Great are the works of the Lord,
studied by all who delight in them.
(Psalm 111:2)
Lessons on Grace
This duck can glide smoothly through what looks like turbulence because the water is actually calm. The peaceful surface of the water merely picks up the image of the atmosphere around it.
Sometimes I fail to enjoy the peace the Lord has granted me because I am caught up in the turbulence of the lives of people I care about. It’s a hazard for empathic people whose sensitivity causes them to pick up other people’s emotions. The Bible calls it the gift of mercy. It can be a useful tool, but it is a tool, not a reward, and it needs to be used with skill and wisdom. One of the great frustrations in my life has been the seemingly callous attitudes of people who are oblivious to the pain of others. Nothing stirs up my self-labeled righteous indignation more than non-compassionate people who shrug in the presence of suffering and say, “Not my problem.” It makes me furious!
James 2:14-17 says it’s a useless faith that walks past suffering and says, “Go in peace; keep warm and well-fed,” or as Dickens wrote, “Are there no workhouses?”
But this week the Lord has been smacking me upside the head (ever so lovingly) about misaligned compassion that is actually a lack of faith on my part.
I have discovered 1 Corinthians 12:9,10 to be true in my life.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. ” (1 Corinthians 12:9,10)
It’s not a matter of self-imposed martyrdom or false humility, but I am learning that it is in the areas where I have been, quite frankly, an utter failure that God is most able to communicate his goodness through me. His goodness amazes me and I love to talk about it. But this is where he called me up on the carpet this week.
“Why, when you have experienced My goodness, do you think that I am not able to do the same thing for others?”
“When did I say that?”
“When you keep jumping in to fix things for people. How will they learn to call on Me when they can call on you? Why do you assume I don’t care? Maybe I’m allowing some of the troubles in their lives for a purpose. I want them to ask Me, to know Me. I’ve called you to pray, to intercede. I want you to stand in the gap, not stand in the way.”
I admit, I’m bad at the whole boundaries thing. I was an over-responsible eldest child and had my personal boundaries violated so often I don’t have an innate sense of when I need to step back and let God be God. (Yes, Lord, I realize that is an explanation and not an excuse.) I’m still learning.
I noticed that parents of my students who applied “tough love” as their go-to position used it on teens who had known precious little “gentle love” in the first place. I felt agony for overachiever-types who were locked out of the house for being five minutes late for a 10 p.m. curfew. On the other hand I have also seen far too many young people grow up with a sense of learned helplessness when their parents ran defense for them with excuse after excuse for their kid’s lack of self-discipline. I’ve also been caught, more than once, pouring more effort into changing someone’s circumstances than they themselves put into changing the habits that got them there. I’ve seen people who haven’t been tempered by adversity presume on the grace of God with a sense of entitlement that reveals a shallow unloving relationship where the Creator of the universe is viewed as their personal Santa Claus. Someone told me the sin of presumption David recognized as a problem in Psalm 19 is assuming God is here to serve your agenda, instead of you being here to serve God’s.
But God forgive me, sometimes I’ve been the enabler, and it’s been the result of my own lack of faith.
Like everyone else I tend to hear what I want to hear. The folk who easily gravitate to “tough love” need to hear the message “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” (Proverbs 21:13) and the folk who rush in, striving to fix the world themselves need to hear, ““I am the Lord, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:17)
The last one is me. One couple I admire who have cared for thousands of orphans and fed the hungry and healed the sick and introduced millions to the goodness of God is Heidi and Roland Baker of Mozambique. Heidi repeats, “God is God. I am not.”
This is what I am learning: God gives plentiful grace for our own circumstances. He has grace in overabundant supply for anyone who asks Him. He does not necessarily give me grace to deal with problems that are not mine. When I am overly influenced by the turbulent atmosphere all around me I lose my peace and when I am worried or afraid I can’t move. I’m no help to anyone. My joy becomes forced and my ability to love is limited to my own willpower. I need to be on solid ground myself before I can throw a lifesaver to a drowning person. I need, like this duck on the lake, to appreciate the peace that is mine in Jesus Christ and move on that.
Sorry, Lord. Give me discernment to stand with you and not for you. Your grace is sufficient for all the people I care about as well. I trust you.
Share this:
Nothing
Jeremiah didn’t get it. Essentially He complained to God, “You asked me to go pay good money and sign legal documents to purchase a piece of land that you already told me will be captured by foreign invaders. I can see the destruction that’s coming; you made me a prophet, remember? This does not seem like good stewardship to me.”
“You don’t get it because you’re too short-sighted, Jerry. I have a plan that goes beyond your generation, a plan that will bring long-lasting peace and prosperity and a renewed relationship with me. You weep and wail and get depressed because you see the immediate pain of loss. I see the joy of restoration,” God answered.
“You just prayed, ‘Ah, Sovereign Lord, nothing is too hard for You.’
Were you even listening to yourself? I’m asking you an obviously rhetorical question here. ‘Is anything too hard for me?’
Care to answer?
Trust me, Jerry.
….And that is not a suggestion.”
(My very, very loose paraphrase of Jeremiah 32)
Share this:
Presently
The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Share this:
Giving It Up
“Lord in my confusion all my strength is giving in.
My adversary’s everywhere.
It seems that there’s no way to win.
Then, I hear Your voice all through me
Telling me this battle’s Yours, not mine.
I have no choice left to me, but to yield to Your design
As You take it from my hands what can I do
But lift them up in sacrifice to You?
O Lord, Your loving kindness is everlasting,
That’s why I sing.
O Lord, Your loving kindness endures forever
And You are able to deliver me.
Deliver me!”
(From Song of Deliverance by Marty Goetz)
Share this:
Shelter
I went down by the creek to look for pussy willows. Instead, I found a nest from last summer.
The inborn urge to fly thousands of miles to a place never before seen must be incredibly strong to make a bird want to leave its familiar nest.
When my friend was dying of breast cancer she told me, “Every day I long to see Jesus more and more. I can’t wait to see him.”
And then she left, leaving her earthly shelter, her broken dysfunctional temporary shelter behind.
The most vital question to ask about all who claim to be Christian is this: Have they a soul thirst for God? Do they long for this? Is there something about them that tells you that they are always waiting for His next manifestation of Himself? Is their life centred on Him? Can they say with Paul that they forget everything in the past? Do they press forward more and more that they might know Him and that the knowledge might increase, until eventually beyond death and the grave they may bask eternally in ‘the sunshine of His face?’ That I might know him! — Martyn Lloyd-Jones
We know that if our earthly house—a mere tent that can easily be taken down—is destroyed, we will then live in an eternal home in the heavens, a building crafted by divine—not human—hands. Currently, in this tent of a house, we continue to groan and ache with a deep desire to be sheltered in our permanent home because then we will be truly clothed and comfortable, protected by a covering for our current nakedness. The fact is that in this tent we anxiously moan, fearing the naked truth of our reality. What we crave above all is to be clothed so that what is temporary and mortal can be wrapped completely in life. The One who has worked and tailored us for this is God Himself, who has gifted His Spirit to us as a pledge toward our permanent home. In light of this, we live with a daring passion and know that our time spent in this body is also time we are not present with the Lord. The path we walk is charted by faith, not by what we see with our eyes. There is no doubt that we live with a daring passion, but in the end we prefer to be gone from this body so that we can be at home with the Lord.
(2 Corinthians 5:1-8 The Voice)
Every miraculous healing is a foretaste of what God has planned for us. Healing is wonderful, but it is only a sign pointing to the day when the ones Jesus Christ bought with His own blood will no longer need healing, because our frail bodies will be replaced by immortal resurrected bodies.
Share this:
Go-between
“Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message second-hand. One of Israel’s fatal mistakes was their insistence on having a human king rather than resting on the theocratic rule of God over them. We can detect a note of sadness in the word of the Lord, ‘they have rejected me from being king over them’ (1 Sam. 8:7). The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between. In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change.”
― Richard J. Foster
Share this:
A Day of Celebration for a Miracle!
Today is a day of celebration, not only because it is our precious granddaughter’s birthday (a miracle herself), but because it has been one year since the disaster that struck her family led to a miracle and taught us so much about the abundant love of God.
For those who have not read the story here before, her Daddy went to the hospital with what he thought was the flu and a pulled hamstring. It turned out to be necrotising fasciitis –flesh eating disease. After surgery his blood pressure crashed and he experienced multiple organ failure. He was on total life support and bleeding out. Privately, a team of highly skilled physicians treating him gave him 0% chance of survival. One of them said, “If this guy survives it will be the biggest miracle I have ever seen.”
Our daughter’s Facebook posts, intended to save time and answer friend’s questions, went viral and tens of thousands of people around the world joined in the effort to pray for him. On Good Friday last year he bled into his lungs and his condition was so unstable he couldn’t be moved across the hall for more surgery, so it had to be done in his room. Within half an hour of hearing the news a hundred people showed up in the hospital to pray for him (many more met in homes) and he survived that day. On Easter Sunday morning he responded to his wife’s voice and opened an eye.
Defying predictions that if he survived he would lose limbs, suffer brain damage, need dialysis indefinitely and be in rehab learning to cope with multiple disabilities for a very long time, he was pronounced medically cleared forty days later, and ten days after that walked into his church unaided -on Pentecost Sunday. He stood and gave the sermon the week after that. One of the specialists said to another, “You know it’s a miracle that guy is alive.”
Throughout the experience we saw a demonstration of love as God raised up an army of praying people -in his room, in the waiting room, in groups in homes and in African, Mexican, and Inuit villages and churches across the country. In the process He healed the hearts of many of those people who had suffered the pain of disappointment and moved many other Christians to reconcile their differences that they might come in unity to pray for not only our son-in-law, but a broken big C Church universal. God showed us that the church is like a sleeping giant who needs healing from hidden corruption with broken dysfunctional parts that do not communicate with each other. His desire is to restore the church and see it raised up to be the influence and demonstration of love He intended.
Like Ezekiel or Hosea in the Bible whose lives were a picture of what God wanted to do, our son-in-love gave God permission to do whatever it took to get him to a place where God wanted him to be, and was willing to lay down his life for his friends, and for the church. God took him up on that offer, and while he slept in a coma, accomplished everything our son-in-love had been striving to teach others.
This past year has been quite the ride. Our son-in-love is back to playing the sports he loves and except for a bit of decreasing pain in his feet that was a side-effect of the medications, and an impressive scar that covers most of the back of his leg, is in better physical condition than before he became ill. God has been faithful and kind beyond anything we understood before.
Our little granddaughter says, “I think Jesus healed my Daddy because he knows we like to jump on him and He is good.”
With her we celebrate and sing. God is so good! This is going to be a great party.
Share this:
One Thing I Have Asked
The Lord is my Light and my Salvation—whom shall I fear or dread? The Lord is the Refuge and Stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked, even my enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though a host encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, [even then] in this will I be confident.
One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek, inquire for, and [insistently] require: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord [in His presence] all the days of my life, to behold and gaze upon the beauty [the sweet attractiveness and the delightful loveliness] of the Lord and to meditate, consider, and inquire in His temple.
For in the day of trouble He will hide me in His shelter; in the secret place of His tent will He hide me; He will set me high upon a rock.
And now shall my head be lifted up above my enemies round about me; in His tent I will offer sacrifices and shouting of joy; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord. (Psalm 27: 1-6 Amplified)
Charis: Subject to Change 