“The true follower of Christ will not ask, “If I embrace this truth, what will it cost me?” Rather he will say, “This is truth. God help me to walk in it, let come what may!”
-A. W. Tozer
Have I not commanded you?
Be strong and courageous.
Do not be frightened,
and do not be dismayed,
for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.
(Joshua 1:9)
“I can’t pray about my problems. I was taught that it is selfish to pray for myself.”
I understood my friend when she told me this. I was also taught that asking anything for yourself was self-centered and we need to be other-centered. But at the heart of the message we were taught is the fear of not having enough to go around. Self-sacrifice can also be self-centered in a way, as bizarre as that sounds, because it is based on a fear that we will have to cover for God’s short-comings.
God is not on a budget.
While praying for ourselves and our needs can be a sign of self-focus, I am reminded of the airline stewardess’ lecture about affixing your own oxygen mask before helping anyone else. If our own love tanks are running on empty, if we don’t know how much God loves us and who we are in him, we tend to either ignore or sacrifice ourselves to meet other people’s needs, and eventually we will run out, burn out, and die out.
The problem is that we view prayer as a one-way conversation asking for things. I have learned prayer is seeking a closer relationship with the Lover of my soul. We give out of the abundance of his love. As one of my friends said “Invest heavily in worshipping God and soaking up his love, then give the interest and not the capital and you won’t run dry.” When I find myself feeling resentful of other people’s neediness and their expectations of me it is usually because I am running on empty. I need, like Jesus did, to go away and spend more time with the Lord.
As I look at the immensity of the sky I am reminded of the immensity of his love. How much sky do you need? How much love do you need? Ask. He’s got more for you than you ever imagined or dared to think. Then give freely what you have freely received. There’s more where that came from.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20, 21)
For I will pour water on him who is thirsty,
And floods on the dry ground;
I will pour My Spirit on your descendants,
And My blessing on your offspring
(Isaiah 44:3)
Our son and his wife and their two children moved into temporary housing this week. They now have a place of their own after being homeless all summer when their house (along with thousands of others) was flooded in Alberta. It’s a cramped two room trailer in a new neighbourhood of identical cramped trailers and a far cry from what they had, but they are thankful.
The children are back to school. Our granddaughter’s school yard is full of portable classrooms as it is also accommodating students who no longer have their own school buildings. One of those buildings was the beautiful new Catholic school, Holy Spirit Academy.
“We have to make room for Holy Spirit now,” she told me.
Indeed we do, sweetheart.
Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”
Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:10-14)
The town has only one problem. It’s dead.
Every day its streets bustle with activity, but as the sun sets the tinker lays down his tools, the blacksmith’s forge goes cold, Miss Bailey balances her bell and pointer and dunce cap on the stool in the corner. The Northwest Mounted Police recruit drops his British accent and hangs his red serge on the costume rack. The inhabitants of Fort Steele leave via the employees exit to the parking lot and carpool home to the next town, because no one actually inhabits in this one.
It’s dead.
When pioneers built the livery and school and churches and hotel and shops Fort Steele glistened with the promise of wealth. Since gold had been discovered in the nearby Wildhorse Creek all sorts of adventurous trail-blazing men streamed in, and after a tense situation with the first dwellers in the area was settled without violence, the abundant beauty and riches of the valley convinced them to invite their wives and children to join them.
The town of Fort Steele, named in honour of Superintendent Sam Steele of the Northwest Mounted Police who settled the uprising, basked in potential. Second sons and peasant entrepreneurs who left Europe behind prospered. But prosperity has a way of being usurped and the man who represented the town’s interests in parliament, retired British army officer Colonel Baker, had a way of also representing his own interests. The promised railway changed course. The station was built on Colonel Baker’s property instead, too far away to serve a town in horse and buggy days. Eventually people started moving to be closer to the railroad life-line. Eventually shopkeepers and trades people followed.
The result was an abandoned ghost town turned living history museum fifty years later.
When we first moved to this area, when our children were young, we often visited the town. We warned the kids not to barge into the house in the photo at the top because someone still lived there. Now no one lives there.
This week I was reading in the book of Revelation about the church of Sardis.
“To the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. “
This reminded me of Fort Steele and the fun events we attend there, going to marvelous concerts in the old theatre, sharing potlucks around a pot-bellied stove in the NWMP barracks in the deep cold of winter, attending weddings seated around the huge gazebo in the hot summer sun, celebrating Thanksgiving in the garden produce-bedecked Presbyterian Church followed by a groaning table feast in the hotel. The place is full of activity –but no one lives there. It’s all an act.
No one is born there, or moves there, or grows up there, or grows old there.
This is the rest of the message to the church at Sardis: Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.
I wonder if it isn’t easier, when we are in churches that have become monuments to past moves of God, churches whose congregations are dwindling, to either practise willful blindness toward creeping death or abandon them to follow the newest thing. The church in Sardis was not given either option. They were not told to pick up and move to Philadelphia where the church was living love. They were told to wake up, strengthen what remained, hold fast, turn from deadly thinking and change. A remnant –an uncompromised scrap of the fabric that once made up this church remained to help them.
Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.
When folks in the big C church at large choose to pronounce death before the Lord does (and He does do this when a group is so far gone it becomes toxic) they could be cutting off those few who still walk in victory, who faithfully live worthy of their callings right where they are, without denying the seriousness of conditions of those around them. They are beacons of hope, worthy of our prayers and support. Revival is about breathing life into that which once was thriving, but is now dying.
God is still able to revive and restore. Our part is to let go of our reputations and change our ways to match His. Jesus knows all about resurrection.
Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. (Revelation 3:6)
Those who see are often loyal folk who “insist on seeing because they care for the institution and want to see it succeed.” True prophetic voices speak the truth in love for the purpose of building up the body of Christ, not for tearing it apart. I found this TED lecture on willful blindness by Margaret Heffernan, a secular expert on what makes businesses work, an eye-opener.
“Gentleness is not apathy but is an aggressive expression of how we view people. We see people as so valuable that we deal with them in gentleness, fearing the slightest damage to one for whom Christ died. To be apathetic is to turn people over to mean and destructive elements, to truly love people cause for us to be aggressively gentle.”― Gayle D. Erwin, Spirit Style
I have told my kids to avoid burning bridges. It’s amazing the way people turn up in our lives thirty years after we were sorely tempted to tell them what we thought of them and their stupid job the day we were told to clean out our desk. What is truly amazing is that people can change and thirty years later enemies can become friends.
I am so grateful that the Lord put a guard over my mouth sometimes (although, alas, sometimes I shouted over it.) I’m so glad gentle folk did not curse me when I was so angry and hurt by some folks in the church and walked away in disappointment. (Discussions about which denomination would be the greatest in heaven were as tiresome to me as the disciples squabbles were to Jesus.) I am so thankful the gentle ones not only talked about grace; they practised it.
“Speaking the truth in love” is less about criticizing that part of people’s lives which is dead or rotten and more about pointing out the part of them that God sees – the part of them which, like the water lilies I saw in this pond with its dead wood, yearns to live and grow and blossom.
It also struck me this week, whilst reading the apostle Paul’s qualifications to write the letter to the Galatians, that God knew who Saul was going to be even when he was violently opposed to Jesus Christ and threatened his followers. God saw something in him even then and chose him in advance for a special mission. Unlike many of us would have, given the opportunity, Christ did not curse him. When Jesus spoke the truth to him it was to tell him who he really was.
Today I read another blog publicly condemning some well-known ministers. One commenter was quite willing to call them “accursed” for what he considered to be inaccurate doctrine.
There is a reason why Paul told Timothy and Titus that leaders need to be able to teach, but with gentleness. It could be that God is simply not finished with the people they are charged to serve and love. It could be that people whose understanding of God is not yet complete (and whose is?) are people in process and need, like Apollos, to be taken aside and gently and lovingly taught by someone who actually has a relationship with them, rather than be publicly executed by a stranger.
Decisions to remove those who have become toxic to the body from positions of influence can only be made by those who love deeply and are willing to lay down their lives for another in their care. Poor teaching is best routed by good teaching.
We do not need not be contentious in order to contend for the faith.
Again I say, don’t get involved in foolish, ignorant arguments that only start fights. A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people. Gently instruct those who oppose the truth. Perhaps God will change those people’s hearts, and they will learn the truth. Then they will come to their senses and escape from the devil’s trap. For they have been held captive by him to do whatever he wants. (2 Timothy 2:23-26)
The point of preaching the good news of the Kingdom of God has never been to make bigger, fatter caterpillars.
Now all of us, with our faces unveiled,
reflect the glory of the Lord as if we are mirrors;
and so we are being transformed,
metamorphosed,
into His same image from one radiance of glory to another,
just as the Spirit of the Lord accomplishes it.
(2 Corinthians 3:18)
Well here it is past midnight, again.
It’s time to let go of this day, but I don’t want to let go. I want to squeeze more out of it.
Hey, God! I still have questions! I don’t understand what your plans are in regards to this flood thing. My kid’s house has a big old “UNINHABITABLE” sign slapped on it now after 8 feet of sewage-contaminated river water swamped everything they worked so hard for and has left nothing but a mess and a huge mortgage. What now? This waiting, waiting, waiting is getting a little hard on the nerves, not just for them (and us) but for everyone in their town. I know you promised to never leave your children destitute or begging for bread, but I’m watching my grandkids having to let go of their beds, their bikes, their books, their clothes -everything that is familiar. I’m watching my son and daughter-in-law who are the hardest-working, most giving people I know, just standing by, unable to do any more work, feeling exhausted and discouraged with nothing left to give and no home to go home to.
This is hard Lord. I would appreciate some answers about now.
And as I try to figure out how to help them -and can’t do it- I am reminded that God promises to give peace that passes understanding. God is not logical. Neither is he illogical. He is supra-logical, transcendent. He cares about our minds enough to protect them with his peace, but his peace requires a bit of letting go of our own right to understand.
Don’t worry over anything whatever; tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6,7)
Elisabeth Elliot wrote, “Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.”
To tell you the truth, I would be rather disappointed in a God who is no smarter than I am. The most intellectually wealthy folks on earth (and I’ve known a few) have trouble squeezing their brains through the eye of the needle as much as any rich man’s stuff-laden camel. Brains are not enough. In fact our heads tend to get stuck in narrow places or throw our balance off when they become too big. Unless we are willing to jettison not only some of our stuff but our need to comprehend the eternal repercussions of any event right now, or at least submit that need to the One who can see the whole big, B-I-G picture, there is no peace.
The peace that passes understanding leaves our understanding in the dust.
You have brought me through so many tough, tight places, Lord. I will remember and honour you by trusting you and going to bed now -in peace.
P.S. It will be interesting to see how you get us out of this one.
When my anxious thoughts multiply within me,
Your consolations delight my soul.
(Psalm 94: 19)
In school we learned that in the physical realm for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I wonder if, in the spiritual realm, for every anxiety there is an equal and opposite consolation available.
I wonder if there is, hidden in every adversity, an opportunity for greater blessing.
I wonder if, in His grace, God allows some losses in our lives knowing that His justice requires the one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy to pay back many times over what he took.
Now that’s multiplication.
Be still in the presence of the Lord,
and wait patiently for him to act…
The wicked plot against the godly;
they snarl at them in defiance.
But the Lord just laughs,
for he sees their day of judgment coming.
(Psalm 37:7, 12,13)
Seek the Lord.
Seek the Lord.
Seek the Lord.
And wait.
This is going to be good!
Charis: Subject to Change 