Wading through life

It’s time to pursue the Lord on an entirely different level.

Starting right… now.

You may hear about it. You may not. You may notice. You may not. I don’t know.

What I do know is that with each passing moment, the time we have available to choose to serve Him is shrinking. There will come a time when we pass into His glory and He will elicit worship and service. But for now, it’s still ultimately a choice. And the greatest offering we can make to Him is to serve Him with all our hearts and souls and minds and strength…

undefiled

undignified

undevided

undone.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
The whole earth is full of His glory!”

And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke.

So I said:

“Woe is me, for I am undone!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King,
The LORD of hosts.”

Who needs 50 lb, 20-volume Bible commentaries when you have this Web site? Check out Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org/)—a Calvin College labor-of-love.

Probably the coolest thing I ran into in my brief initial visit is the world-wide study Bible, which has links to study resources for each verse of the Bible: multiple translations, audio, dozens of different commentaries, sermons… And it has these on verse, chapter and book levels.

But if you’re working for the works of Augustine, Luther, Justin Martyr… they’re here.

The amount of information available, not just here, but everywhere, to the would-be disciple of Christ, is just staggering.

Eldredge, on stages of relationship with God:

The Bible uses a number of metaphors to describe our relationship to God at various stages. If you’ll notice, they ascend in a stunning way:

• Potter and clay. At this level we are merely aware that our lives are shaped—even broken—by a powerful hand. There isn’t much communication, just the sovereignty of God at work.
• Shepherd and sheep. At this stage we feel provided for, watched over, cared about. But beyond that, a sheep has little by way of true intimacy with the Shepherd. They are altogether different creatures.
• Master and servant. Many, many believers are stuck in this stage, where they are committed to obey, but the relationship is mostly about receiving orders and instructions and carrying them out.
• Father and child. This is certainly more intimate than being a servant; children get the run of the house, they get to climb on Daddy’s lap. These fortunate souls understand God’s fatherly love and care for them. They feel “at home” with God.
• Friends. This stage actually opens up a deeper level of intimacy as we walk together with God, companions in a shared mission. We know what’s on his heart; he knows what’s on ours. There is a maturity and intimacy to the relationship.
• Bridegroom and bride (lovers). Here, the words of the Song of Songs could also describe our spiritual intimacy, our union and oneness with God. Madame Guyon wrote, “I love God far more than the most affectionate lover among men loves his earthly attachment.”

I, unfortunately, make frequent stays in stages 2 and 3, while longing to prolong my brief visits to 4.

Last night I ended up preaching on the absolute centrality of Christ to everything. God’s whole plan revolves around Jesus and I aimed to make that plain.

To do so, I basically read 90-100 passages of scripture that contain phrases like “in Him”, “through Him”, “in Christ”, “through Christ”, “in Jesus” and “through Jesus”. And I threw in some passages about “overcoming” for good measure, noting that we only overcome in Christ.

Here’s a 10-page PDF of the scripture I shared if you’d like to study it yourself. I did my search across the NIV, NASB, NKJV and NLT, so there’s a mish-mash of translations in there. And I think there’s an occasional duplicate passage that I overlooked.

But… enjoy! Enjoy coming into a deeper understanding of who Christ is and what He’s done for us.

It’s really quite amazing.

So… I’ve of course be preparing for my Friday night teaching. Last night I went down the path written below… but I’m pretty sure that’s not the path I’m supposed to go. So, I’m now backtracking and seeking another route.
But rather then just push the delete button, I decided to salvage it and throw it up on my blog!

For what its worth…

You were made for this

What’s been burning in my heart the past few weeks and probably months are things along these veins:

• Where is life truly found?

• What have I been truly made for?
• What do I do with my desires?
• How can I answer my call?

Mixed in with these questions, which probably linger inside all of us in some manner or another, have been things which fuel them: movies I’ve watched, trips I’ve gone on, places I’ve visited, conversations I’ve had, scripture I’ve read. Eldredge basically calls this stuff The Journey of Desire.

I’m part way through the book, but have been derailed from it for the last few months. The big idea seems to be that we have internal longings and aches… and these are mostly from the Lord. Of course, some of them are fueled by our flesh and our soul. These obviously can mess with our mind and emotions. But at the core of us, at the core of the new heart God gave us when we entered into covenant relationship with him and he redeemed us from the curse and set us free to live for him—when we were crucified with Christ and it was no longer we who lived but Christ who lives in us—we were reconnected with who God created us to be and we began the acclimation process to real life.

We are essentially like survivors of traumatic brain injury—people who have to re-learn how to do everything because their memory is warped. The information is in there, but they need help accessing it. They sometimes have moments of déjà vu when something rings familiar and true, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. They have moments when they recognize a face or a name or a place or a song. Family members bring pictures to them to trigger memories; physical therapists guide their feet as they learn to walk again; speech pathologists train their tongues to speak again.

This relearning process often unfolds blindingly fast compared to learning it all for the first time. My nephew experienced an accident in his home which caused his brain to be without oxygen for several minutes. His brain was damaged as a result and, once his life was stabilized, he was guided through a rehabilitation process. He was taught to walk and talk again. And though several years later he’s still receiving special learning support at school, he’s nearly fully recovered. He was released from the hospital about seven or eight weeks after his accident.
Chase was able to relearn to walk and talk in a matter of weeks because it was all stuff he essentially knew how to do—he just needed to be guided into that knowledge.

So, all that to say: There’s a person we are—a person God created, a person God knew before we were even conceived in our mothers’ womb—that we’re learning how to become. We’re recovering from traumatic brain injury, learning who we really are. We’re being reconnected with our real selves.

Now, this may sound like I’m contradicting Paul’s statement that we’re new creations. I’m certainly not trying to do that, because, from our carnal perspective, this essentially is all new to us. We were awoken into a state of disassociation from our true selves. But from God’s perspective—the perspective we need to strive to have—we’re getting reacquainted with who we’ve been all along. Mr. Old Creation is meeting Mr. New Creation for the first time, and to his surprise, Mr. New Creation is actually older than him!

So what’s my point: My point is that you were made this… and by “this” I mean everything. Everything that life throws your way, everything that seems to have gone right or wrong, fair or unjust, positive or negative, happy or sad. You were made for it. And you were made to be victorious in it!
It may not seem like it now… it may be confusing and frustrating and bloody hard. Go ask a victim of traumatic brain injury how joyful it was to learn to walk or talk again. They’ll likely tell you it stinks, especially when they realize that they once knew how to. Learning how to walk as a child was probably a joy if we could remember it. But relearning… not so much.

Yet no matter how hard it the process is, you were made to complete it. You were made to be conformed to the image of Christ.