O
Dear friends
It is one year this week since my colon cancer has been diagnosed. Thank you Lord for another year with Sally. She bought a car last week/ actually just changed the ownership to her name. And she still has time for her baking in spite of many more errands. (We appreciate good house help.)
We talk to Jon &Maike almost every Sunday on FaceTime. Over the past few months things have been deteriorating slowly, but for the past 6 weeks or so, more rapidly. I am on bed rest most of the time since I am most comfortable laying down. Mostly reading, streaming music (enjoying Andre Crouch), Francis Chan sermons etc. on YouTube, but lately sleeping more and getting tired more quickly. My appetite is small and I am losing weight again.
I am not comfortable if I am up for more than 15-20 minutes, so we are entertaining visitors in the bedroom. I am still able to get up for meals, shower etc. I am thankful for each good day, but am having more bad days. And also thankful for minimal pain from the colostomy surgery and no pain from the tumor.
Thanks for your prayers for peace & strength. -dh
Saturday, March 17, 2018
Thursday, May 11, 2017
The LAMB'S BOOK OF LIFE - Revelation 21.27
Can You Know You're Going to Heaven? (Lightly edited -dh)
("THE BOOK OF LIFE" Revelation 21.27) By Randy Alcorn / epm.org March 5, 2010
Soon you will read in the newspaper that I am dead. Don’t believe it for a moment. I will be more alive than ever before. — D. L. Moody
Earth recedes. . . . Heaven opens before me! — D. L. Moody (on his deathbed)
In the words of C. S. Lewis, “All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”
You are made for a person and a place. Jesus is the person. Heaven is the place. They are a package—you cannot get Heaven without Jesus or Jesus without Heaven. We will explore Heaven’s joys and wonders throughout this book ("Heaven"). But we dare not presume we can enter Heaven apart from Christ.
Ancient cities kept rolls of their citizens. Guards were posted at the city gates to keep out criminals and enemies by checking their names against the list. This is the context for Revelation 21:27: “Nothing impure will ever enter [the city], nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”
Ruthanna Metzgar, a professional singer, tells a story that illustrates the importance of having our names written in the book. Several years ago, she was asked to sing at the wedding of a very wealthy man. According to the invitation, the reception would be held on the top two floors of Seattle’s Columbia Tower, the Northwest’s tallest skyscraper. She and her husband, Roy, were excited about attending.
At the reception, waiters in tuxedos offered luscious hors d’oeuvres and exotic beverages. The bride and groom approached a beautiful glass and brass staircase that led to the top floor. Someone ceremoniously cut a satin ribbon draped across the bottom of the stairs. They announced the wedding feast was about to begin. Bride and groom ascended the stairs, followed by their guests.
At the top of the stairs, a maitre d’ with a bound book greeted the guests outside the doors.
“May I have your name please?”
“I am Ruthanna Metzgar and this is my husband, Roy.”
He searched the M’s. “I’m not finding it. Would you spell it please?”
Ruthanna spelled her name slowly. After searching the book, the maitre d’ looked up and said,
“I’m sorry, but your name isn’t here.”
“There must be some mistake,” Ruthanna replied. “I’m the singer. I sang for this wedding!”
The gentleman answered, “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you did. Without your name in the book you cannot attend the banquet.”
He motioned to a waiter and said, “Show these people to the service elevator, please.”
The Metzgars followed the waiter past beautifully decorated tables laden with shrimp, whole smoked salmon, and magnificent carved ice sculptures. Adjacent to the banquet area, an orchestra was preparing to perform, the musicians all dressed in dazzling white tuxedos.
The waiter led Ruthanna and Roy to the service elevator, ushered them in, and pushed G for the parking garage.
After locating their car and driving several miles in silence, Roy reached over and put his hand on Ruthanna’s arm. “Sweetheart, what happened?”
“When the invitation arrived, I was busy,” Ruthanna replied. “I never bothered to RSVP. Besides, I was the singer. Surely I could go to the reception without returning the RSVP!”
Ruthanna started to weep—not only because she had missed the most lavish banquet she’d ever been invited to, but also because she suddenly had a small taste of what it will be like someday for people as they stand before Christ and find their names are not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
Throughout the ages, countless people have been too busy to respond to Christ’s invitation to his wedding banquet. Many assume that the good they’ve done—perhaps attending church, being baptized, singing in the choir, or helping in a soup kitchen—will be enough to gain entry to Heaven. But people who do not respond to Christ’s invitation to forgive their sins are people whose names aren’t written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. To be denied entrance to Heaven’s wedding banquet will not just mean going down the service elevator to the garage. It will mean being cast outside into Hell, forever.
In that day, no explanation or excuse will count. All that will matter is whether our names are written in the book. If they’re not, we’ll be turned away.
Have you said yes to Christ’s invitation to join him at the wedding feast and spend eternity with him in his house? If so, you have reason to rejoice—Heaven’s gates will be open to you.
If you have been putting off your response, your RSVP, or if you presume that you can enter Heaven without responding to Christ’s invitation, one day you will deeply regret it.
Preparing for the Journey
Can we really know in advance where we’re going when we die? The apostle John, the same one who wrote about the new heavens and New Earth, said in one of his letters, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13, emphasis added). We can know for sure that we have eternal life. We can know for sure that we will go to Heaven when we die.
Do you?
People who want to get to Florida don’t simply get in the car and start driving, hoping the road will somehow get them there. Instead, they look at a map and chart their course. They do this in advance, rather than waiting until they arrive at the wrong destination or discover they’ve spent three days driving the wrong direction. If you want to get somewhere, guesswork is a poor strategy. The goal of getting to Heaven is worthy of greater advanced planning than we would give to any other journey—yet some people spend far more time preparing for a trip to Disney World. Many books on Heaven seem to assume every reader is Heaven-bound. The Bible says otherwise. I owe it to all my readers to share with them God’s map to Heaven and offer them his Good News.
What You Need to Know and Do
To sin is to fall short of God’s holy standards. Sin is what ended Eden’s Paradise. And all of us, like Adam and Eve, are sinners. You are a sinner. That’s the first thing you need to know.
Sin deceives us and makes us think that wrong is right and right is wrong (Proverbs 14:12).
Sin has consequences, but God has provided a solution for our sin: “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Jesus Christ, the Son of God, loved us so much that he became a man to deliver us from our sin (John 3:16). He came to identify with us in our humanity and our weakness, but he did so without being tainted by our sin, self-deception, and moral failings (Hebrews 2:17-18; 4:15-16).
We’re told that “God made him [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This means that even though we are under God’s wrath for our sins, Jesus died on the cross as our representative, our substitute. God then poured out his wrath on Christ instead of on us. Christ, who stood in our place, conveyed his righteousness to us so that we are declared innocent of all our sins and declared righteous, so we may enter the very presence of God in Heaven and be at home with him there.
No other prophet or religious figure—only Jesus, the Son of God—is worthy to pay the penalty for our sins demanded by God’s holiness (Revelation 5:4-5, 9-10). Only when our sins are dealt with in Christ can we enter Heaven. We cannot pay our own way. “Salvation is found in no one else [but Jesus], for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Being himself God and therefore all-powerful, Jesus Christ rose from the grave, defeating sin and conquering death (1 Corinthians 15:3-4, 54-57). When Christ died on the cross for us, he said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The Greek word translated “it is finished” was commonly written across certificates of debt when they were canceled. It meant “paid in full.” Christ died so that the certificate of debt, consisting of all our sins, could once and for all be marked “paid in full.”
Because of Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross on our behalf, God freely offers us forgiveness. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. . . . As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:10-12).
Forgiveness is not automatic. If we want to be forgiven, we must recognize and repent of our sins: “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). Forgiveness is established by our confession: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Christ offers to everyone the gift of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life: “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17).
There’s no righteous deed we can do that will earn us a place in Heaven (Titus 3:5). We come to Christ empty-handed. We can take no credit for salvation: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
This gift cannot be worked for, earned, or achieved in any sense. It’s not dependent on our merit or effort but solely on Christ’s generous and sufficient sacrifice on our behalf.
Ultimately, God’s greatest gift is himself. We don’t just need salvation, we need Jesus the Savior. It is the person, God, who graciously gives us the place, Heaven.
Joining the Body of Christ: the Church
You may think that you don’t deserve forgiveness after all you’ve done.
That’s exactly right. No one deserves forgiveness. If we deserved it, we wouldn’t need it. That’s the point of grace. On the cross, Jesus experienced the Hell we deserve, so that for eternity we can experience the Heaven we don’t deserve.
Once forgiven, we can look forward to spending eternity in Heaven with Christ and our spiritual family (John 14:1-3; Revelation 20:11-22:6). We need never fear that God will find a skeleton in our closet and say, “If I’d known you did that, I wouldn’t have let you into Heaven.” Every sin is covered under the blood of Christ. Moreover, God is all-knowing. He has seen us at our worst and still loves us. No sin is bigger than the Savior. If God wasn’t willing to forgive sin on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice, Heaven would be empty.
Jesus said, “Watch out that no one deceives you” (Matthew 24:4). There are countless groups, religious and secular, that will assure you Heaven is your automatic destination or that it can be attained by your hard work and avoiding certain sins. This is false—there is no salvation except by Jesus and his redemptive work.
False teachers can be attractive and persuasive, often quoting the Bible out of context. But they should be rejected because they contradict God’s Word (Acts 17:11). False doctrine is one reason the Christian life should not and cannot be lived in isolation. We must become part of a family of Christians called a church, where God’s Word is believed and taught. You may feel self-conscious around other Christians because of your past. You shouldn’t.
A Christ-centered church is not a showcase for saints but a hospital for sinners.
The people you’re joining are human, imperfect, and needy. Most church people aren’t self-righteous. Those who are should be pitied, because they don’t understand God’s grace.
A good church will teach God’s Word and provide love, help, and support. If you have further questions about Jesus and about Heaven, you can find answers there. (If you’re looking for such a church in your area but can’t find one, use this address and we’ll gladly help you.) epm.org
To those who presumed they would go to Heaven because they were religious, Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Matthew 7:21-23). Those who assume their religious activities alone will get them to Heaven have a terrible surprise ahead.
Do not merely assume that you are a Christian and are going to Heaven. Make the conscious decision to accept Christ’s sacrificial death on your behalf. When you choose to accept Christ and surrender control of your life to him, you can be certain that your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
Water for the Thirsty
After showing us the new heavens and New Earth, Jesus says near the end of the Bible, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life” (Revelation 21:6). But then Jesus adds these sobering words: “He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur” (Revelation 21:7-8).
For those who know Christ, their place is Heaven. For those who do not know Christ, their place is Hell. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). There is no middle ground. Either you are a follower of Jesus or you are not. Christ said, “He who is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23).
The Bible ends with yet one more invitation, suggesting that God wants to give every reader one last chance: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17). It is Jesus—and Heaven—we thirst for. Jesus and Heaven are offered to us at no cost because he already paid the price for us.
God invites you to come. The church invites you to come. As a follower of Jesus, I invite you to come.
Why would you not come? What reason could be good enough to turn away from Jesus and from eternal life in the new heavens and New Earth? In the words of C. S. Lewis, “All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”Heaven
You are made for a person and a place. Jesus is the person. Heaven is the place. They are a package—you cannot get Heaven without Jesus or Jesus without Heaven. We will explore Heaven’s joys and wonders throughout this book. But we dare not presume we can enter Heaven apart from Christ.
“Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6). Have you confessed your sins? asked Christ to forgive you? placed your trust in Christ’s death and resurrection on your behalf? asked Jesus to be your Lord and empower you to follow him? Wouldn’t it be tragic to read about the wonders of Heaven, and not end up going there?
For more information on the subject of Heaven, see Randy Alcorn’s book "Heaven."
("THE BOOK OF LIFE" Revelation 21.27) By Randy Alcorn / epm.org March 5, 2010
Soon you will read in the newspaper that I am dead. Don’t believe it for a moment. I will be more alive than ever before. — D. L. Moody
Earth recedes. . . . Heaven opens before me! — D. L. Moody (on his deathbed)
In the words of C. S. Lewis, “All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”
You are made for a person and a place. Jesus is the person. Heaven is the place. They are a package—you cannot get Heaven without Jesus or Jesus without Heaven. We will explore Heaven’s joys and wonders throughout this book ("Heaven"). But we dare not presume we can enter Heaven apart from Christ.
Ancient cities kept rolls of their citizens. Guards were posted at the city gates to keep out criminals and enemies by checking their names against the list. This is the context for Revelation 21:27: “Nothing impure will ever enter [the city], nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”
Ruthanna Metzgar, a professional singer, tells a story that illustrates the importance of having our names written in the book. Several years ago, she was asked to sing at the wedding of a very wealthy man. According to the invitation, the reception would be held on the top two floors of Seattle’s Columbia Tower, the Northwest’s tallest skyscraper. She and her husband, Roy, were excited about attending.
At the reception, waiters in tuxedos offered luscious hors d’oeuvres and exotic beverages. The bride and groom approached a beautiful glass and brass staircase that led to the top floor. Someone ceremoniously cut a satin ribbon draped across the bottom of the stairs. They announced the wedding feast was about to begin. Bride and groom ascended the stairs, followed by their guests.
At the top of the stairs, a maitre d’ with a bound book greeted the guests outside the doors.
“May I have your name please?”
“I am Ruthanna Metzgar and this is my husband, Roy.”
He searched the M’s. “I’m not finding it. Would you spell it please?”
Ruthanna spelled her name slowly. After searching the book, the maitre d’ looked up and said,
“I’m sorry, but your name isn’t here.”
“There must be some mistake,” Ruthanna replied. “I’m the singer. I sang for this wedding!”
The gentleman answered, “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you did. Without your name in the book you cannot attend the banquet.”
He motioned to a waiter and said, “Show these people to the service elevator, please.”
The Metzgars followed the waiter past beautifully decorated tables laden with shrimp, whole smoked salmon, and magnificent carved ice sculptures. Adjacent to the banquet area, an orchestra was preparing to perform, the musicians all dressed in dazzling white tuxedos.
The waiter led Ruthanna and Roy to the service elevator, ushered them in, and pushed G for the parking garage.
After locating their car and driving several miles in silence, Roy reached over and put his hand on Ruthanna’s arm. “Sweetheart, what happened?”
“When the invitation arrived, I was busy,” Ruthanna replied. “I never bothered to RSVP. Besides, I was the singer. Surely I could go to the reception without returning the RSVP!”
Ruthanna started to weep—not only because she had missed the most lavish banquet she’d ever been invited to, but also because she suddenly had a small taste of what it will be like someday for people as they stand before Christ and find their names are not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
Throughout the ages, countless people have been too busy to respond to Christ’s invitation to his wedding banquet. Many assume that the good they’ve done—perhaps attending church, being baptized, singing in the choir, or helping in a soup kitchen—will be enough to gain entry to Heaven. But people who do not respond to Christ’s invitation to forgive their sins are people whose names aren’t written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. To be denied entrance to Heaven’s wedding banquet will not just mean going down the service elevator to the garage. It will mean being cast outside into Hell, forever.
In that day, no explanation or excuse will count. All that will matter is whether our names are written in the book. If they’re not, we’ll be turned away.
Have you said yes to Christ’s invitation to join him at the wedding feast and spend eternity with him in his house? If so, you have reason to rejoice—Heaven’s gates will be open to you.
If you have been putting off your response, your RSVP, or if you presume that you can enter Heaven without responding to Christ’s invitation, one day you will deeply regret it.
Preparing for the Journey
Can we really know in advance where we’re going when we die? The apostle John, the same one who wrote about the new heavens and New Earth, said in one of his letters, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13, emphasis added). We can know for sure that we have eternal life. We can know for sure that we will go to Heaven when we die.
Do you?
People who want to get to Florida don’t simply get in the car and start driving, hoping the road will somehow get them there. Instead, they look at a map and chart their course. They do this in advance, rather than waiting until they arrive at the wrong destination or discover they’ve spent three days driving the wrong direction. If you want to get somewhere, guesswork is a poor strategy. The goal of getting to Heaven is worthy of greater advanced planning than we would give to any other journey—yet some people spend far more time preparing for a trip to Disney World. Many books on Heaven seem to assume every reader is Heaven-bound. The Bible says otherwise. I owe it to all my readers to share with them God’s map to Heaven and offer them his Good News.
What You Need to Know and Do
To sin is to fall short of God’s holy standards. Sin is what ended Eden’s Paradise. And all of us, like Adam and Eve, are sinners. You are a sinner. That’s the first thing you need to know.
Sin deceives us and makes us think that wrong is right and right is wrong (Proverbs 14:12).
Sin has consequences, but God has provided a solution for our sin: “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Jesus Christ, the Son of God, loved us so much that he became a man to deliver us from our sin (John 3:16). He came to identify with us in our humanity and our weakness, but he did so without being tainted by our sin, self-deception, and moral failings (Hebrews 2:17-18; 4:15-16).
We’re told that “God made him [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This means that even though we are under God’s wrath for our sins, Jesus died on the cross as our representative, our substitute. God then poured out his wrath on Christ instead of on us. Christ, who stood in our place, conveyed his righteousness to us so that we are declared innocent of all our sins and declared righteous, so we may enter the very presence of God in Heaven and be at home with him there.
No other prophet or religious figure—only Jesus, the Son of God—is worthy to pay the penalty for our sins demanded by God’s holiness (Revelation 5:4-5, 9-10). Only when our sins are dealt with in Christ can we enter Heaven. We cannot pay our own way. “Salvation is found in no one else [but Jesus], for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Being himself God and therefore all-powerful, Jesus Christ rose from the grave, defeating sin and conquering death (1 Corinthians 15:3-4, 54-57). When Christ died on the cross for us, he said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The Greek word translated “it is finished” was commonly written across certificates of debt when they were canceled. It meant “paid in full.” Christ died so that the certificate of debt, consisting of all our sins, could once and for all be marked “paid in full.”
Because of Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross on our behalf, God freely offers us forgiveness. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. . . . As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:10-12).
Forgiveness is not automatic. If we want to be forgiven, we must recognize and repent of our sins: “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). Forgiveness is established by our confession: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Christ offers to everyone the gift of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life: “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17).
There’s no righteous deed we can do that will earn us a place in Heaven (Titus 3:5). We come to Christ empty-handed. We can take no credit for salvation: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
This gift cannot be worked for, earned, or achieved in any sense. It’s not dependent on our merit or effort but solely on Christ’s generous and sufficient sacrifice on our behalf.
Ultimately, God’s greatest gift is himself. We don’t just need salvation, we need Jesus the Savior. It is the person, God, who graciously gives us the place, Heaven.
Joining the Body of Christ: the Church
You may think that you don’t deserve forgiveness after all you’ve done.
That’s exactly right. No one deserves forgiveness. If we deserved it, we wouldn’t need it. That’s the point of grace. On the cross, Jesus experienced the Hell we deserve, so that for eternity we can experience the Heaven we don’t deserve.
Once forgiven, we can look forward to spending eternity in Heaven with Christ and our spiritual family (John 14:1-3; Revelation 20:11-22:6). We need never fear that God will find a skeleton in our closet and say, “If I’d known you did that, I wouldn’t have let you into Heaven.” Every sin is covered under the blood of Christ. Moreover, God is all-knowing. He has seen us at our worst and still loves us. No sin is bigger than the Savior. If God wasn’t willing to forgive sin on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice, Heaven would be empty.
Jesus said, “Watch out that no one deceives you” (Matthew 24:4). There are countless groups, religious and secular, that will assure you Heaven is your automatic destination or that it can be attained by your hard work and avoiding certain sins. This is false—there is no salvation except by Jesus and his redemptive work.
False teachers can be attractive and persuasive, often quoting the Bible out of context. But they should be rejected because they contradict God’s Word (Acts 17:11). False doctrine is one reason the Christian life should not and cannot be lived in isolation. We must become part of a family of Christians called a church, where God’s Word is believed and taught. You may feel self-conscious around other Christians because of your past. You shouldn’t.
A Christ-centered church is not a showcase for saints but a hospital for sinners.
The people you’re joining are human, imperfect, and needy. Most church people aren’t self-righteous. Those who are should be pitied, because they don’t understand God’s grace.
A good church will teach God’s Word and provide love, help, and support. If you have further questions about Jesus and about Heaven, you can find answers there. (If you’re looking for such a church in your area but can’t find one, use this address and we’ll gladly help you.) epm.org
To those who presumed they would go to Heaven because they were religious, Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Matthew 7:21-23). Those who assume their religious activities alone will get them to Heaven have a terrible surprise ahead.
Do not merely assume that you are a Christian and are going to Heaven. Make the conscious decision to accept Christ’s sacrificial death on your behalf. When you choose to accept Christ and surrender control of your life to him, you can be certain that your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
Water for the Thirsty
After showing us the new heavens and New Earth, Jesus says near the end of the Bible, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life” (Revelation 21:6). But then Jesus adds these sobering words: “He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur” (Revelation 21:7-8).
For those who know Christ, their place is Heaven. For those who do not know Christ, their place is Hell. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). There is no middle ground. Either you are a follower of Jesus or you are not. Christ said, “He who is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23).
The Bible ends with yet one more invitation, suggesting that God wants to give every reader one last chance: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17). It is Jesus—and Heaven—we thirst for. Jesus and Heaven are offered to us at no cost because he already paid the price for us.
God invites you to come. The church invites you to come. As a follower of Jesus, I invite you to come.
Why would you not come? What reason could be good enough to turn away from Jesus and from eternal life in the new heavens and New Earth? In the words of C. S. Lewis, “All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”Heaven
You are made for a person and a place. Jesus is the person. Heaven is the place. They are a package—you cannot get Heaven without Jesus or Jesus without Heaven. We will explore Heaven’s joys and wonders throughout this book. But we dare not presume we can enter Heaven apart from Christ.
“Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6). Have you confessed your sins? asked Christ to forgive you? placed your trust in Christ’s death and resurrection on your behalf? asked Jesus to be your Lord and empower you to follow him? Wouldn’t it be tragic to read about the wonders of Heaven, and not end up going there?
For more information on the subject of Heaven, see Randy Alcorn’s book "Heaven."
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Keith Giles on ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
Monday, February 13, 2017
DO I SUPPORT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION?
Over the weekend a friend on Facebook questioned me about this issue of illegal immigration and the refugee crisis.
My original post was a link to an article that highlighted the inevitable clash between churches that offer amnesty or sanctuary to those fearing deportation, and the Immigration Enforcement Agencies that are tasked with finding, arresting and deporting these people.
His question was this:
"I am curious to hear your defense of someone illegally entering a foreign nation, and following that up with repeatedly violating multiple other laws of that nation while simultaneously illegally receiving a variety of monetary benefits...Surely you aren't going to argue that the mere "existence" of immigration laws represents an "unjust law" that - as a believer - can be morally ignored? I'm just trying to establish a 'baseline' for your argument, here. Where does 'just enforcement' begin, in your view? Or is there no such thing?"
It's a fair question and one that that I myself have wrestled with over the years as someone who has tried to reconcile my faith with everything else in my life.
In the past, I might have tried to do exactly what he asked me to do: Justify the legality of immigration laws in our country, or seek to directly balance the words of Jesus with American immigration policy.
But that's not what I do anymore. I have a different perspective now.
Here's how I answered my friend:
"Do I need to justify prostitution to care for a prostitute? Is it 'anti-criminal justice' to serve in prison ministry? Am I pro-drug use if I serve someone who is addicted to drugs?
"No. We show mercy and grace and the love of Jesus to everyone."
See, we don't need to limit our ministry to those who are "righteous" and "law-abiding". In fact, to do so would be completely pointless.
If someone is already "good" then who needs Jesus?
And Jesus was quick to point out that it was only those who were sick who need a physician, and it's only those who admit they are blind that receive healing for their blindness.
The greatest blindness, of course, is not recognizing our own blind spots. If we fail to see ourselves in the outcast, and the poor, and the broken, then we also fail to see Jesus in them as well.
"Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done it unto me," Jesus reminds us.
So, we really only love Jesus as much as we love the people around us who are poor, and weak, and hungry, and thirsty, and naked and in prison.
What's more, we are reminded in the New Testament that we ourselves are equally in need of Jesus and His mercy and grace and healing as anyone - and everyone - else we see:
"Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?....And that is what some of you were." [1 Cor. 6:9-11]
We forget that we are no better than anyone else. We are all sinners saved by the same grace. We are all people who are dearly loved of God and in need of His endless mercy.
Refugees and illegal immigrants are people, just like you and me. They love their families. They want to live in peace. They are running from war and oppression and poverty and looking to find a new life here - just the way we would if it was our family - our children - who were starving and dying and in need of safety.
Regardless of what the laws might say, we are answerable to a higher authority. Jesus, our glorious eternal King, commands us to treat everyone - especially the weakest among us - as if they were Him.
It's not our job to work out who is most deserving of His mercy. That's way above our pay grade. Our job is to love everyone we see and to recognize that our King commands us to be extravagant with our love.
So, do I support illegal immigration? No, I don't. But I do support loving everyone around me. If those people happen to be illegal immigrants, or refugees, or Muslims, or anything else, my job is to love them as much as I love Jesus.
If you're following Jesus, it's your job too.
Peace,
-kg
Friday, December 30, 2016
intro to Keith Giles "NOBODY FOLLOWS JESUS (So Why Should You?)
NOBODY FOLLOWS JESUS
(So Why Should You?) (the blog)
Nobody follows Jesus anymore. Just look around,
and you’ll see what I mean. How often do you ever see
someone show love to a person who is in their face? Have
you ever once heard of anyone chasing a thief down the
street screaming, “Hey, you forgot my DVD player!” or
witnessed a person who has just been slapped in the face
turn their head to offer the other cheek? I doubt it.
That’s my point. Jesus had some pretty radical
teachings; Love your enemies, pray for those who abuse
you, give to those who steal from you, lend without
expecting anything in return, and bless those who curse
your name.
He doesn’t stop there. No sir. Jesus even goes so
far as to say that those who follow Him must deny
themselves and take up their own cross (an instrument of
brutal torture and death). In fact, He says if you don’t do
this, you “cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27).
Even the most casual glance at the words and
teachings of Jesus will tell you this guy had unreasonable
expectations of those who would dare follow Him. It was
almost as if He was trying to thin the crowd by raising the
bar so high.
No wonder no one follows Jesus anymore. Now,
I’m not suggesting people don’t believe in Jesus anymore.
There are millions and millions of people out there who
196
really do believe a guy named Jesus actually lived 2,000
years ago. They believe that He was the Son of God, and
God the Son, and that He lead a sinless life, died on the
cross for their sins and rose bodily from the grave after
three.
Yep. They believe all that. But, those people
don’t necessarily follow Jesus, not the way He expected
them to.
Maybe that’s why Jesus wondered out loud,
“When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on the
earth?” (Luke 18:8). Maybe He knew after 2,000 years of
Christianity, we would have just given up on following
His specific example of how to live.
G.K. Chesterton once said, “It’s not that
Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it’s that it
has been found difficult and left untried.”
You see, I think Jesus really did expect His
followers to live extravagant lives of love as He
commands in Luke 6:27. He wasn’t kidding around.
Jesus makes it pretty clear that the kind of love
the world has is nothing special. “If you love those who
love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love
those who love them. And if you do good to those who are
good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do
that” (Luke 6:32).
Jesus was trying to get His potential followers to
understand they were expected to model a standard of love
that went far, far beyond what anyone living on this planet
had ever encountered or dreamed of before.
Once you understand this, it starts to make more
sense. Jesus calls His followers to this kind of life for a
reason—so we can show those who aren’t aware of the
kindness of God what it means to be loved, forgiven and
shown mercy.
197
Yes, Jesus expects us to actually do these things.
Yes, it will hurt.
Can you think of a better way to show those who
are far from God that He really loves them?
Imagine a world where we all actually did this
stuff on a daily basis. Would it change the world? Would
it change everyone’s idea of Christianity? Of Christ?
Would it set the teachings of Jesus apart from every single
other religious figure who had ever lived?
Isn’t it ironic to think the most radical thing a
modern Christian could do today would be to simply do
exactly what Jesus says?
Yeah, it’s really a shame that no one really
follows Jesus anymore. But, I still can’t help but imagine
what would happen to the world we live in if even a few
people actually did.
Jesus promises those who actually do put His
words into practice that they will be blessed and have life
abundantly.
Maybe it’s time to start following Jesus? Maybe
it’s time to take Him seriously?
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of
mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who
built his house on the rock”- Jesus, (Matthew 7:24).
It is sort of sad, but we can’t help but face the
awful truth that Jesus doesn’t seem to inspire followers the
way He used to.
Christian author Dallas Willard once said,
“There is absolutely nothing in what Jesus himself or his
early followers taught that suggests you can decide just to
enjoy forgiveness at Jesus' expense and have nothing more
to do with him.”
198
Noted theologian A. W. Tozer once remarked
that “a notable heresy has come into being throughout
evangelical Christian circles—the widely—accepted
concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only
because we need Him as Savior and that we have the right
to postpone our obedience to Him as Lord as long as we
want to!" (From his book I Call It Heresy)
He goes even as far as to suggest, "that salvation
apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred
scriptures."
What we have in modern American Christianity
is a brand of religion that says to its founder, "I'd like a
little of your blood to cover my sins, but I don't care to
follow you or take your teachings seriously. If you would
please excuse me, I’ll get on with my life. See you in
heaven." Dallas Willard calls those kinds of people
“Vampire Christians” because all they want is some of
Jesus’ blood, but none of His leadership.
Does this sound to you like what Jesus had in
mind for His church? I wonder why would anyone align
themselves with someone as radical as Jesus and then
totally ignore His teachings?
I ask you to consider what you’d think if you met
a man who said he was a Muslim, but after interviewing
him you discovered that he didn't read the Koran, didn't
attempt to live his life in obedience to Mohammed, and
didn't seek to become more like a person who modeled
Islam. In what way would that guy be a Muslim? You
could say the same of a Buddhist or a Mormon or a Jew.
Clearly, Jesus taught and expected that those who
followed Him would put His words into practice and
respond with obedience.
“We know that we have come to know Him if we
obey His commands. The man who says, ‘I know Him,’ but
199
does not do what He commands is a liar, and the truth is
not in him. But if anyone obeys His word, God's love is
truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are
in Him: Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus
did. (1 John 2:3)
According to this verse, and many others in the
New Testament, the way to know whether or not you’re a
follower of Jesus depends on whether you’re obedient to
Him or not.
Jesus did spend a lot of time on the subject of
obedience. He seemed to really stress it. He seemed to
really expect that we would obey Him and seek after Him
and encourage each other to do the same.
I've been looking at the verses at the end of
Matthew chapter 25, where Jesus speaks to those on His
right and on His left at the Judgment seat. Both sides call
Him "Lord", and both sides did the same works, but only
one group was allowed into the Kingdom— the group that
showed compassion to the sick, the hungry, the poor and
that "knew" Jesus. (Suggesting that they did these acts of
mercy BECAUSE they truly "knew" Jesus and were
responding out of a heart of love).
Jesus was also careful to warn us that just
because we call Him “Lord” doesn’t mean that we’ll
actually see the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus says, “Not
everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the
kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my
Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)
The Great Commission that Jesus left to his
church had discipleship and obedience built into it.
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have
commanded you.”- (Matthew 28: 19- 20)
200
How many churches do you know of that offer
classes like “How To Love Your Enemies”? Virtually no
church on the horizon has any real, practical method of
actually training their flock on how to go about obeying
the teachings of Christ, and yet, this is exactly what Jesus
left us to accomplish.
It makes one wonder, what are we doing with our
time? What is the church about if not training us to be
followers of Christ himself?
I have to be fair. As I think about how many
people I know who have actually lived out the teachings
of Christ and I do realize there are those who really do
follow Jesus.
My good friend David Haliburton used to be the
Children’s pastor at a church where my family attended.
He and his wife helped my family get through a very
difficult year and a half when I was without gainful
employment after I was laid off. That alone was an
amazing thing for me, but then David and his wife did
something that astounded me even more.
Even after seeing the difficulty we were going
through, they willingly quit their jobs, sold everything
they owned and entered the mission field, taking their
three children with them. I can’t think of anything else
more amazing than that.
For a follower of Christ to take Jesus so seriously
that they would enter a life of complete surrender and
submission like that astounds me. It blesses me. It
challenges me.
Over the years I’ve met others who have taken
the calling to follow Jesus seriously. I’ve witnessed
amazing humility, incredible sacrifice, and sacrificial love,
and this gives me hope.
201
Maybe there’s hope yet for this generation.
Maybe there really are more followers out there who are
willing to take Jesus seriously, and to willingly surrender
themselves to His authority.
I pray their tribe will increase.
I want to be in that tribe.
***
NOBODY FOLLOWS JESUS
(So Why Should You?)
Volume One (the book)
By Keith Giles
This book collects articles previously published online in
the free, weekly e-newsletter known as [Subversive Underground].
Some articles also appeared online at
RelevantMagazine.com, TheOoze.com, Ginkworld.net
and SeedStories.com.
Copyright 2007 by Keith Giles
Find out more at www.keithgiles.com
FREE EBOOKS Free Download - This Is My Body:Ekklesia As God Intended [eBook]
Free Download - Subversive Interviews, Vol.1 [PDF]
Free Download - The Gospel:For Here Or To Go?, Foreword by Neil Cole, [PDF]
Free Download - Nobody Follows Jesus (So Why Should You?), [PDF]
Thursday, December 29, 2016
THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM
DALLAS WILLARD
PART 2 OF 3- “THE LOST INTERVIEW” WITH KEITH GILES
KG- “I have so many possible questions and directions we could go from here….so, I’ll just pick one. I’m curious how and when and in what way did this distinction of the Gospel of the Kingdom become clear to you? Have you just always understood this? Were you raised in a church that taught this? Or did you discover this over time?”
DW- “Well I can tell you very easily about that. First of all, anyone who goes through a theological education will be given a version of the Gospel and it will be said that it is different from the Gospel that we’re supposed to preach. On the Liberal side, the Kingdom of God was taken to be a condition of society towards which they were supposed to work. Both Left and Right, theologically, share the idea that Jesus was going to bring the Kingdom of God, but he didn’t. So, the Liberal version was that Jesus expected a political order to emerge among the Jewish people and instead they rejected it and so he was wrong because Jesus thought the Kingdom was going to come and it didn’t. The Conservative version was the one that was most common among the people in Jesus’ own day, namely that there was going to appear the King and the Kingdom would come, politically, because the King appeared. Well, the King appeared on the cross and so that’s where you get the dispensational teaching. You see it in the old Scofield Bible and elsewhere, the idea that we were then put into this odd thing called “The Church Age”. So, they believe that the Kingdom will come at the end of the Church Age and that’s where you get your Left Behind books and so on.
“There’s no New Testament scholar who would ever tell you that the Gospel of Jesus was about anything other than the Kingdom of God. What they don’t understand is how that connects to the development in the book of Acts, and later in the Church, where people come to understand The Kingdom through Jesus and that’s where, if you do an inductive study on The Kingdom of God in the book of Acts, or of “The Kingdom”, you’ll see how that develops. So, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul spells out the Gospel he preaches, it is presenting The Kingdom, in the form of Jesus. That’s the way we’re supposed to do it. We’re not supposed to say, ‘Won’t it be wonderful when the Kingdom of God comes?’ or whatever.
“My theological education took all that in and I began to serve as a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention, in the Church, as a young man. As I did that I began to see something strange. I spent a lot of time trying to get people to come to church. I looked at Jesus and I saw that He spent a lot of His time trying to get away from people.”
KG- (laughs) “Because he had so many people following Him around?”
DW- “Absolutely. When you read the Gospels you see people walking on one another in Luke to just get to hear Him and be around Him. It wasn’t just a signs and wonders show, they came because of His teaching. Publicans and sinners thronged around Him, flocked to Him and to hear Him present the Kingdom of God because, again, that’s all Jesus talked about. But it wasn’t a political thing, it was a reality that is here now and you can, by trusting Him, live in that Kingdom.”
“So, all of these zany things He talks about; the birds and the flowers and so forth, that’s the presence of the Kingdom and that’s what He taught. So, I knew I must find out about this. I knew I must preach what Jesus preached. Although I was far from having His effect. Once I began preaching this way, then this issue of trying to pump people up and come to church and trying to get people to do things, that just disappeared.
“I began to say to people, ‘The real issue is your life when you’re not in church and what are you going to do with that?’ Now, then if you want to know how to do that you begin to become a disciple of Jesus. You trust Him to the extent that you believe that He knows the best about everything and you want to learn from Him. That means how to run your business, how to run your home, personal relations of all sorts, etc., come under His control and authority. That’s the path of a disciple.
“So, to put that long story simply, I just realized that what Jesus was saying in the Gospels is for us now. But to access it we have to trust Him with our whole life and then the whole New Testament lights up and the great passages like Ephesians chapter 3 and 4 and Galatians 5 and Colossians 3, all those you suddenly realize, ‘Well, this is talking about life in the Kingdom of God’. So, it ceases to be Laws and becomes an expression of the life you live in Christ.”
KG- “So, forgive me if this seems like a loaded question but, is discipleship to Christ necessary for salvation?”
DW- “If you mean life in the Kingdom, it is. If you mean going to heaven when you die, I think a lot of people are going to be in Heaven who don’t understand this. I think they may have to wear a dunce cap for several million years but uh…”
KG- (laughs)
DW- “…but I think people are going to go to heaven in different conditions. I do think that what Paul the Apostle says, that ‘whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved’ includes that, and you don’t have to understand everything perfectly to be on Jesus’ side. See, our situation now is one where we are under a severe mis-teaching and I don’t think that people under that teaching are going to be automatically condemned for it. God knows their hearts and I’m sure that many people who wouldn’t know how to talk Kingdom language if their lives depended on it will be in heaven. But of course the question that faces us is, ‘What are we going to do until we go?’ and is that all just lost?
“Many people treat the time before you die as if somehow it had nothing to do with God. God has nothing to do with your life here, we’re just hanging on, trying not to sin and we all fail and we have a whole teaching that you never make any progress, and that you don’t have to make any progress, because you’re saved by Grace. Grace, to them, relates only to forgiveness it doesn’t relate to life.”
KG- “This leads right into what I was going to ask you next which is the whole fascination we seem to have, as a culture, with Grace. Although, it seems that the version of Grace that we’re so enamored with isn’t the complete, Biblical version of Grace.”
DW- “It has almost nothing to do with it. But, see again, that follows this basic line, which I believe is inspired by evil to keep our lives out of touch with God. If you do an inductive study of Grace, in the Bible, you would never come to the idea that it has only to do with forgiveness. I have heard nationally-known speakers say, and these are the exact words, ‘Grace is only for guilt’. Now, if you take that and, for example the words of Paul the Apostle in Ephesians, “..unto me, who is the least of all saints, is this Grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ”. Now just take that context. Does this mean that all that is involved here is forgiveness? Not at all. What Paul was referring to is that Grace was a gift of a ministry of life to the Gentiles. The general idea that fits all the contexts of Grace found in the both the Old and the New Testaments, is that Grace is God acting in my life to accomplish what I cannot accomplish on my own. Now then, if you take that idea and you go back to all the passages about Grace you will see that suddenly things begin to light up. Paul in Colossians 15 is talking about he was the last one who witnessed the resurrected Jesus. He says he doesn’t deserve to be an Apostle, even though he was late, he says, “I have labored more abundantly than they all” and he catches himself then and adds, “yet not I but the Grace of God that is in me.” Now, that wasn’t forgiveness. That was God acting in Paul and then you watch his life and you see what that means. So that when Paul acted he knew that God was acting with him and through him. Again, Grace is God acting in my life to accomplish what I cannot on my own. Of course, it’s much bigger than that because it also has, not just an individual but a social presence in history. Now you come to the very famous passage in 2 Peter 3:18- “Grow in Grace” (and that means to grow in the presence of God in your life, doing what you cannot do on your own), “and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”. Now, knowledge, Biblically, always refers to interactive relationship and that’s Grace. So now, that I would say that, of all the things that we have to go back and re-do the vocabulary, to get it right, Grace is the big thing and the next thing is Salvation, or what does it mean to be saved?
“Once you get those right then you see a picture of a life lived in the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of God is God in action. It’s God reigning. I often say it’s where what God wants done is done. Now all that comes together and you get a coherent picture of what it means to trust Jesus, enter the Kingdom, be saved and live by Grace.”
(END PART 2 OF 3)
PART 2 OF 3- “THE LOST INTERVIEW” WITH KEITH GILES
KG- “I have so many possible questions and directions we could go from here….so, I’ll just pick one. I’m curious how and when and in what way did this distinction of the Gospel of the Kingdom become clear to you? Have you just always understood this? Were you raised in a church that taught this? Or did you discover this over time?”
DW- “Well I can tell you very easily about that. First of all, anyone who goes through a theological education will be given a version of the Gospel and it will be said that it is different from the Gospel that we’re supposed to preach. On the Liberal side, the Kingdom of God was taken to be a condition of society towards which they were supposed to work. Both Left and Right, theologically, share the idea that Jesus was going to bring the Kingdom of God, but he didn’t. So, the Liberal version was that Jesus expected a political order to emerge among the Jewish people and instead they rejected it and so he was wrong because Jesus thought the Kingdom was going to come and it didn’t. The Conservative version was the one that was most common among the people in Jesus’ own day, namely that there was going to appear the King and the Kingdom would come, politically, because the King appeared. Well, the King appeared on the cross and so that’s where you get the dispensational teaching. You see it in the old Scofield Bible and elsewhere, the idea that we were then put into this odd thing called “The Church Age”. So, they believe that the Kingdom will come at the end of the Church Age and that’s where you get your Left Behind books and so on.
“There’s no New Testament scholar who would ever tell you that the Gospel of Jesus was about anything other than the Kingdom of God. What they don’t understand is how that connects to the development in the book of Acts, and later in the Church, where people come to understand The Kingdom through Jesus and that’s where, if you do an inductive study on The Kingdom of God in the book of Acts, or of “The Kingdom”, you’ll see how that develops. So, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul spells out the Gospel he preaches, it is presenting The Kingdom, in the form of Jesus. That’s the way we’re supposed to do it. We’re not supposed to say, ‘Won’t it be wonderful when the Kingdom of God comes?’ or whatever.
“My theological education took all that in and I began to serve as a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention, in the Church, as a young man. As I did that I began to see something strange. I spent a lot of time trying to get people to come to church. I looked at Jesus and I saw that He spent a lot of His time trying to get away from people.”
KG- (laughs) “Because he had so many people following Him around?”
DW- “Absolutely. When you read the Gospels you see people walking on one another in Luke to just get to hear Him and be around Him. It wasn’t just a signs and wonders show, they came because of His teaching. Publicans and sinners thronged around Him, flocked to Him and to hear Him present the Kingdom of God because, again, that’s all Jesus talked about. But it wasn’t a political thing, it was a reality that is here now and you can, by trusting Him, live in that Kingdom.”
“So, all of these zany things He talks about; the birds and the flowers and so forth, that’s the presence of the Kingdom and that’s what He taught. So, I knew I must find out about this. I knew I must preach what Jesus preached. Although I was far from having His effect. Once I began preaching this way, then this issue of trying to pump people up and come to church and trying to get people to do things, that just disappeared.
“I began to say to people, ‘The real issue is your life when you’re not in church and what are you going to do with that?’ Now, then if you want to know how to do that you begin to become a disciple of Jesus. You trust Him to the extent that you believe that He knows the best about everything and you want to learn from Him. That means how to run your business, how to run your home, personal relations of all sorts, etc., come under His control and authority. That’s the path of a disciple.
“So, to put that long story simply, I just realized that what Jesus was saying in the Gospels is for us now. But to access it we have to trust Him with our whole life and then the whole New Testament lights up and the great passages like Ephesians chapter 3 and 4 and Galatians 5 and Colossians 3, all those you suddenly realize, ‘Well, this is talking about life in the Kingdom of God’. So, it ceases to be Laws and becomes an expression of the life you live in Christ.”
KG- “So, forgive me if this seems like a loaded question but, is discipleship to Christ necessary for salvation?”
DW- “If you mean life in the Kingdom, it is. If you mean going to heaven when you die, I think a lot of people are going to be in Heaven who don’t understand this. I think they may have to wear a dunce cap for several million years but uh…”
KG- (laughs)
DW- “…but I think people are going to go to heaven in different conditions. I do think that what Paul the Apostle says, that ‘whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved’ includes that, and you don’t have to understand everything perfectly to be on Jesus’ side. See, our situation now is one where we are under a severe mis-teaching and I don’t think that people under that teaching are going to be automatically condemned for it. God knows their hearts and I’m sure that many people who wouldn’t know how to talk Kingdom language if their lives depended on it will be in heaven. But of course the question that faces us is, ‘What are we going to do until we go?’ and is that all just lost?
“Many people treat the time before you die as if somehow it had nothing to do with God. God has nothing to do with your life here, we’re just hanging on, trying not to sin and we all fail and we have a whole teaching that you never make any progress, and that you don’t have to make any progress, because you’re saved by Grace. Grace, to them, relates only to forgiveness it doesn’t relate to life.”
KG- “This leads right into what I was going to ask you next which is the whole fascination we seem to have, as a culture, with Grace. Although, it seems that the version of Grace that we’re so enamored with isn’t the complete, Biblical version of Grace.”
DW- “It has almost nothing to do with it. But, see again, that follows this basic line, which I believe is inspired by evil to keep our lives out of touch with God. If you do an inductive study of Grace, in the Bible, you would never come to the idea that it has only to do with forgiveness. I have heard nationally-known speakers say, and these are the exact words, ‘Grace is only for guilt’. Now, if you take that and, for example the words of Paul the Apostle in Ephesians, “..unto me, who is the least of all saints, is this Grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ”. Now just take that context. Does this mean that all that is involved here is forgiveness? Not at all. What Paul was referring to is that Grace was a gift of a ministry of life to the Gentiles. The general idea that fits all the contexts of Grace found in the both the Old and the New Testaments, is that Grace is God acting in my life to accomplish what I cannot accomplish on my own. Now then, if you take that idea and you go back to all the passages about Grace you will see that suddenly things begin to light up. Paul in Colossians 15 is talking about he was the last one who witnessed the resurrected Jesus. He says he doesn’t deserve to be an Apostle, even though he was late, he says, “I have labored more abundantly than they all” and he catches himself then and adds, “yet not I but the Grace of God that is in me.” Now, that wasn’t forgiveness. That was God acting in Paul and then you watch his life and you see what that means. So that when Paul acted he knew that God was acting with him and through him. Again, Grace is God acting in my life to accomplish what I cannot on my own. Of course, it’s much bigger than that because it also has, not just an individual but a social presence in history. Now you come to the very famous passage in 2 Peter 3:18- “Grow in Grace” (and that means to grow in the presence of God in your life, doing what you cannot do on your own), “and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”. Now, knowledge, Biblically, always refers to interactive relationship and that’s Grace. So now, that I would say that, of all the things that we have to go back and re-do the vocabulary, to get it right, Grace is the big thing and the next thing is Salvation, or what does it mean to be saved?
“Once you get those right then you see a picture of a life lived in the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of God is God in action. It’s God reigning. I often say it’s where what God wants done is done. Now all that comes together and you get a coherent picture of what it means to trust Jesus, enter the Kingdom, be saved and live by Grace.”
(END PART 2 OF 3)
Saturday, August 26, 2006
DALLAS WILLARD: THE LOST INTERVIEW (PART 3 OF 3)
DALLAS WILLARD: "THE LOST INTERVIEW" - PART 3 OF 3
KG- “Thank you so much for taking the time to go through that description, that clarification, of Grace. I agree with you that we have grossly misunderstood Grace and then you said the second thing we need to understand is Salvation. Could you do the same thing for this concept also?”
DW- “Right. What it means to be saved is to be living a life of interaction with Jesus and that’s the only description of Eternal Life in the New Testament is John 17:3 where Jesus says, in his prayer, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent”. Now again, “Know” does not mean “to know about him”.
KG- “It’s not about knowledge”.
DW- “Biblically ‘Knowledge’ is interactive relationship. As Mary said to the angel, “But how can this be since I know not a man?” See that word ‘know’ is different than knowledge. What she meant is that she had not had sexual intercourse with a man, that is called ‘Carnal Knowledge’.
KG- “So, it’s an intimacy that conceives something then?”
DW- “It most certainly does. The intimacy is one of interaction. When the prophet says, on the behalf of Jehova to Israel, ‘You only have I known or all the peoples on the Earth’, he’s not saying he doesn’t know “about” the others, he’s saying ‘You’re the only one’s that I’ve entered into a covenantal relationship with, an interactive relationship’. So eternal life then is an interactive relationship with God. That’s what Salvation is.
“Now what about forgiveness? That’s a natural part of that interactive relationship when you trust Jesus you trust him for everything, including forgiveness. But God’s point of view, as Paul says in Romans about Abraham, ‘He believed God and it was accounted unto him as righteousness’, but if you trust Jesus Christ, God would rather have that than sinlessness. When God saw Abraham’s confidence in Him, God said, ‘I like this better’ and to be accounted as righteousness means that the proper relationship between a human being and God is now resumed. That is an ongoing relationship in which progress in understanding and practice of holiness and joy and obedience and all these things come together as a part of a life. So, you don’t get a little thing that says you get heaven when you die and you’re left with the option of saying, ‘Well, shall I obey?’ and then of course if you say, ‘I shall obey’ the next step is ‘I learn to obey’ because that isn’t done for me, though we do it with God it’s not something we do on our own and so that, too, is Grace. When the person comes to the place where they can actually love their enemies, that is Grace. But it’s not passive. That’s where we have to learn that true Grace is not opposed to effort. It’s opposed to earning, but not to effort. Earning is an attitude but effort is action.”
KG- “There is a connection then, as you describe Grace as ‘God helping me to accomplish the things I cannot accomplish on my own’…”
DW- “I would say, ‘God acting in my life..’, the wording there is very important.”
KG- “Ok. So, it seems that this is the necessary fuel for the spiritual formation of a person.”
DW- “Spiritual Formation is a word for the process you go through in a life.”
KG- “So, Spiritual Formation should not be optional. It is a natural process that would occur if you were completely trusting Christ.”
DW- “That’s exactly right. It’s the process of actually trusting Christ. If you really trust Christ then He will be your teacher and you will be His student. Where will He teach you? About everything that is going on in your life. You will come to the place where, as Colossians 3:17 says, ‘Whatsoever you do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God the Father..’”
KG- “It seems that, for some people, the Spiritual Disciplines are too heavy. It’s like, ‘Fasting and Solitude are such a drudgery’ to most of us.”
DW- “No see, that is a person who, whether they know it or not, they are still living their life on their own. So, they come to something like these disciplines and they say, ‘Now this doesn’t fit into my plans, I couldn’t do this, or I don’t need to do this’, and it’s because they are living their life on their own. That of course is the basic sin, living your life your way, on your terms.”
KG- “So, in this case a complete surrender has not taken place?”
DW- “That’s right. Of course, they haven’t been taught what that would mean. They haven’t been given an opportunity to do that. So, it’s almost natural that they would be in that position.
“See, the ordinary preacher, when he goes to his church what he’s actually facing as he looks out at his congregation is a wall of unbelief. Now, of course you might say, it’s well-intentioned unbelief, and it is. Most of the folks you’re dealing with in churches, they have head knowledge of a lot of stuff. For example, they know there’s a Trinity perhaps but it has no connection with their lives. They never think, ‘I’m living in a Trinitarian Universe’, and that’s why it does no goods for ministers to moan and groan about the lack of involvement or obedience, about how they have to keep entertaining people so they’ll come back next week and keep giving and so on. That’s the situation these ministers are in. They’ve now accepted that as normal. Whereas that’s not normal.”
KG- “No. That’s not what Jesus works so hard for and died on the cross for and rose again for. Not to create this kind of mediocrity.”
DW- “Absolutely. We can sing a song about ‘Joy unspeakable and full of Glory” but nobody’s got it and the rest of the things that are talked about in scripture are missing. Even the social issues are fundamental to the Kingdom; loving our neighbor as ourself and so on, but they are not additional things we’re trying to tack on, they are more expressions of the kind of life that is moving in us appropriately under our discipleship to Jesus.”
KG- “I think we touched on this a little bit the last time we spoke, but it seems that the other factor is, not just that it’s not being preached in our churches, but it’s also not something that the average Christian could see a role a model for, to help him or her to get an idea for how to live this sort of life. I’m not saying it’s not happening, but I’m suggesting that the idea of mentoring or discipling one another is a bit of a lost art these days. I guess because it isn’t being taught from the pulpit then it therefore also isn’t being practiced either.”
DW- “Well, two things. One is, the kind of so-called fellowship we have in our churches does not allow people to know one another. If it did, they might actually find some people who are remarkably exemplifying life in the Kingdom of God. Second thing, we do have cases at a distance, for example people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or Billy Graham, or the late Pope, and I’m not talking about perfection here. That’s one thing you really have to stay away from in this discussion. We’re not talking about perfection, we’re talking about doing a lot better. The fact is, there are many people that Christians know at a distance that exemplify life in the Kingdom. They recognize this. They know this. They may even have to travel to Calcutta to be with Mother Teresa, and I’ve met many people who have made that trip, but they’re not going to do what she does. They come back and they talk about her, and maybe they are different in some respects, but they don’t do what she does. The same way you go to Francis of Assisi and all these people talk about him and what he did but you don’t see anyone doing what St. Francis did. At a distance we have these exemplars. Jesus Himself is “The” exemplar. We know about Paul and others in the New Testament, and sometimes with their imperfections because perfection is something you have to put out of your mind. You have to think in terms of learning to do the things that Jesus said to do. The models are there. The problem is, Keith, we have this automatic theological adjuster in our minds that says, ‘That’s not for me, that’s for special people’.
One of the most touching things I observe, as I come across people who have read Brother Lawrence’s book on Practicing Presence of God and immediately they translate that into feeling at peace and being calm and so on. They don’t translate that into obedience. They don’t look at the life that Brother Lawrence lived as essentially a servant in the kitchen and apply that to themselves. That’s because they have this little theological adjuster, it’s like one of these dimmer switches on the wall where it has a knob and you can turn it down. So, they turn it up so they can see Brother Lawrence but when it comes to themselves they turn it down, and they’ve accepted that, see? The main reason why they’ve accepted that is because they’ve accepted the idea that Salvation is about forgiveness of sins.”
KG- “Yes, I agree.”
DW- “Now on the Liberal side, they don’t talk about sin or heaven when you die, they don’t even talk about that. They talk about getting involved in social issues and then if you’re really serious you’ll join Sojourners and help out in the soup lines and protesting the war, and all sorts of things like that. But they’re not going to put their lives on the line for that. They have a mild little version of what they would call discipleship which is about being engaged, or at least concerned about, social issues.
“Both of these, in the whole spectrum, basically leave your life untouched. We need to communicate that, what you’re doing now is where God wants to be in your life and you can invite Him in and begin to expect Him to act, and you will know the Kingdom of God, you will know God in action, you will know Christ, and you will be inwardly transformed, progressively, by spiritual formation, as a disciple who is one who is learning to live his life as Jesus would lead his life is Jesus were that disciple.”
KG- “What I want to ask, now that we’ve identified this condition, what’s been going on in American Christian Culture, how do we turn this ship around?”
DW- “By preaching. This is really the heart of the matter and it’s very simple. I say this over and over to people, to pastors, ‘Just start with Matthew and just preach what Jesus preached’. Now that’s going to really jerk you around. You have to avoid things like going to your church and saying, ‘We’re going to keep doing things the same but now we’re going to really mean it’. That’s really what they think, but as long as they do that they’re really going to get nowhere. Spiritual formation, as a hope, will flame out within just a few years unless people understand that they really are doing something different than they’ve done before. So, I say to anyone who asks, ‘What do we do?’ I just suggest that you just start and teach what Jesus taught and begin to put your own life into it and progressively you will see people respond. It will take a little while to realize that you really are saying and doing something different. Then when they do that you’ll see various reactions, just like the Parable of the Sower, some people will say, ‘You’re not preaching the Truth anymore, brother’, or maybe that you’re teaching salvation by works..”
KG- “Yeah, that’s usually the first comment that rises up.”
DW- “So, you have to, as a Pastor, you have the Grace of God with you to deal with that. You have to show people that Grace doesn’t equal passivity, we still do things. My background is Baptist and I like to rib them a little bit so I’ll say, ‘We’ll preach to you for an hour telling you you can’t do anything to be saved and then sing to you for an hour trying to get you to do something to be saved”. It’s really confusing to tell you the truth.
“So, the pastor, as he preaches will begin to react in different ways. In nearly every case, if that pastor does his work from the Bible, the people will be joyously won over to what he is doing and they will say, within a short period of time, ‘Yes, we want to live in the Kingdom. We know what trusting Jesus means now. We want to make disciples. We want to be disciples. We want to teach people how to do everything He said’, but you can’t go there and start. You can’t go into the church and say ‘Now we’re all going to be disciples. If you’re not a disciple you’re not one of us’, and so forth. That’s just terribly misguided behavior and it doesn’t come from the love of Jesus. So, you accept the transition and you stay with it and eventually your people will come around, but you have to give them time to replace this whole string of concepts we’ve talked about like Salvation and Grace, and so on. The way to go about it is through teaching the Bible.
“Here’s what I found out years ago, and if I hadn’t I would’ve been out of the business thirty or forty years ago, and it’s this; You don’t have to make it happen. The little parable that Jesus tells in Mark about the farmer that goes out and sows the seed and then takes a nap? There’s a little phrase there that says, ‘the farmer knoweth not how this works’. There’s a plant coming up out of the dirt and pretty soon there’s something edible there. But although the farmer doesn’t know how it happens, you can be sure it’s going to happen and that takes the load off of you. You don’t have to make this happen. This is one of the most important thing for pastors to understand. Don’t try to get people to do anything, just speak the Word of the Gospel, live as a disciple, lovingly teach, be with people, and it will happen.”
KG- “It’s funny, last night I was getting ready for bed and I was reading a chapter from A.W. Tozer’s book “The Knowledge of the Holy”..”
DW- “Oh you can’t beat that!”
KG- “Yeah, it’s a wonderful book. There was a paragraph here that goes along with what you’re saying…if you don’t mind me reading this to you, ‘When viewed from the perspective of eternity, the most critical need of this hour may well be that the Church should be brought back from her long Babylonian captivity, and the name of God be Glorified in her again, as of old. Yet we must not think of the Church as an anonymous body, a mystical religious abstraction. We Christians are the Church and whatever we do is what the Church is doing. The matter, therefore, is for each of us, a personal one. Any forward step in the Church must begin with the individual.’”
DW- “That’s absolutely correct. The Church is a pretty ragged bunch of people and actually one of the surest signs that the Church is on the wrong path is when it tries not to be.”
KG- (laughs)
DW- “I’ve seen Churches die when they try to go around the neighborhood to collect the right sorts of people, when the wrong sorts of people were right under the shadow of the building but they would not reach out to them and say, ‘It’s ok for you to come. Jesus accepts you and we do too.’ Of course, Jesus got into more trouble for hanging out with the wrong kind of people than almost anything else, but of course those were the ones who were happy to hear. Those were the ones who were breaking down the wall to get in.”
KG- “That’s why Jesus had the response that it’s the sick that need a doctor. The point being that, all of us are sick and in need of a doctor, it’s just that some of us are more aware of our need for the Physician than others.”
DW- “As Jesus said to the Pharisess, it was because they claimed to see that they were guilty of sin. If they had not claimed to see they would not have been in sin. That’s the problem with the leaders of our churches because they say, ‘We see’, but they are not doing what Jesus says to do. The idea of doing it doesn’t even appear on the horizon of most of those who are leading others. They hammer away on righteousness but often righteousness is defined in terms of culture, (don’t smoke or drink, etc.), than in terms of how you live your life as a disciple of Jesus.”
KG- “Thank you so much, Dallas for taking the time to sit and talk to me about these very important issues. I’m very grateful to you for this.”
DW- “We can talk again.”
KG- “I’ll be in touch.”
Monday, April 20, 2015
JESUS UNTANGLED - Keith Giles
Jesus
Untangled
A
few days ago I received an email from a friend of mine. He was
sharing with me his frustration over the apparent blindness that many
Christians seem to have when it comes to following Jesus.
His
experience was that every time he attempted to talk about doing what
Jesus commanded us to do – like loving our enemies, turning the
other cheek, caring for the poor, etc. – the responses he kept
receiving were comments like, “But the Founding Fathers say…”,
or “The Constitution says..”, or “Common sense tells you…”,
and so on.
This
isn’t something new to me. I’ve had – and continue to have –
similar conversations with Christians on almost a daily basis.
So,
what’s going on here? Why is this such an ongoing problem in the
American Church today? What can we do about it?
I have a few ideas.
What’s
going on?
Most
Christians simply do not understand the Gospel, plain and simple. I
know this because – only about 10 years ago – I was also unaware
of what the actual Gospel was all about. Keep in mind, I was also a
licensed and ordained Southern Baptist pastor at that time.
See,
I used to believe that the Gospel was about saying a prayer so that I
could go to heaven when I die. But that’s
not the Gospel.
The
Gospel – or the “Good News” – that Jesus came and died to
proclaim is found (curiously enough) in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John.
Here’s
what the “Good News” (or the Gospel) is according to the NT:
“Jesus
went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming
the good news of the kingdom..” (Mat. 4:23)
“Jesus
went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has
come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and
believe the good news!” (Mar. 1:14-15)
“But
he said, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to
the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.” (Luk. 4:43)
Wait
a minute, what does this have to do with why Christians confuse
America with the Kingdom of God? Good
question!
See,
because Christians have confused the Gospel with saying a prayer so
you can go to heaven, they’ve neglected to see the Gospel as
something that is for here and now. That has led us to a Christianity
that is largely about something that only starts to kick in once
we’re dead – rather than a Gospel that’s about a way of life
that starts once you decide to follow Jesus.
It’s
also a problem because Christians today largely do not see their
faith as something to be lived out. Instead, they see their faith as
something that needs to be believed.
Once
you reduce the Gospel as something that only needs to be believed –
and not obeyed – then you can simply read the words of Jesus and
say, “I believe that!” and think that you’ve done all that
Jesus asks of you.
Of
course, if we think a little longer about that we’ll see that this
makes no sense – and that it’s not at all what Jesus says.
If
your parents told you to clean your room and your response was, “I
believe that!”, do you think you’d be an obedient child?
Obviously,
Jesus gave very specific commands to his disciples (that’s what the
NT calls “Christians”) and his constant refrain was that those
who love Him obey Him, and those who do not love Him do not obey.
(See John 14: 15-24)
What
we have today in America is a Christian Church that is filled with
people who have “prayed the prayer” and “believe the Gospel”
but they do not see the words of Jesus as being for them today, nor
do they understand that the Gospel is about submitting to the
Kingship of Jesus in their actual, daily life.
How
do I know this? Because on almost a daily basis I encounter
Christians who respond to the clear commands of Jesus with a long
list of “Yeah, but…” statements.
Another
serious problem we have is that Christians in America have confused
their faith with American Christianity. In other words, to be a good
Christians means being a good American. More specifically, in my
experience at least, being a good Christian means being a
conservative Republican.
In
essence, many Christians in America can’t untangle Jesus from their
politics.
I
sometimes try to help those people think differently by saying:
“Imagine that someone in North Korea or Communist China hears the
Gospel and repents and begins to genuinely follow Jesus. Are they now
also a Republican?”
See,
the fact is that most of the Christians on this planet are not
American, or Republican. In fact, most of them aren’t even
Capitalists.
I
would take this even further by suggesting that no Christian should
ever identify as a Capitalist, or a Socialist, or as a Republican or
a Democrat, or as an American or any other nationality.
According
to the Gospel, everyone in Christ is now a new creation. The old has
gone and the new is now here. That means, in the Church, there is now
no longer any Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male nor female, etc.
but we are all one in Christ Jesus. [It’s in the NT, trust me].
Jesus
is our life. Jesus is our king. His Kingdom is now our home. We
pledge allegiance to no one else – and to no other nation –
except for Jesus and His Kingdom.
This
nation – the United States of America – will soon pass away. In
fact, it MUST pass away in order for the eternal Kingdom of Jesus to
be fully established here on earth – so must every other nation and
government, and every political ideology and man-made philosophy.
[And why would we want to put our energies into propping up a nation
or a political system that is destined for the ash can when we could
be working towards advancing the Kingdom of God?]
If
we really believe these things, then it’s time to start living all
of that out.
Jesus
is Lord. He is Lord right now. He is my Lord. His commands are
binding on me because I am already a citizen of His eternal Kingdom.
It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says. It doesn’t matter
what anyone else thinks. Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega. Everyone
else is only a pretender to the throne.
So,
let’s swear allegiance to Jesus and commit ourselves to Him and His
Kingdom and begin to put His words into practice starting today.
Or,
as Jesus phrased it: “Why do you call me ‘Lord, lord’ and do
not do what I say?” – Jesus
-kg
Keith Giles elysiansky@hotmail.com via mail.feedblitz.com
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Saturday, March 7, 2015
LOVING YOURSELF DOES NOT= POPULAR "SELF ESTEEM"
Is Our Misinterpretation of the Great Commandment Ruining Our Application of the Great Commission?
Unfortunately, today’s followers of Christ are not being criticized for loving too much. Rather, we are often observed as being critical, harsh and judgmental in the way we operate. Transmitting our Western ways along with our gospel message is not our only challenge in missions today.
Either being glossed over or just flat out taught incorrectly, it seems the right order of the Great Commandment is easily being ignored in ministry and missions alike. Before you disagree, let’s closely re-examine the facts some of us have taken for granted for decades.
The Great Commandment reads:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength And your neighbor as yourself.
The way most Christians read, teach and act out this text:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength And your neighbor, making sure to put yourself last.
In fact, in Sunday school I learned a song as a little girl called JOY – Jesus, Others and You. This seemed to reinforce the idea that I was last on my list of things that required my love.
Very seldom do we hear anyone say, “If you do not love yourself, your neighbor is in trouble,” or, “If you do not love yourself, you do not know God.” While these statements may seem strange, they are fundamentally true.
I have worked for 47 years with Christian evangelical ministries in churches, parachurch organizations and here at Frontier Ventures, formerly known as the U.S. Center for World Mission. In my early days here, as I worked side by side with Dr. Ralph Winter, our main goal was to get the word out about the Unreached Peoples – those who did not have access to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The task was of primary importance and rightfully so.
Dr. Winter and his generation were called Builders. This peer group of Christians diligently demonstrated their love for God out of great sacrifice and personal integrity. As a consequence, being personally exhausted or “spent” was often the norm. The Builder’s children, called Boomers, went on to become defined by their work, not particularly their character as were their parents. Family life took second place to their pursuit of career and as a result the Boomer generation has produced the highest divorce and second marriage rate in history. This fragmentation of the family began to produce children who are now called Gen X and Gen Y who had to take care of themselves early on in their development, often creating not only super independence but also cynicism about life. Their abandonment and rejection wounds impacted their ability to function well within relationships. In the absence of the framework of unconditional love and strong family with community ties, a different kind of need has arisen withinChristian workers.
Statistics show that missionaries usually return from the field because they are unable to get along with other missionaries or they have burned out from overwork. In many cases this can come as a result of unresolved personal issues and an overall lack of self-care. It has only been recently that we at Frontier Ventures have sensed the sacred responsibility to help our staff develop self-awareness to endure for the long haul and help them bring personal authenticity to their ministries. Yes, The Great Commission is still our utmost objective. But our journey for getting there is currently being defined differently. We have begun by developing a curriculum for our staff training called Being, Living, Doing, concentrating on allowing our doing to come from the flow of our being and living relationally with God, our self and others.
It is true that we should love God for God’s sake and be involved in his cause. But when Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the four degrees of love, the highest degree of love he mentioned was to love self for God’s sake. This seems somehow contradictory to what we have been taught.
We must understand that the link between loving God and loving ourselves is intricately connected. Loving yourself must come along with loving God and others. Augustine said, “How can we draw close to God when we are far from our self? He prayed, “God, grant that I may know myself that I may know You.” After all, if we are made in God’s image, shouldn’t this love of self be a part of our journey to love him?
Sometimes our inability to love God comes from our misconceptions about God. These misunderstandings often stem from our childhood upbringing (relationships including our parents and important events in our life.) Research shows that what a person believes about their earthly father impacts their belief about God no matter what they have been taught. It is one thing to believe and give mental assent to God’s love, for instance, but quite another to internalize and experience with one’s own heart that same fact.
In order to love God we must understand we have been created for an intimate relationship with him. The first time I realized that God was pursuing a relationship with me and wants my heart more than he wants my efforts, it rocked my world. The kingdom reality of this universe is that the Father, Son, and the Spirit are all conspiring to be with me – to live in me, dwell with me, love me and work through me. It’s the divine conspiracy! This understanding takes away my performance orientation to try, after receiving my salvation by grace, to add works to the mix to make sure that I am worthy of the gift. But it is through this understanding and expression of love, coming from the inside out, that substantial works can be made for the kingdom. Good and remaining works should follow our relationship with God just as good fruit can only be produced when connected to the vine, not before. (John 15)
The command to go into all the world and make disciples should be based on a love relationship with the Holy Trinity. This love relationship shows us our own value and worth, gifts and talents and our place in finishing his task. This agape love relationship also allows us to accept our weakness and pronenesses, producing a relationship with God that begins a journey of becoming like his—uniquely us but like him. This process doesn’t ask us to hide or pretend, but rather leads us to become authentic and transparent. It is this that would be translated to the world as the gospel of Jesus Christ. Developing a relationship with God and self takes work and time just as any relationship does. It requires time to care for one’s body, soul and spirit and times of silence and reflection— stepping back and being an audience to our own reactions and values.
This necessary order of loving self and others is always so clearly illustrated to me when I travel. When I fly on an airplane I am always instructed that in the case of losing cabin pressure I must first put on my own oxygen mask before I attempt to assist others. The reason for this clearly illustrates the order of the commandment—I will only be able to truly help others when I have first taken care of myself. Otherwise I run the risk of running out of oxygen before I am able to be of any help. Let’s make sure we do not get the excitement of doing the commission ahead of being and living within the commandment. Don’t forget that the commandment can inform us how well we will be able to give our utmost for his highest in fulfilling his commission. by Prudence Dancey/FrontierVentures(Mission Frontiers)
blog/FaceBook exerpt:
SPIRITUAL INSIGHT from: MISSION FRONTIERS (March/April 2015)
It is true that we should love God for God’s sake and be involved in his cause. But when Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the four degrees of love, the highest degree of love he mentioned was to love self for God’s sake. This seems somehow contradictory to what we have been taught.
Sometimes our inability to love God comes from our misconceptions about God. These misunderstandings often stem from our childhood upbringing (relationships including our parents and important events in our life.) Research shows that what a person believes about their earthly father impacts their belief about God no matter what they have been taught. It is one thing to believe and give mental assent to God’s love, for instance, but quite another to internalize and experience with one’s own heart that same fact.
In order to love God we must understand we have been created for an intimate relationship with him. The first time I realized that God was pursuing a relationship with me and wants my heart more than he wants my efforts, it rocked my world. The kingdom reality of this universe is that the Father, Son, and the Spirit are all conspiring to be with me – to live in me, dwell with me, love me and work through me. It’s the divine conspiracy! This understanding takes away my performance orientation to try, after receiving my salvation by grace, to add works to the mix to make sure that I am worthy of the gift. But it is through this understanding and expression of love, coming from the inside out, that substantial works can be made for the kingdom. Good and remaining works should follow our relationship with God just as good fruit can only be produced when connected to the vine, not before. (John 15)
The command to go into all the world and make disciples should be based on a love relationship with the Holy Trinity. This love relationship shows us our own value and worth, gifts and talents and our place in finishing his task. This agape love relationship also allows us to accept our weakness and pronenesses, producing a relationship with God that begins a journey of becoming like his—uniquely us but like him. This process doesn’t ask us to hide or pretend, but rather leads us to become authentic and transparent. It is this that would be translated to the world as the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This necessary order of loving self and others is always so clearly illustrated to me when I travel. When I fly on an airplane I am always instructed that in the case of losing cabin pressure I must first put on my own oxygen mask before I attempt to assist others. The reason for this clearly illustrates the order of the commandment—I will only be able to truly help others when I have first taken care of myself. -by : Prudence Dancey/FrontierVentures(Mission Frontiers)
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