discipleship to Jesus works. He wants us to find enemies to love. (At least I think it does.)

Our Teacher, the Holy Spirit, knows how ignorant we really are. But He is patient and oh so very kind. He has lessons that fit us and our needs. I want to love (usually) and I’m counting on Him to tutor me. How do I do this?

You learn to love by loving.

A few things (I know it’s a terribly incomplete list):

  • To love you must walk in discernment. Learn to “see” the needs of specific people. Contrary to church opinion, discernment is not to pass judgement on another, rather it’s all about seeing needs. Not everyone can do this.
  • To love takes availability. You need to be “ready for use.” This takes a certain amount of skill. I’m a terrible kind of introvert. Sometimes I won’t answer the phone or go to a home group. I sorta resent it. The Spirit keeps putting me in spots that require interaction with others, and I hate it.
  • Love creates humility in us (which takes some doing). As I learn to love I find myself stripped down and washing somebody’s feet. I become a servant who is learning to scrub between the toes if that’s what it takes.
  • To love you must love others just like Jesus loves you. (Yikes!) “The extra mile,” all of that. So tell me, how much has He loved you? Isn’t that supposed to teach you something? Remember, love is a fruit of Him living inside of you.
  • To love creates growing joy. This joy will protect us from legalism. When joy is operational every burden is light–we do our tasks smiling. I heard a preacher speak about J.O.Y. Jesus, Others, and You. In order of importance.
  • To love is to learn how to pray. Intercession is like oxygen to a fire. It’s like one of those old fashioned bellows to a sputtering flame. It pumps air into the pile of twigs and wood to spread the fire and ignite a blaze. We pray and love starts spreading.

To live with hard mental and physical issues as an authentic Christian is profoundly difficult. We get so self-absorbed at times. But being a disciple of love isn’t just for healthy believers, it’s also for us who struggle.

Grace is increased exponentially to those of us with deep physical problems.

I totally believe this. God takes special care as He works on and in us. We can count on Him to give us the extra attention we need as we learn love.

I’ve found that suffering is like learning another language. Changed by His love we are speaking to others in a way they understand. We can communicate with others because we’ve learned how to “speak their language.” We have been taught by God to speak into broken lives because we’ve been broken too.

“We love because he first loved us.”

1 John 4:19

2 Corinthians 12:9

Are You Drowning?

painting of a person swimming underwater
“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia:
that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.“

   2 Corinthians 1:8

“We should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism.”
“But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others’, that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.”

John Piper

It is my deliberateness, and not the impulsiveness that scares me.   I know despair.  I know what it is like to be ‘backed into a corner’ and then feel a totally empty desperation.  But you must understand, there can also be a weird seductiveness to ‘being lost,’ a strange sort of nobility, a twisted kind of weird honor when it comes to despair.

Some people are convinced they are never going to change. They embrace the ‘dark certainties’ of knowing they are profoundly flawed and therefore damned. It’s these dear ones that Jesus especially came for.

Now, this really seems rather bizarre, that people could do this intentionally, deliberately.  But I’m afraid to tell you that it happens all the time.  Despair is chosen over the option of life. This is the ‘lostness’ of the race of Adam.

Perhaps suicide begins before the action? Perhaps it starts days, weeks or months before we actually do the deed?

Pop culture has given us words, albeit in a rather simplistic form.  I just happened to think right now of an old AC/DC  song, ‘Highway to Hell‘.  The lyrics are pretty basic and very simple, but the lead singer seems to really have a chronically, decided dedication to being one of the irretrievably lost. 

The songwriter formats a ‘certain glory’ to being part of the damned.  This is a simplistic approach to the next stop– a more advanced case of stark-white despair, suicide. (We can call this ‘spiritual hubris,’ or even, “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.”)

In dealing with sin we can make two mistakes. One is to make light of it. The other is to be overwhelmed, throw up our hands, and surrender.

When we decide to live this kind of living, we’re pulled into a vortex of a black melancholy with a dash of fatalism, which makes it reasonable and weirdly heroic in some perverse way. We love the dark, and we embrace a fatal life–it becomes our identity.

To escape this ‘drowning despair’ we must first dethrone our right to personal sovereignty.  And secondly, we need to grab the concept that God’s grace has an ultimate power that supersedes our notions of a ‘deserved’ love.  (It’s completely undeserved.)

We must believe that somehow, someway, God chooses us out of a pile–a pile of the worst and ugliest that has ever existed.  And somehow, He delights in doing this, and after all, He is the Lord.

We’re meant to be the people of true hope. 

Our problems, our addictions, force us to clearly renounce our evil folly of despair.  Our issues make us vulnerable.  I’ve discovered that there is a seductiveness to giving up and taking up the sin of despair.  There can be a ‘weird romance’ that lures those who walk out this living DEATH. 

But honestly, is it not even more heroic to live in hope? To live a life full of joy?

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?  Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you.”

Psalm 42:5-6

When Others Are More Gifted Than You

pentecost_holy_spirit

“There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit is the source of them all.”

1 Corinthians 12:4, NLT

“God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another.”

1 Peter 4:10

“Deliver me, O Lord, from that evil man, myself.”

     Thomas Brooks

Several years ago, the Holy Spirit upended my understanding of the Church. It took some time, as I’ve been in full time ministry for almost 40 years now–and that can be good, or bad. I made many mistakes, and naturally blamed most of the failures on others.

Over the years I suppose I had made the Body of Christ into a competitive sport. And although I wouldn’t have phrased it exactly that way, it was how I approached the Christian brothers and sisters in my life. There were simply rungs to be climbed.

A great deal of my effort was generated to receive the proper recognition.

I had misunderstood the nature of being a ‘gifted’ person. As I look back, I was very much like James and John, in Matt. 20:20-22. It wasn’t so much that I was exalting myself, but I felt (?) that I needed to push for all that Jesus had for me. I desperately thought it had to be on a platform.

We must learn to respect the giftedness of others.

Often, this is easy. Encountering those with a special ability, it can be fairly easy to do. When we hear a teacher or preacher, a worship leader or even an amazing writer we often put them on a pedestal. Because of that gifting it becomes fairly simple for the Church to recognize them.

I suspect we’re probably more inclined to operate out of our own envy or frustration. Rather than accepting others, we look for any reason at all to invalidate and disparage them. We scour and search for anything to minimize or reject our “competitor.” To bolster our efforts, we label it as “discernment.” This justifies us, as we think that it is protecting the Church.

The Spirit, out of His infinite inventory, distributes the gifts to the Church.

We honor and respect Him when we acknowledge that. We don’t elevate the person, but we do accept them, and their obvious gifts. We can’t ignore any sin, but we should recognize the Spirit’s decision to use a person in a certain way. Almost always, that gift is hidden in a clay pot. And maybe that’s our difficulty? (I have met some gifted saints who were absolute jerks).

What about a person who has a gift that is seen in someone 30 years younger than you? Paul wrote young Timothy precise instructions on how to handle his youth, and understand how he should understand his position in the Body.

“Don’t let anyone think less of you because you are young. Be an example to all believers in what you say, in the way you live, in your love, your faith, and your purity.”

1 Timothy 4:12

We honor the Spirit when we honor His gifted people.

We should respect the giftedness that others may have. Humility often varies with the person, the gift and the maturity. And yet, it would be foolishness for us to think we have settled this issue, once and for all.

A good place to start. And finish:

“Be desirous, my son, to do the will of another rather than thine own.”

-Unknown

 

Be Thoughtful This Christmas

Some thoughts about the meaning of Christmas. Take these slow, they might be a bit dangerous if applied too fast. :-)

He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.    

–Augustine

There were many who saw the babe, but did not see the salvation.  

–Author Unknown

For the Christ-child who comes is the Master of all; No palace too great, no cottage too small.  

 –Phillips Brooks

Rejoice, that the immortal God is born, so that mortal man may live in eternity.    

–John Hus

His poverty was so great that He was born in another man’s house, and buried in another man’s tomb.    

–John Boys

It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the most profound unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. God became man; Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the incarnation.  

–J.I. Packer

Who can add to Christmas? The perfect motive is that God so loved the world. The perfect gift is that He gave His only Son. The only requirement is to believe in Him. The reward of faith is that you shall have everlasting life.  

–Corrie Ten Boom

The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the Incarnation.  

— J.I. Packer

There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.    

–Thomas Merton

Christmas is based on an exchange of gifts, the gift of God to man – His unspeakable gift of His Son, and the gift of man to God – when we present our bodies a living sacrifice.   

 –Vance Havner

The idea that there’s a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. Actually, maybe even far-fetched to start with, but the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in shit and straw and poverty is genius, and brings me to my knees, literally. To me, as a poet, I am just in awe of that. It makes some sort of poetic sense. It’s the thing that makes me a believer, though it didn’t dawn on me for many years.    

–Bono

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man.   

— C.S. Lewis

Infinite, and an infant. Eternal, and yet born of a woman. Almighty, and yet hanging on a woman’s breast. Supporting a universe, and yet needing to be carried in a mother’s arms. King of angels, and yet the reputed son of Joseph. Heir of all things, and yet the carpenter’s despised son.   

–Charles Spurgeon

Carols stir us. Holy words inspire us. The golden glow from the manger warms us. A little religion at Christmas is fine. But that glow in the manger comes from the Light of the world. It exposes evil and either redeems it or destroys it. The babe in the manger is far more than an object for sentimental sighs. He is the Son of God who must be accepted as ruler – or confronted as rival.  

–John G. Stackhouse, Jr.

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.  

–Charles Dickens

Christmas is for children. But it is for grown-ups too. Even if it is a headache, a chore, and a nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chilled hidebound hearts.  

–Lenora Mattingly Weber

Hark the herald angels sing,
Glory to the newborn king.”
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled.

–Charles Wesley

This Gospel anticipates a world far different from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, where it is “always winter, and never Christmas.” The promise of the Gospel is that it is “always Christmas.”  To be “in Christ” is to enjoy each morning as a Christmas morning with the family of God, celebrating the gift of God around the tree of life.  

–Kevin VanHoozer

The spirit of Christmas needs to be superseded by the Spirit of Christ. The spirit of Christmas is annual; the Spirit of Christ is eternal. The spirit of Christmas is sentimental; the Spirit of Christ is supernatural. The spirit of Christmas is a human product; the Spirit of Christ is a divine person. That makes all the difference in the world.  

–Stuart Briscoe

Here’s a side to the Christmas story that isn’t often told: Those soft little hands, fashioned by the Holy Spirit in Mary’s womb, were made so that nails might be driven through them. Those baby feet, pink and unable to walk, would one day walk up a dusty hill to be nailed to a cross. That sweet infant’s head with sparkling eyes and eager mouth was formed so that someday men might force a crown of thorns onto it. That tender body, warm and soft, wrapped in swaddling clothes, would one day be ripped open by a spear. Jesus was born to die.    

–John MacArthur