The Christian's Bottom Line

The thoughts in this post apply only to those who truly belong to Jesus Christ, fulfilling all of His requirements to be with Him for eternity. After all, it's His requirements that set the standard, right? If you're not sure about your standing with God, do yourself a favor and read my post titled "Prayer of Christian Renewal". It's in the blog archive (the upper right side of your screen) for March, 2013. Read it and pray it for yourself.
Now, back to the topic at hand.
This life can be over-taken with pain, physical and emotional and spiritual pain. There are times of great sadness, struggle, hardship, anxiety, separation, and loss. There are times when our bodies suffer. There are times when we feel spiritual pain, sharing in the breaking of God's heart over the brokenness of His creation. Can anything make us say it was worth it?

God's Ferrari

God has a way of putting us in our place. He has to, if there's ever going to be any hope of us being what He wants us to be.

Back in the 90's, there was a stretch in which I was regularly hearing from God, regularly sensing what was on His heart, able to pray those things back to Him, seeing frequent answers to those prayers, and experiencing what it's like to be part of His wonderful encounters with others. I'm not much of a car guy, but somehow a car analogy popped into my head. It felt like God and I were really moving smoothly and in style. It was great, sort of like I was His Ferrari. A Ferrari Testarossa, to be precise. 

[Right about now, you may be thinking that they'll let just about anybody write a blog. Well, they will. You want me to be honest, right?]

Things with God went on like this for awhile. It was like being on an extended mountain-top journey with Him. Then one day, in the seeing that God gives to the eyes of the heart, I was looking down on a narrow road that passed between two steep hills. The hills were covered in dense green vegetation, something like you might see in rural Tennessee. From where I was high up on one of the hills, I saw a car, a sad example of a car, sad even for a junker, barely moving down the road from right to left at what must have been about 20 mph. It was an old sedan, what we used it call a land yacht. It was dented and rusted and beat-up. It had peeling, mismatched paint. The pillar behind the driver's door was pushed in, taking part of the door with it, as if the car had been T-boned at some point in the past. The tires were wallowing in an off-center, uneven, out-of-synch wobbly sort of way that says the frame and axles were bent. The car was struggling along and wasn't anywhere close to comfortable or reliable. It was transportation, but just barely, and definitely not the kind you'd want to be seen in or have to take very far.

I watched this scene for a few seconds, wondering what it was all about. Then the Lord broke the silence. He said, "That's you."

Hard Questions

The older I get, the simpler it gets. Being a follower of Jesus Christ, that is. Because of His death and resurrection, I am forgiven and am being transformed by His persistent Lordship at a far deeper level than any self-help program can reach. Self-help programs fail for the same reason that the Old Testament law failed...both depend upon me to get it right.

The Old Testament law has a lot in common with modern self-help programs, especially when the self-help is taught from the pulpit. They both depend upon my sin-management skills, my "pull myself up by my bootstraps" skills. Some folks have more personal discipline than others and so are better at sin-management, but sin-management won't work in eternity, not even for the very best among us. Fully replacing the sin-nature with God-nature is the only thing that will work in the long long-term.

God's intends to transform His children so completely on the inside that sin-management becomes a thing of the past. Don't get me wrong; I'm not  putting down sin-management. Sin-management is far better than sin run amok. Sin-management is good, but it's not the long-term solution. What God wants for us and from us goes far beyond sin-management. 

With Absolute Ownership, Trust is a Must

What is God like? There are some attributes of His character and nature that we can describe and talk about. Fully understand, no, but we can make good assumptions about them. For instance, He is all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, and eternal; He lives by His own standards and is always true to Himself. He alone is able to create something from nothing. Anything less than these and He wouldn't truly be God.

I have learned something about how this applies to me. In short, He gets to do whatever He wants, whenever He wants, and He never owes me an explanation. It's so important to get that: HE IS GOD. HE GETS TO DO WHATEVER HE WANTS, WHENEVER HE WANTS, AND HE NEVER OWES ME AN EXPLANATION.

If that's all we knew about Him, it would be a very harsh and scary statement. It that's all we knew about Him, it would be very hard to trust Him. If that's all we knew about Him and He could at any time be capricious or flighty, that would be His right and I should be very frightened. So it's important to review a few other things we know about God.

What is Truth?

A lot of folks think that something becomes true just because they happen to believe it. In other words, believing in something makes it true. You have your truth, that person over there has their truth, and I have my truth. It doesn't really matter what you believe in so long as you believe it. As long as you believe in something, that something is "true" for you and that makes it okay.

I am here to tell you that is incredibly wrong, lose your life wrong, on the bad side of eternity wrong. If me saying that steps on your toes, you really need to read the rest of this blog post.