Heart Tracks - No Place For His Word

     Likely we all know that words have power.  Power to build up, and power to tear down.  There are words that we like, and words that we don't.  There are words that we'll embrace, and words that we'll reject.  If this is true in the human realm, how much more so is it in the spiritual?  Even if those words come from the very heart and mouth of Christ.

     In John 8, Jesus is having another one of his many discourses with the Pharisee's.  He says in verse 31, "If you continue in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."  Now, on the surface this would seem to be very good news, but it wasn't to the Pharisee's.  They said to Him, "We're the children of Abraham, and haven't ever been slaves to anyone.  What do you mean by saying 'You'll be made free'?"  They placed their confidence in their heritage and position.  Their fleshly pride and accompanying spiritual blindness wouldn't allow them to see their true condition and the bondage of that condition.  Jesus said to them, "You look for an opportunity to kill Me, because there is no place in you for My word."  Nothing about our flesh nature has changed since then.  We will still look for ways to "kill Him" whenever He speaks words that our flesh, and so we, won't accept.  Oswald Chambers said, " 'You call Me Master and Lord,' but is He?  Master and Lord have little place in our vocabulary, we prefer the words Savior, Sanctifier, Healer."  Those words don't threaten our flesh.  Those words don't require our total surrender to Him.  Those words aren't a threat to the false freedom we are sure, like the Pharisee's, we possess.
    Paul wrote that He was free to be Christ's slave.  To be His slave was his hearts deepest desire and highest honor.  This isn't so for the flesh.  It's a degrading, humiliating thing for it to submit to anything other than its own desires and wants, never seeing or understanding that it is a slave to the tyranny of those desires and wants.  For that attitude, there is no place for His Words.  Not the words that cut through our self-deception, our denial, and our self-imposed delusions and illusions.  We'll accept all of His words as long as they don't threaten those strongholds in our lives, but any word that seeks to pierce and bring down those strongholds will be resisted with all the power of our flesh.  We insist that we're free, all the while being held immobile by the chains that bind us, but never seeing the chains.
    George Matheson wrote in a hymn, "Make me a captive Lord, and then I shall be free."  Can our hearts sing that to Him as well?  Will we enter into the beauty of captivity to Christ so that we might know the true freedom it brings?  Or, will the words of His invitation find no place in our hearts?
And the shackles remain....and the darkness and bondage they hold for us.  Will He and His Word, all of His Word, find a place in us, or, will we too seek to "kill Him"?

Blessings,
Pastor O

Heart Tracks - The Chance

     Have you noticed the tendency, not only in others, but in ourselves, that when we are faced with some great disappointment or loss, we tend to think our lives are over?  It may not be what we say, but it certainly may be what we think and feel.  We just don't feel we can go on, that what we've lost or never even had, is too much.  We feel life is over, and so, though we may continue to breathe, move about, and give the appearance of life, inside, we feel completely disconnected to all that.  We may be living, but we're not alive.  I don't mean to minimize the pain of loss, but could our inability to get past the loss be a result of our living the wrong kind of life.  A life lived for self, and not Christ.

    We will never be free from pain and loss this side of eternity, but they needn't define our lives.  The life we knew before the loss may indeed be "over" but not the life that we can have in Christ.  All through His Word we are exhorted to "go on" with Him.  Yet the landscape is filled with lives that were not able to do this.  They sit by the wayside, crippled, unmoving, trapped in their sorrow and grief.  Victims  They have not been able to go on in Him.  For them, the pain of the loss, be it from death, divorce, betrayal, and any of hundreds of other causes is just as deep and paralyzing as when it first happened.  There is healing for this, but it will be painful to the self-life.  Painful because it requires death.  Death to the self-life that cannot let go, in order to lay hold of the Christ-life that brings the fullness of healing and victory.
   Jesus said in  John 12, "Truly, truly I say to you unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit."  The life of the victim is also doomed to being alone.  Comforting words and actions don't help.  Even the promises of the King seem empty and untrue.  We're held in the grip of death, and the only way out is to die.  Die to our insistence of holding on to the pain, the loss, and all the anger, resentment, and yes, self-pity that go along with it.  When we are willing to die to that life, we can then truly begin to live in His.  We're no longer alone, but alive in His Presence and fullness.  We get up from the side of the road, and go on with Him.  No longer barren, our lives really do become fruitful.  The loss, even the pain associated with it, is not forgotten, but neither does it any longer hold us in its chains.  We have died to that, and now live to Him.  We go on with Him in a new and living way.  We've released our grip on "our" life, and laid hold of His.
   There was a book written about the life of Amy Carmichael titled, A Chance To Die.  In the midst of the pain, losses, and frustrated desires of life, the Father gives us in each and all of them, a chance to die to their hold upon us.  A chance to die to ourselves that we might live in and for Him.  That chance will come to us today and everyday.  A chance to die, leading to a chance to live.  Will we take the chance?

Blessings,
Pastor O
    
    

Heart Tracks - Deceived By "The Wrecker"

     The first lighthouse in America was built in 1718, and marked the entrance to Boston Harbor.  It was called Boston Light.  Previous to the building of this lighthouse, fires were lit upon shorelines to warn ships of rocky coastline upon which they might be wrecked.  This gave rise to a group called "wreckers" who would build fires along dangerous areas of the coast, hoping to lure unsuspecting ships to come near, whereby they would be wrecked upon that coast, and these thieves might then plunder the ship's cargo.  Thus the need for a true light to be placed where all could see, and know its welcoming safety.

    There has always been a spiritual wrecker lurking about, seeking to lure the unsuspecting to their destruction, lighting false fires that entice us to come near to what we believe is safety and truth but in reality seeks to destroy us.  We know him as satan, but perhaps its more correct to say that we know something of him, but seemingly, not enough to make us aware of the difference between his false light, and the light of the true and risen Christ.  The truth of this need only be verified by the many shipwrecked lives that lie upon the coastlands that mistook his "fire" for the real thing, and suffered as Paul said, "spiritual shipwreck."  As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 11:14, the enemy "disguises himself as an angel of light."  Our great problem is that we too often lack the ability to see through his disguise.
    I think the majority of us would say we have little use for the philosophy of humanism, a philosophy that finds its strength and life within the power of the human intellect and ability.  Yet, in reality, how many of us live our day to day lives in very much the same way as those who would adhere to that philosophy?  How many of us rely far more upon our own common sense, centered in ourselves, than upon a spiritual discernment that can only come from God?  We're far more comfortable in the natural realm than the spiritual.  After all, the Father gave us our minds and intellects in the first place didn't He?  Wouldn't He expect us to figure things out in their power?Oswald Chambers makes a powerful statement concerning this error.
   Chambers said that "Common sense is a gift that God gave to human nature, but common sense is not the gift of His Son.  Supernatural sense is the gift of His Son; never enthrone common sense.  The Son detects the Father, common sense never yet detected the Father and never will."  If it cannot detect the Father and His ways, how can it detect the devil and his?  If we live by common sense, than being the victims of deception and delusion will always be our lot, and I think it is the lot of far too many today.  The supernatural, the mystical, make no sense to common sense.  At best there is a tense wariness concerning them.  Outright rejection is a very common response.  The supernatural is reserved for TV shows and movies.  Real life is something else.  all of which the enemy responds to with great glee, and Christ with great sadness.  All the while, more and more shipwrecks pile up along the coastline.  Will yours or mine be one of them?  Will our family, our church fellowship?  Are we living in the power of His spiritual discernment, seeing where He is, and where He isn't?  Or, is it the realm of those "fringe fanatics" who are just a bit too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good? 
  T. Austin Sparks said that we have reduced the wonder and mystery of God to what our human intellects can comprehend.  We miss that God and the things of the Spirit are not to be logically figured out, but received and entered into as He unfolds to us the reality of Himself.  What will lead your life in these days?  Christ light, or the false fire and light of the wrecker?  One will get you home, the other will get you destroyed.  Which will it be?

Blessings,
Pastor O     

Heart Tracks - Wiggle Room

     I saw an entry on social media recently that was a response to a posted article that challenged a very basic tenet of faith, and that is the literal existence of an eternal hell for those who ultimately reject Christ.  It read, "I wish our group (denomination) had some wiggle room on this."  Now, I don't know what was in the heart of the one who posted the article or made the comment, and I don't attribute this to them, but I couldn't help thinking that our flesh always seeks "wiggle room" when it comes across things it doesn't like about Him, His Word, and His cross, and His ways.  The flesh will always seek to wiggle out of the place of sacrifice, of surrender.  It will always seek for a more agreeable way, to live in what author Patrick Morley calls, " a more comfortable orbit."  An orbit that revolves not around the Father, but ourselves, and the God we wish to create for ourselves.
    In his book, Walking With Christ In The Details Of Life, Morley writes, "Over the past few decades, many of us started off on the wrong foot with Jesus Christ.  It is the proposition that Jesus can be Savior without being Lord.  The idea that one can add Christ, but not subtract sin.  Many of us have merely added Christ to our lives as another interest in our already busy and otherwise overcrowded schedule....The problem is that we often seek the God we want, but do not know the God who is."  In short we are "cultural Christians."  Of such, little is asked, and little, even less, is given.  Surrender, if we partake of it at all, is something we do in part, never the whole.  We've found that comfortable orbit.  We are not fully absorbed into His life, but instead have found ways to have Him adapt His to ours.  At least, that's what we believe, even if we would never admit it.  We've found the God we want, but are oblivious to the God who is.  How could we not be, for as Morley says, they're not the same God. 
    Most in the professing church can't understand how anyone could be an atheist, but if we were to examine the day to day path of our lives, would we not, more often, even most often, have to be classified as practical atheists ourselves?  Before we rise up against that, let's examine a few things.  Before He chose His disciples, Jesus spent the entire night in prayer with His Father.  This was His approach in all of life's affairs.  He said He did nothing of Himself, but only what He saw the father doing.  Is this our approach, or do we live and make daily choices as though He didn't exist, relying on our own wisdom, our own strength and understanding?  In our approach to life, are we guided by His Word, by what He has said, and what He is saying now, or do circumstances, people, and opinion lead us?  Do we view the Father and His Kingdom as the ultimate reality, or do we see the kingdom and structures of the world as bigger and more real than Him?  Just what is the "real world" to you and I?
    How much "wiggle room" are you and I looking for today?  What are we truly seeking with all our hearts; the God we want, and who provides all the wiggle room we desire, or the God who is, who simply says, "Take up your cross, and follow Me," and as we do, we trust, we obey, we live, with the God who is, and who is infinitely greater, and more beautiful than the god we want could ever be.

Blessings,

Pastor O
  

Heart Tracks - The Agliaphobic Church

     Agliaphobia is defined as the fear of pain or discomfort.  I think this is a condition that describes our culture in general, and the church in particular.  It's not that pain and discomfort are unknown, only that we desperately  seek to avoid it, and at almost any cost.  We avoid it, deny it, and medicate it.  We don't want to experience it.  So many in the church have, as one man put it,  exchanged the God of all comfort for comfort as God.  We live for the pursuit of happiness, but happiness is an elusive state because it always depends on what is happening around us.  Happiness is based on circumstances, and the Father never promised it.  What He did promise us was His joy.  Joy is the deep sense of His presence and peace within, regardless of what is going on without.  Too many see this as a nice ideal, not a true reality.  Are you and I found in that "many?"

     I recently heard evangelist James Robison tell a story from the early days of his ministry of a young woman named Pam, who was suffering with brain cancer.  During one of his crusades, he'd been made aware of her, and was asked by her family to visit her in the hospital.  Being at first reluctant to do so because of his busy schedule, he felt compelled of the Father to go.  When he arrived he encountered a girl deeply in love with, at peace with, and filled with the joy of the Father.  She didn't complain of her state, or even ask for prayer.  She spent the whole time with Robison remarking on the goodness, faithfulness, and love of the Father for her.  When Robison left her, he remarked to his associate, "I have never met anyone so alive."  A few nights later, Pam was brought to his crusade.  She was in her hospital bed, her head swathed in bandages, and weighed only 80 pounds.  This young woman, only 6 months before a beautiful, athletic swimmer, who now lay on the border of death, spoke into the microphone held by Robison once more of the goodness, faithfulness, and unending love of the Father in Christ.  Her small, emaciated body radiated the joy of her Lord from within.  A week later, she was gone from this world into that which had always been her true one; the Kingdom.  Pam knew true joy, and not even the destruction of her physical life by a deadly cancer could take it from her.  For her, life, even when it included the cancer, was an act of worship.  She gave Him her cancer, He gave her His joy.  She knew the secret.  Such joy and such love.  Do we know anything of it?  Do we know the secret?  She released all to Him, and received all of Him.  Though her body was dying, she was fully alive.  Are we?
     Leon Bloy said that "Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God."  We have so little joy because we have so little of Him.  He has so little presence in our lives.  Chris Tiegreen says this is so because we fail to seek His intimacy.  David wrote in Psalm 16 "You will fill me with joy in Your presence."  Is the infallible sign

Bloy speaks of in yours and my life?  Is the wholehearted seeking of the intimacy of His life a characteristic of our lives?  Are we filled with His joy because we are swept up into His presence?  Or, are we, like too many others, swept up instead by our unending pursuit of happiness, and equally unending state of frustration at its absence?   Pam, as her body wasted away in death, was fully alive.  Are we?  Do we truly have the joy of the Lord, or, are still seeking after a counterfeit we call happiness?  Which marks our lives today?

Blessings,

Pastor O       

Heart Tracks - Too Long At The Wrong Feast

     T. Austin-Sparks said that one of the devil's deepest desires was to get the people of God to despair of ever knowing or seeing His power.  I think in many ways, his desire is being met in these present days.  Many pray daily, but with little hope of really seeing those prayers answered.  Just as many, perhaps more, don't pray at all, but instead have elected to work out their own deliverance and answers, believing that at best, God is a distant, disinterested observer of their lives.  The spiritual famine and drought that so many of us live in just goes on and on, and though we may regularly attend church, pay our tithe, and read our Bibles, God just seems to be absent.  Jesus just goes on sleeping in our boat while the waves swamp and threaten to drown us.  We read of the great works of the God of Elijah, but we ask, "Where is the God of Elijah?"

    The 18th chapter of I Kings is filled with accounts of the wonders God did through Elijah, but I want to focus on the last of those.  There had been no rain for 3 years, but the Father had told Elijah that this was about to end.  Elijah announced this to the people and king of Israel, though they stumbled to believe it.  This is always the response of those whose hearts are far from God.  In the midst of that terrible drought, Elijah said to them "I hear a mighty rainstorm coming."  Elijah saw the barren land that was before him, but it was not what he saw that mattered, but what he heard and was hearing.  He directed King Ahab and his people to go and partake of a feast while he went off alone to pray.  The people were much more skilled at feasting and fellowship than they were at fellowshiping with and speaking to God.  If you read the rest of the story, you know that the mighty rainstorm Elijah heard really did come, and it drenched the land.  He had heard it coming, saw it on the horizon, when all that could be "seen" on that horizon was the same hazy, scorching sky that had been there for 3 long years.
     Someone once answered that question of "Where is the God of Elijah," with the answer, "He is waiting for those with the heart of Elijah to call upon and meet with Him."  Do you and I have such a heart, or are we, in the end, more suited to be with Ahab and his crowd, feasting, fellowshiping, going to church, doing "churchy" things, while the spiritual drought within goes on and on?  I believe that there is a Kingdom rainstorm coming to a church and culture that desperately need it.  The question for us is, will we be swept along with, or swept away by it?  Ahab, and all those at the feast, never realized the blessing that the Father meant for them in that storm.  They missed it.  Will you and I?  They'd been so long feasting in the things of the world that they were unable to partake of the bounty of heaven.  They never heard it coming, and they were not swept up into it, but swept aside by it. 
     Where are you found and to what are you drawn today?  Ahab's feast, or Christ's?  Elijah prayed, waited, and expected alone.  Will he remain so, or will you, will I, join him there and hear and see, the coming mighty rainstorm of the Kingdom?  Will we behold not only the glory of His power, but the beauty and wonder of His presence?

Blessings,

Pastor O     

Heart Tracks - Losing Grace

    So many of us make life all about accumulating, adding on, getting more.  Yet, in reality, life is far more about losing than anything else.  Everything we have, everyone we know, all, sooner or later, will be lost to us.  And in the loss comes pain, heartache, sorrow.  Loss is a reality we will never escape.  The pain of losing things can be great, but the pain of losing loved ones, people who are cherished, can be excruciating beyond words.  Some, many, never get beyond this pain.  The wound of the loss may be as real or terrible as on the day it happened.  Others refuse to acknowledge its depth, and seek to bury the sorrow through activity, achievement, and of course, denial.  Some, too few, find, in the loss, Christ, or, more correctly, allow themselves to be found by Him.

     I read an account recently of a woman coming to grips with the soon departure from this life of her beloved mother.  She of course wished that she would never leave, but of course, she would.  The day was approaching when she would lose her.  As the pain closed in, she was finding in its midst what she termed, "losing grace."  Grace that would allow her to let go.  Not let go of the memories, the love, or even the missing, but grace that would not allow any of those, and so many other emotions, take hold of her, and rob her of joy, and trap her in the captivity of the sorrow of loss.
     We feel loss on so many levels and in every part of life, and it may take many forms beyond death.  Parents feel the loss of children who grow up, leave home, and move away.  Sometimes far away.  Pastor's feel the loss of sheep who stray, church members who leave, ministries that are lost, and relationships that are broken.  There is the loss of a marriage and family through divorce, of a son or daughter through rebellion, of grandchildren as a result of interfamilial strife.  There really is no end, and life can, in the end, seem to be about nothing so much as loss.  The resulting pain can be more than we can bear.  We know His grace is sufficient, but why doesn't it seem sufficient for us?  Paul said he was joyfully willing to suffer the loss of all things in order to obtain Christ, and we want to feel and believe that too.  Why do we have such a difficult time doing that?  How can we handle the crushing losses of life?
     I think the answer lies in something Beth Moore wrote.  She spoke of having to say goodbye to her daughter and her family for a very long time as they moved half-way around the world in answer to His call.  Their separation would be for a very long time, and the pain she felt was intense, and was not diminishing.  Then, in such a time of sorrowing over her loss, she heard the voice of the Father say to her, "Worship Me with it, Beth.  Bring that ache to my altar and I will esteem it as a lavish offering."  In her obedient response to that call, she found "losing grace," and the fullness of her God.  In her sacrificial worship, her own living out of Romans 12:1, presenting not only herself, but all of her loss and all the varying emotions and thoughts that went with it, as an offering to Him, in the giving of all of that, she found and received all of Him.  In wholehearted worship of Him, we find "losing grace," and an endless supply of it.
     Not one who reads this today is without loss in their life.  In it, what consumes you?  The loss, or the fullness of His grace?  Losing grace.  You will have it today if you'll come to Him.....in worship.

Blessings,

Pastor O