The Ultimate Ambition

It's now 4:00 AM on a Sunday morning. I've already been up for a couple of hours. It wasn't what I wanted, but the dog had other ideas. I couldn't go back to sleep, so I started reading and praying through a few Psalms. The Lord was kind and met with me this morning, stirring my heart to share a few thoughts.

The closer He draws us to Himself, the simpler everything gets. The highest ambition a person can have is this: to be carried away in His dreams, to desire the fulfillment of His dreams more than anything. I want us all to lose ourselves in His dreams!

Is God Angry with You?

Do you feel like God is angry with you? Believers often struggle with repetitive, unresolved sin issues in their personal lives, failings that they can't seem to get beyond. It's easy to see God as angry...angry with me, angry with you...because of our sin failures. We often see our Heavenly Father through the same filter that we viewed our earthly dads. In most cases, that's a bad thing and gives us a very poor understanding of our Heavenly Father. I certainly hope that my sons don't use me as the lens through which they view God the Father.

Here is the main thought of this Post: If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, a true believer, you are not subject to God's wrath. You are subject to His correction, but not His wrath. There is a huge difference. His goal is to fix you, not to punish you. His goal is to conform you to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29) so that He may love on you and enjoy your company forever. His correction will be complete, not half-hearted and not half-way. He knows what it will take to get to every last drop of badness. His ways may seem rather strong and stern at times, but His correction will not be done out of wrath.

All My Desire

It's Sunday morning. I'm ready for church a bit early and some verses I read an hour ago are still speaking to me. The first one is Psalm 38:9: "Lord, all my desire is before You; And my sighing is not hidden from You." 

He knows what I need and what I'd like to have and have happen, all of it. I've put it all in front of Him. But that's not what I want to be wrapped up in. Me getting wrapped up in my stuff and you getting wrapped up in your stuff is normal, common, every-day existence. But that doesn't make it right or good or desirable. It definitely doesn't make it the best way to live. In fact, it's a poor way to live, a way that doesn't end well.

I don't want to be normal, whatever that is.

More Than Forgiveness

My mind and heart keep coming back to foundation thoughts. By now, you know that I've been a Believer for over 40 years, but I won't pretend that I've been a particularly devoted Christ-follower for all of that time. For some of it, I've been a lackadaisical Christ-follower. Even worse, there have been times when Christ-following was completely on the back burner, as much out-of-sight, out-of-mind as I could make it. I'm not going to get into my details. You have your own details, and I hope this post will help you get through some of them.

Maybe it's that I'm getting old enough to sometimes remember things from long ago more clearly than I remember things from last week. Failures and foolishness from long ago have been coming up in my quiet moments. Whatever the reason, I see that I need more than forgiveness. 

All or Nothing

With a title like All or Nothing, the theme of this post is obvious. The Lord Jesus Christ, the soon coming King, doesn't want lukewarm followers. He doesn't want  followers who abandon Him when things get rough or who are choked out by the cares of this world. He doesn't want followers who do things in His name but who don't have what He defines as a relationship with Him. And when you think about, this really is about how He sees things and what He wants, isn't it? It's not about Him doing things my way or Him having a relationship with me on my terms. This isn't about the Potter doing what the clay wants, the clay's way. This isn't about Him fitting into my comfort zone; this is about me fitting into His comfort zone. And His comfort zone is quite different from what lazy, rebellious, sinful, self-deceiving humans want it to be.

It's pretty clear. All or nothing.

 

The Free Gift That Costs You Big Time

I celebrated my 62nd birthday a few days ago. Maybe celebrated is the wrong word for it, but you know what I mean. Frankly, I'm feeling a bit surprised that I made it this far. Looking back, the path of my life is littered with lots of presumption, ignorance, and self-interest, along with many glaring instances of failing to put even the most obvious of two's with another two. I have fallen very short on God's scale. Sometimes I haven't even been very high on the human scale. And that's just the little bit I'm aware of. There should be no doubt that He's protected, forgiven, blessed, and carried me -- and you -- many more times and at much greater depth than any of us are aware. We just don't get it, at least not by much, and we see only a very small portion of how good He is to us. 

And that makes me think of grace, the Saving Grace that results in our eternal salvation. What does it cost?

Without getting too high-falutin with the words and logic, here it is, as plain and simple as I can make it. By the way, High-Falutin = fancy, highbrow, self-important, and deliberately showy. You  know, putting on airs. It comes from the Dutch word verlooten, for stilted. I do come from a long line of Dutchmen, so it's okay for me to use words like that, especially about myself. 

Discussions about the cost of grace often end up in arguments about Faith and Works. Avoiding that for now, my conclusion is that Saving Grace costs me absolutely nothing and yet it costs me absolutely everything.

Can't have it both ways, you say? Follow along, I think you'll change your mind.

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. 

Hi to My Friends!

There are so many more posts that I want to write, ones I think you'll like. In the busy-ness of life, I find that it's not as easy to focus and get it all on paper as I'd hoped. Please be patient with me and come back here every so often to see what's been added. Maybe you can even say a prayer for me. 

I also look forward to your comments because there are things I need to learn from you. While you're at it, if you don't mind, let me know how you found this website and maybe even what part of this country or this world you live in.

Thank you for being here. I trust that the Lord has treats in store for us. I trust His heart.

The Lord loves you! In great joy of heart, may all that He wants to establish in you, through you, and around you come true! May your life be full of that which counts for eternity!

In the Love of our Lord,

Brother Mark

Personal Prophecy: I’ve Got a Word for You

This Post has been pulled from a manual I wrote several years ago for training Altar Ministers. It’s a bit abrupt in its phrasing but still gets the point across. The points made here are appropriate for any Believer involved in one-on-one ministry.

This Post should be treated as a companion to the Post “God Speaks, But What Did I Hear?”

And now, without further adieu:

Personal Prophecy: I've Got a Word for You

God Speaks, But What Did I Hear?

It's God's will for the Christian to hear from Him and then put what He says to use so that it may accomplish its purpose. This topic deserves a lot more attention than I’m able to give it here. My goal in this Post is to give some high level pointers and insight.

First, I’m not going to try to prove that God speaks to His people today. Face it, He does. There is a lot about this in the Bible, but the only reference I’ll use today is John 10:16 in which Jesus said, “And other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they will hear My voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd.”

It’s also clear from Scripture that some folks hear from God more than others. What does it take to hear from God? In the verse from John, He is referring to His sheep. So it’s safe to assume you have to be one of His sheep. That means that a believing heart, tender and surrendered to God through Jesus Christ, is the only place to start. That makes you one of His sheep, right? I've also learned that He typically won’t say much if He knows His words will be discarded, ignored, mocked or disobeyed. 

Leaving that part of the discussion behind, then, I believe there are several things about hearing from God that must be considered:

1. Was that really Him speaking?

2. Did I clearly hear what He said?

3. What did He really mean?

4. How should I respond to what He said?

5. When and how is this to be shared, if at all?