4SpiritualSecrets

“This is how we know we are in Him: whoever claims to live in Him must walk even as Jesus walked.” (1 John 2:5-6)

In the first sixteen verses of his short letter, the Apostle John tells us about a prescription for fullness.  His prescription comes in seven parts: facts, faith, forgiveness, fellowship, follow-ship, fruitfulness, and then fullness.  His facts are the death and resurrection of Jesus.  When we believe the first fact we have forgiveness.  When we believe the second the result can be fellowship with a risen Christ.

By changing one letter in the word “fellowship” I have come up with the key to John’s prescription for fullness.  When you go through this letter observe the repetition for emphasis of this concept.  You will know that you know when you walk even as Jesus walked.

This word follow-ship is also a key to the fullness emphasized by Jesus.  His covenant with the apostles was “Follow Me and I will make you” (Matthew 4:19).  The most important part of the Great Commission of Jesus occurred when He commissioned the disciples to make disciples (Matthew 28: 18-20). A synonym for discipleship is apprenticeship.  Jesus apprenticed the apostles and He commissioned them to apprentice disciples.

A great claim of Jesus was recorded in the Gospel of John Chapter 7 when Jesus declared that His teaching was the teaching of God.  Jesus also proclaimed that we can prove that when we do his teachings (John 7:17).

According to Jesus the doing leads to the knowing.  Intellectuals have claimed for millenniums that the knowing will lead to the doing.  Jesus said “Oh know, when you do you will know.”  Are you willing to do that you might know the teaching is the Word of God?

“For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart…”           . (1John 3:20)

In the Bible the heart is often referring to our emotions.  The Apostle John is using the heart in that sense in the verse quoted above.  What he is essentially writing is that if the way we feel condemns us, God is greater than the way we feel.

Before he writes these words, he was challenging his readers to love in actions and not merely in words.  He follows this insight that God is greater than the way we feel with the prescription that we should keep the two great commandments of Jesus: that we are to love God and our neighbor as much as we love ourselves (Matthew 22: 35-40). Jesus claimed that these two commandments would fulfill all the commandments in the Bible.

We are to love when we look up, when we look around, and when we look in. He was teaching that we are to love God completely, love others unconditionally, and love ourselves correctly.  Loving ourselves does not mean that when we pass a mirror we should stop and have our devotions.  Jesus was teaching that we should say the same thing about ourselves that God says about us – that He loves us.

The prescription for depression the Apostle of Love is giving devout disciples is that when our heart condemns us, we should realize that our faith is not to be based on something as fickle as our feelings.  Our faith is to be based on the reality that we believe and apply the commandment to love.

The last thing we should do when our heart condemns us is to isolate ourselves into a pity party.  We should get with people and love them.

When the first church I started began its first building, there was a young sailor with a family of two small children who was struggling to pay his bills.  One Saturday night there was a knock at my door and he stood there with a beautiful hunting rifle.  He could not even speak.  He just gave it to me and ran down the steps from my apartment.

That Monday I went to a gunsmith and asked him what he could give my church for this beautifully hand carved weapon.  He looked at me so strangely and asked me “What are you preaching in your little church over there that could get a man to give you a gun like this?”

Later I was asked to speak to the Elders of a Presbyterian Church.  They were not specific about what they wanted; they simply said they would ask me questions.  The meeting opened with a question from a very familiar voice: “Just tell us how you got the man’s bird gun?”

The gunsmith was one of the Elders at that meeting.  As a result of a retreat with those Elders discussing stewardship, wonderful things happened.  I believe God can use the sacrificial giving of a sailor’s bird gun more fruitfully than he does the larger gifts given by wealthy people who do not give sacrificial gifts.

If we think about it, we all have a “bird gun.”  Stewardship challenges us to give that cherished treasure to God.  That is what Lonnie Gunter did.  If the members of the body of Christ would all catch the vision of what sacrificial giving looks like, it would revolutionize the way our churches are funded today and in every generation.

“To what can I compare the people of this generation? How can I describe them? They are like children playing games in the marketplace. They complain to their friends, ‘We played wedding songs, and you didn’t dance, so we played funeral songs, and you didn’t weep.’”(Luke 7: 31, 32)

Jesus said some very hard things.  For most of His three years of public ministry, He had an ongoing hostile dialogue with the religious leaders of His day.  Jesus spoke these metaphors in the context of the religious establishment’s criticism of John the Baptist and Himself.  They criticized John the Baptist because he was so austere and disciplined.  Their criticism of Jesus was that He was too happy and presented the image of the happy man.

In that culture, children played games in a busy marketplace.  Since they had observed weddings and funeral processions they would imitate those proceedings in their play.  They would stop busy merchants and say “We are playing funeral today.  Stop and weep with us!” Or, “We’re playing wedding today and we’re playing flutes.  Dance with us!”  Of course, the busy merchants had no time for children’s games.

Jesus turned this metaphor into one of His hard sayings when He applied this to their critical attitudes toward Him and John the Baptist.  By application, He was saying John and I have not come to play your silly little religious games.  We know our vision and our mission objectives.  We have come to revolutionize the Jewish religion.

By application, the religious and secular culture is still playing many games.  We need to have a clear vision and mission objectives that will keep us from being distracted and tempted to play the games people want us to play with them.

“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled,and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” (Luke 5: 37, 38)

The metaphors of Jesus were profound in their simplicity.  The people who heard them understood because He used commonplace, every day examples.  If they made the mistake of placing new or unfermented wine in an old brittle wineskin, one afternoon while taking a siesta they would hear a loud popping sound.  They would then see red wine running down the wall where they had hung the wineskin while the wine was fermenting.

Jesus used this metaphor to make a statement about responding to His teaching.  The statement was that His teaching was like the unfermented wine and the wineskin was their mind when they heard His teaching.  Just as the fermenting expanding wine put pressure on the wineskin until it exploded, His teaching would put pressure on their mind.  If  like the brittle, old wineskin their mind would not yield to the pressure of His teaching, His teaching would literally blow their mind!

A mind blowing prescription therefore would be to become an expert in the teachings of Jesus and never even consider yielding to the pressure to do what Jesus taught.  A prescription that can heal and transform our mind, however, is to study the teachings of Jesus with the intentional objective that we are going to make the values of Christ our own personal value system as we live out our life in this world by Christ, in Christ and for Christ.

Will you consider joining the millions around the world who have chosen to take that second prescription?

“Make a straight highway through the wasteland for our God!”               .(Isaiah 40:3)

 In ancient times if a king wanted to travel to a faraway province in his kingdom they would build a highway for him.  While they were working on that project they called it “The Kings highway.” Isaiah is using that metaphor to say that God is going to travel into this world on a highway and that Highway will be the life of the Messiah.

When you build a highway you do four things: you level mountains, you fill valleys, you straighten crooked places, and you smooth out rough places.  In the life of His Son the Messiah the mountains of pride will be completely leveled, the empty valleys will be perfectly filled with the Holy Spirit all the time, the crooked ways of sin will be perfectly straightened, and He will respond to the rough places in a way that will bring glory to His Father and salvation to the world.

After spending three years 24/7with a dozen men, Jesus challenged them that in precisely the way His Father had sent Him into the world, He was sending them into the world in the same way (John 20: 21).  One of many practical applications to that challenge for them, and for us, is that our life is also to be a highway for God.

I challenge you, in fact I dare you to pray this prayer: “God, make my life I highway for You!” If you do this, don’t be surprised when His spiritual bulldozers show up in your life leveling your mountains of pride and filling your emptiness with His Spirit, making straight your crooked places and smoothing out your rough places.

“So the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? If you do right, will you not be accepted?” (Genesis 4:7-8)

This is the familiar biblical story of the first two brothers on the face of the earth.  We might call Abel “Mr. Acceptable” and his brother “Mr. Unacceptable” for good reason.  They had both presented an offering to God.  Because Abel was acceptable to God, his offering was acceptable.  Because Cain was not acceptable to God, his offering was unacceptable.

In response to this Cain was angry; in fact, he was so angry he beat his brother to death.  In the context of all this, God asked Cain the question,“Why are you angry?” He also asked Cain essentially, “If you get your stuff together will you not be acceptable?”  God was offering Cain a choice.  He could get right and be acceptable or he could go through life beating Abel to death -one Abel after another.

When we are angry we should always ask, “Who is the source, and the true object of my anger?” I personally believe Cain was angry with Cain because he was unacceptable.  He was transferring his self anger to his brother.  Have you ever done that?  Are you doing that now?  Are you the Abel someone else is beating to death?

Jesus provided a commentary on this story when He told hypercritical people they were like those who look for specks of sawdust in the eyes of others while they have a log sticking out of their eye (Matthew 7: 1-5).  If you are the angry person, listen to God as he questions Cain or to Jesus in these verses.  Get right and be acceptable.  Get the log out of your eye.  Don’t go through life beating Abels.

“Blessed is every one who fears the Lord, who walks in His ways. When you eat the labor of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the very heart of your house, your children like olive plants all around your table.” (Psalm 128: 1-3)

When you meditate on this Scripture that describes the role and function of a wife and mother, you can paraphrase your observations this way: a mother is a man-maker.  She is like a fruitful vine in the very heart of her husband’s home.  To borrow a metaphor from the very beginning of the Bible, she is a completer whose passion is to see that her husband becomes all that His Creator designed him to be.

She is a people-maker because she gives him children who are like fruitful plants around his table.  Many people would like to put a period after the fourth word of this psalm and say that everyone is blessed or happy, but that is not the way the psalm reads.  The blessing on this man is because he meets conditions.  He walks in the ways of God.

The other verses of the psalm tell us that this is how God blesses and impacts the world.  He finds a blessed man, joins him to a blessed woman and gives them blessed children.  They impact Zion- which is the spiritual community- and this family unit fruitfully impacts the city and the country.

A mother is at the heart of this great strategy of God.  As such she is also a home-maker and a memory-maker.  What a great and noble calling this is.

Rise up and call your mother blessed this Sunday!

“When Jesus came by, he looked up at Zacchaeus and called him by name. “Zacchaeus!” he said. “Quick, come down! I must be a guest in your home today.”  (Luke 19:5)

When Jesus came face to face with the greatest sinner in Jericho, He knew him and called him by name.  He then invited himself to spend the entire day in the house of His sinner friend.  The chapter tells us elsewhere that Jesus was only passing through Jericho.  He was extremely popular at this time and His walk through Jericho was like a parade with the sides of the street crowded with people who wanted to get a glimpse of the famous Rabbi from Galilee.

We might imagine that the religious leaders would like to have entertained Him for lunch.  To everyone’s shock and amazement Jesus declares that He will spend His one day in Jericho with the greatness sinner there. Publicans were hated in that day because they collected taxes for the Romans from their fellow Jews.  And this man was the chief of the publicans and he had become very wealthy in that position.

We are told nothing of what Jesus and the publican discussed that day, but at the end of the day as they come out of the house the sinner announces that he will give half of his money to the poor.  And with the other half he will restore 400% of everything he has taken from people unjustly.

One scholar put an interesting spin on this story when he suggested that Zacchaeus was the publican in the previous chapter of Luke who prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

Do you know any sinners by name?  Are you a friend of sinners?  Do you think you should be?

“Now let me remind you, brothers, of what the Gospel really is … I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said.”  (1Corinthians 15: 1, 3, 4 LB)

Imagine that your pastor gave everyone in church paper and pen and then asked them to write the answer this question: “What is the Gospel?” How many would write the correct answer to that question?  How would you answer that question?  We have all been commissioned by our Lord to preach the Gospel in every nation in the world.  How can we even begin to do that if we don’t even know what that Gospel is?

In the verses above the Apostle Paul gave us the right answer to that question.  The Gospel is two facts about Jesus Christ.  Fact number one is the death of Jesus Christ for our sins according to the Scriptures.  Fact number two is the resurrection of Jesus Christ according to the Scriptures.  The word “Gospel” means “Good News”.  What makes these two facts about Jesus Christ good news for you and me?

When we believe the first fact, the result is the forgiveness of all our sins.  If you are a sinner and you know it, that is very good news.  When we believe that second fact, the result is the good news of a relationship with the risen living Christ.  He can and will equip us with everything we need to follow Him.

Will you believe these two Gospel facts about Jesus and have a personal Easter this year?