Merciless Grace

~ Preamble

2007-07-19T13:40:00.001-04:00

This is the part where an attempt is made to give you some idea of what you are going to be getting yourself into with this book. Writing this has felt like stuffing a thousand bottles with messages and letting them drift out to sea, hoping that one gets through to someone. I hope that someone is you. My hope is that there will be something here for you – even if only one thought. It might be something you’ve never considered before, or something you just needed to be reminded of.

This is not a serious theological work, at least in the usual sense of that phrase. I am serious about these things, but you will quickly see that it is not an in-depth “exegetical” effort. It’s actually quite subjective at times. I may have taken things out of context. You just might accuse me of reading too much into Scripture. I’m alright with that. But the gravity of my seriousness finds it’s centre in the finished work of Christ – A work that is more complete than most seem to give him credit for.

I was told long ago that there are only two religions in the whole world. One is called “Do” and the other is called “Done”. I’m all about the one with the name “Done”. When Jesus said, “It is finished”, I believe he meant it. Everything that I needed to have done for me – He did it. He has covered needs that I never knew I had. And he didn’t ask my permission first. He went ahead and “gave himself for me”. That is the message that, like Jeremiah, burns in my bones.

I am indebted to so many who have pointed me back to the all-sufficiency of the Lord Jesus. People like T. Austin-Sparks, J.B. Stoney, William Newell, Miles Stanford, Ruth Paxton, Hannah Whitehall-Smith, and C.H. Mackintosh. Maxwell’s “Born Crucified”, Huegel’s “Bone Of His Bone” and Watchman Nee’s “The Normal Christian Life” have also been so helpful for me to understand just what Jesus did for me. Christ is my complete spiritual provision, so much so that I can say I am “complete in Him.” I can’t add to that. I just believe it and receive it.

There is one more person that the Lord has used to get through to me. His name is Paul. His letters have revealed to me a man who knew by experience that Jesus is life. We have his journal to see just how the Lord taught him that “to live is Christ”. Paul learned to value weakness over strength. He learned to say “when I am weak, then I am strong.” He settled in to the restful grace of Christ, and fought to preserve the integrity of that message. It is a message of grace and grace again.

The thing that has continued to stupefy me is that the grace I’ve found in Jesus is relentless. “Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more” was the cry of Paul. It’s merciless grace. It’s grace that shows no mercy – no sign of giving up any time soon. I can’t exhaust it. I can’t get to the end of it. And that grace has meant judgment on things that I must accept, just as much as I accept the forgiveness it offers. The grace of Jesus is merciless toward sin. It pays no attention to the white flag sin might wave. The cross of Christ not only offers forgiveness, but it also condemns sin, judging it for what it is. Sin has not been excused. It’s been executed.

This may not be making much sense yet. It will as you go on. I believe that the experience of every Christian person bears out the fact that we all fail to live the Christian life. Why this is so, is always due to our misunderstanding of what he has done for us. And once you see it, you’re amazed that you didn’t see it before. It sounds too easy. It seems too simple. It’s simply trusting that God has already “condemned sin in the flesh” through Jesus Christ.

Once again, I hope there is something here for you. Maybe once you find it, you can just put this book down, and move on to higher ground. Along with Paul, my prayer for you is that you will have “the eyes of your heart” opened to see the finished, complete, and perfect work of Christ. Please pray the same thing for me.

1. Pardon Me

2007-07-19T13:39:00.004-04:00

As the crowd feels you push through them, they hear you mutter the words, “Excuse me…” and “Pardon me…” and they instinctively know, as well as you do, that you don’t mean a word of it.

We ask for forgiveness, but it is more of a heads-up than anything else, isn’t it? “Pardon me…” we say, but we could just as well say, “Make way, coming through.” We don’t mean it. Tinged with sarcasm, we say it to a family member who has just accused us of eating the last everything bagel. We raise our voices a little and apologize for existing - “Excuse me for living.”

What if we meant it? “Excuse me for living… my whole life is in desperate need of pardoning.” Old Job wrote, “My breath is offensive to my wife.” For us, literally breathing is an offense. Our lives invade other lives every second of the day. Jesus’ disciples asked him how often they should forgive someone and he figuratively said, not seven times, but seventy times seven. If he only meant 490 times, then we would have all run out of forgiveness in diapers.

Helmets, shoulder-pads and the rest should be our uniforms, because we are on the offensive. We storm and lay siege to one another, whether it is through emotional-blackmail or using people as welcome mats to wipe our dirty feet. We’re in bad shape. Poor form. We need forgiveness. Without even considering what we may have done to the God who lovingly made us, we are still crying out for a clean-slate.

Deserving retribution, we so often get mercy. It happens so frequently that it becomes something expected. You let a driver squeeze into the spot in front of you and you get no wave. You hold a door open for an old lady and get no time of day. Even in the face of forgiveness, we offend. Did I say we are in poor shape? There is no geometric description for us.

Forgiveness is not just a spiritual or religious concept. Pick up your copy of Whatever Magazine and find out that being a better you involves being a forgiving person. No rocket-scientist performing brain surgery there. Simple. People who cannot forgive become these caustic personalities with permafrost of the heart. Put any two humans together and watch as the reasons for the need to overlook offenses pile up like rugby players on a ball.

Alright. Enough in that direction. I will make an assumption at this point, and place some faith in the fact that we are all well aware of our offensive qualities. If you are unsure of whether or not this is a sound thing to do, ask anyone who knows you at all to verify it. Better yet, use the short list of people you could ask as proof of this. It’s a given, then, that without pardoning, our grating little lives would spin off from one another into seclusion. Being alive is often being that gift people reluctantly accept in the hope that it might make a good door-stop or dog-blanket.

“The parade has been cancelled due to rain.” “The ribbon-cutting ceremony has been postponed due to the scissors being used in a crime.” The bad news is in. But what if there is more? Could it be worse? Yes. It could be, and is. If it isn’t bad enough that we offend just by living, the moral to the story is that forgiveness will not solve our problem. Forgiveness is like lubricant that keeps an engine from seizing, but it will not replace the worn-out parts. Something needs to be replaced.

As a young Christian, I remember being mystified by the whole concept of the Unforgivable Sin. What is it? Have I done it? I have since come to the realization that the unforgivable sin is simply a sin sinned by a sinner who doesn’t want forgiveness. You have to want it to get it. Forgiveness cannot be forced on another. By it’s very nature it must be received – accepted. You can offer it, but it can be turned down. This gets us back to the bad news - that just got worse. There is something about us that neither wants forgiveness, nor can even be forgiven. Sin actually is unforgivable.

Wait a second… Aren’t sins the reason for forgiveness in the first place? Ah – but I didn’t say “sins”. I said “Sin” – singular, not plural. There is a big difference. We normally think of sins as verbs, but what I’m talking about here is a noun. The first time sin is mentioned in the Bible is way back in Genesis, where God had to have a little talk with Cain about his attitude. He said to him, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.” Sin is spoken of as “it”. Sins are one thing, but Sin is quite another.

Consider for a moment a strung-out drug-addict. It started small, but very soon became unmanageable. Friends were pilfered and shops were lifted to keep the habit healthy. Soon he became even a scourge to his own family. His father loved him though. He put up with much. Forgiveness was doled out without a grudge. You see, this father remembered pushing his little boy on the swing out back and fixing up his bike. This father dug deep to pull memories to the forefront about fishing and answering endless questions about why what is what. He looked at his son now and hated the poison that ran through his veins. He hated what it had turned his little boy into. He forgave the stealing and lying and the things his son said while under the influence. But the addiction? There would be no forgiveness for that. It would be hunted down, smoked out, and summarily executed. It’s called rehab. Cutting off contact with the chemical would be the only way to get his boy back.

You have just heard your story – and mine. Sin is our addiction. It is a poison that has infected our souls. We are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sin-factories, pumping out the stuff from an endless supply of raw materials. Those sins are a problem. Forgiveness keeps things running smoothly, but what we really need is someone to throw a wrench in the gears. Jesus illustrated this perfectly when he gave the very practical advice of gouging out your eye if it causes you to sin. He also advised cutting off a hand or foot for the same reason. He meant for us to see where this was headed, and to realize that heart-ectomies should be scheduled for later today. Is there anything in us that does not cause us to sin? It’s rampant, infectious, and it doesn’t want forgiveness.

The sin nature that we all receive as a door prize for entering the world would actually love for us to think that forgiveness is enough. If we believe that it can be forgiven, then it can surreptitiously continue getting sin out through every crevice of our lives. This is not to underemphasize our need for pardoning. Going back to our engine metaphor, you have to have lubricant or it won’t work. But no mechanic thinks that a blown head-gasket can be fixed by pouring 10w30 all over it. The only fix is a new one. It’s not really a fix at all. New wine for new wineskins, Jesus said.

So, there we have it. Sin has set up shop in our lives and it likes it fine just where it is. It laughs at forgiveness and hopes that we think a pardon is good enough to keep it under control. But Jesus is not fooled. He knows the very day and hour sin came to town. He remembers the day Adam died. He looked down from his vantage point in eternity and saw the future of Adam’s sin-cursed race and said, “I’ll go, send me.” Jesus Christ came to do business with sin. Forgiveness is necessary, but that’s not enough to satisfy the kind of love we’re talking about here. The father we were thinking about earlier who loved his son enough to get him into rehabilitation, is just a drop in the ocean compared to the love of Christ for sinners. He came to stop sin dead in its tracks – and that’s exactly what he did.

How did Jesus do it? Why do I still sin? Those two questions need answering. Maybe you’re at the place in your life where you don’t want to be forgiven anymore because you can’t stand thinking about having to ask for it again. Maybe you’re tired of coming to God with the same sins time and time again, and you feel like He’s tired of it too. Most Christians are aware of the sin-repent-sin cycle. It’s not a washing machine option, but it does make you feel like you’ve been through one.

I’ve backed up the truck and dumped a whole lot of bad news so far, but I can’t wait to unzip the sky and let loose the good news for you. It’s so good. Jesus is good news. It’s exclusive too. I’m not about to give you another promise with a flat tire, offering a Jesus-plus-something-else. It’s Jesus-plus-nothing, here. I’ve been given the goods on Christ. So have you. It’s called, your Bible.

I’m writing all this because someone listened to me. He really listened. I went on about how I thought I was living the life the Lord had for me, but this guy knew I was missing out. He knew I didn’t know the whole story. I had half of it, but try riding a unicycle with half a wheel. Try running with one leg. Try asking God to do something that He’s already done and wonder why He doesn’t seem to be answering your prayer. That was my life. I didn’t think Jesus was enough. The guy that listened to me? He told me to read my Bible. He told me to read those hard places that I usually skipped over. I read them. I heard the sky unzip.

I hope you will pardon me for sounding holier-than-thou, but due to the fact that I so seldom hear what I’m going to spend the next - I don’t know how many pages - trying to get through to you, I can’t help talking like you are my little blacksmith in training. So I’m going to use the small hammer to give the sword on the anvil a tap, so that you know where to swing your big one. You have to come down on it with all your weight. You have to come to rest on it. The sword – you know – “every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The only living I’ve ever known is from leaning hard on God’s word. He expects me to. He expects you to too. He’ll forgive you for not doing it. He forgives sins – just not Sin.

2. Romans Six Wasn't Built In A Day

2007-07-19T13:39:00.003-04:00

It takes time to come to the point where you realize you don’t have it all together. I referred earlier to the sin-repent-sin cycle (which once again we might as well call the ‘spin-cycle’) that all of us come to know quite well. We come to Christ because we have sinned. The guilt drives us to Jesus. We see him there on the cross and know that it should have been each one of us. He took my place. He took your place. It changes you forever. You feel like a swimming pool full of thousand-dollar bills. You’ve been forgiven and you swear that you are never going to forget it.

How long did it take you to forget? At first you just couldn’t believe that Jesus allowed himself to be treated like he lived your life, so that you could be treated like you had been living his. But then life came knocking. Everyday, clock-watching, bill-paying, re-run life. Things you vowed to never do again, you did. And then you did it again. Spin-cycle. It made you sick to your stomach. It was even worse now, because you let Jesus into your life, and it’s a mess.

There is another dimension to the Spin-cycle that we should take a second to spot. It is what has been called, The Law of Diminishing Returns. It goes this way: You indulge yourself in some sin – gluttony, lust, greed, pride (self-inflation) – and it has a sweetness to it that you secretly enjoy. But the next time, it feels like someone switched the sugar for sweet-and-low. And after that, you begin to barely taste any sweetness at all. Hebrews 11 calls it “the passing pleasures of sin” - sin for a season. It’s all re-runs after that. Never as good as the first time. And then you move on to a new one. You constantly jump ship and swim to the next port for a chance aboard another. It takes time to realize that the fate of each is exactly the same. They all run out. There are holes in every bucket that promises to be bottomless. But for a while, you believe the lies.

Many Christians live in this place for a long time. They think back to when they first got saved, before the Spin-Cycle – before the Law of Diminishing Returns. They long for those feelings of joy from the early days. They sprung up quick, but the roots were shallow. They withered. Even wilted, they tried to prop themselves up any way they could. Maybe that was you. It was definitely me. I was a wilted Christian for 15 years. Sin still had this strangle-hold on me that I just could not shake. I hated it. It made me hate myself. It crippled my growth. I knew I was still forgiven, but that didn’t seem good enough. Why would God forgive me, but still leave me just as prone to need more forgiveness? Was this all my life was going to be? I wanted out of the washing machine.

Romans Six. It’s a chapter in the Bible. New Testament, after the four Gospels, after Luke’s sequel – the book of Acts (the Acts of the Holy Spirit), then we have Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome. This is the first explanation we have for all of the stories that we just read. What came before was Lego, fresh out of the box. The Gospels and Acts are blocks of different shapes and colours. Romans is the little picture-book that comes with the set. You flip from frame to frame to piece the whole thing together. You don’t actually know what the thing is supposed to look like without it. That’s why people so often get the Gospel wrong. They try and piece it together without the instructions. They make it sound like Jesus gave us the flip-book in the Gospels. He didn’t. He said so himself, you know. John 16:12,13 says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth.” Romans is the Spirit speaking to us.

The first five chapters of Romans are spent trying to get through our coconut heads (ever tried to open one of those things?) the fact that we are guilty, cannot save ourselves, but that God in Christ did something about it. We read that even though God had sent three different wake-up calls, we just ignored them. Who are the three amigos, you ask? Three C’s – Creation, Conscience, and Commandments. They’ve been banging on the door from the start, but we pretend they are telemarketers who love their jobs a little too much. But another stands at the door as well. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He has not come asking for anything. He has come to offer you everything for free. That’s chapters one to five. Then we get to six. Pick up sticks. Big ones. Cross beams.

Jesus once said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” I thought for a long time that what he was talking about was the old idea of a “cross to bear.” It’s like this: You have this neighbour who has a habit of lining his eaves trough with beer bottles and his four dogs make it hard to go into your own backyard without gagging. You say, “Oh, it’s my cross to bear.” No it’s not. That is not what Jesus had in mind at all. Everyone puts up with the troubles and encumbrances of life. That’s what we complain about in line at the grocery store. But Jesus was not talking about putting up with bad neighbours or high gasoline prices. He was talking about you. He told us to take up our own cross. What is a cross? It is a place to die. Jesus walked the Via Delarosa with that cross-beam on his back, because he was going to Golgotha to die. Taking up your cross daily is to agree with the Lord about Jesus’ cross. The truth is, His cross is ours. His death is ours. That’s what Romans Six is all about.

Romans One to Five is good news for the lost. Jesus paid for the sins of the world by his shed blood on the cross, offering life for all for free – no strings attached. That’s good news. But there’s more. Romans Six to Eight is good news for the found. It’s good news for Christians, but once again, you have to know the bad news first. Once someone realizes that they are in debt to God for the non-recyclable waste they have made of their life, they are ready to receive his free gift of salvation. For the Christian, they need to realize that they have a deeper need for deliverance from sin itself before they will find it in Christ. This takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is Romans Six.

It takes about a year for most babies to learn how to walk. It is then at least another (long) year before toddlers are potty-trained. God allows young believers to crawl along until they are ready to take those first steps. If kids are encouraged to walk too soon, they can become like an old western gunslinger – bowlegged. Someone once said, “When God makes a squash he takes a few months. When he makes an oak tree he takes a 100 years.” It takes time to realize that crawling will just not be enough to get through life. You want desperately to stand up on your own two feet – to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, so they say. But that’s impossible.

My daughter was about two years old when she discovered that she could not pick herself up. She told us so. She was crouched in the kitchen with her hands under her thighs, groaning as she made the attempt. We thought there was something else going on at first… but when she said, “Mom, I can’t pick myself up” I had this epiphany. That is all of us from God’s perspective. He watches us try to levitate our lives into holiness and Christ-likeness, and he knows we can’t do it. What the Lord is waiting for, is for us to realize it.

Romans Six is gibberish until you need it. It seems redundant – like training wheels on a tricycle. It gets treated like its just another way of saying all that came before in chapters one to five. But the Spirit has Paul write these words, “Do you not know…?” The day you are born, you have no earthly idea what just happened. That’s probably best for many reasons. But when you are young, you have no clue about so many things. That’s why two-year-olds walk around saying “why?” all the time. Being spiritually reborn is just the same. Romans Six tells us that not only did Christ die as our substitute, but he died as our representative as well. His death includes our death. That might not sound like good news, but it is. It won’t sound good until you have exhausted yourself trying to be like Jesus, and give up trying.

Time is so necessary. Spiritual infancy can last three years – like it did for Paul who spent that time alone in the Arabian Desert. But it can take much longer. For me, it was 15 years before I gave up trying to be like Christ. It was only when I realized that I didn’t need help from God to be more Christ-like, that I began to accept what He had already provided for me in Christ. I didn’t need more life. I needed death. Romans Six tells us that our old man has been crucified. Once again, that’s good news for Christians. It goes on to say that “He who has died has been freed from sin.” The only escape from sin is death. Jesus provided that for me and you on the Cross. Anything else is only a bandage.

The Cross is spiritual surgery. The problem is that many things have anesthetized us into thinking that it never happened. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. If you have received Jesus as the ransom paid for your sins, then you got more than you bargained for. You died with Christ – and you were raised with Him too. It’s time to live up to the name “Believer”. The Lord wants to be believed. It’s time to take Him at His word. Romans Six declares that we are free from sin, right now, this minute, because of our great Saviour. It sounds too good to be true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not.

3. Divine Stop Signs

2007-07-19T13:39:00.001-04:00

Most people that have achieved some level of greatness have a story that goes this way: Born in obscurity and with little means, with the whole world against them, they kept striving toward the goal, finding new resolve after every failure, to finally push through and… get into the Guiness’ Book of World Records for baking the largest donut. Or joking aside, maybe it was changing local politics, or opening a homeless shelter, or any number of noble pursuits. Everybody has stories about disappointments and failures. Sometimes they come at us from such unlikely sources and from so out of the blue that you would almost think they were planned….

The truth is, they are. And no, you can’t blame the devil. He’s pretty much a mad dog on a rope that God gives some slack from time to time. It’s the Lord who plans our little downfalls. And it’s love that drives him to it. What people don’t realize is that God is always trying to shut down our efforts, and frustrate our attempts at making a life for ourselves, so that we will simply take from him the life he offers. He will eventually let us have our way if we continue pushing his hand away. You may have heard many a motivational speaker talk about setbacks and tell you that they are simply opportunities in disguise. No they’re not. The disappointments we face in life are simply the Lord saying, “No, don’t go that way.” They are divine stop-signs that you really shouldn’t drive through.

Too often there is this idea in our heads that we need to do something great for God, when all the while God has done something great for us that we simply ignore. King David is a perfect illustration of this. In 2nd Samuel chapter 7, we find David sitting in his lovely cedar home, telling Nathan the prophet that he would like to build a similar house for the Ark of God. You see, the Ark symbolized the presence of God on earth. It’s actually a wonderful picture of Christ. Inside it was Aaron’s rod that budded, the tablets of stone the commandments were written on, and the jar of manna. Those three things are each symbols of Jesus as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But David is moved to do something for God, and even Nate thinks it’s a great idea. The trouble was, God didn’t.

We are dreamers. Our imaginations can run wild and we can conjure up such wonderful ideas. But no matter how wild they are, they are never as wild as God’s. David was thinking too small. He was thinking of building a material, earthly house for God’s presence to dwell in. God was thinking so much bigger. He envisioned a house, but one that would outlast the earth. He was going to make a house out of us, not out of cedar or stone. Reborn, new creations in Christ are the very temple of God, that is presently being built. When David was told this, he gladly traded his dream for God’s. It left him speechless.

There are two paths in life. You can either take the life you’ve been given, or you can make one for yourself. “Life is what you make of it” the world says. Well, it can be what you make it, or it can be so much more. The Lord has put a staggering amount of thought into our lives. The apostle Paul said it this way when he was in Athens,

“God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.” Acts 17:24-27

Notice that God determines when and where each of us lives. Each of us. Each of the 6 billion souls on the planet have been carefully planted right where God wanted, and right when God wanted. That shows his incredible sovereignty, doesn’t it? But there is more. Paul also said that the purpose of this meticulous people-planting by the Great Gardener, is “so that they should seek the Lord.” The events of our lives are designed to raise our eyes to our Maker.

And the Lord uses hard times to do it. Good times just don’t work. God graciously gives sun and rain, harvest after harvest, blessing and peace, prosperity and health, and all the while we pat ourselves on the back thinking it was all us. Isn’t it amazing that when something good happens we take the credit for it, but when something bad happens it’s the thing we put to God’s account? God gets blamed for the catastrophes of life with fists shaking in the air. Well, it’s staggering how close to the truth we can be and still not see it. It IS God’s fault. All of it. Blame Him. He wants you to. Give Him credit for toppling your house of cards. Thank Him for it while you’re at it.

How often do bad things happen in life? Every day? Every hour? Every second? Yes, yes and yes. Just how badly do you think God is trying to get our attention? Every disturbance, every tragedy, every failure, every minor setback and every catastrophic event is a wake-up call from the Lord. But we just keep blowing stop-signs. I once heard someone call them “Stoptionals.” The Lord lovingly brings us to our knees so that we can acknowledge that we need Him. We first discover our need for God when the guilt of our sins has crippled us. It’s then that we find Christ as the gracious gift that He is. There are more discoveries to be made. There are uncharted waters for each of us. Failure reveals our deep needs. We wouldn’t know them otherwise. God is always trying to reveal them to us, but we think it’s either bad luck or that we are being punished in some way. Wrong on both counts. The Lord is to be praised for the very things he is most often jeered for.

For those of us who have our sins forgiven – who have God’s money in the bank, in the currency of the blood of Christ, to pay for any and every debt still to come – failure still has a new lesson for us. We need to learn that sin is too big for us to handle on our own. Initially, it seems that God gives us easy victories over certain vices. New Christians seem to be able to quit smoking, give up alcohol, stop gambling, etc… cold-turkey. Excitement is there at the new birth. But it doesn’t last. Christians are still capable of gross sin. You hear about it all the time. It’s heart-breaking, but it needs to happen. The Lord who saved us, wants us to know what we have been saved from. We really have been saved from sin.

Many come to know Christ at an early age. Four and five-year-olds can truly receive the Lord as Saviour. Have they sinned? By the time they are four, they have lied, stolen, and been disobedient enough to have a wheelbarrow full of guilt over it. But at the same time, they would not know anything compared to a teenage sinner. A fifteen year old can be real monster. I know, because I was one. I had the mouth of a sailor and the eyes of Samson. The thing to remember though, is that both the four year-old and the teenager have the same sin nature. A murderer and rapist who comes to Christ is not more forgiven than a child who comes with a stolen cookie in his mouth. Sin is the same in everyone. Sins differ, but they come with opportunity. A shark in a cage, is a shark that would eat a whole tank of dolphins if it could. Jesus taught this when he talked about anger being equal to murder, and lust equal to adultery. “It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean” he said. But no matter how awful your sins are, you still don’t know what you are fully capable of.

Sin often plays it safe. It will make a glutton of someone rather than a murderer, because it is less conspicuous. It doesn’t seem so bad. But sin needs to be exposed for what it is. It is the very heart of the devil. And it’s in you and me. It would rather you think it under control than for you to look at Jesus on the cross and see that it took the death of the Son of God to beat it. Nothing else could do it. It’s that bad. We need God’s stop-signs to alert us to the danger of trying to go toe-to-toe with Sin. It will win every time if we do. We’ve been to Romans Six, but we need to turn the page. Romans Seven tells us that even though we want to do good, we can’t. And the thing we don’t want to do, we do. Allow those failures to turn your eyes to the Lord Jesus who has already beaten Sin.

I’ve penned much about failure in general. But for the Believer, failure to become Christ-like is the means by which God points us back to the cross. The greatest lesson any Christian can learn is that they cannot live the Christian life. It’s not something to be imitated. It’s not about being Christ-like. It’s about Christ being himself through you. The life of Christ is in you, and it is intended to grow and produce fruit. The Christian life is not a skyscraper to be built, but a tree to be watered and exposed to the sun. When our failure to make ourselves more like Christ becomes painfully apparent, we then have the wonderful opportunity of looking to Jesus himself and finding that he doesn’t need or want you to try. He wants to live His life through us. We get in the way far too often.

Failure is our friend. Stop-signs are gifts. Pay attention. If it looks like God is telling you to cease and desist, put your hands up and let Him arrest you. In the Book of Acts we find Paul and Silas in a Philippian Jail, and ecstatic about it. They were singing at midnight. They knew that God was saying, here is where I want you. God has put you right where he wants you, and is waiting for you to simply resign yourself to it. Even Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Don’t just slow down – come to a complete stop, and wait to see if the way is clear. You may even need to turn around.

4. Night And Day

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Let’s continue to unzip the sky. God does it every day, actually. We have this thing called a transparent atmosphere. It looks blue during the day when the sun shines on it, but at night we see straight through. Unzipped. Unbuttoned. Unveiled. It takes night to do it. When the sun hides it’s face from us, we get a chance to feel really small in this gargantuan universe the Lord of Heaven and Earth has made. He is so good to give us illustrations of deep truths that are in front of us every day. The most important one is the sun itself. This blue planet we walk on is absolutely and utterly dependent on something 150 million kilometers away. It affects the tiniest green plant with this artful process called photosynthesis. Oxygen is produced and we get to keep breathing. Brilliant really. But it was dark first. That’s what the Bible says.

Light was not the first thing made. It was the first thing that was spoken into existence, but “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void.” Genesis 1:1 It was dark. To punctuate the idea, every time a day of creation came to a close, we read, “and there was evening and morning, day one… two… three”. Day starts with evening. Jews today still include this as a part of their worldview. This principle must be crystal for us if we are going to get anywhere near the good news of Jesus. What came first, his resurrection, or his death?

Night precedes day, and death precedes life. You might be saying to yourself, “wait a second… did you just say caskets first, pacifiers second?” Yes I did. Spiritually speaking, death comes before life. Death is good news. Jesus came to die. That was his primary focus, and he went unblinkingly to it. He knew that it must come first before there could be any real life for those who put their faith in him. We were thinking just a minute ago about being able to see through our “see-through” atmosphere, to the blackness beyond. One thought here, is that you have to know dark before you stop taking light for granted. You have to know that you need light. You have to ache for it like they do in Nunavut after their month-long night. You need to know that death is what you really want.

Once again, spiritual death comes before spiritual life. That means, that in order for a person to spiritually live, they need to spiritually die. Jesus provides life for us by first providing death. Going back to Romans Six, verse three says, “do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” Don’t get too hung up on that word ‘baptized’. It just means ‘dipped’ or ‘immersed’. Having faith in Jesus as Saviour means that you were put into Him. Just like old Noah went into the ark to be saved from the flood, we are placed in Christ to be saved. Part of being put there, involves our death with Him. His death included us.

Let’s back up just a little. We started out by looking at how dark preceded light. Night – then Day. At night we look up through our transparent atmosphere and see into deep space. In a previous chapter we dealt with the idea that it takes a while before you are ready to take a second look at Jesus and find a whole lot more there than you initially thought. But when you see stars at night, you are seeing places that you can never get to. Light from stars takes, literally, an astronomical amount of time to get to us. Now, when God made stars he also made the light between them and us, but for us to get to them, it would take millions of ‘light-years’. The Bible is like looking into outer space. We read about Jesus saying, “Be perfect just as your Father in Heaven in perfect.” We read that we should love others as Christ loved us – and died for us. We are to have all this fruit of the Spirit, and be conformed to the image of Christ. We are supposed to be like Jesus. That is star-gazing if ever I heard it. You just can’t get there! Trying to be like Jesus is like trying to get to the Andromeda galaxy. It can’t be done.

But hold on. What if stars come to us? They live to be light to us. That is their purpose. God said so back in Genesis – “for signs and seasons.” They come to us in those rays of light that reach our very eyes. Those rays are like hands stretching out from places we can never get to, so that these places can come to us. Reading the Bible should make us feel like we’re star-gazing, but it should also include the discovery that galaxies have made the journey of light-years to get to us. Hearing the Gospel is realizing that God in Christ already paid your ransom. Getting saved does not involve us doing any of the saving ourselves. We are saved purely by Christ, by His grace. The same is true in the realm of living after-the-fact of salvation. We need the revelation that not only has God dealt with the fines for the sins we produce, but that he has already provided the kill-switch for the sin factory. Jesus paid for our sins, and he shut the plant down too. The universe just showed up.

Night and day. The Bible tells us that the darkness of death must come first. Death is the fear of all mankind, and yet God turned everything on its head and made death something to hope in. Sin is a monster with so many teeth, that the only escape from it is death. God created the world as a great object lesson to this effect. Think about agriculture for a moment. Even though farmers today use a lot of technology to produce crops, the simple process of germination remains the same. A seed goes into the ground and must die before it can reproduce. It breaks open, exposing itself to the earth so that it can sprout and push its way back to the surface. Is it not amazing to you that a great oak tree can come from such a small seed? Jesus used this exact metaphor when describing what he came to do. He said, “unless it (the seed) dies, it remains alone.” Death is the entrance into life.

God also illustrated this, by doing something rather remarkable the moment Jesus died. There was an earthquake, and Matthew tells us that after Christ yielded up his spirit, tombs opened and some saints rose from the dead and went back to hang out with old friends in Jerusalem. In case that was not enough, God then punctuated the moment by ripping the veil that hung in front of the Holy-of-Holies in the Temple. It was torn from top to bottom – a curtain as thick as the span of a man’s hand. Getting behind that veil was impossible for anybody but the High Priest. But God was saying here, “Come on in.” This all happened at the time of Jesus’ death.

So, if death must come first before there is life, then how do we die? Many times I have heard people tell me that in order to grow as a Christian you need to “die to self.” It’s the concept of self-denial. You really want both bacon and cheese on your burger, but you know you should stick to lettuce and tomato. Ok, there is some benefit to self-denial. Your arteries will thank you. But that is not how we die. We don’t do it. An old Chinese Evangelist named Watchman Nee used this illustration: Crucifixion is the death God chose for us. By it’s very nature, it cannot be self-inflicted. You cannot crucify yourself. You could get the nail through your ankles, and maybe even one into your left wrist – but the last nail would have to be done by another. Someone has to do it for us, and once again, the truth is – Someone has. The question to ask is not what do we do, but what has God already done? He has provided our crucifixion already. We have been crucified with Christ. It doesn’t feel like it, because we have been raised with Him also. But it happened. Just as surely as you’ve been born-again, you died first. Dark came first, then light.

The Old Testament is saturated with stories about going from death to life. Abraham was told that he and Sarah would have a son, but death was there twice over. Sarah was barren and they were both old. But it happened. They tried to go around God’s plan and involve poor Hagar, but Isaac did come. He came in a way that only God could bring to pass. That’s the only way they knew it was Him that did it. Mephibosheth should have been the last person in the world to ever eat at King David’s table, but there he was, all the same. Lame feet and all. He called himself a “dead dog” when David’s invitation came. It’s in the New Testament as well. No more so than when the Lord Jesus was on the cross. It got dark in the middle of the day. It was no eclipse, because it lasted for 3 hours. Jesus yelled, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But then the light returned. It got dark because God was doing to His Son what we had coming to us. Left in our sins, we would be in a Godless eternity. Christ was forsaken by His Father, so that we wouldn’t have to be. It got dark for Him, so that there would be light for us. He stepped into God the Father’s shadow, so that we could bask in the Son.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead. After he had taken our sins on himself and the very wrath of God as well, he left the tomb. The darkness of that grave vanished as the stone was rolled away by the angel. But Jesus was already gone. Resurrection meant that the impossible was no longer an issue. He didn’t have to wait for the stone to be moved before He could leave. That is the kind of life that has gotten into us. But it’s all because of that dark thing called the cross. It cast a shadow over His whole life, as it should ours. Sin cowers under that shadow. Only there do we see sin beaten.

Let night do it’s job. Let the darkness show you the stars. Allow the disappointments and frustrations of life to redirect your heart to the one who said, “It is finished.” The accomplishment of the Cross should be our preoccupation. The death of Jesus is hope for new life. Night – then day. Death – then resurrection. The only way to know that something is of God, is that it can survive death. Death is the worst this world can do. So God begins there, to show that our greatest weakness, is his greatest strength. Our day starts with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is that grain of wheat that went into the ground to die, but has been raised bearing fruit – you and me. The principle of death should be welcomed when we see what God did with it. The difference is night and day.

5. Big Little Words

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One of the most important questions in the world is: What is a Christian? It’s a great conversation starter. You can get a whole host of answers. “I was born a Christian” some say. “I’m a card-carrying member of the church” another will reply. “I read the Bible and pray” still another will say. Or from those who really are saved, many times the definition will come in the form of attitudes and behaviours that are suitable for saints. But Christians are not defined by their actions. “Fruit-inspecting” is not a safe way to determine whether or not a person has been spiritually reborn. Plastic fruit has fooled me many a time. So, what is a Christian then?

I love the Bible. One of the reasons for this is because it is a living book. It surprises me with it’s movements all the time. Verses that I thought I knew, turn their faces toward the Son to reveal something about themselves that I never saw before. Take John 3:16 for instance. Do you know what the literal translation of that verse really is? It goes this way: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes INTO him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” That word “into” sounds strange, doesn’t it? When the Philippian Jailer asked Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved, Paul answered, “Believe ON the Lord Jesus Christ.” Another strange sounding phrase. But these words “into” and “on” are really important when defining a Christian. A Christian doesn’t just believe “in” Jesus. He or she believes INTO him and ON him. Big little words.

Believing in something is merely recognizing its existence. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but I do believe in Christ. I believe He was born around two millennia ago and that he died around the age of 33. But I think you can even believe that he rose again from the dead and still not be a Christian. A Christian pours his or her belief, emptying it into Christ. Paul said, “Let God be true and every man a liar.” That’s what I’m talking about. For the Christian, God is right even when everyone else is saying the opposite. The Christian doesn’t try to fit God into his or her system of belief. Christians make God’s beliefs theirs. That’s what that little word “into” is all about. You trade in your beliefs, for the Lord’s.

What about the word “on”? Believing ON Jesus is best illustrated by the man these words were spoken to. The Jailer fell down on his face before Paul and Silas. He was not standing on his own two feet anymore. Believing ON Jesus is coming to rest on him. It’s not an action. It’s a cessation of activity. We are saved by grace. That means that we have no part in that. Christ does the saving. The second you contribute even the slightest, it ceases to be grace. So, a Christian puts down his sack of beliefs on Jesus’ shoulders. Then He carries them for you. This was beautifully expressed by the Father of a demon-possessed boy in Mark 9 when he said, “Lord, I believe… Help my unbelief!” That’s believing ON Jesus. It’s saying you can only believe if He helps you.

There’s another little word that may be helpful in discovering just what a Christian is. We find it in Galatians 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Did you spot it? We had to go to the good ol’ King James Version to get it, but it’s that big little word “of”. Paul wrote, “I live by the faith OF the Son of God”. Newer translations render that “by faith in the Son of God”, but that’s not true to the original language. Once again, there is some awkwardness to get over, but there is a big difference between my faith, and Jesus’ faith. Which would you rather live by?

Christ was faithful. He faithfully lived a perfect life here. He faithfully died a perfect death as well, being crucified for the sins of the world. His faith cannot fail. Mine does daily. My life in Him is based on His faith. He is faithful to me. His blood never fails. His resurrection life given to me is incorruptible. He stands in Heaven as my great high priest, interceding for me when I sin. He will return one day to remove me from the presence of sin. The quality of my life is dependent on whether or not I see his faithfulness as more important than my own. If I think my faith is the fulcrum, than I will teeter and totter my way through life, never finding balance. It is the faith OF the Son of God that I depend on daily. His faithfulness to me is much more important than mine. It is only when I am focused on His, that my own will be what it should be.

Into, On and Of are all big little words. But there’s one more that we should take some time to zero in on. It’s the word, IN. When defining a Christian, this word is paramount. Especially when it is joined to the word, “Christ”. The phrase “in Christ” dominates the New Testament letters. Before salvation, we are all “in Adam”. That should be an easy one to see. The whole race of mankind was in Adam when God made him. We were all there, in potential, right? Even Eve was there. That’s why God pulled her out during Adam’s little nap. We start off being born “in Adam”, but faith places us “in Christ”. There are only two men as far as God is concerned. We are either in Adam or Christ.

You see, Jesus Christ is actually the second creation of man. The Son of God had no beginning, but in becoming a man, he began a new race – a new line. Adam is the natural, physical line of humanity. But Jesus is the spiritual, supernatural line that anyone can become a part of, simply by believing (being convinced) that Jesus died for him or her. You get plucked out of the old family tree, and grafted into the new one. That makes you “in Christ”.

Right before the Lord Jesus went to the cross, he took some time to explain things to his friends. He called himself the Vine. And then he told them that they are the branches. He told them that each of them is “a branch in me.” A branch shares the same root structure as the vine. The sap that flows through the branches first came from the vine. Reborn new creations in Christ share his life. Peter wrote that we are “partakers of the divine nature.” That’s what it means to be “in” him. When you come to rest your beliefs on Jesus, you’re IN.

There is another thought here. “In Christ” means that you are secure and safe, just as Noah and his family were safe from the ravages of the flood, inside the ark. In Romans 8, we read the words, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Even though we can experience Romans 7 from time to time – not doing the things we want to do and doing the things we don’t want to do – we must trust that we are still free from the judgment of God. We will need to have our fellowship with the Lord reestablished, through confession of sins, but we need never fear banishment. Once we are in Christ, there is no getting out.

So, has this helped us to see what a Christian is? We could sink ships with books on the subject, but essentially, my hope is that it is clear that faith is the determining factor. “The just shall live by faith” we read, thanks to that prophet with such a great name – Habakkuk. (It sounds like a choking noise!) But faith is the issue. Am I a Christian? Well, underneath it all, I have a little live coal of faith that just keeps glowing. No “archeological proof” or revisionist historian has ever been able to put it out, even after dumping sky-scraper sized buckets of doubt on it. I’ve sounded foolish at times trying to explain it, and have looked silly doing some of the things its led me to do, but it’s Jesus’ fault. My faith is only anything because it has something to do with Him. You won’t talk me out of it. You may win the debate, but you’ll have lost me.

I identify with Peter quite a bit. He swore to a little girl that he did not know Jesus of Nazareth. But you know what? Where were Peter’s eyes when Jesus looked at him? I may swear to you that I don’t know him, but I won’t fool Him. That’s faith. May these four big little words: Into, On, Of and In – help you to understand faith. It’s all about the object of faith – the Lord Jesus. The one who loved me – and you – and gave himself to prove it. After all, it’s the object of faith that makes saving faith saving, not the faith.

6. The Firebreak

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There is a whole lot more to the death of Christ than any of us give God credit for. We begin seeing Jesus as the payment for the debt we racked up by sinning. But when we realize that there is still this criminal called Sin inside us, we get a little frantic and go to the authorities – the Self-Help movement. ‘We will help you help yourself’ they say. You read the books, you listen to the speakers, and you modify your behaviour accordingly. But Sin knows when to tone it down. It’s not dumb. It’s actually grinning from ear to ear because the very things you are now doing are in its territory. Trying to make yourself better is a slap in the face to God, because the cross emphatically says that God’s way is resurrection, not renovation. You make lemonade out of lemons, but not if they’re rotten.

So, we’re ready now to look a little closer at the Cross of Christ. How did Jesus do it? How did he beat Sin? I had a leak in my attic, and I didn’t know where to put the bucket, because the drip kept moving down the truss beam. A guy told me that all I had to do was create a “stop-gap” so that the drop would have to fall there. It meant cutting a little spot out of the wood. It was great – I made the drops go in my bucket. They had no choice. They had been stop-gapped. Jesus is the stop-gap where sin is concerned. With a forest-fire, one of the first things done is to create a firebreak. Guys with chainsaws go and cut a whack of trees down so that by the time the fire gets there, there is nothing for it to feed on. Jesus is our firebreak. He stopped sin on the cross.

How on Earth did he do that? Ask and you shall receive. Why did the stop-gap work in my attic? It came to an empty spot. By cutting a piece out of the wood, I stopped the drip from traveling any further. What about a firebreak? Once again, fire needs fuel. By removing the trees, the fire gets nothing more to eat up. Our forest fire is forced to go on a diet. So, in a similar way, Jesus is an empty spot. There is something about us that is missing from Christ. Sin plods along from parent to child, parent to child - Until Jesus. No sin there. Not-a-one. He was born without a sinful nature. Sin is like this raging fire that has consumed everything in it’s path until it comes to this place where all it needs is a single tree to jump to the next part of the forest. But that tree has been felled already. In that light, don’t you find it interesting that Jesus was hung on a cross – on a tree?

The Cross is our firebreak. Sin got to the cross, but went no further. Just as fire will lick at the empty air searching for something dry to bite onto, sin approached the Lord Jesus and found nothing to feed on. The Bible says, “He was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” He never gave in to a single temptation. Sin tried, and failed. The Devil tried tempting him in the desert, but Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to him and handed him his hat. Due to the fact that Jesus is missing sin, it has no choice but to stop at Him. But Sin still had to be directed His way. If it got around him somehow, we would still be in trouble.

The full brunt of sin was directed at Jesus. This raging fire was aimed right at him. Who aimed it? Well, who didn’t. The Jews, Rome, and Greeks all conspired against him. That means religious folks, government types, and the intelligentsia all got together and agreed that this perfect human being must die. But that’s not all. The Devil was involved too. Satan entered Judas, we are told, and had a hand in handing Jesus over to the Jewish officers. The Devil had wanted Jesus dead ever since he heard the promise in the Garden about the seed of the woman who would crush his head. It’s quite a group collected here so far, isn’t it? But there’s more. Not only did Jews, Rome, Greeks, and Satan want Jesus to die, but one more as well. Believe it or not, God the Father did too.

The Cross was not an accident. It was not something that the Lord turned around. He didn’t make the best of a bad situation. He’s the one that planned it along. We were thinking just a second ago about that promise in the Garden that got the Devil antsy. Well, part of that promise was that the heel of that promised one would be bruised. Then we read in Isaiah that “it pleased the Lord to bruise him.” Paul, explaining the cross to the Corinthians, said “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” God was involved – more than just involved – in the Cross. He was the mastermind behind it. He knew it was our only hope. He knew that sin needed to be confronted and dealt with, and the cross was the only way to do it. Why do you think it got dark for three hours when Jesus was up there? It was his father’s shadow.

So, sin was aimed at Christ by everybody – God the Father included. To be our firebreak, it had to be. If sin got around the cross, then we can still be burned by it. But it didn’t. It came to a head at Calvary. How? Well, everything else was already consumed wasn’t it? Sin had already licked up the dry tinder of all life on this earth. The ground is even cursed by sin. Sin infected all of life because of Adam’s disobedience. Born-again believers in Jesus did not exist yet. The firebreak was made so that future Christians could escape. But, with Jesus, sin saw an opportunity to get at something not yet scorched. That’s the way fire is. It has no prejudice – no bias. Anything not cooked, will be. It can burn cinder-blocks. But the fire of sin met its match with Christ. More than its match. It got fooled, actually. Sin thought it could consume Christ, because he let it at him. But Jesus was that fourth man in the fiery furnace way back in Daniel’s day. His presence there made the other three fire-proof as well. But fire doesn’t know something is fireproof until it experiments on it.

Sin was tricked by the Cross. It came at Christ with the heat of the sun behind it, but didn’t realize what Jesus was up to. When fire gets to a popsicle stick, it doesn’t waste a whole lot of time on it. When it gets to a 2,000 year old Sequoia tree named General Sherman (the largest in the world), it has quite the work out on its hands. It took all of the resources of sin to attack Christ. He let it. A verse we looked at earlier says, “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” Christ was made sin on the cross. That doesn’t mean that he sinned, but he was set ablaze by it, taking it all on himself like fire on a tree. What sin didn’t know, is that it would exhaust itself on him. And then it would be snuffed out.

Jesus died. He took sin upon himself, exhausted its resources and then yielded up his spirit to God. He willingly laid down his life, just as you would extinguish a candle. The incredible thing, is that the story doesn’t end there. He rose from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is life from the ashes of the Cross. Jesus snuffed out sin with his death, but was lit once again by God the Father when he rose that Sunday morning – right around the time General Sherman was a sapling. Christ, our firebreak, stopped the path of sin, but then offered something in its place. He offered himself. He took the fire of sin from us with his death, and with his resurrection he gives his own sinless life to be our life. The same life that wasted sin, is in you and I. It all stems from his resurrection. Our life with Christ began back when the mouth of the tomb yawned and the sun shone in there. We are all older than we know. That means you and I, and the General, go way back.

When Moses saw the Lord, it was in the form of a burning bush. But it was unlike any other fire Moses had ever seen. The bush was not consumed. It was still green. That fire did not reduce the plant to ash, but instead revealed Christ to us. God is a consuming fire, we are told. Isaiah says, “The strong shall be as tinder, And the work of it as a spark; Both will burn together, And no one shall quench them.” Humans are dry tinder, whose own works set themselves on fire. But not Christ. He became a man. He never stopped being God. The fire of his divinity and the green life of his humanity came together, and this is what we see in that burning bush. Jesus is a fire of another kind. The fire of sin only brought death, but the fire of Christ is a light that brings warmth with no fear of harm. We have the fire of Christ in us by faith in the living tree who was felled for us.

I hope this metaphor has been helpful. It’s just one side of the cross, but a crucial one to see. I hope it helps to answer the question of how Jesus stopped sin. Why does sin still trip us up? We will get to that. But before we get into practical matters, the theory has to be hammered into us. When Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus, he spent the first three chapters hitting home on the eternal truths that are true regardless of what condition we find ourselves in. He then expounds on practical issues – but only after using the word “therefore”. Why, what, where and when all come before how. The cross is the answer to those first four questions. The how has everything to do with them. If we think that sin was not stopped by Christ on the cross, then we are going to go about things quite differently. But it was stopped. Jesus did it. Where sin is concerned, there may be smoke, but that doesn’t mean there is fire. Fires smolder for some time after they’ve been put out.

7. Dead On Arrival

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“Oh, I just died when you said that.” “I’m dead tired.” “I’m dying to tell you something.” “I’m dead meat.” We say things like this. They’re called euphemisms. But I think there is a secret in this common usage of the concept of death that is worth taking a peek into. There is some truth when we say “you kill me.”

What is death anyway? Well, whatever it is, it’s not cessation of life. Sure, a person stops breathing and they stiffen up after a while, but there is more to us than a pulse. We are more than just a bundle of minerals and proteins. Scientists can tell us how physical things work, but when we get into the realm of the metaphysical – the spiritual world – we have to leave that to those better equipped to look into such things. Enter, the Bible. It says that death does not stop a person from living. It also says that living does not stop a person from being dead.

Alright, let’s better define death, so we can understand that odd sounding sentence above. If living does not stop a person from being dead, then death must be something that is not diametrically opposed to life. We often think that it is. Kids learn about opposites in Kindergarten. The opposite of open is closed. The opposite of black is white. The opposite of peanut butter is really hard to find but you have to try thanks to all these anaphylactic children in school. But the opposite of life is not death. Oh, it is if you have a real narrow definition for the word life. If you think life is simply breathing, then when you stop breathing, you can call it death, I guess, if you really want to. But you can do better than that.

Biblically, death is not simply being corpse-ish. In the Bible, death means “separation.” When a person physically dies, his or her spirit is separated from the body. There is no cessation of existence in Scripture. Even those who go to Hell for not simply receiving the free gift of life in Christ, are alive there – forever. You may say that it’s not really living, but there is existence going on. But what makes Hell, Hell, is that you are separated from God there. It is a living death. Revelation calls it “the second death”. If you can die twice, then it can not be the opposite of life. Death is separation. In that light, you can be alive and dead at the same time.

That’s the secret of our euphemistic use of death. When we say, “I’m dying to tell you something” it means that we are separating everything else that could be said from that one thing on the tip of our tongues. More than that, we are separating even other things we can be doing from that one purpose of telling someone, “Hey, I think your lawn is on fire” or “You closed the car door on my thumb.” We should listen to ourselves more closely. We could learn a lot. We could learn about our deadness.

We all begin life D.O.A. – Dead on arrival. In the first chapter, we learned that sin is something we got for our baby shower from Grandpa Adam at the very moment of conception. Even King David put this into one of his psalms – “In sin did my mother conceive me.” The way the New Testament puts it is that we are “dead in sin”. So, we start of being dead in sin. We are in it. We are inside sin and cannot get out. Just like being in a locked cage, we are born trapped – dead in sin. Being in sin makes us separated - dead.

Sin separates us from God. He is a holy God. Holy means unique, set apart – separate from sin, from all that is not holy. Due to the holiness of God, sinful creatures cannot be in his presence. For hundreds of years, only the High Priest of Israel could approach the Holy-of-Holies in the Lord’s Tabernacle – and only covered in smoke and blood the way God asked. It’s like this: God is fire, and we are dead wood because of sin. It is a mercy that God keeps himself from us while we are in that condition. But he sent Jesus to get us green with life once again. Just like Aaron’s rod that budded almond blossoms, God can take the dry tinder that we are and turn us into saplings. But we have to be reunited to him first. We have to become un-separated.

The way the Bible puts it, is that we have to go from being “dead-IN-sin” to being “dead-TO-sin”. We stay dead. That’s not a problem. We need to remain separated – just from the right thing. Being separated from God is being dead for no good reason. We need to be dead for the right reason. We need to be dead to sin. Dead toward sin. Dead in the direction of sin. Sin is that neighbour that needs to see the hearse parked outside our house. So, how do we do that? Good question. This answer should not be a surprise at this point. We don’t do anything. God already has! Whenever Scripture refers to us being dead to sin, it is always past-tense. It is because of Christ that we can say we are dead-TO-sin, not dead-IN-sin.

Separations have a cause. We were separated from God by Adam’s disobedience. We get separated from sin by Christ’s obedience. Death happens both times. Adam’s disobedience was straight into death. God told him it would happen. “In the day you eat of it you shall surely die.” Adam’s death was separation from God. We know that because he kept physically living didn’t he? God was speaking of spiritual death, not physical. When it comes to Christ, he obeyed, and it led to his death. But his death produced separation from sin. Disobedience made death separation from God, but obedience to the point of death made death separation from sin. This is getting pretty wordy, but the point is, Christ’s death puts us in the casket and all sin can do is pay its last respects. Having sin out of the way, we can now be connected to God. Adam’s disobedience was cancelled out by Christ’s obedience. Separation from one thing brought connection to another.

Jesus’ death on the cross keeps us dead. It just makes us dead to the right thing. We were dead to God before, being dead-in-sin, but now we are dead-to-sin, and that makes us alive to God. Does your brain hurt yet? Mine is sweating. All the same, we need to get comfortable with these truths. The Bible says so, so we are to believe it. It may not feel that way, or “seem” logical, but it is. It’s only when we begin to bank on it that we see just how true it is.

Just as we were dead on arrival to this earth, we are also dead on arrival to Heaven. Separated from sin, we arrive having died with Christ to sin. Jesus included us on the cross with him. This should change our vocabulary of death. Being dead doesn’t make us ghosts. Being dead to the right thing makes us more alive than ever. Death can be a good thing. Only God could have made that possible.

One more thought. It’s about arriving, and maybe we can include another destination. We arrive at every temptation dead-to-sin. Even though we are separated from sin because of the Cross of Jesus, we still have access to it. It is no longer a master-slave relationship, but sin still wants to rule us. It will even pretend to be a friend in order to do this. But we have to recognize it for what it is: Something so heinous that it meant the death of the Son of God. There is no such thing as a small sin. Even when we are confronted with a seemingly trifling enticement, we need to “reckon” ourselves dead to it. We need to arrive everywhere knowing and counting on the fact that we have been separated from sin by Jesus.

We don’t say “reckon” too often anymore - unless we are from Alabama – but it is an important Biblical word. To reckon is to count something correctly. It’s an accounting term. It means taking a look at your bank account and knowing full well what your balance is. It is not guess-work or some kind of make-believe. Reckoning is believing that your bottom-line really is what it says it is, regardless of what anyone else might say. It’s trusting that the bank will give you what they say they have in safe keeping for you. Why does reckoning matter so much?

Because you don’t feel dead-to-sin. You feel very much alive to it. You still seem to be connected to it. But you’re not. You’ve just been so buddy-buddy with it over the years that it’s still a familiar and comfortable place to be. It’s your blanky. It’s your pacifier. It’s the fridge or the TV or anything else you reach your hand out to, to escape from reality. Reality is sobering. Reality is hard. But the truth is that we have already been rescued from this world. That’s why the Apostle Paul said that not only are we dead-to-sin but we are crucified to the world and the world to us. You’re dead to all of it the moment you believe on Christ. You need to reckon that. Recognize it and reckon it.

There is a whole lot of reckoning for us to do. Another big word for this is “appropriating”. It’s true, but we have to believe it. The Lord is trying to tell us time and time again that “if God is for us, who can be against us?” We are dead-to-sin and alive-to-God. It’s not something that we have to make happen. It happened already. We arrive to our new lives in Christ dead. Thank God.

8. Jesus Has Left The Building

2007-07-19T13:36:00.001-04:00

I confuse fairly easily, but a long-standing jumble in my brain had been caused by two things that Jesus said. He said that he was going away, but that he would be with me always. How could that be? It sounded like he was saying goodbye and hello simultaneously. It’s like he was telling me that he was going in one way, but really staying in another. It sounded a little too clandestine for God. Was Jesus going to be some sort of undercover cop?

I settled on that last answer for a while, but it still didn’t seem to make sense. Going away physically, but staying spiritually? Did that mean that Jesus was going to cease being a Man? Men have their spirits on-board. Jesus made the decision to become one, and I didn’t get any indication from the Bible that he was going to cease being a man either. So, what’s the answer? Well, I’ve become simplistic enough to simply take him at his word. He was going away, and yet he would still be with me always. That means that first of all, he’s not here.

Jesus has left the building. He has left earth. He did it very dramatically. He didn’t simply disappear like he did after suddenly appearing behind that locked door with the disciples after he rose from the dead. He chose to actually fly up into the sky and be lost from sight behind some clouds. It was very super-hero-esque. That doesn’t mean that he should be made into an action figure, but I have come to see that act as a very helpful way to burrow into my heart the fact that he is not here. He flew away. He’s gone.

Why did he leave? Well, our hearts are not to get too settled down here. They do pretty easily due to family, but God wants our treasures to be stored up in heaven, doesn’t he? “Where your treasure is, there is your heart.” The Lord wants us to prioritize. “Seek first the kingdom of God…” If Jesus left, then that should give us some motivation to keep our minds set on things above, where he is. That sounds like a good reason for such a dramatic exit.

But there is another reason. Jesus said that he had to go. He said that if he didn’t, the “other comforter” would not come. He wasn’t talking about a blanket. He was talking about the very Spirit of God. He said that He, the Spirit of Truth, would “abide with you forever”. Jesus was leaving, but another was coming. We are working our way to seeing how Jesus can say that he is with us always, and still leave this earth. A big part of that is seeing the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is referred to in Scripture as “He”. He is not simply a force or a spiritual battery of some kind. He is a He. He can be grieved. He can be pleased. There is personhood involved with the Holy Spirit. But Christ said that the Spirit would not “speak of himself”. He meant that the Spirit would not promote himself or seek to glorify himself, even though he is God just as the Father and Son are. The Spirit would speak of Christ and direct hearts to Him. That is his work. It’s quite the task actually.

But the Spirit does something else at the same time. When a person exercises faith in Christ, the door is opened for the Holy Spirit to come in and take up residence in the spirit of that person. The Bible says that we are “indwelt” by the Spirit when we get saved. There is no condition for us to meet to get the Spirit to live in us. The condition was met by Christ when he laid down his life to pay the ransom for our sins, rose again and ascended into heaven. That’s why he had to go, to meet the requirements needed for the Spirit to live inside us. It was a tall order.

Due to the fact that the very Spirit of God is inside us, everything is changed. We are talking about the God who knows everything, can do anything and is everywhere at once – and He is in you and I. How can Jesus leave this earth and still be with us always? Because we left too. Did you get that? Christ is in Heaven, at the Father’s right hand, and we are there as well. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, says that we are “seated” with Christ, right now. The Spirit has made that possible for us. The Holy Spirit has become the conduit, so to speak, so that we can be on this earth and in Heaven with Christ at the same time.

The Spirit acts as a spiritual toffee-stretcher. When we get saved, we get really tall. We become part of the Body of Christ, with our Head – Jesus - in Heaven. We are connected to Him, by the Spirit. Jesus doesn’t come down here. He extends from Heaven and acts through his feet and hands – you and I – to complete the work of saving people. We get it backwards all the time. We often plead for God to come down here, and all the time he is wanting us to realize that we are above it all already, with Jesus.

Just to re-cap a little at this point, Jesus could say that he was going away and at the same time be with us always, because he left to send the Holy Spirit to connect us to him in Heaven. That means that we need to get our thinking off the ground. We need to be heavenly-minded. Heaven-centric. When Stephen was being stoned, his eyes were opened to see Christ standing at the right hand of God. He saw into heaven. Jesus was standing for him, in heaven – even though most of the time we read about Jesus being seated there. He stood for Stephen. Jesus rose to his feet as the Pharisees killed the man who offered life to them. The connection between Jesus and Stephen is so obviously there that we find them both saying similar things, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin.” He was forgiving his murderers. Sounds like Jesus. But Stephen was already home. Jesus stood to embrace his brother.

It’s a good thing Jesus left. That means we are with him. We have been taken far above all that this world can dish out. We are safe. We are free. We are heavenly citizens extending ourselves from there to be the Body of Christ here. It’s another thing for us to reckon. Just as we reckon ourselves to be dead-to-sin and alive-to-God, we need to bank on ourselves being lifted from this place and to simply abide in Jesus. You can’t make yourself at home until you realize where your home really is. We don’t hang our hats down here. We put our feet up beside Jesus. We rest in Him, with Him.

A great verse is found in Colossians chapter 3 and goes this way, “Set your mind on things above not on things below. For you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” We died, it says. We are dead men walking. As far as earth goes, we are dead to it and it is dead to us. But as far as God goes, we are alive to him and he is alive to us. Our resources are heavenly, not earthly. We don’t need to worry about what this world can do for us, even in regard to the work of God. We don’t need money. We don’t need land. We don’t need worldly prestige. We won’t need political influence. We have all we need in Christ who is far above it all. And he has taken us with him.

His interests need to be our interests. What moves Him should move us. Where is his heart? What does he treasure? That is our task: Find out what makes the heart of Jesus beat faster and get in on it. It’s not hard to know, really. Ask a man soon to be married where is heart is, and you will get only one answer. The Bride is everything to Christ. The Church, the Body of Christ, the Bride – three terms for the same thing. Jesus’ heart beats for the Church. Does yours? Does mine? Have you given up on the Church? Jesus hasn’t. Not for a second. That is why when the Apostle John sees Jesus at the beginning of Revelation, he is walking among the candlesticks – another picture of the Church.

When Jesus ascended up into heaven, he was not leaving his Bride behind. His Bride didn’t even exist until the Holy Spirit united believers to him in heaven. He went away so that his Bride could come to Him. Jesus is gone, and so are we. Do you find that impractical? Do you find that hard to keep straight in your head? We all do. But it’s the same with all spiritual truth. Believing God is about believing what seems impossible to us. The death of Jesus gives us life. That is fools-talk to the world. Jesus rose again from the dead. The world says, no way – you have no proof! We are seated with Christ in heaven. Once again, the wise of the world would laugh us off. You just have to remember that it’s a world Jesus died to save from themselves. Believe it anyway. The world is so fickle. You don’t need their approval. Why not have God’s?

God has seated you with Christ whether you believe it or not. He has lifted you above this world even as you walk in it. See it from that vantage point. Use the eyes that faith has given you to see things the way the Lord does. Look down and see a world that needs to know they are lost, and that Christ is their only hope. See that the Lord’s business has everything to do with the Church – the Bride of Christ. God is not out to change the world – he is out to save it. Our primary citizenship is heavenly. Bring some heaven to your sphere. Reach down from your lofty position and be Jesus to a world who needs to know him. Let them know that they can leave the building too.

9. This Place Is A Dump

2007-07-19T13:35:00.002-04:00

Living in an apartment, in a large building, with three other guys meant one thing: Cockroaches. We would go into the kitchen, flick the light on and watch them scatter. I’m sure I’m giving you the creeps right now. Sorry. I had a nightmare once about holding two fly-swatters as I pasted them to the wall. But they moved from apartment to apartment living off our crumbs. We were why they were there. We invited them. They were quite confused I’m sure. We fed them, but didn’t want them around. Dumb humans, they thought.

It reminds me of these little bugs I once had in my pantry. I could not get rid of them. They ruined all the food, and the bug-sprays seemed useless. The only thing I could do was throw out the flour and potatoes and tea and everything else in there. I had to get rid of the source. They had gotten into my house through something – I couldn’t tell what. So it all had to go. Purging, they call it. You see, sins are like those little bugs. The only way to get rid of them, is to throw out their source – the Sin nature that makes them.

Just outside Jerusalem, there is this place called Golgotha. It means, the place of a skull. An aerial photograph would tell you why. You can see eye-sockets and the rest from a helicopter. But this hill was built on an old garbage dump. They used to burn refuse there, calling it Gehenna. Jesus actually used this name when talking about Hell. So, Jesus was crucified on Goglotha – a garbage heap. When people in that day walked by there, they would say, “Man, this place is a dump.” The Lord Jesus was thrown out there, for you and for me.

He was treated like garbage - As if he had no value. That’s why we find him being abused and abandoned, mocked and ignored, and finally crucified. He was treated as if he was the very worst of sinners – as if he had sinned every sin ever sinned. Once again, it wasn’t just us that treated him that way – God the Father did too. Jesus was forsaken by his Father. On the top of an old pile of refuse, nailed to a Roman cross, Jesus died the death of a common thief, after which the plan was to toss his body into a hole without a grave-marker.

So, Christ was put out by the curb. I do not mean to be sacrilegious. I want you to really get the point that the Prince of Life was not only killed, but that he was disposed of – and that we needed him to be. This is another picture, another metaphor, that I really hope to be of some help for you to understand how God dealt with sin. Just like I had to get rid of the source of those little bugs in my pantry, the Lord had to dispose of the sin nature that caused the creepy-crawlies of sin – lying, theft, greed, pride, lust… and the rest. I think it’s clear that Jesus was treated like garbage, but how did that do anything about our sin?

A verse of Scripture that has come up already, is found in 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, and verse 21: “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Paul later in that chapter refers to the concept of “reconciliation”. That’s a money-word. Biblically, it means “to change currency.” When Christ was made to be sin for us, it was as if he was a gold coin that was changed into aluminum foil. It was like he became one of those chocolate loonies, from which the wrapper got crunched up and dropped in the trash. And the chocolate was bad, so it got spit out. We’re chocolate loonies too, but we were never gold. All we were good for was the garbage heap, so Jesus went there for us. And, in having himself thrown out, he took our trash with him.

Our sin was purged from us, by Jesus when he was crucified on Gehenna. He could do that, because he was made to be sin for us. He was made to be our garbage for us. He was actually made to be US for us. We got our sin from one person, Adam. And now our sin is disposed of by one person, Christ. Becoming a Christian means being a part of Christ. His history becomes our history. What is true of him, is in so many ways true of us. We are talking once again about a spiritual reality. So, when Jesus was crucified, we were there with him, and so he was able to dispose of our sin. We were there, so our sin was there too.

This stuff is not easy to fit in our heads. It runs contrary to our normal thinking. It’s backwards, really. But God has always worked that way, so that we know that it’s Him. Peter Larson put it this way: “The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin's womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked, "No Entrance" and left through a door marked "No Exit."

Our sin-nature was separated from us. We dealt with that earlier when we walked through the idea of being “dead-to-sin”. But the way it was done, was by the death of Christ. We don’t have to throw out our sin natures. We don’t have to put them in the disposal unit in the sink, or bag them up and wait for the truck. It’s already been done! The trash has been taken out. Jesus did it for you. He carried it off. You’re not sure, are you… I know. You are wondering why you can still smell it.

The problem we all have is that our sin nature is still available to us. It is not attached to us in the same way as it was before we got rescued, but we still have access to the dumpster. We still sin, don’t we? Hourly. We don’t have to, but we can. We are not forced to, but we sometimes go out of our way to do it. Our job is to leave the lid on the can. Our job is to trust that Christ knew what he was doing when he threw out all that stuff we used to love. Jesus really did purge our sin from us, so let’s not undermine that. Let’s not disagree with the one who loved us enough to become our trash for us. Leave it in the bin. After a while, you really won’t miss it. I promise.

That’s it, isn’t it - We don’t really think it’s trash sometimes. We think that there is still some good stuff in there. It’s like we are these spiritual pack-rats that are afraid to just let it go. “How dare you throw those out! Those are collector’s items!” we say. We are not really convinced that it is all sin. The Bible uses another word for sin. It’s the word, “flesh”. It’s a helpful word, because it reveals the nature of sin to us. The flesh can seem really noble. It can seem good. The flesh can dress itself up and be on its best behaviour. But it’s still “the flesh”. It is that part of us that is ambitious, determined to promote ourselves. It makes both the Olympic athlete and the crime boss. The ends do not justify the means. Much of what this world would call “great accomplishment” has been fueled by the flesh. It’s time to agree with God, and call it what he calls it – Sin.

The Apostle Paul talks about garbage in his letter to the Philippians. He says this, “Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ.” He had just been describing how great he was. He was smart, dedicated, had the right genes, was an all-around good guy. But he calls it all garbage – “rubbish”. I think the actual word there means “dung”, but you get the point. Even sin at it’s very best had to go. It’s worth it. Trade your garbage for Jesus. He gave so much more than he took. He gave himself.

Putting it all together, I hope you can see that the cross was a place where our sin – the source of sins – was given the respect it deserved. None. It was garbage worthy of the dumpster. Jesus spiritually – supernaturally – included us with him on that cross, so that our sin could be purged from us. We were separated from it by the cross. That is our only hope. Anything else we choose to do with ourselves is only cosmetic. And really, we’re only fooling ourselves. Everyone else can smell our trash a mile away. Take the new life that Jesus gives – a life that cannot spoil – and rest in the fact that you are far removed from your old life, seated with Christ in Heaven. Remember, Jesus has left the building. You arrived at your new life dead too, right? The firebreak was made so that sin can go no further. Jesus was thrown out for you, but he rose out of that heap, never to go back. It’s a done deal. Trust in the cross of Christ. Lean hard on it.

One more thing: We still need to realize that this place is a dump. The earth is only fit for fire, Peter tells us. It will all go. The Lord is not out to change the world, but he is out to save people from it. Keep your eyes of faith open and remember that this world is a place that rejected Christ. It still does. And it will only get worse. That is not to say that nothing beautiful happens here. Wild flowers still grow at the dump. But this world is past renovating. We can be good stewards of the things God has entrusted us with, but don’t get too comfortable here. Abraham lived all his life in a tent, to consciously keep himself from getting too cozy on this planet. Consider yourself a camper – a foreigner, stranger and pilgrim here. This is not the promised land. Our citizenship is in Heaven, so let’s act like it.

I wrote earlier that when they crucified Christ, the plan was to throw him in a common grave, without any dignity. Well, that’s not the way it actually happened. Even though he was treated like garbage on the cross, his body was carefully laid in a rich man’s tomb, by Joseph of Arimethea and his buddy Nicodemus. It fulfilled an important prophecy found in Isaiah that said, “they made his grave with the wicked, but with the rich at his death.” When God made him to be sin for us, he didn’t stay that way. When the cross was over, Christ was actually deemed to have more worth than before, if that is possible… “Therefore he gave him a name that is above every name…” Jesus is the only one ever to have inestimable value in both directions. He was valued as both the least and the greatest. He is the First and the Last.

10. Adding Insult To Injury

2007-07-19T13:35:00.001-04:00

I see you have quite the gash there. Allow me to unscrew the lid off this salt-shaker, it comes out much quicker that way… Nothing like kicking a guy while he’s down. It’s like telling your friend that you saw his unsigned fire insurance policy on the kitchen table as his new house is burning to the ground. But you know, that’s what God is telling us in the Bible. He says that we are sinners, and that there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Talk about adding insult to injury.

The cross is offensive. It’s insulting. It declares in no uncertain terms that our best is simply not good enough. Death is the only way out of sin. We balk at that, don’t we? We like to think that if a guy gives it the old college try, then there ought to be some recognition for it, right? Well, sounding good, doesn’t make it so. What we don’t realize is that trying to better ourselves is like pouring water on a grease fire. Good luck with that.

The truth is, we need to be offended. It’s good for us. Not that the actual act of being offended is good. There used to be these high and mighty terms for it like, “injured merit” or “affronted dignity”, that made it sound like being offended was a virtue of some kind. But don’t we read in the love-chapter (1st Cor. 13) that love is not easily offended? What I mean is that it is necessary for us to be offended. I don’t remember the exact quote, but someone once defined meekness as being pleased when you’re insulted, because the truth is really much worse. Did you get that? It’s like someone calling you a loser, and you thinking to yourself – “You don’t know the half-of-it buddy.”

You see, being offended pries the door to our souls open so that we can see in there. We don’t like what we see, so we begin either justifying or excusing it. But come on, get the chair out from under the handle and let the door come right off the hinges! The sooner we find out about ourselves, the better. God designs life that way. But so often we learn to disguise ourselves with the camouflage of self-righteousness. Filthy rags, the Bible says. I went to buy a pair of jeans and all I could find were “new” pairs with stains and rips already in them. That seems to really reveal our condition, doesn’t it? We can’t even be genuine about spilling stuff on ourselves. We’re good liars.

We lie to ourselves. There is a famous TV star with a quote you may have heard: “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.” It’s easy for us to start believing our own tall tales. “I’m a good person” you think to yourself, forgetting about earlier this morning when you… Insert that thing here that you don’t want anyone to know about. No one is good. Good deeds don’t make good people. Does talking make a parrot a person? Does using a computer make a chimp a man? All the good works in the world will not change the fact that we are sinners by birth and by choice. All our lying won’t change it either. We might as well agree with God that we are in trouble, and that only he can do something about it. That’s no lie.

Once again, the cross is offensive. Why? First of all, it shows us our sin. Can there be a worse sin than crucifying the Son of God? I don’t think so. But we did that. We killed the Prince of Life. The next time a little kid asks you what the worst thing you’ve ever done is (as my kids have asked me), tell them that you condemned an innocent man to death. That should get their attention. You didn’t swing the hammer, but you wanted him dead. Jesus said that’s the same thing, remember? (Hatred equals murder) You didn’t want your sin taken from you. It was your “precious” as Smeagol would say. You would do anything to hold on to it. The cross reveals that. It’s insulting.

It’s also insulting because not only are you responsible for it, but it is your only hope. It’s both ironic and paradoxical that the very thing we needed done for us, we inadvertently had a hand in. That doesn’t mean that we saved ourselves in any way, but the very thing that epitomized our distance from God, brought us close to Him. God used our weapon against him, to be a blessing for us. It’s a mind-bender, for sure. But we needed it. He died for us. That’s unsettling. Once again, we’d like to think that we can contribute, and give God a hand. He won’t accept it. The cross is God’s way of saying, I don’t need you. That hurts us.

But it’s a good kind of hurt. I’m glad God doesn’t need me. That would force his hand wouldn’t it? If he needed me, than he wouldn’t really love me. But he does love. Would you rather him need you, or want you? The degree to which he wants you was revealed in the death of His Son. He wants you that badly. God would treat Christ like a sinner, for you, just to have you back. Let your dignity be affronted. Let your merit be injured. He doesn’t need you – He wants you. Don’t you want to be wanted?

When the offense of the cross is active, we find places in ourselves that we have not yet resigned to the condemnation of our sin. That’s a mouthful, but let me say that another way. Uh… You’ve got some mustard on the corner of your mouth. No, the other side. Almost got it – just a second, I’ll get a wet-nap. Ok, there we go. Umm, there’s ketchup on your sleeve too. And on it goes. There’s lunch all over us. We sat in chocolate pudding and spilled our drinks in our laps. The cross is our Mom telling us all this stuff. Unless we agree with God that we had to be born-again, from above this time, we will be dragging around our old dead selves, propping them up against the wall, trying to just act normal. It’s insulting when someone finds us out.

There is more to us than just our sin. That’s where we are headed with this. If you are a Christian – a believer in Jesus who died for you – than you are a new man – or woman, respectively. You see, before, you sinned because you were a sinner. But now, you are a sinner because you sin. It gets reversed. Sin was not really an option before. It was on the surface, but underneath, it ruled you before you came to know Christ. Now, sin is only an option. It does not rule you. It feels like it does sometimes, but that’s a lie from the devil. As Christians, we choose it every time we sin. Sin was your old nature, but you are dead to that, in Christ. You are now alive to God, and that means there is a new principle working in your life. It’s called “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”

We’ve been to Romans Six, and Seven – and now were on to chapter Eight. That’s were we find this new law present in us. The whole verse goes this way, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death.” Freedom! See what a little insulting can lead to? Offend me! Let me see what my sin really is so that I can place no stock in it. Let me put all my eggs in this new basket. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away and behold all things have become new.” We died and rose again with Christ. We are new creations, growing up and out of the old. The old is still around, but the new will outlast it. Even if it barely peeks it’s head out of us during our lifetime here, it will be everything in the next. It’s all about this new law in us: TLOTSOLICJ. Quite an acronym. I don’t think it will catch on.

We get too familiar with our old sin nature still. We need fresh reminders that the cross severed ties with it. It offends us initially, but after, we wouldn’t have traded that experience for anything. Learn to recognize old Adam. When someone crosses you and you feel your blood begin to boil – Adam. When you are denied something that you thought you were entitled to and you start to sulk – Adam. Whenever you choose to put yourself first, whenever you go out of your way to promote yourself (verbally handing out your resumé), whenever you are disappointed with your lot in life (that God has dropped in your lap, don’t forget) – it’s all Adam. Adam and Adam again. Christ died to be the “Last Adam”, Scripture says. His death was Adam’s. His death was yours. It’s done. Hasn’t your Mom ever told you not to play with dead things?

I heard this quote once that I didn’t like, and I still don’t like it. But I’m going to share it with you anyway: “You know how far along you are to becoming a servant, by how you react when you are treated like one.” Ouch. Are you pleased to have your toes stepped on? Are you ecstatic when you get the opportunity to serve others – even when it’s inflicted upon you? Nothing shows spiritual maturity more than actually living out James 1:2 “Count it all joy when you fall into various trials”. There’s nothing like it. The world can’t touch that. That’s the life of Jesus coming out in you. Remember in Acts 5 when the apostles were beaten for preaching Jesus? It says that they went away “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.” It sounds crazy, but that kind of joy is available in Christ. He had it, so you get it too.

Where’s the joy? You won’t find it in your circumstances. Life will go your way sometimes, but our real unshakable joy is found in Jesus who had it even while they were crucifying him. “Fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.” (Hebrews 12:2) Offenses will come. Insults are just around the corner. Let them come. Be found out. Let them go deep and reveal to you the difference between the old man and the new man. It takes time to figure it out, but start now. Let life be your waiter, and hear him say to you, “Would you care for some insult with your injury?” Say, yes please, and then go for a second helping.

11. On The Down Low

2007-07-19T13:34:00.002-04:00

Irony is a hard word to define. If my first language was Cantonese and in learning English I came across this word (This is a stretch I know - Just bear with me) I would think it had something to do with metal. Like iron. You know, iron-y. Like watery, or ketchup-y. Oh, if it was only that easy.

Irony is when something happens that is incongruous with the preceding events. Thank you Webster. That really helps. But I think we all get the sense of something that is ironic. A tyrant rises to power due to a relentless promotion of slavery and ends up being overthrown and becomes a slave himself. Or, you go to rob a bank and just before you pull out your gun, the guy behind you in line pulls a mask over his face and says, "everybody down!" Or, it could be that you go to put some apricot jam on your toast, find the jar empty - fume about it for a while, but later learn that it would have been the thing that sent you into a diabetic coma if you'd had it. I think… This is getting kind of mixed up, but once again, we all seem to be aware of this concept of irony. Heavy stuff.

But here's something that seems to be a secret to most of the world: "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." (Matthew 23:12) That's ironic. That's incongruous. It doesn't make sense to our natural minds. If we demote ourselves, we will be promoted. That kind of takes the wind out of the sails of ambition, doesn't it? But Jesus lived it. In the beginning of Mark's gospel, Jesus is seen casting demons out of people left and right. He then tells them to tell know one about it. He would not let the demons speak the truth about Him. Many times Christ performed a miracle and then demanded silence. Very rarely did he do the opposite (the man from the tombs being one exception). At one point in his public ministry, the crowds wanted to take him and make him king "by force", it says. He wouldn't have any of it. He slipped out. He purposely kept himself "on the down low".

Remember the court room scene before the Sanhedrin. People were accusing him of things that were out-right lies. Their own testimonies were canceling each other out. But Jesus didn't say a thing. "Like a sheep before shearers is silent..." He humbled himself. He was willing to be called "a friend of sinners" (I'm glad for that!) They called him a glutton and a drunkard. They called him a blasphemer. But what was the result of all this? Well, in a word, it was joy. "who for the joy set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame..." He hated the idea that what he was doing was shameful. He was directly opposed to the thought that he should be embarrassed to be nearly naked, nailed to a roman cross, having mostly women there to support him - all of his male disciples took off earlier, except for John. There was joy ahead. Exaltation was coming. He knew it. This was the way. This was how He was given a name that is above every name. His name is now mostly used as a curse-word in our culture. It's still a name that saves, though. Little do they know.

Don't be afraid of things you can't define. Irony is a tough one, but harder still is the idea that God uses things that we think are useless. Jesus was regarded as having been conceived out of wedlock, he grew up as a tradesman (never officially taught), only had a public ministry of 3 years and was followed around by fishermen. Pretty unassuming start. But what an end. And by end I mean, what a beginning to the joy ahead. He took death, sin, hell, the devil, the world - you and me - on his shoulders. That takes humility. God the Father exalted him for it.When Jesus was presented at the temple by Mary and Joseph, it was Simeon that said, "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many." Notice that falling precedes rising here. That means that in order to rise, you have to fall first. We are not simply talking about salvation now, but about our new lives in Christ. This principle is very important to see. It goes against our grain to think this way, but we need to see it already lived out by the Lord Jesus. He was made to be of no reputation – he emptied himself – he was made nothing. Now he is everything. The same goes for us. We have to lose, to win.

“And the first prize goes to…” Every first place winner owes their win to the second place contestant. If he or she had not done worse than the winner, the winner would not have won. Winners need losers. Losers are important people. Without losers, we would have no winners. Losers are the shoulders winners ride on. Everybody who wins should thank their lucky stars that somebody did so badly.

Have you ever been called a “loser”? It hurts. Everybody wants to win. So often our personal best is not enough. It doesn’t matter if we did all we could, it just seems to matter who did worse. There is something in us constantly comparing ourselves to others. That’s why the Guiness’ Book of World Records exists. You have some people that are no good at the regular contests, so they have to make up a weird one to be the best at. There is actually an award for the largest naval fluff collection.

He must increase, I must decrease. He must become greater, I must become less. This is the thought John the Baptist had when confronted with the popularity of Jesus. Not only the popularity, but the success of Jesus. He was baptizing more people than John and John’s disciples appeared to be threatened by this. But John was not threatened. In essence, he replied, “I am still too much. Jesus needs to be more.” At the heart, John is saying, “I have to shrink from view, I have to be less successful, I have to lose more.” John wanted to be a better loser.

We talk about glorifying God but I wonder how often we watch out for competing glories. Our glory gets in the way of the Lord’s. Or maybe we think our glory is necessary for making God look good. Jesus said, “Let your good works so shine before men that they glorify your Father in Heaven.” Well, that isn’t referring to the degree of illumination your works emit. Jesus is talking about the nature of the illumination itself, with that word “so”. You have to back up to one of his illustrations to get the full picture. He talks about a lamp-stand propping up the light, instead of a bowl on top of it. He links the lamp-stand with the works. The light is Christ. We are to hold him up for the world to see. We are to be holders (and beholders) of the light. Do you prop up Christ? Do I prop up Christ? Or are we busy climbing the shoulders of losers?

This can be a hard thing to see in your life, because we are so prone to seeking praise. But start today. We all actively promote ourselves. Sometimes our résumé is a little too handy. Put it away. Let Christ win. Take second place – take last place. May his interests and his endeavours be ours: His Church, his Word, his Name, his Glory… Christ’s is the only opinion that matters anyway. And he doesn’t miss a thing. Even when your right hand is unaware of what your left is doing, Jesus knows. When he says to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant” may there be many secrets between you. Be anonymous in your giving and generous with your prayers. Keep yourself on the down low. That’s where Christ is, you know.

Think about it. The Lord Jesus has decided to be known to this world primarily through his church. If that isn’t humility… The Church is not often a very glorious thing. We do not represent him like we should. But he has still decided to light our lamp. There may be times when it has to be removed from us, as we see with the Church in Ephesus (Revelation 2), but Christ still shines through such opaque people. When Paul said, “for now we see through a glass darkly…” maybe that includes the obscuring nature of the Body of Christ. The Scriptures are clear, but we are not. Still, Jesus humbly defers to the Body of Christ to be his hands and feet, and his face to the world. He is still humbling himself.

May we see him once again as our great Forerunner, and live humbly. It will mean going out of our way to demote ourselves. It will mean refraining from self-promotion and a willingness to be recognized as inferior. It will also mean being seen as a fool for Christ. The world will not understand why you have prioritized your life as you have. Your habit of gathering with other like-minded fools (the Church), your avoidance of earthly wealth - and your willingness to give what little of it you have to the needy, and your insistence on bringing up Jesus Christ in every conversation will get you noticed. It will be humiliating at times. But Jesus said, “they hated me, they will hate you also.” He knows what you are going through. He’s been here already. There is no greater humiliation than the cross. Look what that accomplished. Keep yourself on the down low. That’s where Christ comes into focus.

12. Refrigerators and Wineskins

2007-07-19T13:34:00.001-04:00

My fridge door doesn’t close well. I discovered this one day after pouring some funny smelling milk onto my cereal. The bottom seal on the door doesn’t stick. Well, it does. You just have to give it a little nudge with your foot. We had to get used to doing this for the first week or so, but now it’s a reflex. When people come over to my house and help themselves to something in my fridge, they close the door, and I nonchalantly walk by after them and give it that little nudge it needs to keep my food serious… you know, not going funny.

This little reflex is just there now. I go over to my in-laws and I nudge their fridge door too. I treat all fridges equally – no favoritism here. Every refrigerator door I come in contact with gets a little kick from me. Sorry if I’ve kicked your fridge. It’s hard to change something like that. We get used to doing certain things that started for a good reason, but become unnecessary. I used to have a car with a door that needed a little tough love to close it. But my father-in-law doesn’t appreciate when I exhibit that love on his new Honda.

Jesus said, “New wine must be poured into new wineskins.” New situations call for new approaches. I can’t keep kicking the fridge if the door works. That would actually produce the opposite effect eventually. Counter-productive. But it’s more than that. Humanly speaking, some habits are necessary. Spiritually though, we need to think “new”. Growth is the idea here. When new wine went into a new wineskin, the wine fermented and grew. The wineskin had to keep up with this and got stretched. It was made of leather and had some give. I need to have some give. There is a new life inside of me – a life no less than the life of Jesus himself – and it’s growing. It’s occupying more room all the time, and it’s pushing the envelope.

I’m being stretched. It’s something I have to keep in the forefront of my mind because if I don’t, the experiences I am having will seem more like chastisement, or that I just haven’t gotten it right yet. Jesus is growing my spirit, and it’s not always a very comfortable thing. I love the way Psalm 119 puts it, “I will run the course of your commandments, for you will enlarge my heart.” There is purpose in it! There is something to be done. We are not just saved FROM things, but we are saved TO things also. True, we are saved from hell, death, sin, fear, the world, the devil, self – but also to life, good works God foreordained for us to walk in, heavenly citizenship, conformity to the image of the Son of God, and more.

I don’t want to dig myself into a rut. I don’t want to strap myself to the old contraption of tradition. Jesus was always stupefying people by doing things like picking grain on the Sabbath. That actually infuriated the Jews! Such a small thing, but they had sold themselves to something that was actually a gift to them from God. Jesus said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man.” I don’t want to get it backward like they did. I want the life inside me to dictate the form I take, and not vice versa. I need to listen to mature and wise believers, but wisdom doesn’t always come with age. Jesus was the wisest man alive when he was just a boy. Didn’t he say, “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?”

The Father’s business is life, and more specifically resurrection life. You and I are taking shape according to HIS life in us. We long to be changed, but He has to do it. I don’t want to go around kicking fridges for the rest of my life. I don’t think you do either. We get so fixed on methods don’t we? We do it because it “works”. But what if those works are not supposed to be getting done? “Unless the Lord builds the house, the workers labour in vain.” We all want the Lord to make us into who we are, but we have to relinquish the ways of our old wineskin. It just can’t hold the new wine.

I drink coffee. Work begins each day with me standing at the coffee urn, thankful for the nice lady in the office who always puts it on. She doesn’t drink the stuff herself, but knows we do. The rest of us sure do. It goes fast. My brother wanted a cup one day, and finding the pot empty, came to me. He wanted me to make him some. I started to give him the old “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day…” speech. Nope. He still insisted that I make it for him and being not only my older brother, but also technically my boss, I complied. The soil from the fern pot in the foyer did the trick.

But making coffee takes a little skill, I guess. You don’t really want it too strong or too weak. We learn to do things and eventually have it down to a science, so to speak. Whether it’s the water to coffee ratio, when to apply the solder on a pipe, or when to stop sucking on the hose as your siphoning gas from your older brother’s van… We learn the method. “That’s not how you do it…” we find ourselves saying. “Let me show you how it’s done.” We seem to apply this thinking to everything. My brother had a method too. It was simply to get someone else to do it for him. Delegation is a funny thing. It needs to be learned by those who don’t know it, but it needs to be restrained by those who do. Anyway, we are methodical, generally speaking. We are Methodeers. Spellchecker didn’t like that one (it liked the name for itself though).

So, where does Christ come into this? I love Paul’s determination with the Corinthians, “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified”. Jesus always factors into the equation, doesn’t he? He brings “all things… together under one head”. Well, he didn’t rely on methods much. Take his healings for instance. He gave sight to many. Sometimes he simply touched their eyes. On one occasion he used his own saliva to apply to a man’s eyes, and on another he mixed his spit with clay for the same purpose. The outcome was the same (slightly altered with the man who saw “tree-people” at first), but the method was different. I think that was intentional. When was he not intentional? He did this to show us that God’s ways are not our ways. We think we can get it down to 3 easy steps, 5 simple guidelines or 7 days to victory. There is no method when it comes to the Lord. You cannot confine him. Like C.S. Lewis says, “He’s not a tame lion.”

This makes us rely much more on him. We lean harder on him when we realize that Jesus did not just come to “show” the way, but to “be” the way. He said, “I am the way…”. Change is what we all want, but it always eludes us. We chase self-improvement like the junk food that it is. It abates the hunger for a little while, but you end up worse-off. Think about it for a second; when did you experience the most change in your life? For most people, the answer to that question is at conversion. You meet Jesus and find him to be the cure, the ransom, the wings, the key, and the life that he is, and it drastically alters you. There are many amazing stories of broken addictions, transformed tempers, and infused unshakable joy accompanying that first confrontation with the cross. But from there, the common continuance of the story finds people looking out for the next book or the next speaker, or even the next doctrine to get them through the dry spots. A return to the cross and to Christ himself has no comparison. That was his rebuke to that great church in Ephesus, “You have left your first love.”

Madness may have method sometimes, but do not be dictated by a form or a pattern. Don’t give in to the temptation of doing something because people say “it works.” Jesus isn’t a means to an end. He’s both the means and the end. Let him be both. People may call you impractical or even mad, but they called Jesus that too. And they didn’t understand what he was saying about the wineskin.

This gets us back to having to be really clear on the fact that we are new creations in Christ Jesus – new wineskins. It’s another picture of what is truly a spiritual reality for us. And the wine? The life of Jesus himself. I love that the first miracle (or “sign”) Jesus performs in John’s Gospel is the turning of the water into wine. There were all these huge jars full of water intended for ceremonial washings. He was at a Jewish wedding, and Jews sure loved to wash their hands. They thought it kept them from being defiled by the things they touched. Jesus had to correct there thinking later, of course, when he would tell them that it was actually they that were the source of defilement, but we’ve covered that ground already. All the same, he spoke volumes when he turned that ritualistic water into celebratory wine.

Wine is a symbol for joy in the Bible. That doesn’t mean that joy has anything to do with being drunk. Wine in those days was not like the stuff we have today. It was fermented, but not as alcoholic. Still, it is a picture of the joy the Lord gives us. That’s why Jesus is there blessing the union of a bride and groom. There is no way that they would have been able to drink all the wine he made for them! He was giving them joy. His very presence there meant joy. He wants us to know his joy. May we be full of him, causing our new wineskin to stretch so that he can occupy more of us.

One more thing. Going back to refrigerators, it seems to be a good metaphor for our old lives. When we were fridges, in order to preserve anything, we were dependent on the electricity of the world. Wine doesn’t need refrigeration. The process of fermentation protects the integrity of the wine. Everything is there in the wineskin, without any need for outside support. Don’t hold me to much to this illustration – they all break down eventually. But what I’m saying here is that Christ is our all! He is completely sufficient for all our needs. We have traded our fridge for the wineskin. It’s a fantastic deal. It means joy. It means growth. It means Jesus is in us. It couldn’t be better.

13. Pushing Up Daisies

2007-07-19T13:33:00.001-04:00

Whether or not there is some connection between the decomposition of a corpse in a wooden box, and the botanical world, “pushing up daisies” is a great euphemism for death. Flowers growing on a grave is a metaphor that I hope will help us, as we are now out to define what is commonly referred to as being “born again.” It used to be a qualifier when someone was asked whether or not he or she was a Christian. But it is one of those phrases that seems to have been retired due either to overuse, or under-appreciation. I, for one, quite like it. It means you get to start over. But it also means that you died first.

It’s very much like being transferred from the animal kingdom to the vegetable kingdom. That’s going to make me think the next time I mow the lawn. But there is a lot of language in the Bible about “fruit” and “growth” in believers. There is this Tree of Life in both Genesis and Revelation, and Jesus called himself the Vine – and us branches. He talked about a grain of wheat going into the ground, dying, and coming up again – not alone, but with a whole stock of grain. I’m not trying to say that we should become tree-huggers or anything, but our new, born-again, life in Christ is more like flowers than anything else. The next closest thing would be children.

The thing about babies, is that they grow. Now, adults grow too, but that’s not usually a good thing. Children grow up, while adults grow out. But grown-ups are grown-ups because they have stopped growing. They’ve plateau-ed at around five or six feet tall, and at around 18 or so, they need to get real used to their genetics because that’s what they’re stuck with for the next 50 or 60 years. Being born-again, means that you get to start growing again. You start small, like say, a mustard seed. You can’t see much at first, but it’s there. You can’t make it grow, but you can watch it. It’s a miracle, really.

Getting saved is an incredible, supernatural thing. That’s why there’s all that angel hooting and hollering in heaven when it happens down here. It’s exciting to see new birth. It’s also exciting to see growth. “Look how tall our boy is” my wife and I say about our son. Those with green thumbs love to see the seeds they planted come up in the vast array of natural splendour that the packages promised. Christians really do go through a new birth, after they have died with Christ on the cross. Christians really do get born-again.

Let’s go back to our daisy metaphor for a minute. For the sake of argument, let’s say that they really do get pushed up when a body goes into the ground. The death of the one thing causes the growth of another. It’s actually a scary thought when you consider that decomposing bodies provide nutrients from which grass grows, cows are fed, and then find their way into us after being on the barbecue. How the bodily resurrection is going to work out is a mystery to me, but I believe it nonetheless. If God can make an oak tree out of a tiny seed, all he needs is the tiniest scrap of DNA to make me again. But death into daisies is about transference, here and now. We don’t have to wait until our life on this earth is done, before we get to be reborn.

There are two realities that we have to reckon with, in order for us to really live as new creations in Christ. Number one, you have to acknowledge that you died. You can’t be in denial about that. It’s not that just a part of you died. YOU died. The real you, I mean. Not your body. That’s replaceable. It’s just a tent. The part of you that will outlive this world – your spirit, your soul – died. The old connections that life had with sin, with the law, and with the world have been severed by that death. You can pretend that they are still there, but you are under no obligation to any of it any more.

You may have heard the story about George Wyatt, a man who was drafted during the American Civil War, but was substituted by his friend Richard Pratt. You see, George had a wife and six kids, and Richard, being single, subbed himself in for George. He actually wore George’s name and serial number on his coat. Well, Richard died in the war. Not too long after this, the military approached George again, and was about to have him drafted involuntarily, when George said to them, “Excuse me gentlemen, but I already died in the war. Check the records.” Bewildered, they checked the records. Sure enough, George Wyatt already died. They moved on to someone else. They could make no demands of a dead man. Spiritually speaking, you’re just as dead as George. That has to be really clear, first of all.

Number two, is that after you died with Christ, you were raised from the dead with him too. You came alive again, with a new life, distinct from the old. Oh, it’s still you – the essential you. Not the sinful you, though we do still sin. You were raised, made out of the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. He runs through your new spiritual veins. He animates you. Not Adam. That’s why you are a “Christian”. There’s Christ in you. It’s just in miniature. It’s a mini-you. And the real tricky part now to wrap your cerebrum around, is that God planted the new you, in the old you. Oh boy…

Your old man is fertilizer. It’s dirt. Dirt is made up of dead, decaying matter. Just as daisies grow on a grave plot, the new you in Christ is growing out of the old dead you. That’s why you don’t feel so different right away. The new life also starts so small, that it’s hard for even you to see. It’s a spiritual seed. It needs to grow, and will grow if given the right environment, as with all proper growth. But don’t confuse the dirt for the new you. Don’t start making figurines out of it, or busts of the you you’d like to be. God made Adam out of dirt, because that was what he was going to use to plant Himself into. It just couldn’t happen until the sin that Adam acquired for himself got dealt with by Christ on the cross.

We may need some Bible at this point, just so that you know I’m not making all this up. The seed idea? Here’s John on that: “Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him.” Don’t worry about the “does not sin” part for now, but “His seed” refers to the Lord. There is a seed inside us, associated with the Lord. What about the dirt idea? Here’s a long one, from Paul: “And so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.” Phew. Let me break it down for you: Dust first, Spirit second. God has the spiritual life of Christ grow right out of the dust of Adam.

I used to wonder why God still left me capable of sinning. Wouldn’t it be so much better if when we get saved, we can’t sin anymore? I’m sure you’re nodding your head right now, but hold on. God wants us to know him. That was the point of the cross in the first place, right? He wanted us to know just how much he loves us. If Adam had never sinned in the Garden of Eden, then we would never have known just how far God would go to rescue us. He went to death for us. That’s love. Now, being saved, there is more still to know. Now we get to know that not only can he save us, but he can keep us too. The benediction at the end of Jude’s letter says, “Now to him who is able to keep you from falling”. He’s able, but you can’t know it unless you can still fall.

That’s the purpose of keeping the dirt around. The daisies that will grow up and out of it are proof that God is at work. If you muck around, the new growth will be hard to see, but it’s still there. Let the soil stay where it is. It’s all about differentiating between ground and growth. Learn to tell the difference. There are roots that go down, but you can transplant it – As will happen one day when Christ returns. We’ll get a new pot. One that can’t crack, and is the perfect match for the life inside it. But for now, the business of focusing on the plant and not the soil is of utmost importance. How do we do that?

You will grow when you are exposed to the right elements. You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating: Life in Christ is more vegetable than architectural. Your new creation life is growing, not being constructed. Sure, in the New Testament we read about “edification” or the building up of our faith. But that’s not talking about bricks and mortar – It’s talking about a trellis for a vine to grow on. Or it’s referring to propping up a limb so you get better fruit. So if we are talking about growth, then we need sun and rain. Those are the right elements.

What is the sun a metaphor for? That’s easy. You’re thinking of it right now. It’s Jesus. The Son. When we were discussing night and day earlier, we saw that God’s big object lesson is important not to miss. The sun, our star, is crucial to plant life here. Green things need exposure to the sun, or they will die. Spiritually speaking, believers need exposure to Christ. Here is a verse that should be most helpful here: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” 2nd Corinthians 3:18 Do you see that connection between simply looking at Christ and being transformed? It’s that easy. It’s like salvation to begin with. We think it’s too easy to just believe in Christ, but that’s all we have to do. Jesus did the rest. Yes, I am trying to tell you that in order for you to become more like Jesus, you simply have to look at him. Behold him. Fix your eyes on him. The Bible says that kind of thing all the time.

What about the rain? Well, the rain is the word of God. It’s like drinking water. You need it every day. It also has a cleansing effect on us. Paul talks about Jesus cleansing the church in the letter to the Ephesians, where he says, “that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word” (5:26) The Bible reveals those places in us that are at odds with the Lord, so that we can confess it and get re-focused on Christ. Read it to see Christ on every page. He will be sunlight for your new creation life. We are the most like those we admire. May your admiration of Jesus keep you thinking about him. Only then will you push up those daisies.

14. Unforgivable

2007-07-19T13:25:00.000-04:00

We are fantastic at getting things the wrong way around. Every one of us should have a PhD in Reversology. It’s backwards to think that a few pills can cure us of a lifetime of abusing our bodies. And it’s backwards to spend more money than we can earn. But we do these kinds of things all the time, don’t we? What really concerns me though, is getting it backwards when it comes to forgiveness. It seems that we have a hard time forgiving ourselves when we should, and not forgiving ourselves when we shouldn’t.

We’ll treat the first one first. God has forgiven us in Christ, but it seems that we are still catching up to that. Every sin was laid on Him. Here are a few verses:

“…And the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Isaiah 53:6
“And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.” 1st John 2:2
“…the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” 1st John 1:7

This is the first thing to get straight. If God has forgiven you, don’t keep holding it against yourself. We have a hard time forgiving ourselves for the awful things we’ve done. That’s ok. It’s not our job. Allow the forgiveness of God, to over-ride your guilt. He does not hold your sins against you, so why should you? His blood cannot fail. The Lord Jesus Christ already shed it – once for all. It covers everything, past, present, and future. It’s enough. Trust it. Trust Him. When you can’t forgive yourself, cast that care on the Lord. The cross is all the proof you need that you are forever pardoned, exonerated, cleared of all charges, and free of all judgment. The amazing thing is, we have more than just a clean slate.

God now looks at you and sees His Son. He sees a righteous person when He looks at you. You are IN Christ. You are not only forgiven, but you are justified. You may have heard an old definition for that word, and it’s this: Just-As-If-I-Never-Sinned. That’s what justified means. And it’s not just that God does some imagining. It’s not pretend when God says we are justified. It’s true that we are “declared” righteous, but it’s also just as true that we have “become” righteous. As born-again, new creations in Christ, we have a brand-spanking, shiny new life, free from sin, and fit enough to have the very Spirit of God live inside us. We are forgiven and justified – all because Jesus took our place on the cross. How dare we not forgive ourselves.

Now for the second: We often forgive ourselves when we should not. Here is another way of putting how we’ve gotten it backwards: We don’t forgive the things we do (even though God does), but we do forgive the way we are (when God does not). We excuse our inclinations and propensities, saying “I just have a bad temper” or “I’m a perfectionist” or even “I can’t help it!” We think we can forgive ourselves because it’s not our fault, even though forgiveness is ONLY for when it is! It’s like we are forgiving ourselves for being human. That makes no sense. Applying forgiveness to the way we are is the wrong place to do it. That’s why God doesn’t do it either.

God does not forgive our hell-bent tendencies to sin. He forgives the sputterings and rumblings that come out of the sin-machines that we are, but has a much better plan for our sin-natures: Judgment. Here is how it is said in Romans 8:3 “by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh”. Sin was condemned to death. Far from being forgiven, Sin was judged and executed on the cross with Christ. Remember, “he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” Christ died, AS Sin, so that means that Sin was terminated when Jesus gave up the ghost. It has been judged already, once and for all. Sin isn’t available for comment. It can’t come to the phone right now. It’s indisposed at the moment – and for all time.

These two things need to be firmly embedded in our hearts. One: Forgiveness for sins is inexhaustible, and Two: Judgment on Sin is irreversible. We must live forgiven lives, so that we will be more forgiving people. We must also live a judged life, so that we will have God’s heart when it comes to sin. It grieves Him terribly. It should grieve us as well. God did not sweep it under the carpet, so we must not overlook it either. The more we exercise our faith in Christ, the more we will become sensitized to sin. I love the progression seen in the life of Paul. As a younger man he called himself, “The Least of the Apostles.” As he got older, he called himself, “The Least of All Saints.” Then, in his old age, writing to Timothy, he called himself, “The Chief of Sinners.” Let’s not either excuse sin, or forgive the nature of Sin itself. Jesus condemned sin. Don’t set it free.

Once again, living a forgiven life means that you will be a more forgiving person. When you realize that the blood of Jesus has covered that time when you said what you did to your spouse, or when you lied to your employer - or employee, or that thing you did when you thought no one was looking, or just today when you… It covers it all! Being loved like that should wake us up and have us chomping at the bit to forgive others. We should be pardoning-powerhouses, forgiving people left and right, setting new records in the process. Grace should ooze from us – or come flying out like we are giant bubble-blowing wands that make the kids run with glee over the backyard chasing those shiny effervescent spheres of happiness. I’m getting a little carried away, but I think you get the point. We should be mercilessly forgiving.

And living a judged life? That’s right. You can thank God every day that you have been delivered from sin because Christ’s death included you. You can thank him and praise him because he wasn’t willing to leave you in the shoe-sucking quagmire of sin. You run barefoot now. You are free. Judgment freed you. The condemnation of sin cut the cords between that nature and your new life in Christ. Praise the Lord, I’m dead! We can all say that. The very judgment of God is a mercy.

There’s a part of us that needs to bask in the forgiveness of Christ, and there’s another part of us that needs to languish in the condemnation of the cross. Let’s keep those two things straight. Allow your sins to be forgiven, but don’t forgive your sin-nature. Now, I’m not saying that we are spiritually schizophrenic. We are not spiritual Siamese-twins. But just as you know you have different physical parts, remember that you have different spiritual parts. The Lord wants us to treat each part correctly. Born-again You – that goes to the forgiveness department. Sin-Nature – that goes to the judgment department. Our minds should be mail-rooms from where we send God’s Word to the right offices. We get into trouble when we don’t show up for work: “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” 2nd Timothy 2:15

The more you read the Bible, the more you will see how God is all about making divisions. He spent the six days of Creation separating day from night, sky from sea, land from ocean, plants from animals, and animals from man. He had the Jews circumcised to separate them from the Gentiles. Then he put tongues of fire on the heads of all those who received the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, to differentiate them as well. God’s Word requires us to draw lines in the sand, cutting a swath between flesh and spirit, heaven and earth, faith and unbelief, death and life. We need to divide God’s Word appropriately. In the verse above, Paul uses carpentry as an illustration. He literally says, “cutting straight the word of truth.” Don’t stick it all into the shredder. Cut it into the pieces God has laid out. Then, keep it in the right piles.

“Unforgivable.” It’s the name of the pile that your sin-nature went into. It’s the pile your old life went – on a hill called Gehenna, where Christ was thrown out for you. On a tree shaped into a cross where the fire of sin was put out. It’s that place where you went from being dead-IN-sin to being dead-TO-sin. It can be an offensive and insulting place, but it’s a place where new life grows. A great Vine is growing on that cross, and you and I are branches. But we will only grow and produce fruit, if we have that “Unforgivable” pile in plain view.

And keep that other pile in sight too. The one called “forgiven”. It’s more of a hole than a pile, though. No matter how much I keep shoveling, it never seems to get any higher. Now that I think of it, I don’t ever remember hearing it hit the bottom. Shoveling? It’s called confession. Don’t wait – go to your Heavenly Father and tell him all about it. Yes, he knows already, but then he’ll know that you know he knows – you know? It will give you a fresh appreciation for the cross every time. And that love displayed by Christ will be all the motivation you’ll need to rest in Him and have his life lived through you. Then you’ll start your own pile of things to forgive. It can be bottomless too.

15. Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

2007-07-19T13:21:00.000-04:00

Ah, good old snail-mail. E-mail is handy, but when someone takes the time to hand-write a personal letter, go to all the bother of addressing the envelope, paying for a stamp and taking a little trip to the mailbox, it really means something. I should do it more often. I sent something to myself once. It was something I wanted a copyright for, so someone told me that if I sent it to myself, it would have the official postmark with the date stamped on it to prove I had possession of it at that time. So, that’s what I did. I still have it, but I have to resist the temptation to open it. I think I’m going to send myself something I can actually open.

Now that I think about it, I guess I am a letter, really. You are a letter too. It says so in the Bible: “You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men.” 2nd Corinthians 3:2 I’m not exactly sure what that means, but we do have other distinguishing marks of being a letter. We’ve been signed, sealed and delivered. I’m not talking about the time you got that autograph on your forehead, or when you played in that cardboard box and your brother thought it would be funny to tape you up and address it to “Outer Mongolia”. We’ve all done that stuff... right? But spiritually speaking, it’s true. It happened. We’ve been in God’s mailbag.

We write our names on stuff that we own. With the aid of a “magic marker” we indelibly imprint our claim to the possession of a thing. Permanent ink really helps when two people own identical objects. Call me King-of-the-Obvious, but it’s just that the same thing is true of us spiritually. The Lord Jesus Christ wrote his name on us when we put our faith in him. “That one’s mine” he says. It’s a spiritual tattoo. Here’s what James said about it in the book of Acts: “God at the first visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name.” Then quoting Amos, he said, “Even all the Gentiles who are called by My name.” The Lord’s name becomes our name. That’s why we are often called “Christians”. In Revelation 22 we read, “They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads.” It’s crazy what autographed objects can fetch. Jesus signed his name on us. That makes us worth more than anything.

In the grocery store, it’s important to check that packages have not been tampered with. We’ve all heard stories about things being in boxes that were not found in the ingredient listing. Then there are those jars that have the little indent on the lid – The ones that “pop” when you give them a turn. That’s the time when the men of the house get to feel real strong, after the ladies hurt their wrists trying to open them. Imagine a lid on so tight that only God could open it. That’s your lid. That’s mine. We’ve been sealed. We read in God’s Word that we’ve been sealed by the Holy Spirit. (Ephesians 1:13) It means we’re protected, preserved, and it’s a promise that God will one day remove us from the very presence of sin.

So far, we’re signed and we’re sealed. We’re delivered, too? That’s right. We’ve been borne by the great letter carrier, and no dog would dare bar His path. Just as the Children of Israel were delivered out of Egypt, we have been delivered out of our Egypt – the bondage and slavery of Sin. We are now only slaves to God. “Bondservant” is a better word. We are voluntary slaves. We wouldn’t trade it for the world. We know where we were, and compared to that, the slavery of God is freedom like nothing we’ve ever known. We are out of sins’ hands. The postage has been paid. Delivery is a done deal. We are not waiting to be delivered from sin. We’ve covered that ground already. The Cross of Jesus has trucked us far from that old slave-master. When Jesus was done being made sin for us, he was delivered and received up into Heaven itself. That’s means we’re with Him.

Watchman Nee once gave this illustration. Imagine a piece of paper lying beside a book. Now picture someone coming in, opening the book, putting the piece of paper inside it, and closing it again. Then, that book gets sent to Shanghai. Where is the paper? It’s in the book still. The fate of the paper is wrapped up in the book. What happens to the book, happens to the page inserted into it. This may seem like a silly illustration, but our problems mostly lie in the fact that we don’t really believe that this is our situation. Our fate has everything to do with Jesus. We died with him, we were raised with him, we ascended with him, we are seated in Heaven with him, and one day it will be much more obvious – but it’s still true today. Dead, raised, ascended and seated with Christ. Don’t just think of it as “Theomological” stuff that’s not very practical. It’s very useful stuff for everyday living. We’ve been delivered. The baggage has been claimed.

Signed, sealed and delivered. Each of us is a treasured piece of correspondence. We are in a relationship with the living God, and as living letters, our lives should exude an intimacy with the Lord. He’s written to us, you know. His Word is a message from his heart to ours. There are very personal things written there. He knows you. He can read you like a book. Read him like one too. He doesn’t mind. He’s taken great pains to be transparent and forthcoming. He has poured out his heart onto paper and we so often leave it on the shelf.

No more do we see the pouring out of the heart of God than in His beloved Son. God the Father actually signed His name on Jesus. “I have come in my Father’s name” he said. Another time he said, “Father glorify your name” to which the Father replied, “I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” Jesus was all about his Father’s name. He could have used his own just as rightfully, but He humbly took his Father’s name. And because he did that, and did it to death, God the Father then gave him a name that is above every name.

Speaking of signed, the good book also says that Jesus is “the express image of his person.” Hey, that’s a seal, eh? “Express image” in Greek (they tell me) carries with it this idea of a signet ring being pressed into hot wax. It was the way a king would show that an edict or decree was of his doing. Jesus carries the seal of God. He is the signet ring of God. I guess that’s how the seal got placed on us. Jesus did it. But only after he got it done to himself first. He’s always first, you know. He goes before us – preeminent. He was signed first, and sealed first.

As far as being delivered goes, it’s a bit different when it comes to the Lord Jesus. Remember, he had no sin nature to be freed from. But he was still delivered. He was handed over to the people he came to give his life for. We even have this time when it seems that the Father may have stepped in to stop the whole thing from going down. It’s in those words, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” I’m indebted to a guy named Joe for showing me that Jesus was actually staying God’s hand at that point. Ten legions of angels were at the ready for any time the Son of God’s life was at stake. They tried to kill him before, but were never able. Once, Jesus just strolled through the crowd as they were attempting to throw him off a cliff. Talk about protection. Well, here, Jesus was saying, “Father, let them do it.” We were delivered out of sin, but Jesus was sent right into it.

He went into it, because we were in there! It was a rescue mission. Christ willingly sent himself Express Post into the slave camp of sin to get us out. He carried each of us, not willing that any should perish. But some won’t come. They see him as the enemy somehow. I once read a story about a rescue mission where the prisoners of war had been so brainwashed that they wouldn’t leave with the soldiers who had come to free them. One soldier had a flash of brilliance and took off his helmet and other gear, so that he looked like one of the prisoners. He then got real close and spoke softly to them, and one by one, they got up and left. Jesus did that for us. He took off the glory he wore in eternity past and got real close and spoke softly to us. But that wasn’t all.

Jesus’ delivery meant death. He had to go right through it. That’s where we were. “…Dead in trespasses and sins.” So, in he went, and from the outside, it looked like defeat. He lay silent and still in that cold tomb until the third day, but we’ve been given a little peek into what was going on during that time. We read in Revelation 1 that Jesus has “the keys of Hades and of Death”. Those keys were taken from the Devil. Death was his territory, but not anymore. Peter also talks about Jesus going down and preaching “to the spirits in prison.” What these things really mean, may have to wait for Heaven, but Christ stormed Hell and freed us. We have been delivered from death, because Jesus was delivered into it.

We are who and what we are because of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are only signed, sealed and delivered because HE was first. It’s always that way. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us…” Christ is the great Forerunner. John the Baptist said that Jesus is, “a Man who is preferred before me, for He was before me.” It’s incredible that we are never asked to do anything that Christ has not already set the example in. When he said, “whoever humbles himself will be exalted” we find that Christ humbled himself to the point of death. When he said, “it is more blessed to give than to receive” I have to ask the question: What did Christ not give? Even when he said, “unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” we find that Jesus was always crying out to his Father, wasn’t he? “Father if it be your will, let this cup pass from me…” Christ went first, clearing the way for us to follow.

We’ve been in God’s mailbag, but it’s a humbling thing to see that Jesus, though he is the Son of God, went there too. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Something else to reckon. Another basket to put all our eggs in. They won’t break. God himself is the carrier, remember? Signed by Christ, sealed by the Spirit, and delivered by the Father. We can’t be lost. We’re now a page in His book. He never tires of reading it.

16. Home Sweet Home

2007-07-19T13:19:00.000-04:00

It’s been quite the trip. We’ve been to Rome, camped under the stars, seen a forest fire, walked through a graveyard, held our noses past the dump, stopped at a restaurant for some offensive stuff, and many other places. My hope is that it has not been time wasted. May we all, like the Prodigal Son of old, find that our journeys are all return trips back home. The Father is always within eyesight of the laneway, ready to run to us and interrupt our carefully planned speeches. He’s not willing to let us come back on any terms less than full Sonship. There’s a ring on our fingers, a robe on our backs, sandals on our feet, and the burgers are on the barbeque. We’re home. How sweet it is.

Jesus talked about home quite a bit. It’s not Heaven, you know. It’s Him. He will make Heaven home, but without him, Heaven would be an empty pizza-box. And because Jesus is our home, we can be at home right now. We don’t have to wait, but many of us do. There will be many who will get to heaven and find out they could have been at home much sooner. You see, Jesus said, “Abide in me”. Abide? Think of the word “abode”. It sounds like it’s out of an old Western movie. But it just means “home”. And Jesus verbed it. Abide – Dwell – Put up your feet – Be at home. That’s what he meant. And he said, “in me”. We’ve already learned that we are IN him, but now we have to get comfortable.

It’s hard to be comfortable in a strange place. When we are in unfamiliar territory, we get a bit on-edge. If Jesus is a stranger to us, then we will not be abiding in him. We will always be able to know him more, but that does not excuse us from only knowing him a little. We have the Gospels as such a great place to start. Read the story of Zaccheus again. Read about Jesus washing his disciple’s feet and feeding the 5,000. These stories are so indelible. They get into us, and there are so many nuances about them that they can be mulled over time and time again with an ever-increasing appreciation for Him. There will be things you’ve never noticed before. That goes for every story. Great novels have always been ones you can re-read and not be bored. How about a story that gets better the more it’s read? Get comfortable with the narrative of Jesus. Don’t let him be a stranger to you.

Church is often the last place we are really ourselves. There are so many satires on “churchy” people, because there is so much raw material to work from. Everybody puts on their best religious expressions, and uses the old clichés, and drops a few choice Amen’s. It’s tiring. It’s work. People often get home from Church and feel exhausted. Should it be that way? Of course not, but we seem to think that if other Christians really knew what we were like, it would be too awkward. And so we make it extra awkward with our churchiness. Ironic, isn’t it?

Just as Christ is our home, other Believers are our abodes as well. We should be just as at-home with them as with Christ. We should be comfortable enough to find ourselves in need of forgiveness. We should be at-home enough to do some forgiving ourselves. We should be familiar (family-ish?) enough to laugh and cry with each other, and really share our burdens with one another. Didn’t Jesus say that the world would know we are his by our love for one another? Not just love for our neighbour, but love for fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s the kind of love that gets us noticed. That helps others know Jesus too.

The more we know Christ, the more we will find ourselves hanging our hats there. We’ll take off our religious garb, and find such a rest in the fact that we know we are known. You can’t let someone down when they already know you through and through. You can’t disappoint somebody that already knows in advance what you’re going to do, and still wants you around. That doesn’t mean that we should be cavalier in our sin, or flippant in our attitudes about things that matter. If anything, the fact that the Lord Jesus still wants to be with us, after all, should make us want to be farthest from grieving him. To be known and still loved, makes us love in return.

The Lord talked a lot about following him, while he was here on the earth. The focus seemed to be on keeping up the chase. Right at the end, everybody gave up. The Shepherd was struck and the sheep scattered. It’s a lesson to us all that Jesus can’t be followed. If he could be, why did he have to die for us? If we could keep up with Christ, then how could God judge us? The fact is, we can’t keep up. He knew it all along too. He came to be the exemplary man, and in asking us to follow him, we now know with certainty that it cannot be done. Right before everyone finally gave up trying, Jesus started talking differently. He didn’t talk about following him anymore. He talked about staying put.

It’s all about abiding. Making Christ our dwelling – our home – affects our walk with Him. We all want to live holy lives, but you can’t put the cart before the horse. First things first. Abiding precedes fruit. Rest precedes work. Why did Jesus wait until the 3rd day before rising from the dead? Well, he wanted to allow enough time for people to conclude that he really was dead, and that he didn’t just faint (or “swoon”). But I think it was just as much to illustrate that before resurrection life came, there was rest. As Christ lay “asleep” in that rich man’s tomb, a picture was being painted of how life springs up. It’s not because of our efforts. It’s the Spirit of God animating things that have decided to lay still. We abide in Christ when we stop busying ourselves with trying to be like him, and simply sit at his feet. It’s either Martha or Mary.

When Jesus said, “Abide in me” he also said, “and I in you.” It’s a bit of an odd sounding sentence, but what he’s saying, is that this is a two-way street. Not only do we make ourselves at home in Christ, but he is allowed to make himself at home in us. We all know the scene in Revelation where Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He just wants to come in and have a meal. “… that I may eat with Him, and he with me.” Sharing a meal is such a welcoming thing. We read in the New Testament that there will be times when we may need to lovingly excommunicate a brother or sister, and not even eat with them, so that they will repent of their sin and be welcomed back. It’s all about fellowship. We need to have real fellowship with Christ, and that means letting him in, so that he can sit on our couches and drink our tea. It means offering him something of ourselves, for him to enjoy.

This is illustrated for us in Mary’s flask of fragrant oil. It was worth a lot, in the worlds eyes. But I think it was even more valuable to Christ. The disciples thought it was a waste. Well, it was. Yes, the oil could have been sold and the money used for noble purposes, but there was no greater use for it than to anoint Jesus’ body for burial. He said so himself. I have to assume that Mary’s intent was the same. She got it. Jesus wanted to give up his life, so Mary more than just went along with it. She offered something to beautify it. It was costly, and made her look foolish. But it was waste for Christ’s sake. Did you ever notice that Mary never said a word in that story? Jesus spoke for her. He defended her. He then promised that her story would be told as a memorial to HER. It’s one of the few stories that is told in all four Gospels. She meant it to be something for him, and it was, but he turned it around and blessed her right back. Jesus is like that, isn’t he?

For Christ to abide in us, it’s not a matter of our abiding in him. “Abide in me and I in you” is not an if/so statement. They are two sides of a coin that is ours to offer. To be at home in Christ, he must be at home in us. It seems to happen simultaneously. It’s not that someone will be an expert at abiding in Christ but no good at having Christ abide in him or her. You won’t have one without the other. It’s like this. You come home, put your key in the door, turn the handle, kick off your shoes in the direction of the shoe-rack, put your coat on the banister, call out “I’m home”, dump your keys on the table, fall back onto the couch, etc… You don’t just stand there inside the door. When you’re home, you engage with that environment. Abiding in Christ is engaging Him. You’re not at-home in a place where you’re not speaking to someone. You avoid home when that is the case. Once again, Jesus is not saying that he will make himself at home in us only if we first make ourselves at home in him. It’s not conditional. He is only standing at the door and knocking when we are avoiding him altogether. It’s not Ephesus. It’s Laodecia.

Jesus is home. May each of us personalize that statement. May it mean that he is both our home and that we are his in the process. It’s not about following him. It’s about taking off our shoes, because we are on holy ground. That ground is fertile. It will bear much fruit, if we let it. The busy Christian doing 16 different things “for the Lord” can be barren. The simple restful soul who sits at Jesus’ feet will have bushels.

Find your rest in Christ. You are already in him by faith, so you might as well sit down at the table with him. We often think of our lives as a journey, and all the while God wants us to see that we have arrived already. There is still an aspect to our lives that involves progression, but it’s more like a plant that needs to grow, than a trip we need to take. Christ took our trip for us. His journey is what matters. He went through death and came out the other side to make a home for us, in Him. So put your feet up. Get comfortable in Christ. Then you will find many knocking on your door, asking all about your lovely home.

~ A Prayer

2007-07-19T13:17:00.000-04:00

~ Father of lights, I come to you dressed in the brilliance of your Son, knowing you have sent him to be the light of my world. He shone on me and I saw my sins, like nails strewn across black asphalt. Three times over he proved to me that he would bury them, and bear them away. More than this, his light revealed the hammer in my hand. He knew just what to do to get me to relax my grip on it. I saw him crucified, knew that I could do no worse, and that he could do no better. He loved me and gave himself for me. With a clang, my hammer fell, just before my knees hit the ground. Dear Father, you let your Son be me, for me. And I don’t think I will ever thank you enough. But I’m going to try anyway.

God of all grace, I thank you that I can take it for granted, and it’s still sufficient for me. I cannot exhaust your mercy. The blood of Jesus will not fail me. Though I sin and even trample the Son of God underfoot, I am covered by that precious blood. Father, I know that the only way I will avoid such a grievous act is the awareness that your grace is enough even for that. The Lord Jesus has turned your wrath into mercy. It hit him as judgment, but through his exit-wounds it was transformed into grace. Transgressions, trespasses, iniquity, sins – it’s all under the umbrella of the cross. May I never get over that. May it stagger me, and bewilder me all my days. Your mercies are new every morning, and it’s morning somewhere on the earth at all times.

Father of glory, may the eyes of my heart be open. May I see the Lord Jesus as both the Last Adam, and the Second Man. May I see in Him, both the end of my old man, and the start of my new life in Christ. He is the First, because he was the Last. Father, you have decided to reveal yourself in your Son, and it is also your desire to reveal your Son in me. Conform me to His image. Transform me by the renewing of my mind. May those who pray for me be in the birth pangs until Christ is formed in me. May that be my prayer for others also. I know that the sentence of death is on me that I may not trust in myself, but in You, the Raiser of the dead. Give me opened eyes to see that with Christ I am dead, raised, ascended and seated.

God of the living, I know that I am alive only with respect to Jesus. Only where he is concerned, can life spring up and bear fruit. May I abide in Him, and He in me. He was me for me, so may I now be Him for Him. My life is hidden with Him in you. May this be visible to all. I pray that I will not be ashamed at his appearing, and be waiting for nothing like I am for that day. All this in the name of Jesus. Amen.