Month: February 2017

We live in uncertain times.  Our country is divided as maybe never before.  The world is seemingly filled with hatred and everyone has a portable device connected to the internet through which they can spread their form of hatred and fear.  Is there any hope?

In Isaiah Chapter 41 we have the answer and we learn that in the midst of seemingly impossible circumstances God is not only in control, but He is at work.  God summons the nations to account for the military successes and destruction of a conqueror who turns out to be Cyrus.  God announces that it was He who had raised up Cyrus (the King of the Medes and the Persians) to deal with the sins of His people (the Jews) and Babylon who had taken His people into captivity.  A world that appeared to be out of control was actually in His control.

But even as the world was being ravished and justice was being served for both God’s people and their enemies God gives a promise to His people. – Isa 41:17 – 20 When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them.  I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.  I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive. I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together, that they may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the LORD has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it.

God tells us that He will protect and take care of His people because He is a covenant God who keeps His promises and so “we may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this…”.

“To see” means to behold, or hold up and observe with delight; “to know” means to become familiar with by spending time with; “consider” means to allow it to leave its mark inside you; and “to understand” means to become an expert in well enough to teach.  Therefore, God shows us that He controls history and keeps His promises so that as we behold His works and become familiar with His works we will be changed from the inside out in such a way that we can teach others about the Power and Mercy of God.

The world is not out of control!  God is in control!  The whole world is trying to get you to focus on anything other than God so that you will first become afraid and in response trust and follow anything other than God.  May you see and know, consider and understand that only God can save us and only God will save us.  Be Blessed!

I very much enjoy reading C.S. Lewis.  Here are a few quotes from him that will at least make you think:

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
“Myth Became Fact” (1944)

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
“Is Theology Poetry?” (1945)

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Dedication: “To Lucy Barfield”

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: “We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.” Need-love says of a woman “I cannot live without her”; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

 

If I having  just completed mowing the lawn, stare out the window and proclaim, “The lawn pleases me!” I do not mean that the lawn has done anything that pleases me.  What I do mean is, “The lawn in the state in which it now exists, because of the completed work I have accomplished in it and to it, pleases me.”  I am not pleased with the lawn instead I am pleased in the lawn.  If you are a believer, when God sees you He proclaims, “I am pleased in my Son!” and His countenance rises upon you.  Be Blessed!

The Apostle Paul had established churches throughout the province of Galatia in what we now know as Turkey.  Whether it was southern Turkey or northern Turkey is up to debate but we know that that these churches were relatively close to Paul’s hometown of Tarsus. These churches were dear to Paul not only because of their location but because of their enthusiastic acceptance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the working of the Spirit of God and the mercy and grace of the Father.  They had been set free by an obedience that came through faith.

But then, some Jewish believers from Jerusalem came through Galatia. These Jewish believers had been raised in the Jewish tradition and were proud of their strict adherence to the Jewish law.  Now that they had been convinced that Jesus was the Christ and acknowledged that salvation came through faith in Jesus dying on the cross and having been raised from the dead, they had a dilemma.  What about all those years they had spent following the law? Following the law was part of being a good Jew.  Just because a Jew had become a Christian he didn’t stop being a Jew therefore if following the law was part of being a good Jew then of course it must continue.

Now what about these Gentile sinners? How could Gentile sinners become Christians without having to first adhere to the Jewish law?  How could Gentile sinners get off easier than Jewish believers?  Jesus was a Jew.  How could a believer be a believer without being a Jew or at least by following the Jewish law?  Who was this man who was telling Gentile sinners that all that mattered was listening with faith? Who is this Paul?

Paul was not part of the Jerusalem church.  In fact when he first visited Jerusalem as a Christian following his encounter with Jesus in Damascus he was run out of town.  Prior to his encounter with Jesus he was dragging Christians back to Jerusalem to have them imprisoned or killed.  What authority did this man Paul have to tell these Gentile sinners that they could live in the freedom and joy of the Spirit, being changed from the inside out by the Spirit?

In the self righteousness of a good Pharisee these Jewish believers insisted that the Galatians believers follow the Jewish law in order to prove that they were really saved.  Ignoring the works of the Spirit and the transforming hearts of the believers, they demeaned Paul and exalted themselves above him based on their heritage and their behavior.

Sometime in the early to mid 50’s A.D. while in either Tarsus, Antioch, Ephesus, Athens or Corinth Paul is informed that his precious churches have been infected by this insidious heresy.  He is understandably upset with the Jewish believers whom he has never met but he is astonished with the Galatian believers to whom he has poured out his spirit, soul and strength.  He cannot believe they have fallen prey to such a foolish exchange.  He cannot believe that have rebuilt the wall!

In his letter to the churches in Galatia Paul, in response to the Jewish accusations, says, “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.”  He tells us in another letter that he was in his pre-Christian days “as unto the law, perfect.”  He understood the law but now he understands its purpose.  As he had clearly explained to the Galatians, the purpose of the law was always to show us our utter sinfulness and our need for a savior who rescues us from the wrath of a perfectly righteous and holy God.  When the Galatians had listened attentively to the message of the Gospel (The wrath of God is justifiably on everyone because all have sinned and continue to fall short of the glory of God but in His mercy and love God in the person of His Son Jesus Christ came to earth as a man, lived a sinless life in perfect communion with the Father, became all of the sin of the whole world, died on the cross as the payment for those sins, and was raised from the dead by God the Father after three days as the ultimate proof that He was who He claimed to be, the Son of God, in order that all who by hearing with faith are persuaded that in believing they are made the righteousness of God and the children of God who will live with Him forever) they received the Spirit of God and were changed from the inside out into the children of God who walked in the freedom and truth of God’s mercy and love.  God’s love compelled them to first love Him and then love one another as they loved themselves.  The love of God had allowed them to move beyond the wall of the law and as they did it crumbled because it had completed its work.

But now the Jewish believers had bewitched them and convinced them to rebuild the wall of the law.  As they began to focus on the law, the law simply convinced them of their sinfulness and life, joy, hope and growth vanished being replaced by enslavement, fear and guilt.  Paul writes to them, ” You foolish Galatians”, “I am astonished how quickly you are deserting the Gospel”, “Who has bewitched you”, “If you rebuild what you have torn down, you prove you are a sinner once again”, “If righteousness is possible through the law then Christ died for nothing!”, “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?”, “Are you so foolish, having begun with the Spirit are you now being perfected by the flesh?”, “For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse”, “The righteous shall live by faith”, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons”, “and because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying Abba (Daddy) Father!” “So you are no longer a slave (in need of a wall) but a son, and if a son then an heir through God.”

Don’t rebuild that wall.  The Holy Spirit is now your guardian and God has written His law on your heart.  Let the Spirit change you from the inside out as your listen attentively with faith and you will walk out His ways in His strength and in His time.  He has prepared good works for you to do in advance and He will accomplish His purpose in you and through you. “It is no longer I who lives but Christ who lives in me.”

 

 

 

There is much we do not know about the Old Testament prophet Isaiah who was first recognized as a prophet by King Uzziah sometime prior to the King’s death.  He continued in his ministry as a prophet for as long as 64 years through the reigns of Kings Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah.  We believe he was the nephew of King Amaziah, King Uzziah’s predecessor.  But one thing we do know is that Isaiah became a man of integrity in the year that King Uzziah died.

What is a man of integrity?  We have come to say that a man of integrity is a man of honesty, blamelessness, and innocence but integrity is actually something deeper than that.  The word integrity comes from an old French word, integrite which means “wholeness, perfect condition” and the Latin word, integritatum which means “soundness or whole” from which we get the term integer.  All of you remember from Algebra that an integer is a whole number.  Our words entire and entirety come from the same root.  So you see integrity means to be whole.  Integration means to be made one or whole and disintegration means to tear apart or scatter.

No one is born as a man of integrity.  The Bible tells us “there is no one righteous, not one”. No one is born perfectly integral.  But because Isaiah was born in the kingly line, was the nephew of the king and the prophet of his uncle’s successor, people would have certainly thought that Isaiah was “a man with his act together.”  But he was not!  How do I know?

In Isaiah chapter 6 we discover Isaiah’s imperfection but not before Isaiah is shown what integrity looks like.  The chapter begins with, “In the year that King Uzziah died…” (meaning in a year in which one of Isaiah’s foundations of security and position was taken away) “I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, high and lifted up.”  Becoming a man of integrity always begins with being shown who you are not (God) and then in the light of that revelation being shown who you are.  The passage goes on to say that God is so powerful that his train (the symbol of a King’s majesty) fills the entire temple.  A powerful King might have a train of his robe that filled the entire aisle upon entering the temple but no earthly king could wear a robe whose train filled the entire temple!  In addition the angels are crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of host” and the foundations shake and the temple was filled with smoke.  Isaiah thought Uzziah was powerful but now he had seen the Lord.

Isaiah’s response to seeing the glory of the Lord is “Woe is me, I am undone…”.  Because he is a prophet, literally he is saying, “I am accursed and I am unraveling!”  And why does he pronounce a curse upon himself?  Because having just seen the Glory of God he now sees the truth about himself – “I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.”  He declares that he is a liar and he lives in a nation of liars!

Now Isaiah is ready to be remade.  He has come undone much like a ball of yarn having been wrapped tightly into a ball unfurls when released.  But he’s now ready to be put back together perfectly and become a man of integrity.  Only he can’t do it.  Becoming a man of integrity is something done to you and it always involves (1) an acknowledgement that God is God and you are not, (2) a declaration of your own sinfulness and the sinfulness of the people around you, (3) a surrender to your own emptiness, (4) a sovereign act of God purging you of your sinfulness, (5) hearing with believing that your guilt is taken away and your sin is atoned for.  In Isaiah’s case, an angel takes a coal from the altar and touches his lips and says, “Behold this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sins are atoned for.” When Isaiah hears and believes that he no longer needs to feel guilty and that his sins have been removed as far as the east is from the west through God’s work and not his own, he is made whole.  He is now for the first time in his life perfectly integrated without blemish – not in his own perfection but in the perfection of the Lord.  He is now a man of integrity.  God can now ask, “Whom shall we send?” and Isaiah can answer, “Here I am, send me!”