4SpiritualSecrets

“As they approached, Jesus said, ‘Now here is a genuine son of Israel – a man of complete integrity.’ ‘How do you know about me?’ Nathanael asked.  Jesus replied, ‘I could see you under the fig tree…’” (John 1: 47, 48)

In the first chapter of his Gospel, the Apostle John records Jesus choosing men who will become His apostles.  When He meets Nathanael Jesus exclaims, “Now here is a genuine Jew – a man of complete integrity!” Nathanael is shocked and responds, “How do you know me?”

Nathanael apparently had his devotions under a fig tree.  We might even assume that he enjoyed supernatural relationship with God under that fig tree, but nobody knew about this except Nathanael.  In so many words, Jesus was saying that He was the One Nathanael was communicating with under that fig tree.  This accounts for the enthusiastic response of Nathanael to these words of Jesus.  If you read his response in the verses that follow you will see that these words of Jesus completely convinced Nathanael that Jesus was the Son of God!

A personal, devotional, and practical application I want to make to this interview is what I like to call “The Fellowship of the Fig Tree.” Be challenged by these questions: Do you have a place where you regularly meet with God?  Have you ever experienced the divine presence of Almighty God?  I challenge you to have a time and place where you regularly meet with God.

Establish this discipline in two ways: meet with Him in prayer and in His holy Word.  When you pray you talk to God; when you open God’s Word you should expect God to speak to you.  Are you willing to do that?

“You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.” (James 2:24)

This verse is not a contradiction of the teaching of the Apostle Paul.  James actually wrote before Paul. We might put it this way: “Faith alone can save, but the faith that saves is never alone.”  We are justified by faith alone, but our works show that our faith is authentic, because good works always validate true faith.  What we really believe we do.  All the rest is just religious talk.  And nobody needs religious talk without works.  This is the essence of what James is writing.

The story is told of the headmaster of a Christian school in the Philippines who was holding chapel with his student body when the Japanese soldiers entered the school.  In front of all the students he was ordered by the Japanese to tear down and spit on the American and Christian flags. He refused and was shot in the stomach.

He survived and after the war a news correspondent visited him, and asked him what was going through his mind when he made that decision to be shot rather than do what he had been ordered.  His response was, “It occurred to me that a time comes in every man’s life when he must show by his actions what he believes. That was my time.”

James is writing that it is not at one time but at all times we show by our actions what we believe.  He is not writing that we are justified by our good works but that authentic faith is always validated by good works.

Are you validating your faith by actions that show what you believe?  

“… as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.”     (2Peter 3:12)

Jesus gave a great discourse on His Second Coming (Matthew 24, 25).  In that discourse He proclaimed: ^“And this gospel … will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24: 14).  The prophets and the apostles proclaimed an event that is called the Day of God, or the Day of the Lord.  When Peter added his voice to the chorus he gave an awesome description of that Day (2 Peter 3).

Peter also gave a prescription regarding that Day.  Peter wrote that it is possible to speed the coming of that Day of God.  When you, as a thinking person, ask the question, “How can we speed the coming of that Day?” Jesus gave us the answer when He declared that the gospel must be preached in the whole world as a witness to all the nations and only then the end will come.

That means we can speed the coming of that Day by doing everything we can to get the gospel into the nations of this world.  I believe this means that one day the gospel will be taught in a nation somewhere in this world and then God is going to say, “Now I can bring down the curtain.  I can have My Day because the gospel has been proclaimed in the whole world as a witness to the nations!”

By helping ministries like the Mini Bible College get the Word of God into people and people into the Word of God, together we can speed the coming of the Day of God!

“Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.” (James 1: 15)

In this verse James gives us what we might call the anatomy of a sin.  One day more than twenty years ago, my wife had to be gone for six or seven hours.  As I watched sports television in the evening, every thirty minutes or so there was an advertisement promoting pizza.  I truly love pizza but I’m not supposed to have it because I am a diabetic.  Each time the commercial was shown I developed a stronger desire for that pizza.

I had a telephone and some money, so eventually I called and ordered a pizza.  I told them I was in a wheelchair so please walk in.  When the delivery man arrived, I told him to place the pizza on the blanket in my lap and take the box with him (to leave no evidence.)  When my wife returned, however, as she picked up the blanket to fold it a small pizza crust dropped to the floor.  The consequences were disastrous!

According to James sin involves a lure, a look, a strong desire, and eventually temptation – then sin and death, which means “the pits.”  It is as if the lure is a piece of metal and our strong desire is a powerful magnet.  If we don’t do something to break up that magnetic field between our desire and that lure, we will sin.  I didn’t do that, so the pizza landed in my lap.

James shared this with us so we would understand the importance of breaking up that magnetic sequence of sin.  Are you willing to do that?

“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.