Truth, Grace, and Time

My first thought today while reading the chapter was 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

Specifically about the boxer just beating the air. With modern technology I imagine a young person playing Virtual Reality video games with their goggles on, swinging at the air hitting nothing and something all at the same time. Maybe spiritual formation feels like that to us sometimes. But there is a more concrete plan.

I also appreciate the thoughts about the disconnect we might have concerning people who lived 2,000 years ago. There is much that is different between their life and ours. Yet, much of the human experience remains the same: smiles, laughter, heartache, betrayal, envy, blessings, injustice, depravity as Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun, everything that’s been done before will be done again. In a disordered world there is much that is common in all generations. History is there to learn from. Case studies are rarely made up stories, they are the ones we use to prepare us for life that might come our way.

Finally the last sentence bears repeating…”What small steps in your life would quietly and certainly lead to inner transformation?

For the next 61 week days, some from our church will be going through the above titled book. The journey of transformation from self-absorbed sinner to living my life the way Jesus would is complex to say the least. It’s an invitation to reconciliation between two parties although in this case, it’s between one party who is always right and one party who gets it wrong more often than not.

It’s a beautiful thing that God calls us to, alignment with Him. Like the alignment our car sometimes needs, so much better on everything when the car simply drives straight not veering off to the left all the time.

Today the writer invites us to consider all the great gifts that are ours when we say yes to aligning ourselves with Him. Love, joy, strength, courage, forgiveness, adoption, being an heir, one could make quite a list. Not only could the list be long but the implications are even longer.

I enjoyed the line about “nobody’s perfect.” Maybe sometimes we throw that out there as an excuse to not live out what we know we ought to do. Love that difficult person in our life. What if instead we invited God to fill our hearts with love, so that we could step into our day and love as Jesus does?

Gods Kingdom life is a beautiful picture, but it will always take some strength, courage, power from Him for us to live it out well.

What does it mean for Gods Kingdom to come, Gods will be done in my life today?

God invites us to mind blowing choices. The most natural thing in life is to defend yourself. One of A.W. Tozer’s 5 Vows is “I vow to never defend myself.”

From Psalms 33:16-22… “

The king is not saved by his great army;
a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.
The war horse is a false hope for salvation,
and by its great might it cannot rescue.
Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear him,
on those who hope in his steadfast love,
that he may deliver their soul from death
and keep them alive in famine.
Our soul waits for the LORD;
he is our help and our shield.
For our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O LORD, be upon us,
even as we hope in you.

Who doesn’t want a great army with numbers, personal strength to win a one on one or a swift powerful horse on which to ride and live in some false hope!! “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”

Tozer would go on to say, if my only defense is myself then God might allow me to live in my only hope, my false hope. But if I trust in God as my hope, infinite resources be of the Almighty God are going to fight for me. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Answer: many might be against us… even an unnumbered amount!!! That’s not the guarantee, the guarantee is that God is my hope, the one in whom I trust. The greatest trust is forged in the precipice of desperation. Can this be saved by God or should I intervene for Him? These are the moments we discover the trustworthiness of my Deliverer. It’s how we build a testimony of confidence in our God.

Not only that, but what would it be like in my heart if I dropped all of the defense barriers I’ve built? What would take place in my heart that took a break, for the rest of our life, from building walls? To see life fully, to take it all on trusting in Gods hand of protection over me. If I wasn’t busy building walls, what else could I use that time for? Maybe I could build a bridge instead!

It’s the age old problem, two people witness the same set of circumstances and come up with stories that don’t sound like the true story. The classic sit-com scenario where two characters whitewash their story because obviously they are the victims in this story. They tell the sanitized version to make them look like a saint while the other character is the villain. Neither of them telling the truth fully, somewhere in between the lines, the truth will be found.

People can only see what they want to see, so what is it that you want to see? A great question for your life.

Psalms 18:25-26 speaks about these matters in terms of what we see when we see God… “To the faithful you show yourself faithful, to the blameless you show yourself blameless, to the pure you show yourself pure, but to the devious you show yourself shrewd.”

As with a lot of things in life I think we project on to others what is true about ourselves. “It takes one to know one” is our childhood line. What I see in me is the only thing I can see in you. Our mistrust in, or accusation of, God is simply the act of placing the quality of our character over how we perceive God. It’s hard to see clearly through sin-stained glasses .

From the book (Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice) our church is about to engage here this fall… “To the person who is not inwardly transformed, evil and sin still looks good. But sin looks foolish, ridiculous and repulsive to those cleansed by Christ… a precious truth about what is good and right.” What do you see? What would you see with a heart transformed by Christ?

Famous lyrics from back in the day… “Looking through rose-colored stain glass windows, never allowing your world to come in, seeing no evil and feeling no pain, making the light as it comes from within so dim.” -Petra

What lense are we looking through? How confusing is our day when so many lenses are offered? God’s lense is the only one that counts and aligning our sights with what He has expressed through His Word is the only way to avoid the confusion running rampant in our world.

What you and I make of God’s Word is never as important as what it would, if we’d let it, make of us!

Incomplete title, sorry, I got distrac…

Our church kitchen has this bright shiny toaster. You pick it up and you know that at some point it was a quality kitchen apparatus. It’s very shiny, very sturdy, and doesn’t work at all.

It’s got some cool technology. There is no plunger to get it started. In its day it would feel the weight of the item and would begin working. This feature is now not working.

The funny thing is, no matter how many times it doesn’t work, we just keep putting it back in the cabinet, not sure what we are hoping for but every time we search for one , someone pulls it out and says here’s a bright shiny sturdy well designed toaster. To which I have to let the air out of their tires… nope, not a toaster, a mirror maybe…

Our lives are linked to this question, “Why am I here?” “What’s the purpose of my life?” We hold on to the shiny thing, don’t fix the broken thing and then wonder why we feel so bad. We have an epidemic of two things in our midst. 1. An epidemic of suicide 2. An epidemic of rejecting God who would give us answers about the purpose of life. Wondering why life is bad because it looks so shiny, but failing to address what’s broken and could, through Christ be made whole.

This toaster will continue to disappoint, but it could be made to do what it was made to do.

“ The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” “Not to us, Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.” Psalm 115:1

Not the shiny “thing” but the purpose of the object “thing”. We’re distracted by the wrong thing in the same way a fish gets caught chasing shiny stuff.

“ Yes lord, walking in the way of your law we wait for you; for your name and your renown is the desire of our hearts” Isaiah 26:8

I want to be healed, redeemed, restored and toast bread for You, be apart of Your Kingdom, not just be a shiny busted tool.

” Blessed is the one whose sins are forgiven, whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them and in whose spirit their is no deceit.

When I kept silent my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. for day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” Psalms 32:1-4

It’s a hot humid day here in the place that I live. We were supposed to have football practice from 3-5 PM at the height of 100+ degrees with heat index at 108+. We opted for 6 AM where the temp was 78; dewpoint 77, 99% humidity. The young men could drink while breathing!! The misery of the morning was enjoyed in light of what it would have been hours later.

These type of days I always think about Psalm 32. The older I get, the more heated days like this take it out of me. It takes a lot of cold to get my body temperature back down, meanwhile my strength sapped.

There is an obvious link to our Spiritual life. A link that I think many overlook by choice, folly or ignorance. “Do you not know or have you not heard” from Isaiah rings in my ears. Which one is it… Do you not know? Have you not heard? There is a link. Part of the bad feeling we get when we choose to partake in sin is the weight of God’s conviction. Todays’ thought is that it’s just Christians moralizing that makes us feel bad. Get rid of them, we’ll get rid of our bad feelings about these matters.

It’s a great blessing to not live in sin. It’s a great blessing to have it be 72 degrees, sunny with a light breeze. But when I try to act like my sin isn’t there or go to great lengths to cover it up; God, because He loves me, wants it to be confessed by us, wants it to be out in the open, wants confession, acknowledgment, contrition. It’s not so different than the things we expect of each other when someone sins against us. It’s realistic to think someone would come up with an apology so we can get our relationship back on track. That act of contrition leads us to the rest of this psalm, to the solution God is always wanting to get to…

“Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sins.”

I came in out of the heat into an airconditioned space, got a tall glass of ice water to quench my thirst, and took a shower to wash away all the sweat, grease and grime. I feel like a new person.

Today is a day to feel what that renewal physically can feel like spiritually. Then Like David at the end of his Psalm “rejoice in the Lord and be glad you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart.”

Today: physically stay inside and feel much better. Spiritually confess your sin and be one with the One who brings you life!!

“If you’re right you don’t need a defense; if you’re wrong, you don’t have one.”

The Prophets were forced to understand this. Jeremiah tried to make things clear. Jeremiah 17: 1-18 if you’d like to read it. Reading it with ears that are open would accomplish much. Read it with a hard heart or the belief that the Bible couldn’t, shouldn’t, can’t, won’t speak through the Holy Spirit who wrote it and the Holy Spirit that takes up residence in our hearts upon repentance, you won’t be able to hear anything anyway.

I would copy and paste the text here but… Proverbs 26:15 comes to mind…

So… Jeremiah 17:1-8

1-3 the problem is obvious

4 What’s lost?

5-6 It’s never been hidden

7-8 The blessings

9 The origin of every single one of our problems. Read a newspaper and see what you think about the nature of humanity

10 Gods not confused about our core.

11-13 Obvious results

14-18 The right response.

If you have ears to hear, you could buck the U2 trend and find what you’re looking for. If you keep stubbing your toe in the darkness…

The purpose of art is to elicit some sort of response. That response has a wide range anywhere from a peaceful serene scene in nature, angst over an issue, wonder, movement, joy, sadness, any number of emotions get stirred through art. The best art is able to do that for us in some way.

I saw this picture and had to get it. Pictures say a thousand words. For me this picture could write a book for what is plainly seen, but also for all the metaphors and illustrations about life. I’ll spare you all of them, because I’d rather have you think about what you see in this picture. Maybe in a week, I’ll add my verse that came to mind the second I saw this photo.

Bonsai has been my hobby for well over 20 years at this point. Taking trees and making them into works of art, living art. Art that changes from year to year and has a real chance at radical transformation over time. In these ideal moments you begin to string together beautiful things on a repeated basis and watch as a tree and a whole collection become something other!!

But the blessing of living art is that is can become the curse of dead art and no one seems to care about your dead tree. I had a couple of moves(hard on trees), a couple of winters with mice eating the bark off of a number of trees that were becoming great little specimens and a winter where my cold storage harbored enough disease to kill off most of the trees inside. At some point it becomes too much and you wonder why you care anymore(probably a devotional thought about God and his patience with us is contained in here).

Most recently I had a season of winter death, a move to a very different climate (giving them a year off to acclimate), followed by a year hesitation or genuine lack of interest. But Bonsai is something you have to stay on top of or it will become an overgrown mess pretty fast. Welcome to my spring of 2023. At this point I am glad to say I have plucked and fertilized and done everything I am suppossed to do, but…

I won’t bore you with the details of a wide variety of trees, but I will take a look at two trees in my collection called Rocky Mountain Junipers (One pictured above). Tough old trees that can survive almost anything except… too much work, too fast. RMJ has a foliage that when mature is very pleasing, but when you work on it too hard the mature foliage will revert back to immaturity (see where I might be headed??!!!)

Mature juniper foliage has a scale-like quality to it. When it stays closed up it has a nice tidy appearance, If you cut off too much foliage, the plant will freak out and the scale will open up(think solar panels collecting as much sun as possible.) The look is pretty ugly, bonsai people know you messed up and the worst part is it will take years to get it back right.

So this is where I sit, me kicking the can down the road has created a situation that needs me to fix it, but fixing it too fast will make the problem even worse. If I wasn’t mindful enough before, will I be mindful enough now? An excellent question!

Several observations about all of this. 1. Development and growth are an ongoing journey of trimming, growth, and rest. To be honest, I’ve filled the whole cycle with rest and growth has gone unchecked and the process of getting things to backbud has been lost and things have mushroomed to an unfortunate place. Ecclesiates speaks about everything in its time and that is important. Because I have done a good job pruning this year, I can live in great confidence that my fertilization will be of great use. Much better than can kickin’.

2. Getting worked on and reverting back to immaturity!! It would be more funny if it weren’t so true. All of our defense mechanisms come spilling out of us in these moments and people around us wonder if the growth is really growth or not. But when we learn how to trust God and settle in with a few branches being cut off or a couple new branches being grafted in, eventually is becomes the genuine and better version of who God made us to be. Our culture is currently lost in the lie that God can’t change us, he’s too powerless to make things new. The gospel is the realization that God can make every broken thing whole. We just want to be left alone in our broken thing, that’s not the good news.

3. Diligence and perseverance. In the world of development, there is always another destination to arrive. We get bored with some step along the journey as though there isn’t always another interesting step to take. Inevitably there is always another skill to develop. Sometimes that’s frustrating cause you wonder if this never ends and it does, when you die and these old things pass away. One of the many reasons we look forward to Heaven!!

Here’s to your season of trimming, or growing or resting. May you sense God’s presence in each of these and step into the journey!

Every year it’s the same story for me, I can hardly help myself. An ever changing landscape requires new plants, new plants require this life giving collection of elements… H2O (water). But this is the year I bit off more than I could chew combined with nature’s lack of cooperation. I was beginning to get into a mode of triage. What is the most important thing to salvage and what is just going to burn up. Thank God some good quality rains came along and is moving everything forward… for now!!

The book of Psalms is a collection of wisdom poetry and the first chapter was chosen to be the first chapter because it had a story to tell about the rest of the chapters.

“Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked, or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night. That Person, is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither-whatever they do prospers.”

A tree planted next to its source of life is a great recipe. Once established, that tree will flourish. Paul invites the Ephesians in chapter 3 to be rooted and established in love, God’s love; a love that is wider, longer, higher, deeper than any stream or body of water. A life giving force that you and I have to choose to plant ourselves next to.

Plant yourself outside of God’s natural design for life and see how hard it is to flourish. People do this all of the time and blame God. Plant yourself on a dry sandy mound in the desert and see how well it will go. But I like it there, that’s where I want to be, everyone else is trying to plant themselves there. Well…

The writer of Psalms recognizes that God has created this world and our hearts to flourish in a certain way. We can heed the way and flourish, great gardens and God’s people are made in this way. We can reject the way and people will say they don’t have a green thumb or that God isn’t good. There is a common denominator in all of this.

I pray your gardens become rooted and established in good soil, even more that your heart becomes rooted and established in the overwhelming love, generosity and mercy of God.