Heart Tracks - Breaking Free

    The great sadness I carry after nearly 30 years of ministry is the knowledge of how many people I have come into contact with throughout those years continue to walk in captivity.  We are born into this captivity, and Christ is the only way out of it, but tragically, so many of those who would profess belief upon Him, would say they are His and follow Him, themselves continue to live in some degree of bondage.  I love the way The Message translation of the Bible puts I Thessalonians 4:14, "Since Jesus died and broke loose from the grave, God will most certainly bring back to life those who die in Jesus."  The resurrection of Christ did just that.  It broke the power of death over us, both physical and spiritual.  For those who are His, the grave cannot hold us, and neither may sin, which is the author of death, because it has been conquered by Him who is the Author of Life.  That life, resurrection life, fully received, will break all who receive it, from the power of the grave.  

      When Christ called forth Lazarus from the grave, the first thing he told those who were there was to cut the grave clothes from him, grave clothes that held him, and did not permit any movement.  So many have been called forth from spiritual death into His life, but the grave clothes have never been removed.  In the form of addictions, thought patterns, behaviors, beliefs about the Father and ourselves, these grave clothes remain, hold us in their grip, make it impossible to move about, emotionally, spiritually, even physically.  Lies that we have believed, about others, ourselves, and especially the Father, keep us in captivity.  We've been called out of the grave, but we've never broken free of it.  It haunts us still, and so the resurrection life He offers remains an ideal, not a reality.  We find ourselves coping with life, instead of living in the resurrection power of Christ, a power and life that bring overcoming and overwhelming victory.  We end up trying to cope with a life created by sin and death, rather than living the life we were created for by Him, and is ours in Christ.
     What is the state of our lives today?  Are we coping, trying to survive and make it through another day, hoping more good than bad takes place, that we "do" more good than bad, or, are we living in the power of His resurrection?  Do we know what it is to be an overcomer, to be "more than a conqueror,"  to face the power of sin and death, knowing it has no power over us because we're in Christ?  To know that in every battle, we're victorious, because He is victorious.  Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, He is victorious, and so, in Him, we are too.  This is breaking free of the grave.  Have you?  Have I?  Have we?

Blessings,

Pastor O

Heart Tracks - True Worship

      Have you ever found yourself, like Elijah, at the brook Cherith?  Elijah, sent there after the Lord had proclaimed there would be no more rain in the land, was cared for by the Father, feeding him and refreshing him by the brook called Cherith.  Surely Elijah not only treasured this time, but most especially the brook and what it brought to him.  Yet, in I Kings 17:7, we're told that, "the brook dried up, for there was no rain in the land."  Everything now changed for him.  The place of rest, peace, and renewal, and blessing, was gone.  The brook had dried up.  What would he do?  What will you and I do should the brook dry up?  Perhaps it's dried up now.

     I have found myself most often in life, treasuring the brook more than I treasured Him.  I could worship Him at the brook, but when the brook dried up, and all brooks of this life eventually do, I found my worship of Him tended to dry up as well.  Rarely, if ever, could I bring myself to see or admit that I worshiped the brook more than I worshiped Him.  When it was gone, I was devastated, angry, and even accusing of Him.  I loved the brook, and whether I could see it or not, saw it, and not Him as my Source.  Has the same ever happened to you?  Is it happening now?
     I've a good friend who related recently how he had been mourning the passing of time in his ministry, thinking of the many great things the Lord had done in it, and how now, in what he calls, as Paul did, "the time of his departure," feels a kind of lack.  His brook had dried up.  Yet he said that in the midst of the mourning he heard the voice of the Father speak into his heart saying, "I am your Home."  He heard Him tell him that it was not his past, future or present that was the his source or his end, but the Father Himself.  That he could worship him, find wholeness in Him, fulfillment, and joy, because it was His presence, not the brook, that gave life.  Every blessing in this life will eventually dry up in some way, every brook we depend on it will eventually run dry, but He who is the Source of all the bread and water of life never will.  Every brook Cherith, no matter how beautiful, is not meant, was never meant to be our home, our dwelling place.  He, and He alone is.  So, is He?
     Watchman Nee relates the story of Abraham being told by God to go to Mount Moriah to worship Him, and to there sacrifice his only son, Isaac, his promised and long awaited son.  Nee says he made no protest, but simply went to worship.  He trusted, and he obeyed.  He would yield what he treasured most to the One who gave him.  Nee said that this was true worship, "to let go to God all His gifts to us, all our rich experiences, and all our hopes in Him, and to find unqualified joy in God Himself."  Not in the brook, not even in the son, but in God Himself.  The Father did not take Isaac, and He didn't keep Elijah at the dried up brook, but led him to another place, a deeper place in Him.  The place of worship.  Not dependent on the brook, or the person, or the blessing, but upon Him.  Can He lead you and I to such a place as well?  Has our brook dried up?  If so, what has that done to our life, our walk, and our love of Him?  Can we only worship and love Him where the brook flows, or, can we do so even when all has dried up, because we, as Nee said, have found our full joy in Him, our Source, the brook that can never dry up.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Heart Tracks - Empty Enough?

      We are people who long for "new wine."  Whether it be in something as sweeping as what we call "revival," or to His bringing forth new life to our marriages, families, relationships, and ourselves, we find ourselves fervently seeking it, praying for it, longing for it.  Yet, in so many cases, in so many ways, it seems He's not listening, or doesn't hear, or, worse, doesn't care.  Yet, if we truly know His heart, we must know that none of these are true, so, why is the longing not met?  Why doesn't the answer come?

      I recently heard a lady named Priscilla Shirer make a comment concerning the Lord's turning water into wine in John 2.  She said that perhaps we have to come to the full realization that our pots are really empty, that all the wine of our lives has run out.  There is no more, and all that is left is to come to Him, fully empty, and our greatest, no, our overwhelming desire is that we be filled with the new wine of His Life and Spirit.  We may well cry out to Him for all that is listed above, and we sincerely want to see these desires fulfilled, yet, we are not yet ready to admit, confess, our emptiness.  Some part of our self-life still believes it can "handle" things apart from Him.  Our flesh can't yet admit to its total poverty and powerlessness apart from Him.  We want change, be it in our church, ministry, family or marriage, but we ourselves are not yet ready to be changed.  We want improvement.  We don't want transformation.  We want a makeover, but we want to retain control in the midst of it.  So, our prayers continue to go up, our desires continue to remain strong, but the needs remain unmet, and we somehow remain blind to why that's so.
T.Austin-Sparks said that, "Reformation is an essential part of revival.  He calls for certain drastic adjustments before He opens the windows of heaven."  Therein lies our problem.  We don't really want to undergo those "drastic adjustments," if they are to take place within us and in our hearts.  Circumstances, other people, these are all fair game, and we readily ask Him to change them, but ourselves, well that is another matter altogether.  We want encounters with Him that change everything around us, but leave us the same.  We'll sign up for some minor life adjustments, but a total demolition that bring about a complete reformation is a lot more than we're looking for.  We're a culture that finds it unthinkable that we should have to get up to change the channel on the TV.  As we do with our remotes, we want to change the channels of our lives from the comfort of our easy chairs.  So, little or nothing changes, and we wonder why?
    So many of us are walking about empty today.  Are we empty enough?  Have our desires for change become so consuming that we can truly say to Him, "Lord, whatever you have to do, not only around me, but in me, even to me, in order to bring new life, new wine, do!"  Such prayer will bring answers, and will bring about radical reformation.  He will move in His time and His way, but He will move, and so will we.  No longer held captive by our spiritual Lazy-Boys, He will work from the inside out in us, in our homes, relationships, and above all, His church to bring forth that life.  Like the widow of Zarephath, starving in the midst of famine, we must bring our empty pots, and not a few of them, but all.  In our hunger and thirst, surrendered hunger and thirst, He will fill them.  Let us come, empty, and be filled.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Heart Tracks - The Other Jesus

      I'm weary of the Jesus being put forth by a large segment of the western church these days.......That may sound shocking, even blasphemous, but please, bear with me a bit.  So much of the Jesus being presented is about a gentle rabbi, teacher, who, as Henry Blackaby writes, "Walks along the seashore, loving children, and gently forgiving sinners."  He does love children, and He does forgive sinners, of which I know firsthand.  His love is boundless, and He does have a gentle heart, but I think the Christ we've put forth falls short, greatly short, of the Christ who is.  We tend, as a good friend has put it, to only know Him "after the flesh," that is, only by what our fleshly minds and understanding can comprehend.  This can be seen in the lives of the disciples immediately after His resurrection.  They didn't recognize Him.  He was in His glorified state, and since their knowledge of Him was so limited, He was a stranger to them.  So many of we modern day disciples have the same problem.

     Blackaby writes, "We grossly underestimate the God we serve....The Christ we serve today is the Lord of all creation.  He is vastly more awesome and powerful than the gentle rabbi we often imagine."  Many of us still sing the classic chorus, "Our God Is An Awesome God," yet, do our fellowships, our families, and our lives really reflect that belief.  Is it our reality?  I want to know Jesus not as I wish Him to be, or as popular culture, both in and without the church, might paint Him to be, but as He is, for who He is.  I want to know Him in all His glory and wonder, at least as far as is possible this side of eternity.  I don't want to know after the flesh, but in the Spirit.  Jesus said "He who sees Me, sees the Father also."  That is so true, but our "seeing" doesn't stop with the Jesus revealed during His fleshly incarnation on earth, but goes on through His direct ministry to, in, and through us, day by day.  He is the Lord of all creation, and the Word says that all creation is "held together in Him."  His power is unlimited.  So is His wonder and glory.  When the disciples found themselves in the midst of a storm on the sea, at a word, Jesus brought a dead calm to it.  The disciples could only say, "Who is this man, that even the winds and seas obey Him."  This is a question we must ask each day, and the beauty of it is that day by day, He will answer it as He leads us into ever deeper knowledge of Himself.
    The book of Revelation was written by the disciple who was closest to Christ's heart, John, yet even John, on the Isle of Patmos, fell on his face when he beheld the glory of His Lord.  He writes in Revelation 1:14-15, "His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes were like a flame of fire.  His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters."  This is an aspect of Jesus not much talked of today, and encountered even less.  A Jesus who walks along the shore, hugs children, and heals bodies, is a beautiful one, but He is also one that we, consciously or not, feel we can control.  We can encounter this Jesus, and still feel we are lords of our own lives.  No one can encounter the Christ John describes and remain the same.  We will either flee from Him, or fall before Him.  We will never be the same.  We will never live the same.  And Jesus will never again be just the gentle Shepherd, or unassuming Friend.  He will be the Mighty God described in Isaiah 9.  He is the Mighty God.  Do we know Him as such?  Have we encountered Him as such?  Will we encounter Him now?

Blessings,
Pastor O

     

     

Heart Tracks - Water Carriers

      A good friend remarked recently that there is a great difference between going and being sent.  Many in the church are willing to go, and in fact do go, but too often I think, without having been sent.  Yes, I know that Jesus exhorted His followers to "go and make disciples," but if we understand the full context of His Word, His listeners understood they were not to go until they knew clearly where and to who He was sending them.  More, that they would be in full, personal possession of the great treasure that they were entrusted with, the message of the cross and the resurrection power found there.  We are eager to go out, but so often we go out unprepared, unempowered, and unable to truly be an effective witness of the resurrection life found and offered in Christ.  The disciples were told, "as you go, preach," but they were not to go until they had experienced Pentecost, the experience of the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and that when they did go, that experience of the fullness of His life would flow through them as they went about their daily lives in every situation possible.  At their work, in their community, wherever they were.

Author and pastor Wade Taylor said that it had been his habit that after receiving some new understanding of His Word, he would want to rush out and preach it, until the Lord admonished him to wait, until the experience of that Word had been worked into his daily life.  Only then could he go, because he was now truly sent.  Too often we go out telling people about a God and a Savior we have not truly or fully experienced ourselves.
     I think we see a good illustration of this in John 2, with the miracle of the changing of the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.  For those un- familiar with the story, the wine has run out, a great humiliation for the bridegroom and his family.  Mary brings the problem to Jesus, knowing He had the power to do something about it.  He does not promise that He will, and Mary, realizing she could not command Him, but could trust Him, told the servants, "Do whatever He tells you."  Jesus than instructed them to take six, thirty gallon waterpots and fill them with water.  They did so, and He then instructed them to "take them to the master of ceremonies."  They did so, and when the man tasted it, found it to be the sweetest of wines.  He didn't know where this wine had come from, but the servants did.  I think we have here a clear teaching on how the Lord wishes to work through us.  That good friend mentioned above also once said that "We're to be water carriers as the Lord makes the wine."  The key is hearing what He says, "Do whatever He tells you," and then following as He leads.  We don't make the wine, He does, and we don't choose the when and where of it all.  Our role, like the servants, is to know what He saying, and follow where He is leading.  He makes our lives new, sweet wine, and pours it our through us unto and into others.  The results are miraculous as He pours that wine out, transforming from death to life, despair to hope, brokenness to wholeness, and the carnal to the holy.  

     He has chosen to do this through water carriers like you and I.  Water carriers that as we go, He distributes the wine that He has made from our transformed lives, into those lives we encounter upon the way.  Lives that have seen all hope, joy, and strength run out.  We go because we've been sent, doing what He has said, because we have heard Him.  Water carriers for Christ as He continues His miraculous work of changing water into wine, one life at a time.

Blessings,

Pastor O
     

Heart Tracks - Beautiful Stranger

      Hosea has always been one of my favorite books because it so powerfully displays the heart of the Father unto people.  It is a story of a God who watches as a people He created for Himself, resolutely go about living lives that day by day are destroying themselves.  In His grief, He says in one part of the book, "My heart turns over within Me," over the waywardness of His people Israel.  To what degree might our actions, choices, paths, be bringing about the same response within His heart for us?  In 2:6, He says, "My people are being destroyed because they don't know Me."  He doesn't say that they never entered the doors of His "church" or that they didn't believe in Him.  He says, and continues to say, that they, we, don't know Him.  And the result of this lack of knowledge is always going to be our own destruction.

     Something we so easily overlook in the spiritual collapse of the nation of Israel, is that they never stopped "going to church," or observing the rituals of worship.  They were very religious, they met in their local synagogues, made the journey to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, and paid their tithes.  Yet the Father said that their worship was all "pretense."  They acknowledged Him outwardly, but in the real matters of life, they relied upon themselves, their wisdom, their understanding.  The Father said that they'd be "destroyed, for they refused to understand."  The destruction would not come as His punishment, but rather as the fruit of lives lived apart from Him, and unto themselves.  His heart is heard through Hosea's plea, "Come, let us return to the Lord."  Is this a plea that He may well be directing towards yours or my heart today?  Towards your church fellowship or mine?  Does His heart turn over within Him over us?
     God is not interested in our being religious.  He yearns for something more than our church attendance, the giving of our tithe, and the keeping of His "rules."  He yearns for us.  In 6:6  He says, " I don't want your sacrifices.  I want you to know God."  We may know all the words that He has said, that Jesus has said, but we know little or nothing of the heart and person who has spoken them.  We are not strangers to Him, but He remains a stranger to us.  He's the Beautiful Stranger.  We know so much about Him, but we don't know Him.  And the result for us is destruction, and it's on every level, emotional, physical, and most of all, spiritual.
     Today is April Fool's Day, and one of the central desires of all practical jokes of this day is to get one to believe something that isn't true.  Our scant personal knowledge and experience of the Father has gotten us to believe so many things about Him, and so about others and ourselves that is not true.  As a result, we more often end up living life as if there is no God.  Few of us would say we believe this, but the results would show otherwise.  David said that only fools say there is no God.  Living lives that show so little knowledge of Him always makes fools of us all.
For such, every day is April Fool's Day.
     In Hosea 7:16 God says of the people, "They look everywhere except unto heaven and the Most High."  How true is this of you and I today?  The Beautiful Stranger stands before each one of us, each of our fellowships, of His church, and of all people, and invites us to come to Him.  Come to all of Him, with all of ourselves.  He'll still be beautiful, but He'll be a stranger no more.

Blessings,

Pastor O

Heart Tracks - Black Alligators

      Wade Taylor tells of the time when, as a Bible College student, he had deep doubts as to his ability to make it as a pastor.  Before entering the college, he'd had a lucrative living as the owner of a TV repair business.  Feeling very insecure as to his calling, and believing he needed to provide a fallback plan for himself, he purchased an expensive piece of equipment that would help him get re-established in that business should he fail as a pastor.  The equipment was housed in a black alligator skin type case.  He put the case in his attic, and felt more secure, and more at peace because of it.  Some time went on until, one day, in a class, his professor gave the illustration of having little black alligators as pets.  He said that in the beginning they made wonderful pets, but that they had to be fed each day, and each day they grew bigger.  The great problem was that eventually they would become big enough to eat their owner.  This is the great snare of anything or anyone that we place our trust or security in that is not Him.  It is here we will always be most vulnerable to the attacks of the enemy, and like the alligators, we will need to feed them each day.  In time, these idols will consume us.  Taylor realized that the case in his attic, housed in the alligator like skin, was an "idol" of sort that he would need in some way feed each day, and each day its power over him would grow greater.  In our flesh, it seems reasonable to come up with "back-up plans," but with the Father, the journey has only one plan, His, and only by living in deep intimacy with Him can we know it.  We can be sure that His call will demand that we be willing to go with Him, like Abraham, with no idea where He might be leading, we only know that He is leading, and we can trust in the heart and love of the One who leads us.
     Such a life will contain huge and numerous challenges.  It will not be easy, and there will be times of fear, even doubt.  The Father knows this and understands.  What He desires and expects is that the fear and doubt will not hold us captive.  I've a friend who said that as we follow Christ, we may well be haunted by some of the old fears and doubts.  They may creep into our minds and heart, whispered by an enemy who desires above all else to get us to turn back from going with Him, to take the safer, "more secure" way.  We may never be completely free of that haunting, but in Christ, we need never be subject to it either.  This is victory in Christ.  That same friend thought that what it is to be "more than a conqueror" in Him was to fight the battle day by day, and each day, triumph.  This is victory.  This is conquering.  We may be haunted by our own self-doubt, or our own lack of trust in that moment, but by His grace, we walk on, we refuse to "feed our black alligator," and we go and grow higher, stronger, and deeper in Him.
     In Mark 10:32, as Jesus headed to Jerusalem, and ultimately, His death on the cross, we read that as the disciples followed Him, "they were afraid."  One translation says that they were filled with dread.  Beth Moore said that we need to recognize the power that dread has over us.  It will paralyze us.  Jesus did not promise that we would never be afraid, never tempted to put our trust in something other than Him.  He did promise that if we would look to Him, only Him, those fears, that dread, would evaporate in His Presence.  The black alligators would not be fed.  They would not consume us.
     Where our are black alligators today?  In what attic of our lives have we placed them?  How great is the power of fear and dread over us as we seek to follow Him?  What is consuming us, the fears of this life, many of them real, or the fire of His life and love, which is far more real than our greatest fear, and mightier as well?  Taylor rid himself of that equipment and case that he kept as a safety net in case of failure, both his and his Father's, and trusted that He in whom he believed and trusted, really was able to keep ALL that he'd committed to Him until that day, and beyond.  Can we, and will we?  We are entering into days, indeed are already there, where the words He has spoken will be put to the test as to our belief and trust in them, and Him.  Everyone of our black alligators will fail us.  He will not.  It is time to clean out our attic.

Blessings,
Pastor O