BARRENNESS (FIND ME IN THE RIVER)

In the great spiritual battlefield of the mind we struggle with many things, mostly Self induced. It is painfully obvious, even to those saints lacking God’s discernment, that we are ignoble despicable creatures, more sinful then Godly... shamefully always needing Grace. Spiritual Barrenness is a place of meandering within the narrow universe between one’s heart and the heart of the living God, a time of sorting out life’s priorities and purposes in the spirit realm, a journey of spiritual integrity where we see our heart as it really is... and we see God’s heart. Barrenness is a bump in the road, a place along The Way, a detour into the wilderness... a dry desert time... a hard time... a time of restoration.  Barrenness is... ultimately, the cry of a desperate heart longing to experience the power of God’s affections and thereby... through intimacy with God, know that they are truly known by God. Lord: Once again I look upon the Cross where You died. Once again I am humbled by Your majesty... broken inside. And once again I am thankful... ever so thankful, that in Your constant and superabounding Love... Grace for me resides.

MY PRAYER

FATHER: My heart aches... but faintly. I love You, desire You, want You... weakly... waveringly. Even the pain of my denials, denying by my actions that which I profess, even that pain is so faint... more discomfort then the heart-wrenching anguish that accompanies true love torn asunder... true love betrayed. My knowledge of You is nothing, my wisdom even less, as I look without perceiving, hear without understanding... seeing nothing as it truly is... blind to the beauty in You. Eternity... what is light. Earth-life... what is dark. Stories remain stories, void of living water, unable to penetrate my dry and thirsty soul... unable to circumcise my heart with the scars of divine invasion. Your Cross is a picture... my cross a facade. My tears... when they do come, are sweet emotions... moving reminders of Your sacrifice. But not, sadly, the tears of sharing in Your suffering. Heaven seems a fantasy with no transforming power, The Way seems a mystic road... the stuff of midnight ramblings. My heart is cluttered, wanting to be free to soar with You, wanting to drown in Your love... wanting... while contending with lovers less wild. I call Your name with sincerity, but do not know its face.  All I am... all that resides in me, seems far, distant... removed from Your heart. But You beckon me to come... the scepter is raised once again. Lord, I am nothing... I have nothing... I know nothing... I am at best despicable... I deserve Hell. All the something I thought was me...  all that I held to be important, simply dissolved before Your radiant beauty... leaving me naked... possessing nothing... poor for words... empty of all... needy and alone. Even so my Lord... even so Great Lover of my soul, You call me... naked and wrenched as I am... You call me. You will not leave me here fatherless... You beckon me to come. May I find You in my nothingness... in my poverty... in my barrenness, as I cast myself on Your unfailing love, clinging to the hope You’re not through with me yet. Where else could I go... Whom have I but You...

WHEN WE CAN’T FIND GOD’S GRACE...

IT WILL FIND US...

LOVE-ROCKS

I look beyond the empty cross

Forgetting what my life has cost

Out of my sight, out of my mind

Lovers less wild consume my time

And then a love-rock crashes through

Breaks reality dims my view

Pain speaks loud when it speaks at all

But blessings whisper faint Your call

My broken heart knows what to do

Turning my gaze again to You

I need Your love, need Your power

Need You more each passing hour

I look upon the blood-stained cross

Remembering what my life has cost

How great the price His precious blood

Consumed by His relentless love

FATHER, SHOW YOURSELF TO ME

The Lord stays with us when we are disheartened, when doubt and dead-end questions flood our mind in the dark night of our soul... He stays with us! These are the thorns, the nails, the cross of our despair when misplaced hope doesn’t come true...our suffering isn’t relieved... our questions left unanswered. Father, show Yourself to me, help me to understand Your weakness in the wilderness, Your tears on the road to Jerusalem, Your agony in Gethsemane, Your tortures on the Cross... to understand the depths of Your pain that I might fully appreciate the depths of Your love for me. Thank You for the good that has come from my suffering for I have learned to feel for others. Thank You for the pain I have experienced, for I have become more sensitive to the pain of others. Thank You for the sorrow, for it has made me sympathetic to the sorrow of others. Thank You for the thorns and nails of the world... this life, and the weight of my cross, for in this I feel something of the pain of Your earth-life... something of the fellowship of Your sufferings. And, thank You for the pressures of earth-life that form the brilliance of Your nature within... human diamonds... make me Your jewel. Father, show Yourself to me, especially when I am disheartened, for Your presence means more to me than my understanding... and imparts an intimacy with You unknowable apart from tears...

“I WILL MAKE THEM MY JEWELS”

REDEMPTIVE CONTINUITY

The Bible promises a final chapter to our life in which God restores His creation to His original plan, tying together all the verses of our lifesong... the good and the bad... the blessings and the adversity, into an eternal sequel of incredible beauty, happiness, and fulfillment. In Christ we are radically changed through salvation, transformation into Christlikeness, and resurrection... the change accompanying “Flying” or dying. But we will remain the unique individuals God created with the same history, appearance, personality, memory, interests, skills, likes/dislikes, etc. There must be continuity of the uniqueness of the individual for resurrection to be resurrection... calling into existence a completely new individual is not resurrection... not bringing back to life the dead.

The eternal life to come flows out of this smidge of an earth-life, whose adversity and suffering is not worthy of comparison to the glory our resurrected life will bring. Man’s eternal glory grows organically out of the adversity we experience during present day life... just as it did for our Lord: Heavenly glory is conditioned on earthly suffering... no suffering, no glory! Glory is a God-word, the true apprehension of God from unending self revelation, a state of high honor involving brilliant, radiant beauty... measured in watts. God’s radiant brilliance, His covering and His dwelling place, is a physical manifestation of His love. Our glory is reflective... the source is always God, but we shall be like Him, brilliantly beautiful, magnificent, splendid... and aglow. 

Isaiah 65:16-17 is often cited as implying saints will not remember their earth-life in Heaven. Contextually, this passage refers to God choosing not to remember our former sins (ref. Jer. 31:34). “Remember” is a covenant word that includes acting upon what comes to mind. Though God will wipe away every salty tear attached to our earth-life, He will not wipe away our memories, human history, or His divine intervention into the affairs of mankind. We will never forget that our sins nailed Jesus to the cross... His nail scared hands and feet will be a constant reminder, prompting eternal joy and worship of our Savior for His awesome Grace. And memories of our earth-life suffering will not diminish but rather enhance the magnificence of God and His heaven. Our memories of adversity and evil will provide a backdrop to better see God’s grace and holiness... intensifying our love for Him, just like the Passover served the children of Israel, contrasting Egypt’s cruel bondage with God’s goodness. We will enjoy the magnificence of our Lord and the Heaven He has prepared for us, not merely in spite of all we suffered during earth-life, but, all the more so, because of our earthly suffering and adversity. Just think, we will enjoy forever life on the New Earth restored to its finest majesty and splendor... in perfect prime bodies that never wear out... with a transformed nature fully Christlike... with our own unique individuality. We will experience unending joy, unswerving happiness, and complete fulfillment... while continually bathed in God’s radiant glory. All this, and some still choose the smidge...           (Rom. 8:17; 2 Cor. 4:17; 1 Peter 1:11, 2:20, 4:13, 5:1; Heb. 2:9, 5:8; John 20:24-29; Rev. 6:9-11)

POSTSCRIPT

Our Daddy is bigger, bigger than... well, there simply are no human words to describe His bigness... His anything, anywhere, anytime power. I really believe that someday, ages and ages hence, while hanging around a campstar on a clear millennial night, we will remember and have a good chuckle about the adversity of earth-life. Adversity will be only a memory, ban forever in God’s Kingdom... a word that only has meaning in the past tense... a memory that evokes loving adoration of our savior. Then, reflecting on God’s goodness and His faithfulness, we... the general assembly and church of the firstborn will break out in two part harmony with an innumerable company of Angels singing praise to our Lord....

HOMEWARD BOUND

To say “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord” is to summarize in Old Testament language God’s divine plan as seen through the eyes of the Apostle Paul in Rom. 8:29-30: Those He FOREKNEW... knew before in eternity would be His, He PREDESTINED... “before-ended”, fixing their end in time, that they might be CONFORMED... changed into the nature of His Son. These same ones He CALLED... the heart of the Father calling from eternity His chosen ones back to Himself in time, He JUSTIFIED... placed into right standing with Himself, and He GLORIFIED... providing them with abundant life flowing now into eternity. This is a picture of the “ordered life” of a “good” man... one who follows God’s precepts, a new covenant metaphor for God’s elect... His time-chosen ones who chose Him in eternity. God knows His Jewels through His foreknowledge, which captures the exercise of our free will before we exist in time. The ordering of our life, our predestination, transforms us into Christlikeness, beginning our confirmation process long before we hear the call of the Father. Our response to the Father’s call declares what He already knew, that our heart would be receptive to His call. Justification is the judicial act in the courtroom of Heaven whereby God declares us innocent... acquitted of all charges, and frees us from the bondage of enslavement to sin which held us prisoner.  Now we understand that the true glory of man is the ideal condition into which man was created by God, so glorification in the human sense is restoration. Our glorification begins with our spiritual union with Christ, progresses as we cloth our Self with Christ’s nature, and will be completed when we are “CHANGED”, when we receive our immortal bodies.  God is simply ordering our steps homeward...   

HE BRINGS RESTORATION TO OUR SOUL...

WHO’S RATTLING YOUR CHAIN

There’s a significant difference between the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the accusations of the enemy... a difference of both method and substance. The Word of God calls our enemy the prince of devils, diabolos, “devil”, and satanas, “satan”, his nature defined by his names:  The nature of our enemy is to slander, defame, accuse, and destroy, standing in opposition to all that is godly and attempting to separate man from God through false information... he is the father of lies. He uses the shotgun approach to overwhelm us with a sense of condemnation and unworthiness to the point of despair... even hopelessness. Within the confines of our conscience our heart sides with the enemy’s accusations igniting the debilitating paralysis of self-analysis...Self trying to fix itself. As “the accuser of the brethren” the enemy’s goal is to separate us from the enabling Grace of God by obstructing our fellowship with God, causing us to withdraw from the throne of His Grace.   

On the other hand the conviction of the Holy Spirit is always gentle, specific, and purposeful, as He shines the light of Christ’s nature on an area of our life where repentance and change is needed. As saint’s we are all on the road to Christlikeness... to more of Him and less of Self,  changing bit by bit as the Holy Spirit manifests Christ’s nature in us as an alternative to Self. As our “Comforter”, the Holy Spirit’s goal is to ignite a passion for Jesus so the Holy Spirit will always manifest Christ... will always point us to Christ... will always encourage us to approach His throne of Grace with great boldness: “For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.” God is greater than our heart... greater in love... greater in compassion, no less than in knowledge. We must always remember, we stand in the virtue of the shed blood of Jesus... which has never lost its power to save... to heal... to restore... to make us Christlike, it is still the way we overcome.

GOD IS GREATER...

BUT IF THE SHOE FITS...

The Holy Spirit’s job is to manifest Christ in us... to change our natural virtues, our natural traits, qualities, and characteristics, from our Self-nature of the seed of Adam to His Divine-nature of the seed of Jesus. The Spirit is a master craftsman, not a cobbler. He never just patches up our natural virtues with a little bit of Christ sprinkled here and there. “You shall be perfect”: There is no ambiguity about our need for spiritual maturity. The Son said it, the Father commanded it, and the Spirit will execute it... in willing hearts. Our natural virtues can never come close to the virtues demanded by the Godhead... our Self-serving love is not even a cheap imitation of God’s self-sacrificing agape love, yet we cling to our natural virtues, Self loving itself, all the while proclaiming Christ is our Lord. But, Jesus knows what is in the heart of man... God knows our hearts! So... we must learn to draw our nature from the reservoir of the resurrection life of our Savior, to bring every part of our nature into harmony with the implanted Christ-Life... to put on Christ. Woven within this “learning” is death, submission, and renewal... not painless processes, but so very rewarding for Self-willed stubborn folks who seem hell-bent on misplacing their love on trinkets of wood, hay, and stubble. Remember, our Self-nature is programmed to love the world, the same world we are commanded not to love... the same world predestined to burn! Be thankful for God’s patience... and determination, therein lies our Blessed Hope...

Author’s Note: As with most of the thoughts I share, this “song” is for me. I am traveling the road of Transformation at a snail’s pace, catching fleeting glimpses of what could be... should be... if I could just climb up on my cross and spread wide my arms. Don’t pray causally for God to reveal His heart to you, for we cannot see His heart without seeing our own... and recognizing just how far short of His transforming glory we have fallen. While I am most concerned about an experience... signs, wonders, miracles, the felt presence of God, God is whispering “Son, I need to talk to you about your heart.” The greatest sign of spiritual maturity... of pleasing God, is not spiritual giftings, ministries, or signs following. It is Love, Joy, Peace... the Fruit of the Spirit, obedience, passion, and sacrifice. God’s presence is drawn to Godliness like a magnet, abiding where His nature is strongest, but... Christlikeness is my weak suit. Like I said, this song is for me...  but if the shoe fits...

SON, I NEED TO TALK TO YOU

 ABOUT YOUR HEART

MOSAIC DISPERSION

No truth is founded on a single verse of scripture. The minimum requirement to establish new covenant truth is two co-witnessing New Testament verses taken in context, with three preferred (Matt. 18:16; 2 Cor. 13:1; Ref. 1 Tim. 5:19; Heb. 10:28; type – Dt. 19:15). Truth seemly established on a single verse of scripture is either incomplete, with applicable related passages excluded, or simply is not truth. The strength of a doctrine is directly related to its frequency of mention. Conversely, doctrine must be in harmony with all topically related parallel passages, without conflict or contractions, all passages taken into unifying consideration. God teaches by mosaic dispersion, dispersing bits and pieces of a doctrinal mosaic here and there, breathing truth through the various New Testament writers. A mosaic of truth must be “seen”, perceived, in all its various colors and hues before it can be understood. The “workman” of God’s word is to collect everything God says on a subject and compile it into a comprehensive whole – complete the mosaic.

For example, there are at least 27 New Testament passages on asking and receiving petitions from God:   To take any one of these scriptures such as Jn. 14:12-15, “Whatsoever you ask in my name, that I will do”, and form a doctrine for petitioning God based solely on this one condition at the exclusion of the other 26 scriptures, is not considering the whole council of God.  In addition to “ask in my name” one must also believe (Mk. 9:23), abide in Jesus and have His words abide in them (Jn. 15:7), bear fruit (Jn. 15:16), ask according to His will (1 Jn. 5:14), obey His commandments (1 Jn. 3:22, 23), etc.  It is wise to be “slow to speak”, searching the scriptures (Acts 17:11) to ascertain the “whole council of God” relative to any truth, before sharing truth with others. Failure to consider all the relevant parallel passages when studying a topic is paramount to assembling a picture puzzle while discarding some of the pieces, creating an incomplete picture. God is obliviously serious about His command to study as a perquisite to rightly interpreting truth and to gaining His approval. This methodology is sayonara to Cherry-picking passages to substantiate pet doctrines.

Truth-Truth: Truth with a Capital “T”

FIVE PRIMAL VIRTUES OF LOVE

The First and Second Commandments of our Lord sum up, encompass... capture in essence all of the O.T. Law and the Prophets, so surely they suffice as a good definition of the purpose driven life! Imbedded in our Lord’s First Commandment is four love virtues: We are to love God with all our heart... with compassion, with all our soul... with wonder, with our mind... with curiosity, and with all our strength... with energy. These primal virtues (coined by Mark Batterson) of compassion, wonder, curiosity and energy, are at the heart of who we were created to be as humans, and are lost virtues among many saints. We need to learn what it means to love God with every fiber of our being, developing a deeper and richer understanding of the First Commandment. However, it is all too easy to slip into the veneer of heroic individualism, in which the fundamental relational focus is between an individual and God, effectively splitting off what Jesus joined together, the Second Commandment, “loving your neighbor as you love yourself” from the First Commandment to “love the Lord your God.” (Mk. 12:30-31; Lk. 10:27) Being great at the First Commandment is important but what God wants is the natural out flowing of the First Commandment through the Second Commandment, that we demonstrate our love for God by “considering others better than ourselves” (Phil. 2: 3) and imitate Christ by pouring ourselves out in love for our spiritual brothers and sisters, neighbors and all whom God’s providence brings into contact. What many saints miss, fall short of, or outright ignore is the all important fifth primal virtue of “selfless love” imbedded in the Second Commandment: To love your neighbor as you love yourself. “All important”??? Yes, all important! “He who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, Whom he has not seen. (1 Jn. 4:20 Amp; ref. 1 Jn. 3:17; Lk. 10:27-37) Now this is where the rubber hits the road for we love to love, pamper and take good care of our Self... don’t we! This is sort of a modified Golden Rule: Do unto others as you do unto your Self... Ouch! God’s agape love is compassionate, self sacrificing, outwardly directed love, love that gives more than it takes... selfless love. What we need most today, in a world where individualism is as essential, common and unquestioned as the air we breathe, is not a reformation rooted primarily in personal character promoting more individualism... the First Commandment in isolation,  but an ecclesiological reformation in which we understand anew that God is calling on His Bride to embody His agape love... embody His Second Commandment by sacrificially loving and caring for others... be they family, spiritual kin, neighbors, friends, or total strangers. Only in this way can we demonstrate our love for our Lord... by our selfless love for others...

THEY WILL KNOW 
WE ARE CHRISTIANS 
BY ...