Two Directions

"I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God's power for us who believe Him." Ephesians 1:19...."We have tried to attract people through so many different strategies. What if they saw an army of people with inexpressible joy, peace that surpasses comprehension, and immeasurable greatness of power? How could they not be intrigued?" Francis Chan

The above quote from Francis Chan reminded me of a conversation I had not long ago with a great brother in the Lord. We were talking of many of the current happenings in our culture, the decidedly downward spiral that it is clearly in, and what is the church's place in seeking to minister. His response was very similar to what Chan is speaking to. My friend used the picture of two groups of people walking beside each other, but in opposite directions. One group, the larger, is walking towards a horizon of death and darkness. This is the group without Christ. It's a group marked by their wearing the chains of darkness. They are trapped in that darkness and on an ever more desperate road to destruction. Opposite them, and moving ever further into their horizon of Light and Life is the Church. These ones are marked by the very traits Chan lists above; inexpressible joy, immeasurable peace, everlasting hope, and overflowing life. Both groups see and are aware of the other.

What happens is those who comprise the church, seeing the state of those held in their chains, cry out to them, calling them to leave the trail of death and come and join them in their journey. They invite them to simply turn away from the death march and enter into the walk of life. And the invites are not just words, but words of life, filled with all the joy, hope, power, and wonder of Jesus Christ. My friend believed, as does Chan, that this is to be the role and ministry of the church in these days and all days. To be so filled with the power of His risen life that all the power of darkness cannot extinguish that light or snuff out that life. A Life and Light so mighty that the strongest chains of the darkness are broken in the hearts, minds, and being of those who respond to it. It's a picture of the Church being the Church. Is it a picture of you and I being the Church as well?

This world is made up of people, souls, walking in two directions. Both lead into an eternity. One to an eternity in the Kingdom of God, the other into an eternity of the kingdom of darkness and death. The deep tragedy is that those in the second, larger group, are mostly unaware of where their steps are leading them. In part because in too many ways, the Church has not been living in the power of His Life, and so lacks the vitality to show the wonder of the way we say we walk in. It will always be so when there is more defeat than victory in our ranks, more despair than hope, more fear than love, and more chaos than peace. When this is the case, it can even appear as if both groups are walking in the same direction. God forbid that it should be so.

We all walk in one direction or the other. Which is ours? In the Bible is a series of Psalms called the "Songs of ascent." They were to be sung as the people journeyed to Jerusalem to worship. The closer to "home" they got, the louder they were to sing. So should it be with we who are the Church. We're pilgrims passing through this world, heading to our true home in Him. As we go, we must sing. Sing in voices that attract the hearts of those trudging in the opposite direction. We all have "Lifesongs." Does ours pierce the darkness that is all around us? Have they the power of His Life that breaks every chain?

Blessings,
Pastor O

The Thirst

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful." 2 Timothy 4:7

Has it ever registered that the faith lives of we in the west don't often resemble the ones we see lived out in His Word? Abraham was directed to go out, but wasn't told where he was to go. Moses, raised in royal splendor in Egypt, spent 40 years tending sheep on the backside of the desert. Joseph, told he would be a ruler, first ended up a slave, then in prison for more than 10 years. The list goes on and on, all of them could testify to what Paul testifies to in the above Scripture. They ran the race the Father set before them. They fought the good fight of faith, in the power of His life and light against all the power of death and darkness. In it all, they remained faithful to One who called them. They endured to the very end....and into the fullness of all that He had promised them. That's what their eye was always upon....the fullness of eternity and the wonder it promised. That's where their citizenship lay. It was never here, and nothing here was going to keep them from it. They had a thirst. Larry Crabb, in his book, "When God's Ways Make No Sense," called it a "thirst to endure." Have we, you and I, such a thirst?

Somehow we've bought into the deception that when Jesus promised us an abundant life, we thought it was about our emotional, familial, material, and financial well-being. Though He does bless in all those ways, He never promised that we wouldn't face desert times in all of them. God's heroes of faith did. We will as well, but then, few of us really want to be heroes of the faith for Him. We'd rather just have the easiest route to heaven possible, accompanied by the least amount of loss possible. That's probably why we have so few "heroes" amongst us today. Entitlement has replaced sacrifice, and cheap grace has replaced blood bought kind. The result is a disaster, because what we have is a crossless, costless faith, which benefits no one, especially ourselves.

For those who've bought into such a "faith" all that can lie ahead is disappointment, discouragement, and alienation from Him, because, as Jesus promised, in this world we WILL have trouble. We emphasize the second part of His promise, that He has overcome the world, but we forget that in that, we will suffer loss, pain, heartache, betrayal, disappointment, and yes, deep challenges in our belief about the goodness of God and all His promises to us. We lose sight of the truth that He has promised to get us home, and to get us through every desert, wilderness, and mountain and giant along the way.....but not without many wounds. When we lose sight of that, we lose sight of Him, and....in that, as Crabb says, His ways make no sense....to our flawed understanding and expectations of Him.

When Crabb wrote of that thirst to endure, he told the story of his father. A faithful believer, he lost his own father at age 5. He lost his first son in a plane crash, his only brother to cancer, and his wife to Alzheimer's. Of his father he said, "Something survived in the deep places of his soul. He fought the good fight, he finished the race, he remained faithful to the end. One night, some years before his father died, he was woken with two words ringing in his mind; "sheer delight." Then God gave him a vision. He saw his father. "Papa, he said, "what's it like there." His father replied, "I don't want to ruin the surprise. It's good beyond telling." His father, having lived a very hard life, went back to sleep, his faith renewed for the final leg of his race. He had a thirst to endure, and it carried him into a place "good beyond telling."

Wherever your or my life is, do we have the thirst to endure all things that we might live for the One thing...Jesus Christ and the fullness of eternity? I want that thirst, and all the fullness of His life now, and into all His eternity. An eternity good beyond telling.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Everything

"Come unto Me." Matthew 11:28....."Personal contact with Jesus alters everything." Oswald Chambers

No one can see and experience Jesus Christ and remain the same. It's impossible. So what does the reality that many attend church worship services regularly, yet emerge no different than when they entered the sanctuary? Is the lack found in the worship itself? In those who lead it? In those who constitute the congregation? Perhaps all of them together? These are questions to ponder, and will only be answered by the allowing of His Spirit to search us deeply. When we do, the answers will come forth. Are we willing to ask these questions? Are we willing to receive His answers?

Why is it so hard for us to obey those three simple words from the Savior, "Come unto Me?" Chambers says that as long as we harbor unresolved and unsurrendered issues within, we will dispute with Him rather than come to Him. The One who comes to Christ must come yielded. They must come knowing at least something of their depth of need for Him. They must come broken, for the unbroken will not come. They'll never see the need that they should. In a world with no lack of tragedies, there is nothing more tragic than this; that those He came to seek and save see no need to be found, and no need to be saved. So they remain lost.

So, in whatever degree we resist His invitation to come to Him, we miss the wonder of what it is He wishes us to receive from Him. Life, real Life. And all that is included in that Life; hope, joy, peace, strength....and love so amazing and true. All of it and more is ours when we come to Him, encounter Him, and are changed by Him. He wants to meet with us Life to life, Heart to heart, Mind to mind. Could any of us imagine what the result would be if this was the regular experience of His Church? Nothing, not the Church, and not the culture surrounding and within it would ever be the same again. This is what's to be our regular experience with Him. Not emotion based warm spiritual fuzzies, but life transforming encounter. Are you hungering for that? Hungering for Christ, the real Jesus Christ?

I close with a prayer that I've had in my journal for a number of years now. "Jesus, walk with us today. Fill our lives with Your heart. Fill our hearts with Your life. May You become more and more at home in our hearts as we become more and more at home in Yours." May this be fulfilled in your life and mine, your church fellowship and mine. May we come to Him each day, and be changed more and more into His likeness each day. Coming to Him alters everything.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Refiner's Fire

"You have tested us O God; You have purified us like silver melted in a crucible." Psalm 66:10

I was a part of a prayer group this morning that closed with us listening to the beautiful song, "Refiner's Fire." I hadn't heard the song in a very long time, but its beauty and its power to speak to our day was so clear. The Church, more than any place in my lifetime, is in deep need of His refining fire. The lyrics of that song are, "Refiner's fire, my heart's one desire is to be holy, set apart for You Lord. I choose to be holy, set apart for You my Master. Ready to do Your will."

It's a beautiful song to listen to, and not one hard to sing.....unless we really understand what it is we ask for when we sing it. Psalm 66:10 speaks of a crucible. This is a container in which metals, usually precious, were placed in order to be melted down under intense heat and fire. In the melting, all the impurities would come to the surface and be scraped off, so that the gold or silver would be purified. When we call for the Refiner's fire, this is what we're asking Him to do with us. Our self life is the crucible, and our hearts are the precious metal. We invite Him to apply the intense heat and fire, and His scraping away of the impurities that are sure to surface. In the metalworking process, the impurities tend to look like scum. They do in the spiritual one as well. Do we desire this? Do we really desire to be holy people, part of a truly holy church? Or, do we just like to sing songs that touch our emotions but leave our hearts alone and unchanged?

Through the events of this day, the Father is bringing us to our own crucible. We have allowed, even welcomed impurities into our hearts and minds. Worship of self is liberally mixed in with worship of Him. We've grown quite comfortable with many impurities that the Bible calls sin. We've come to be at peace with compromise, unbelief, and rejection of the authority of Scripture. We've distorted His grace to the degree that its become so cheapened as to be almost meaningless. It cost the Father everything in the giving of His Son, Jesus Christ to extend it to us, but we feel it costs us nothing at all to receive and live in it. The result is a world disintegrating around us, and a church, at least in the west, that hasn't shown an ability to respond to it in the power of His risen life. Thus the need for the Refiner's fire.

I once had a discussion with a brother who took some issue with some things I wrote about the need for personal and corporate holiness. He felt that holiness wasn't a central part of Christ's message, and we err by making it part of ours. Let that sink in....God said that we're to "be holy as I am holy," and Jesus said that when you see Me, you see the Father. I and the Father are One." We are both called to and commanded to be holy. Our flesh hates the very word, and will rise up against it every time. God's response is holy, purifying fire. It is the need of this hour, this day. Now. Do we recognize it as our need as well?

Holiness of life is not the keeping of a book of rules. Neither is it a result of our working as hard as we can at being like Christ. These just keep "self" at the center. True holiness is living out, in ever increasing ways, His Life within us. He molds us, shapes us, and yes, melt us as He refines the deep impurities that are within us all. The process will always involve His refining fire. It will also involve our willingness to be yielded to that fire. Will we yield? Will we be holy unto the Lord?

Blessings,
Pastor O

My Hometown

"Lord, through all generations, You have been our home." Psalm 90:1....."One Road leads home and a thousand into the wilderness." C.S. Lewis

In one of the episodes of the classic comedy "The Andy Griffith Show," a young man comes to the town of Mayberry, and though nobody there had any idea about who he was, he insisted on telling everyone that Mayberry was "his hometown." This unsettled people, and they came to think him strange, and then they became hostile. It was all cleared up when he explained to Sheriff Andy that he had grown up with no real home, and that in the army, he'd met a fellow soldier from the town, and then spent so much time reading the local paper, learning people's names, and soaking in all that he could about Mayberry. A young man who had no hometown was so drawn to a place he'd never been, that he decided that it would be his hometown too.

I think in that 60's sitcom is a message for we who are the Church. It's popular to say that "heaven is our home," but do we actually live as if it is? Are we so deeply in love with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so immersed in His Kingdom that we draw others who have never "been" to His Kingdom? That they might long to be a part of it as well? When we speak of His Kingdom, if we speak of it, can others sense the fire and passion of our hearts about it? Do they get the idea that not only is that the place we want to live eternally, but that it's also where we're living now? The sad tragedy is that this is supposed to be the normal way of life for a follower of Christ, but for too many of us, living such a life would seem abnormal to how we're living right now. We profess to know that this world is not our home, but I think that would be surprising news to too many who are our neighbors, co-workers, and yes, fellow church goers. we seem very much at home indeed.

We are called, indeed commanded to live in the fullness of His Kingdom life, a life above and beyond anything this earthly realm can offer. Yet there will be a risk, a great risk. Like the citizens of Mayberry, the citizens of the world's kingdom will think us peculiar indeed. Christ's presence unsettled many. When we walk in His life, we will too. To live fully in Him will sharply set us apart from those living outside of Him. The more passion we have for His life, the stranger we will seem to many. In some cases, such a life will give rise to fear because we speak of a world lost to our fallen flesh. Darkness always fears the light, for it can't exist in it. Fear can quickly turn to hostility for men always fear what they cannot understand and do not know. Yet, in the midst of it all will be people upon whose hearts He's ministering to. He's drawing them to Himself, and He means to use our lives as part of the drawing. Christ has called His people as His chief means of drawing others to Himself. Sadly, many are called to this, but too few of us are living in such fullness as to be chosen for it.

C.S. Lewis famously said that if we find ourselves feeling like we don't belong in this world, perhaps we need to admit that we were made for another one. His. Like the lonely young soldier, such people are everywhere around us. Our purpose is to so display the wonder of our "hometown" that they desire to live there as well. Can we be such people? Are we being such people now?

When I entered ministry, I had big dreams of ministerial success, recognition, and advancement. Thankfully, the Father (mostly) purged me of such fleshly ambition. All these years later, my heart desire is to minister and live in such a way as to constantly point people to Him not just through what I say, but how I live and who I am. I want people to come and find a home in my "hometown." How about you?

Blessings,
Pastor O

Be Still

"I will climb up into my watchtower now and wait to see what the Lord will say to me." Habakkuk 2:1....."Anyone who is willing to hear should listen to the Spirit and understand what the Spirit is saying to the churches." Revelation 2:29....."Be still and know that I am God." Psalm 46:10

Our culture and nation are in turmoil. It seems everyone is looking at the immediate problems, be it race, civic disorder edging toward societal chaos, and open lawlessness to name a few. Many, particularly in the church are seeking ways and means to respond to it all. This is not bad, but I fear that most, including we in the church, are responding emotionally rather than in His Spirit. This, no matter how good and pure our intentions will always be wrong if we are doing it apart from the counsel and leading of His Holy Spirit. Our flesh is impulsive. His Spirit is not, and I believe that is clear from the above Scriptures.

The prophet Habakkuk lived in days like this, indeed much worse days than this. His nation and people were being overrun by a powerful and evil empire. Destruction and loss were everywhere, and Habakkuk sought reasons and answers for it all. Surely his flesh response was one of feeling he had to "do something." Yet the Holy Spirit led him to a spiritual "watchtower" where he would wait upon His God for direction and leading. He composed himself before the Lord and focused his attention on hearing His voice. In due time he did, and the Father spoke beautiful and wonderful truth and understanding into His Spirit. Dare we admit that there are not many Habakkuk's among us today who are willing to refuse the urge to do something and instead seek the leading and wisdom of the Father? Dare we admit that few of us even know how to go about doing so?

Jesus through His Holy Spirit called upon the churches of Revelation (as well as the churches of today) to hear what He was saying and so understand what He would do in the days they were living in as well as the days yet to come. The call to hear His voice is still being given to us through this Scripture, yet how many are listening? How many of us even have the spiritual skill needed so that we can listen? We believe God is silent and has to be pleaded with to speak. Sometimes He does keep silent in order to teach us, discipline us, and in these, work in us. Most of the time though, He is speaking. Our problem is we have no idea how to listen and so can't hear Him, or worse, we don't know His voice and so can't recognize Him when He whispers in the Spirit.

His Word says, "My people are perishing for lack of knowledge." Knowledge first and foremost of their God. We are a people who may name Him as our Savior, but who are largely ignorant of who He is, His ways, and His voice. In the myriad of "voices" constantly screaming at us, we have no real ability to distinguish His. Yet His pathway to such intimacy is open to us. Too few of us ever discover it.

Psalm 46 calls us to "Be still and know that I am God." Not a mental knowing, but a heart knowledge. Knowing that comes from time spent just soaking in His presence. This requires a stillness in our souls, a release of all distractions, and a centering on His Person. None of this is natural to our flesh, but all are spiritual disciplines that He can and will nurture in us. How many of us know how to be still that we might also know Him?

Oswald Chambers, founder of a college for missionaries, exhorted his students to never step out into service until they had spent much time in His presence, listening to His voice, hearing His heart. That way, they did not go out, they were sent out. There is a difference, and we must learn it. He is speaking, moving, doing in this and all times. Whether we are actually a part of it all will depend upon whether we will be still, hear, and know...His voice and His heart.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Let God Arise

"Let God Arise, let His enemies be scattered, and let those who hate Him flee before Him." Psalm 68:1...."There is a great enemy rising against us. There is a greater God rising within us." Unknown

The above Scripture has been in my mind and upon my heart of late. We, His people, need to hear His call to be His intercessory prayer warriors in this day. To date, we haven't been. If we had, our culture would not be in the desperate straits it now finds itself. We have been beyond lax. We have centered on our own comfort, provision, and security. We've been willing to sacrifice up to a certain amount of discomfort, give up to a tithe, and serve up to a point. Most of us have invisible yet clear boundary lines as to just how far we will go in our journey of faith. That kind of faith will not stand in the days in which we live.

As you read this, you don't need me to remind you of all that has been happening over the last months, weeks, and days. Chaos is growing, fear is increasing, and too much of our message seems to be passive. Rest, trust, be at peace. All these must be part of what we proclaim, as well as hope, but there is something more. We must heed the call to go to war. Spiritual war. In intercessory prayer. In realization of who the enemy really is, and who it is we are actually fighting. Its not the political and cultural leaders who are really assaulting not only the foundation of this nation, but the foundation of the church as well. It is, as it has always been, the father of lies behind them. He never rests. He constantly assaults, and we've been far too unaware of him. Keith Green sang a song during the Jesus movement about how the devil rejoiced over the ease with which he had infiltrated the church. A lyric in it said it was because "No one believes in me anymore." Even if we do believe, we've accepted a false security built around the false belief that because we are His, we're always protected. We are, but our part is to be vigilant, aware of his tactics, and always on guard and coming against them. When we aren't, we set ourselves up to be overcome. Brethren, we're in danger of being overcome, but the battle is not lost, because we have a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whose very character is Victory. Victory in Jesus.

The battle is the Lord's, but He fights through us. Many are praying that He would turn back all of the assaults of hell, but we are missing something in our prayers. Before He can rise up against the enemy before us, He must rise up against the enemy within us. All that is within our hearts that opposes His Lordship and control. Until that happens we are feeble warriors at best, defeated ones at worst. Neither should ever mark the follower of Christ. Do they mark you? Me?

His Word proclaims that the gates of hell shall not prevail against His Church. We can see those gates with every news report and most every social observation. William Booth said it was His desire to build his ministry before those very gates. He desired because he knew who the victory belonged to. Do we have that desire? Those gates are before us. Either they will prevail, or we His church will. God has already won the victory in Christ. The question is, will you and I be partakers of it, or swept away in the course of the battle. God will rise up. Will we rise up with Him?

Blessings,
Pastor O