Sweet Potato Testimonies

 A good many years ago in a Sunday morning worship service given over in part for some "testimonies" to be shared, a 30 something man stood up to share his. For the uninformed, testimonies are meant to be times when we share something of note that the Lord has done in our life. I'm still dumbfounded that the man thought what he shared was "noteworthy."

It seems that he'd been in a restaurant the night before, a buffet type one that offered amongst other specialties, sweet potatoes stuffed with brown sugar. When he made his order, he was told they were out of sweet potatoes. He was disappointed, but a few moments later the server returned saying that there was one potato left and would he like it. The man gave glory to God that He had provided him with his sweet potato....AND his brown sugar! I was stunned then and remain so now. You may be as well, but wait, how much of what we give Him thanks and glory for has little more life changing impact than a sweet potato stuffed with brown sugar?

When Mary saw the risen Christ, she ran to the disciples and proclaimed, "I have seen the Lord! He is risen!" The two travelers on the Emmaus Road did the same. They could not keep quiet about who and what they'd seen and experienced. The old Jesus movement song had the lyric, "I've got to tell someone!" The wonder of what they'd seen could not be held in. They had to proclaim it. Someone said that we say so little about Him because we've seen and experienced so little of Him. This leaves us with "sweet potato testimonies," and sweet potato testimonies impact no one for Christ. 

The Apostle Paul wrote that we're to "always be ready to give reason for the hope we have in Him." If you were asked to give your reasons, what would you say? If you were to share the wonders He's wrought in your life, what would they be? How much of what you shared would be about your being able to buy something you didn't really need, or how He made your life so much more comfortable and easy. How much of the reason for your hope ends up being nothing more than sweet potatoes and brown sugar?

Jesus said in Matthew 10:7-8, "Go and announce to them that the Kingdom of heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, and cast out demons. Give as freely as you receive." Jesus said that He was always about the Father's business. This is the Father's business. This is to be our business. The witness of our lives and of our church is that we are living out Matthew 10:7-8.....but we're found instead at our worldly buffets, glorying in our sweet potatoes and brown sugar. And we wonder why an unbelieving world doesn't want to join us there.

The world is literally dying to hear the reason for our hope. Have we anything to say to them? Have we a testimony that makes Jesus real to them? He is our Savior God with all the wonder, splendor, and glory that brings. He is not the Caterer of our buffet. The Kingdom is near, nearer than we think. Can anybody hear or see that through our church and through our lives? Through mine, and through yours?

Blessings,
Pastor O

And Beyond

 I'm feeling led to share something I wrote a dozen years ago. I think it will speak to you. I know it still speaks to me.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my mother's approaching end of life. Earlier this week, just a little over an hour past midnight on Tuesday morning, the Lord took her home. My mother came to Christ late in her life, and though she loved Him, she always struggled to receive and live in the fullness of His life, healing, and love. As a result, she grappled with fear, depression, and feelings of abandonment, particularly over the course of this last year as her health steadily declined. She even wondered if perhaps it was all due to her having angered the Father, or that it was all the result of her past sins. She believed she was His, but she could never enter into His peace and joy, and the glory of His life. Then, in her final days, His love broke through. 

On this past Sunday morning, with her kidney's beginning to fail completely, my sister and brother-in-law came to her home to help the full-time aide we'd retained get her into her bed. As my brother-in-law helped place her on her bed, she said to him, with a joy that came from eternity, "Can you feel all His love?" She then slipped into a semi-conscious state and those were the last words she spoke. Her Father's love had laid hold of her. The reality of Romans 8 burst forth. Not even death as it approached may separate us from the love which is in Christ our Lord. My mother had always believed He loved her but had never been able to really experience His love. Now, in her final hours, she did. Death has no sting, and for those who are His, it never will.

As I meditated on this, the Spirit brought Jesus' words in John 13:1 to mind. He was preparing to leave this life and return to His Father. "Jesus, knowing that His hour had come, and that He should depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end." To the end...and beyond the end. In that living room where she lay, she saw the One who had loved her from the womb and through all the hurts, wounds, failures, and regrets. The One who loved her through all her struggles, doubts, and lies of the enemy. The One that all the power of darkness and death could not keep from her. The One who cannot be kept from you and me. His love broke through it all. It will always break through it all. He loved her to the very end of her life here, and as she stepped from the confines of her failing earthly body into the wonder of eternity, He loved her through the open door to the fullness of that eternity. To the end and beyond....forever.

To some degree, I think we all share my mother's struggles. Whether from a sense of unworthiness, or an inability to believe we're forgiven, loved, treasured, we stumble through life hoping to somehow endure until the end, and then we can enter into that love. Jesus calls us to enter in right now. To the fullest extent possible.....right....now.  What my mother experienced in her last hours can be experienced by His people in these hours. No matter how strong the barrier, His love can shatter it. Has it shattered all the barriers between you and His love? As the old hymn says, His is a love that will not let you go. His love will hold you to the very end....and beyond.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Apprehended

Throughout my ministry, there have been some things that we "do" in church that have always bothered me. It has to do with what we pray about in our "prayer meetings," and what we testify about in our "testimony services." Too often, both seem to dwell in the "shallow end of the pool."

Preacher and writer T. Austin-Sparks said that, "The Lord calls us to a distinctiveness of life and testimony. Is our life distinctive of the realm we say we belong to?" Is mine? Is yours? Do we look and live like Kingdom of God people, or like people from a kingdom that has no part in Him?

The Apostle Paul said that the desire of his heart was to lay hold of the life for which Christ first apprehended him for. Some translations say he sought to lay hold of the life that Christ laid hold of him for. To grasp, clutch, cling to. To hold and not let go. Supernatural life. Life that marked him as one who lived a life clearly not of this world. A life that was miraculous and beheld the miraculous. A life that believed for the impossible, beheld the impossible, and experienced the impossible. For Paul, nothing was allowed to keep him from that life. In his writings, he left a "testimony" that still blesses, guides, and shows the way to Christ to this day. All who are His by faith are created for and called to that life as well. We're to lay hold of its fullness. What has, what is, getting in the way of our doing so?

If an unbeliever we're to come into one of our usual prayer gatherings or praise sharing, what would they "see?" The world, too often rightly so, sees the church as being self-absorbed. We so often ask for prayers that make our life easier and more comfortable. Prayers that give us what we want in order that this would be so. Our times of praising Him center around His co-operating with our desires and doing just that. Where are the prayers that seek and believe for the breaking of sinful behavior in our lives, marriages and families? For the healing of past abuse and the deliverance from self-destructive behaviors and attitudes. Where are the testimonies for His miraculous response to these things? Miraculous healings. Dead marriages made whole. Prodigal, rebellious children brought back to their parents and to their God? When Christ walked and ministered in this world, those who heard Him were amazed and awe struck by what He did. He has not ceased to do these things, but I think, in too many ways, we have ceased to believe that He will. And we've ceased to believe He can do it through us.

May we, you and I, live for that which He apprehended us. May nothing be allowed in our lives that will keep us from such a life. May He hold us in His grip as we hold Him in ours.

Blessings,

Pastor O 

Bumblebee Life

 The promise of 2 Corinthians 1:9 is beautiful, but how much do you and I really dwell upon it? The Apostle Paul writes, "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him." What a wondrous promise and reality, but how real is it to us? We've heard it preached and read it for ourselves, but it just doesn't seem real. Not as a future state or a present one.

Erwin McManus in his book, Soul Cravings, writes, "God calls us out of the life we have known and calls us to a life we have never imagined." Eternal life. A life whose wonder begins the moment we come to Christ in surrendered belief and faith. Sadly though, this life remains more theoretical than actual to us. We're blinded by the earthly, passing realm and cannot see or perceive the heavenly eternal one. We're citizens of the Kingdom of God, but our lives don't look to be markedly different from those who have their citizenship firmly in this fallen world. Yes, we're promised a wondrous future, but we're also promised the riches of His life right now. Are we realizing the promise? Do we dare to believe that what He calls us to, what He created us for is real? 

McManus writes of "the bumblebee effect." According to the laws of physics and aerodynamics, there is absolutely no reason or possibility for a bumblebee to be able to fly. Their bodily structure should make it impossible. Yet they do fly? Why? The answer is....that's what God created them to do and it's what they do. They don't know that it should be impossible. They're just doing what He intended for them to do. We need to become part of the bumblebee effect as well. We need to know that defeat, despair, discouragement, and disillusionment are not what He made us for. He made us to be overcomers, to be victorious, to go from glory to glory. He made us to soar...to fly. Circumstances, problems, the screaming voice of the enemy say it's impossible. He whispers in our ear, "You can. You can fly. It's what I made you for. All things are possible for him who believes."

He created us for a life beyond imagination. My heart soars in the expectation of what the fullness of eternity will be, but I also know that He created me, and you, for a life beyond imagination in this realm as well. A life that can rise above all the wreckage of this fallen world and......soar. The enemy, through this broken world, says that there is nothing about us that makes such a life possible. There's nothing about us that makes it so, but there is everything in Him as He lives through us that does make it so. The Father, in Christ, simply invites us to step out in faith.....and fly. He created us to scale the spiritual heights with Him. What's keeping us from that? What's keeping you?

Blessings,
Pastor O

Impossible Life

 God has called us to an impossible life. We say we know that but we don't live like we do. A lot of this can be put down to bad theology and bad teaching. We think that we're given an example in Jesus Christ and that we're to strive to imitate His life and ways. That's impossible, but we're deterred from continuing to try. Jesus lived in the power of a supernatural life. To live as He lived, we must live in that life as well. We never will in our own strength. It comes only through the power of His Holy Spirit and the gift of His resurrection life.

John Piper, in his book, When I Don't Desire God, speaks of when God opened his eyes to the difference between the kind of life he'd been living and the life he'd been created for. He writes, "Manageable, duty defined, decision oriented, willpower Christianity seemed easy, and real Christianity had become impossible. The Christian life became impossible. That is, it became supernatural."

The life we were created for is impossible because we can't manage it, control it, or live within the boundaries of our own comfort zones. It is not a natural life at all. It's a supernatural one. Impossible, terrifying, dangerous, and one from which our flesh will flee from at all times. It can't be lived out within the limits of our understanding, but only with the intimate connection to the One who is the Author of wisdom, understanding, discernment, and power. It is the life Christ lived and still lives. It's the life He calls us to, made us for. What's keeping us from it? What's keeping you from it?

Columnist Barbara Wentroble wrote, "Too often we live not out of who we truly are in Christ, but out of diseased (fallen) feelings, attitudes, and images of self that are not real." We live bound by chains and lies about ourselves, fed to us by the world and the father of lies. Lies about ourselves and our God. The result is we settle for a life that we believe is possible. A life that results in, at best, mediocrity. A life of lukewarmness. A half-life. His people are to know nothing of such a life. We're called to a life out of our control and fully in His. He knows where it is going and we trust Him even when we don't. We're at peace, because we not only KNOW that He is good, we are experiencing that He is good. We've learned, as Chris Tiegreen says, to ignore the devil's lies about His character and trust in His heartbeat.

His Word tells us to "delight ourselves in Him." Delight is an experience that demands our emotions and our being. Piper says that "God is glorified in His people by the way we experience Him, not merely by the way we think about Him." We don't live out our lives in Him based on logic and reason. That will always make the impossible life impossible. We His life out in and through our hearts, where He abides, and from where His wondrous, miraculous, and abundant life flows out from us. Lord, may it be so for us!

In His Word we're asked, "How then shall we live?" How then shall you live? How shall I? Will it be the controlled kind of half-life that has been, or will it be in the fullness of His life? Out of control, impossible, supernatural. It's center is not in our heads but in our hearts. Hearts intimately joined with His.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Missing Jesus

 Luke 2 tells the story of Jesus' parents returning from their trip to Jerusalem and discovering at the end of the day that Jesus wasn't with them. They had been there to observe the Passover festival, a high and most holy time for the Jews. The Scripture reads, "His parents didn't miss Him at first because they assumed He was with friends among the other travelers." They went an entire without Jesus in their company and didn't know it. In effect, they'd just "been to church" yet didn't sense the absence of His presence. I think they have a lot of company in that regard. Think too on how easily it is for this to happen. They assumed He was with them. He wasn't, but it took a full day for them to realize it. It can take us a lot longer.

John Bevere once said that "The Holy Spirit comes very powerfully but leaves very quietly." I'm not saying that Jesus abandons, forsakes, or walks away from anyone. His Word is true. He will not leave or forsake us, but there are 1001 ways and more for us to drift from Him. There is a vast difference between having a general sense of His presence and a deeply intimate one. With the first, it's very easy to walk through life assuming that He's involved in everything we're doing, overseeing everything that's going on. There is a wide gap between His overseeing things in our lives and His seeing through our lives. The latter is what true intimacy is about.

Joseph and Mary immediately returned to Jerusalem and when they found Jesus in the Temple, rebuked Him for staying behind, causing them worry and the need to search for Him. His answer to them was, "But why did you need to search? .....You should have known I'd be in My Father's House." We can read this and think this means we're to be found constantly in a church building, especially every Sunday. The "house" Jesus was speaking of was not a building, but a heart. His Father's heart. That was where He lived, moment by moment. Oswald Chambers asks, "Do I look upon life as being in my Father's house? Is the Son of God living in His Father's house in me?" Is the heart of the Father being lived out in my heart and in yours? This is much more than His having a general presence around us while leaving all the details of life to us. One translation reads, "Didn't you know that I must be about My Father's business?" The business of the Father will only be our business to the degree He lives through our reality moment by moment. Otherwise we can be sure, and our lives will give the evidence, that we're about no one's business but our own.

Chambers asks, "Am I always in contact with His reality....or only when things have gone wrong? If it's the latter, we can be sure we'll be among those traveling along, assuming our connection is vital and deep but panicking when a crisis hits and discovering such a connection doesn't exist. He is there, but since our lives aren't really found in the Father's heart, His peace, hope, joy, hope, strength, and life are near impossible to lay hold of. We've drifted from all of them as we drifted from Him. So we search, and His word to each of us is the same, why did we need to search when He's already told us where He'll be found? In His Father's house. His Father's heart. He invited us, you and me, to join Him there. Do we come, or do we continue to "miss Jesus" in our journey?

Blessings,
Pastor O

The Embrace

 I love how Mark 11:23-24 reads in The Message translation of the Bible. Jesus was matter of fact: Embrace this God-life. Really embrace it, and nothing will be too much for you....That's why I urge you to pray about absolutely everything, ranging from small to large. Include everything as you embrace this God-life and you'll get God's everything.

We so often read about Jesus' words and life, but we miss what He's saying to us. We "see" what the words are saying, but we're missing His voice and heart in it. We're missing Him. We don't really know and believe what we say we know and believe. It's not our reality. We speak much of living His abundant life but seem to actually have very little of it. We get overwhelmed by the details of life because we resist embracing His life.

Fear of intimacy in our culture is real. We fear it with each other, and I believe that comes from our fearing it with Him. We seek to keep Him at a distance, and so end up keeping everyone else at a distance as well. He calls us to His heart and to His embrace, but we hold back. He offers us the fullness of His life, but to have it we have to let go of our fleshly fear and defense. To have His life we must trust His heart.....but we know so little of His heart and so have so little trust of Him. 

We can't experience His life from a distance, but so many of us try to. We have our daily devotions, our daily prayers, but we never really lay hold of HIm in them. We emerge from them unchanged, and too often, further from Him than before. We haven't brought all of ourselves to Him so it's no wonder as to why we have received so little of Him. So we're left with our nagging anxieties and fears. Our unhealed wounds and yes, our unconfessed and uncleansed sins. None of these can survive in the midst of His embrace. Fear, worry, guilt, bitterness, unforgiveness and every kind of bondage cannot exist in His loving embrace. The loving embrace of the Father through Jesus Christ.

We usually call our daily time with Him our devotion time, but what does the word devotion mean? To devote is to consecrate. It is giving everything to Him. It means what we've been holding onto is given over to Him...especially when what we hold most tightly is our right to ourselves. What's been held in our hand is now in His. Devotion is not a time of the day but a way of life. It's how we live...moment by moment. It's how we overcome the world and all the ways of the enemy.

Jesus continues to be matter of fact about all this with us. He invites us to embrace Him in full surrender. To enter into the intimacy of His embrace and know the life that makes us free. Bringing everything to Him and receiving everything of Him in return. He invites you to His embrace. WIll you come?

Blessings,
Pastor O

The Dance

 2 Samuel, chapter 6 tells of King David and the bringing of the Ark of the Covenant into the city of Jerusalem. It was a wonderful celebration, and David led the celebration. So much so he was leaping and dancing in complete joy before his God. 

We tend to focus on the reaction of David's wife, Michal, to David's behavior. She despised him for it, thinking it an undignified and coarse way for a king to act. That was happening, but there was also something more, something deeper taking place as well. We're told that David was dancing before the Lord. I think he was dancing WITH the Lord as well. A dance of deep intimacy with the God we profess to love.

Lisa Harper once spoke on this. She said, God calls us to learn to dance with Him, and as we do so, He says to us, 'Don't look at your feet. Look into My face.' I think in our walk with Him, our dance with Him, we're spending most of our time looking at our feet. We wonder if we're getting this thing right? How do we look to anyone who's "watching?" Do we seem to know what we're doing? Do we look foolish? Are the impressed with our skill? Is the Lord? We're self-conscious, which is a polite way of saying we're self-centered about it all. Our focus is not on Him, but upon ourselves. We're looking at our feet while He calls us to gaze upon His face. It's impossible to notice anything or anyone else when you're looking into the eyes of the One who is the lover of your soul. 

Harper also said, We often feel that God grimaces when He sees us coming. Do we really feel that He delights in us? We feel that all He sees is our failures and imperfections. Our sins. We think He endures us. His Word tells us that He treasures us above all else. 

David was a man who failed the Lord greatly, and more than once. Yet his songs of love to the Father that are found in the Psalms speak of his God's steadfast delight in him. And in you and me as well. May the power of the lie of a grimacing God be broken in our lives. May we begin to approach Him with the sure knowledge that we come to a God who takes infinite delight in just being with us. Yes, there may be issues to be dealt with, sins to be confessed and repented of and cleansed from. If we have drifted from Him, there will be healing and restoration. In intimacy He will minister to us. He delights to do so.

Wallflowers is a cruel word for those whom no one has asked to dance. They stand against a wall, unwanted and rejected. With God, there are no wallflowers. He calls us into His embrace. An embrace He doesn't want to end. He asks us to look not at our feet, but into His face. A face that looks exactly like His Son, Jesus Christ. The face of unconditional love.

He stands before each of us right now, arms open wide, calling us into His embrace, into His delight and love. Will you have this dance....with Him?

Blessings,
Pastor O

Breathe

 Author Gerald Fry writes, "Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the unification of all that's been broken." As we survey all the brokenness of His church and people, we see the lack of His peace everywhere. Broken lives, marriages, families, and relationships. Turmoil, not peace, seems to rule the day. The church, which is called to be the center of His peace, is often the scene of so much of this turmoil. 

How many churches and ministries have been destroyed by warring factions? How many divisions and splits have taken place over disagreements that began in a small way but were fanned into a raging tempest? How many people have been lost to the Kingdom because of the pain inflicted upon them while "in the church?" How many ministries must be destroyed, families torn apart, and fellowships broken, and all to the glee of the enemy, the one we should be fighting? Instead, we fight each other.

However much we may talk of forgiveness, we seem to practice very little of it. Being offended seems to be a ministry in itself to many in the church. Fry says that, "If Satan can offend us, He can keep us from giving or receiving mercy." His plan enjoys success in far too many fellowships and ministries. How are we, you and I, contributing to that? 

The church is to be a gathering of love, but it is risky to love. We are very human and very imperfect. We're composed of many people at different stages of their journey with Him. Misunderstanding, conflict, and hurt, sometimes deep hurt, are going to happen. What do we do with the hurt? His Word says that "Love covers a multitude of sins." Only His love, flowing through us, can forgive such hurt and such sin. Only His love can heal it. Fry writes, "We can only love the lost to the measure we love the Body." An overwhelming observation of first century unbelievers towards the church was the degree of love for each other that was present in His church. Is that their observation today? Today, when we leave a fellowship on a whim, join another and call it "church growth?" Staying until the next conflict, the next hurt feeling.

A pastor friend once said about forgiveness that the Lord had shown him something from the life of Stephen in Acts 7. Indeed, from Stephen's death. He was stoned for his testimony in Christ. With his last breath he said, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." My pastor friend said that perhaps, though he'd been willing to forgive, he also held on to the Scripture where the Father says that "vengeance is Mine." Somehow, we seem to relish the thought of that. I know I have. You have too. My friend thought we come to real forgiveness when we can stand with Stephen in the midst of the deepest offense and ask the Lord to not mark that offense, that sin, against us.....against them. Against the one who so deeply wounded us. I knew my friend was right. You do too.

Where are your deepest wounds, and who are those responsible for them? Can you come to the place of Stephen? Can you release the person from the penalty? This is more than just forgiving them. Can you fully desire that He forgive them too? God's plan is to restore us to wholeness. This can't happen while we're on the run from the churches or people who've hurt us. John Dawson said, "Breathe out forgiveness repeatedly until you feel the grace of God welling up in your soul." May you and I be ready and willing to.....breathe!

Blessings,
Pastor O