D = (E + R) – 05/15/2016

WARNING:PREACHY  (and sort of longish.  Oh! and quite likely a little offensive)

Galatians 1:6-9

⁶ I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— ⁷ which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. ⁸ But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! ⁹ As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!

In Matthew 21, Jesus went into Jerusalem, the event that the Bible titles as The Triumphal Entry.  I reject this title and description even though it is written in the Bible (GASP – I know!).  But really, how triumphal is it that the people who were calling out praise and welcoming Jesus this week, were the very same people who were calling for him to be crucified (Matt. 27:22) in the very next? (One of these days I will write about this and why people who love the study of Revelations and End Times things should spend some time with this text.)  So in Matt. 21 Jesus is going into Jerusalem where the people praise Him and lay their cloaks or palm branches along his path, then, in a week’s time these same people turned and no longer sang his praises, for they were calling for Pilate to crucify him.  This event was driven by the expectations of the people.  The people expected Jesus to come in as a warrior king (like King David of old) and free them from the oppression of Roman rule, but once they realized Jesus was not going to fill their expected role as King they took cue from the Jews and called for him to be crucified.  Sort of why Judas had a problem with him. 

I bring this up because we humans always have Expectations, and when the Reality of those Expectations are not satisfied we become Disappointed.  Thus the equation D = E+R (Disappointment= Expectations + Reality).

In Galatians 1, Paul is astonished that the Galatians are turning from the original gospel they received from him, that someone else was coming in and confusing them with another non-gospel message.  It seems plausible to me that the Galatians were so quickly turning because they may have had Expectations that were not being met by the gospel Paul preached.

I think this sort of thing is epidemic among people today.  I cannot tell you how many people I know who were active in the church but eventually decided to scrap their faith completely.  While I do not know what gospel these friends received at first, too many of them have turned from Jesus altogether and have rejected the true gospel today.

So what is the true Gospel message that Paul is referring to?  We find it in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4;

“³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…”

The true gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I think there is much Disappointment among converts to the faith, because they Expected something of becoming a Christian that apparently didn’t happen.  So people either leave their faith all together, or they seek out a preacher/church that will tell them what they want to hear.  We people love agreeing with anyone who agrees with us, regardless if what we think is correct or not.

While I cannot know what the Galatians were hearing then, I will  broach one of the prevalent non-gospel ideas of today.  This is the idea that “all dogs go to heaven”.  

It is popular to believe that if we have ever walked forward at a Billy Graham crusade, raised our hand at a church youth camp meeting, or can locate our baptismal certificate from when we were babies, that we are heaven bound when we die.  This is a damnable idea that strips Jesus of the very efforts of His blood stained cross.

Everyone is in heaven?  

Seriously, the very idea strips our Lord of the victory that He bought with his passion.  The very concept makes Jesus inconsequential because we Expect that God just automatically gives our deceased loved ones a place in His heaven.  We forget the “do not judge” (Matt. 7) where our loved one’s eternal destinies are concerned.  When our loved ones die, it often just makes us feel better to believe in our own thinking about the matter – which is not the gospel at all.

I do a lot of funerals, and most people's thinking seems pretty much the same to me.  ‘The deceased are going to be waiting for us in heaven when we die.’  

One day I did a funeral for a man whose wife and mistress were in the same room.  In the mind of the wife, the man was a bastard who deserved to rot in hell, and in the mind of the mistress, he was a great man who would meet her again one day in heaven.  What is clear to me is that nobody thinks to ask Jesus His thoughts?  No, people are just happy to assume that God thinks like we do.  And that just is not Reality.

This is where the true gospel of God comes in. 

1. Jesus died on the cross to destroy sin and death.  This was His purpose for being born.  Jesus was born to make a path for us humans to have a relationship with God again – to destroy the sin barrier from the days of Adam.

2. Jesus was buried.  When He was buried, it appeared that it was over, the devil actually had the final say.  Sort of like how it feels to us when our loved ones die, and that relationship is painfully and finally finished in this life. 

3. Jesus rose from the dead.  When He rose again, there was hope again, that there was life, right now, for all of eternity with God the Father.  Sin and death were at long last destroyed, for the dead man had rose back to life thus proving His words true- "Relationship with the God of the universe was possible again."

The above is the gospel message, but it has a caveat.  The gospel requires a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit of Jesus in this life, right now (John 14).   Too often, we people want so bad to see our deceased loved ones again that we ignore this part.  And trust me, I get it. 

I have lost loved ones to death; it would be very easy for me to ignore the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus in order to believe that my loved ones are in heaven just waiting for me.  The problem with this notion is that it's just not honest.  The truth is that I am too human and too ignorant to know the Reality of another man’s eternal destiny, so I am relegated to just trusting that Jesus is a righteous and fair judge.  My real position is to simply just trust Him.  Am I willing to trust Him even if my loved one’s eternal destiny is not as I Expect?  That’s the question.  It is the true gospel of Jesus that elicits my faith, here and now, it is a Reality that is rooted in what is true, and not simply contrived by me or my own imagined Expectations for the future.  It is an active trust in a real savior who is living and present in my everyday life through the Holy Spirit of God; a faith of Realty.

And yet, many people will reject this Gospel simply because accepting it requires a dying to self.  Many will reject the true gospel for many reasons, but mainly because we cannot get past our own imagined thinking about Reality and refuse to accept anything other than what makes sense to "me". 

The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, is the true gospel that Paul was preaching to the Galatians, and this is the gospel that you and I need to hold tight to.  If we don’t, I fear that we will know much Disappointment with Life which is caused because the Reality will prove not to meet our own Expectations.

I pray that as we all go through our faith journeys, that we will recognize a real faith in the living Jesus who conforms us the reality of this life.

Philippians 4:4-7

⁴ Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. ⁵ Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; ⁶ do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. ⁷ And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

 

My First Soul Mate - 5/8/2016

WARNING:PREACHY

Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness. 

(Matthew 10:1)

As I was in prayer this morning (5/6/2016), I had a train of thought that led me to believe that I have an unclean spirit in my soul.  I’m not talking about demon possession, but I do believe that I have a visiting demon in my life, and when it comes I welcome it like an old friend. 

In fact, my visiting demon is an old friend and has been with me since I was really young.  I don’t exactly know when we first met or when we became friends, but over time our friendship became more than just a friendship.  It was with me though the terrible pre-teen and teen years when the essence of myself was becoming itself.  This unclean spirit actually became my first real soul-mate because it alone was there when I so often poured out my confused angst feelings.  It was there for me in the deepest moments of my life.  Today, this impure spirit comes visiting me every so often and I welcome it in like an old dear friend, even asking Jesus to leave me alone for a while while we visit.

Someone may believe that I am mistaken, that this ‘impure spirit’, as I call it, was really just the Holy Spirit guiding me through that hard time in my life.  But that someone would be wrong because I can identify the spirit by how it manifests itself in my life.  This unclean spirit physically manifests itself in sexuality, and not the healthy kind either. 

When this spirit shows up, I get an old insatiable desire for pornography.  In many ways it’s almost nostalgic for me, and in some sick way I am comforted in it.  When this feeling comes over me I think of myself as an addict who is helpless to say “no”, and who really doesn’t want to say no anyway.  I wonder if this isn’t how a battered woman feels in her unhealthy relationship with the man that she loves.

As I ponder these things I know that I am not alone in this.  I can see the manifestations of other people in their own lives as clearly as I can see my own.  And no, the manifestation of an unclean spirit is not always in pornography.  Unclean spirits manifest themselves in our lives a million different ways, whether it be in the recurring negative moods that we so easily enjoy, feelings of inadequacy that we so willingly believe, the food that we binge for comfort, or drugs, or alcohol, or sex, or risk taking, or relationships, or whatever.  The manifestations of an unclean spirit really are numerous.

When I became a Christian, at 24 years of age, I experienced a very real dying to myself as the Holy Spirit of God entered into me and made me a new person on the inside.  I now think that this experience was the spiritual eviction of this unclean spirit in me and the filling of the Holy Spirit in my life.  That every now and then the unclean spirit returns seeking to reclaim its home and this visit creates a cosmic battle in the very core of my soul while its here.

Will this unclean spirit ever finally leave me alone?  I really don't know, but I do know that the times that it comes is much easier to handle when I am soaked in the community of God's people and in His word.

~ Come Holy Spirit, please continue to fill me and leave no room for an unclean spirit within me.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

(2 Corinthians 5:17)

Not Through Man – 05/01/2016

WARNING: PREACHY

¹Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man,

but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—…

(Galatians 1:1)

I have noticed that many people today are not as opposed to the idea of God as they are the reality of having to go to church.  Let’s face it, church can be jab-me-in-the-eye-with-a-stick boring at times.  Even if it isn’t “boring” it can often be little better than a stage show that could have been missed all together.  I’ve experienced this myself so I know it’s true.

I had coffee with a friend this week and we talked about the filling of the Holy Spirit of God in a person’s life, the reality of the Spirit of Jesus residing in Christians.  We discussed the very real problems that exist in the church as we men try to determine the reality of one man’s filling or not.  We agreed that while we might have problems among our churches as we men try to assess such things, and all that matters is what has transpired between the man and God.  The manifested reality of God’s Holy Spirit in the man’s life will be evident even if that evidence is different than what we men are looking for.

This discussion is important in light of St. Paul’s introduction of himself in his letter to the Galatian church.  In chapter one and verse one Paul identifies that he was an apostle, but not because men said so.  The credentials which made him an apostle were because God, alone, said so.  Paul continues and points out how it was God who met him and drastically changed his life.  He had a very real external and internal experience with God by which he transformed into the apostle he was.  It mattered not what man thought, it only mattered what God knew.

So what’s the point? 

The point is that there is a difference between going to church because someone tells us to go and being a part of the church because we have had an honest to goodness experience with the God of the universe and the Spirit of Jesus now resides in us.  We go to church not because of man but we are a part of the church because Jesus rose from the dead.

¹⁶ Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?

(1 Corinthians 3:16)

My Lack of Concern - 05/01/2016

WARNING: PREACHY

I’ve been considering lately my lack of concern for those who don’t care about their spiritual lives.  Many of my fellows would say that I am not being Christian in this but this is where I'm at.  I’m fully engaged with non-believers who are concerned for their spiritual lives and I am very happy to work with and pray for them, but for those who could care less, I really don’t feel like God is directing me to stress about them in all of my free time.  And yes, my voice dripped with sarcasm as I wrote that last comment.

I have an acquaintance.   One day while meeting with him he made an off comment with a hint of sneer in his tone, “Do you want me to repent too?”

I really wasn’t sure where this came from or, how to respond, so I just told him “Nope”.

He told me that a mutual friend told him that his life’s problems were because he would not repent of his sins.

“Do you believe that Jesus Christ rose back from the dead and is alive right now?”  I asked.

“No, I believe that when you’re dead, you’re dead, end of story.”  

“So you don’t believe historically that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and was brought back to life by God on the third day?”

“Nah, I don’t even believe in a god.  Like I said, when you’re dead you’re dead.”

While he knows that I am a minster of the gospel, our relationship has always only been business related, so he knows me well enough that I wouldn't get offended by his admission of disbelief, and I knew him well enough that I knew he would understand when I said, “Then by all means don’t repent, for what’s the use?  If you don’t believe in God, and the resurrected Jesus from the dead, then Christianity doesn’t have anything for you.”

We continued talking for a bit and I told him about 1 Corinthians 15 where the apostle Paul wrote about the necessity of the belief in the resurrection from the dead for the Christian faith not to be a fool’s errand.  Then we concluded our business and we parted until the next time.

As I think about it now, I may have been a little too flippant about the whole thing.  Of course Christian morality can benefit even the non-believer in this world but I don’t think this was what I needed to stress with him at that moment.  I felt like to preach a Christian morality to him would not bring him to faith.  At best, if he accepted it, he might rid his life of some present irritations but nothing that would last long, as I believe that once the immediate problems were solved his faithless life would create new problems.  Sort of like putting salve on the burned fingers of a child who is unwrapping a new carton of firecrackers, I decided to stay clear.

1 Corinthians 15:12-22