As you and I grow closer to God, one of two things happens: God burns out of us everything contrary to the essence of His spiritual and holy nature, or our resistance to this process puts our relationship with God in a spiritual “deep freeze.”

Years ago I visited a man who had just experienced a five-artery bypass operation after suffering a massive heart attack.  Involved in much sexual immorality before he became a follower of Christ, he had sought my counsel frequently regarding his continuous battle with a sexually impure thought-life.  When I arrived at his room in the hospital, he extended his hand to me from his oxygen tent and said, “I haven’t had a sexual thought since I entered this hospital!”

What he said reminded me of that part of the verse quoted above by the Apostle Peter, which tells us that sin can sometimes lose its power when we are suffering.  If people were transparent, many would acknowledge the reality that their loving heavenly Father has kept them from much sin by permitting many shades and grades of suffering and limitations.  According to the book of Hebrews (12: 29), and the first letter of the Apostle Peter, God sometimes uses suffering to diminish sin and increase the share of His holy nature with His children.

If a large block of ice and a blowtorch came together slowly one of two things happens: the blowtorch can melt the ice or the ice can extinguish the blowtorch.  God knows His business is to prepare us for heaven.  He is a consuming fire that sometimes uses suffering to do that business.

An attractive young lady was returning from a church meeting at a late hour.  When she stopped at a traffic light, a large “eighteen-wheeler” truck was in the next lane.  As the light changed and she pulled away, the large truck “tailgated” her car while blinking its lights and blowing its loud air horn.

She was very frightened and increased her speed as she drove out of the city limits toward the farmhouse where she lived with her parents.  The huge truck followed her all the way, blinking its lights and blowing its horn.   She turned into a long dirt road that led to her home.  The truck followed her as she drove right up to the porch of the house.  When she frantically popped open her door to run for the house, the back door of her car suddenly opened and a man with a large knife bolted for the woods.

When she stopped for that light, the truck driver saw the man crouching behind her front seat with a knife in his hand.  Realizing that she was going to be attacked as soon as she drove into the country, the truck driver was determined to save her from that tragedy.

Sometimes, our suffering and limitations seem like that eighteen-wheeler bearing down on us.  Actually, however, that suffering can be a vehicle of our loving God, purging out of our lives the evil one who is determined to ruin us.  This is what our Lord was profiling when He instructed us in the disciple’s prayer to pray that we might be delivered from the evil one.

Can you meet yourself in this story?

Editor’s Note:  Dick Woodward (my Papa) recently returned from a hospitalization & has recovered nicely (thanks be to God!!)  He is now getting back into his normal schedule (blog writing inclusive.)  We appreciate your continued prayers as we give thanks – Life is a Gift!!

When you read the first words of Paul’s letter to his favorite church they show you the passion of Paul and the heart of this church he loved.  The bonds that made them so remarkably one in heart are expressed in the repetition of one word: “Gospel.”  Paul writes that the things he has experienced have fallen out to the furtherance of the Gospel.  And that he has them in his heart because in the defense and confirmation of the Gospel they all are partakers of God’s grace.

As Paul continues to repeat the word “Gospel” he expresses his heart’s passion when he describes what he calls “the faith of the Gospel.”  He precedes that with the concept of behavior that becomes the Gospel.  Paul is describing the purpose and function of a church when he calls their church “a fellowship of the Gospel.” The context in which the Gospel is to be believed is that fellowship of the Gospel.

Paul is in prison when he writes these words and he doesn’t know if he will be released.  In verse 27 he writes his ideal for his ideal church.  His great Gospel prescription is: “I want to hear that every member of your church is a Christian; every Christian is Christian and Christians are Christian together in a way that results in other people believing the Gospel!”

Paul’s plan for filling this prescription for his ideal spiritual community is to “Stand fast in one Spirit with one mind, striving together for the faith of the Gospel!” (1:27) That Church in Philippi is to act as if they have one mind among them because in fact because they do.

It is the mind of Christ.

 In the great prayer our Lord prayed for His Church (John 17), Jesus asked His Father, not once but five times, that we all might be one.  In light of that great prayer priority of our Lord, is it not an evidence of the work of the evil one when we consider all the “sects and insects and isms and spasms” that say they are His true Church today?

The risen, living Christ can be known by His followers today.  One of the favorite ways the authors of the New Testament identify the authentic followers of Jesus is when they refer to them as being “in Christ.”  When His Church in Corinth was hopelessly divided the Apostle Paul asked that church a very appropriate question: “Is Christ divided?”

If thinking people really track with the authors of the New Testament would they not think it strange if people profess to be in Christ and then cannot agree on anything?  There is, however, a supernatural oneness or agreement among people who are truly in Christ today.

Many decades ago when African American believers were petitioning white churches in the southern part of our country to integrate I discovered that it didn’t matter whether the people in my church were born in northern or southern United States.  What mattered in my congregation was whether or not they were born again.  Christ does not feel more than one way about civil rights.  Neither will we if we are born again and in Christ.

Paul concludes the second chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians by claiming that we have the mind of Christ.  If we in fact do have the mind of Christ we will agree.

These are some of the most familiar words in the Bible loved by Protestants, Catholics and Jews.  They describe our relationship with God.  They tell us that when God is our Shepherd we have green pastures, still waters and a full cup that never empties.  This is because our great Shepherd makes us lie down.  He may use problems we cannot solve to make us lie down.  However, since we are creatures of choice we can choose to get up again.  When we do our green pastures turn brown and our cup empties again.  He then restores our soul by driving us into the paths of righteousness that restore us.

Many devout souls also love this psalm because they see in it a description of a believer’s death.  To them death is the great Shepherd coming into a life for the last time making a devout person lie down so He can give them the green pastures that never turn brown and the full cup that never empties in the eternal state.  The only way He can give us these eternal blessings is to make us lie down in death.

The key to these eternal blessings is found in the opening words of the psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” Meditate on these words one word at a time.  They are the key to living here and in the hereafter.  Can you say that He is your Shepherd today and always?

Most people associate the still waters of David’s Shepherd Psalm with peace.  However, if you do some research you will find that when a sheep drinks from a stream of water that stream must be as flat and still as a mirror or the water will go up the snout of the sheep.  The authentic application of this metaphor is therefore that the still waters mean our great Shepherd leads us to the places just suited for us.

In 1979 I resigned from a large church and accepted a call to a small church that had just begun.  After being in the small church for a year I went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota because of weird symptoms I was experiencing.  After nearly a month of studies, the doctor who directed my program misread my file.  Thinking I was still in the large church, when he gave me the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis he told me I needed to go to a small church in a small town.    I told him that I had already been in a small church for a year.  I was to learn to be fulfilled with doing less and doing it better.

As my symptoms persisted and I was confined to a wheelchair a group of men helped me build a house that accommodated my physical challenges.  One of them made a stained glass window with two words on it.  Near the entrance for 26 years those two words have been “Still Waters.” Those two words are not just a label for my home but also my ministry – in this location I have accomplished the most fruitful work of my life.

Can you write those two words across what God is doing in your life right now?

Have you ever watched a dragonfly move from one plant to another with its two sets of wings making it possible for it to hover like a helicopter?  A dragonfly actually spends the first two years of its existence at the bottom of a large body of water.  When that phase of its existence comes to an end, it rises to the surface of the water, climbs up on the bank and lets it wings dry in the sun.  Then it spreads those magnificent wings and begins the second dimension of its existence when it becomes an aeronautical wonder.

Easter reminded us that like the dragonfly we are meant to live out our existence in two dimensions.  If you did a cross-section of that under-water dragonfly you would see that it has two respiratory systems.  It has one for living under water and one for breathing air in the second dimension of its life.

If you could do a spiritual cross-section on a born again believer you would find that we are also equipped with two systems.  We have an outward man and an inward man.  Our outward man is just a little clay pot in which our eternal inward man lives.

We are told in the great Resurrection Chapter (1 Corinthians 15), that we are given a body for living this life and we will be issued another body for living in the eternal state. According to Paul, that new body will be a spiritual body that will equip us for living throughout all eternity.  I don’t know about you but as a bed fast quadriplegic I’m really looking forward to being issued that new body!

Jesus was celebrating the Passover with His apostles.  Luke writes that on the way to the upper room where they were to celebrate the Passover with Jesus the apostles argued about which of them would be the greatest in the kingdom Jesus promised.  What a shock it must have been when Jesus assumed the attire of a slave and washed their feet!

Having washed their feet He asked the question “Do you know what I have done to you?” His question is answered in the words quoted above.  The most dynamic characteristic of the personality of Jesus was love.  He had loved these men for three years in ways they had never been loved before in their entire lives.

He also answered His question by telling them that He had given them an example.  If He as their Lord and Teacher had washed their feet they should wash each other’s feet.  Then He made the connection between feet washing and love by giving them the New Commandment.  They were to love one another in the same ways He had loved them.  This would be the absolute credential that they were His disciples.

A New Commandment directed them to a New Commitment.  Each of them had made a commitment to Jesus but now they were to make a commitment to each other.  This new commitment established a New Community.  We call it the church.  The secular people said of the early church, “Behold how they love one another!”  If they made that charge today about your church or mine would there be enough evidence to convict us?

Oh Lord make it so!

 The prophet Habakkuk lived in one of the most difficult times in Hebrew history.  God gave him a prophetic message to preach when the Babylonians were about to conquer God’s people.  The watchtowers were manned with soldiers who were listening for the dreadful sounds of the Babylonian army.  This little prophet had witnessed the terrible ways the great Prophet Jeremiah was treated when he preached his message.  Being a simple choir director he could only imagine how he would be treated if he assumed the role of a prophet.

He therefore came up with a very clever literary form.  He proclaimed that he was going to build a spiritual watchtower and ask God all the difficult questions that were on their hearts at that time.  Questions like, “Why will you use a people more sinful than we are to chasten us?” He told them that when he heard from God he would tell them what God said in answer to these and other questions.  His literary form was like a talk show in which he was the host and God was the Guest being interviewed.

God’s answer was that the wickedness of the Babylonian would be their undoing, but the just would live by their faith.  Originally this meant faith in the prophecy of Jeremiah that they would return from the Babylonian captivity.  By application these seven words, which are quoted three times in the New Testament, were used to inspire the great protestant reformation.

People say God does not speak today as He did then.  The truth is we do not listen for God as this prophet did.  Do you have a spiritual watchtower? Do you listen for God and expect to hear from Him?

Here Jesus uses a metaphor that had probably been the experience of some of those who heard this teaching.  Undoubtedly they had made the mistake of putting new wine, or unfermented wine, in an old brittle wineskin.  They would hang that wineskin on the wall of their home to let the wine ferment.  But one afternoon while they were taking a siesta there would be a loud popping sound and they would see wine running down the wall.  They would immediately know they made the mistake Jesus was describing.  The expanding fermenting wine burst the wineskin.

By this metaphor Jesus was teaching that His truth was like unfermented wine.  When they took that truth into their mind, if they did not yield to the pressure of that truth and apply the teaching it would literally blow their mind!

We place such a high value today upon knowledge that many people think knowledge is virtue.  However, it is the application of knowledge that leads to virtue and wisdom.  Jesus taught in another place that it is when we do what He teaches that we will know His teaching is the Word of God (John and 7:17).

This is also a warning from Jesus.  If we build up a reservoir of the truth Jesus taught that we never apply, that unapplied teaching can give us so much conflict it can make us sick.  The greatest truth this world has ever heard came through Jesus.  Resolve to do it before you know it.  The application of the truth Jesus taught can convert you into a new wineskin.