Mountains

 Mountains are not a welcome occurrence on our life's journey. They're steep and require effort to climb. They're also large, and tend to block out the sight of most everything....sometimes, at least to us, of the Father Himself. They can be so intimidating that we think they  block us from His sight as well. From our perspective, mountains are to be avoided, not chosen. If we come across one, we immediately want them to be "cast into the sea." Didn't Jesus tell us to say just that? Yet God's "Removal Service" often doesn't resemble what we think it should be at all. Even more, we can't fathom that we'd choose for the mountain to be there in the first place. We want the smooth, easy path. Pain free, problem free. Mountains obstruct and are problematic. They could never be from Him....could they? He always wants the best for us. Mountains could never be part of His best...could they?

Isaiah 49:11 says, "I will turn My mountains into roads." His mountains, placed there by Him. The enemy may lurk there, plot there, ambush us there, but the mountains don't belong to him. They belong to God. Our God. He rules there, not the adversary. Even so, the mountains are real, imposing, frightening. We pray they will be removed, but then we open our eyes and.....they're still before us. Why? Why won't He honor His promise? If He answers, it's likely to simply tell us that, "My ways are not your ways. Press on!" He might then say the most unexpected thing of all: "Surrender to the mountain." Surrender to the appearance of things....so that He might reveal His reality in the midst of the appearances. Instead of running from the mountain....we yield to it. In that lies the secret of its removal. In the surrender we find that He does turn His mountains into roads.

At first look mountains appear impassable. Yet in them are roadways and passes that are unseen at first look. A way through. A way home. This is even more true in the spiritual realm. In the midst of the seemingly impassable are pathways and passes that will take us over and through the highest most dangerous mountain. The Apostle Paul walked through these passes in his ministry for His Lord. He said plainly that "many were the adversaries." These adversaries were never able to prevail against him and His Father's purposes for him. He surrendered to their presence and still always arrived at the place the Lord had purposed for him to be. In his surrender to them he triumphed over them, and all the dangers they contained. He'll do so for us as well....if we'll surrender.

In Joshua 14:12, the land is being given to the Israelites. Most of them chose the lush, lovely and safe plains, which had already been conquered. Caleb chose the mountains. Caleb, who with Joshua had seen all the dangers of that promised land 40 years before. At that time they exhorted the people to enter and take possession of what was already theirs. They refused and suffered 40 long years in the wilderness for their unbelief and disobedience. What enemies now remained had retreated to the mountains, the very mountains Caleb asked to be given him. As Henry Blackaby puts it, "Caleb knew that his inheritance from God was on the mountain. He refused to allow the difficulty of gaining it keep him from enjoying all that God had promised him....Seek out the mountains, and you will witness God doing things in your life that can only be explained through His mighty Presence." 

The mountains are there before us. Will we choose them or run from them? Will we surrender to their reality and so discover the deeper reality of who He is in the midst of them? He will make a road leading to our inheritance. May we refuse to be lowlanders, satisfied with less, and be mountaineers, gaining all that He has for us....and discover, in the end, that He really did remove the mountain after all.

Blessings,
Pastor O

The Sack

 I've been greatly impacted by the life and ministry of a Chinese believer known as Brother Yun, the Heavenly Man. His experiences as part of the heavily persecuted church in China are filled with miracles of deliverance and power. To read of them is both spiritually exhilarating and humbling at the same time.

In his book, Living Water, he tells of when it came time to send out some brethren for the spreading of the Gospel, they would gather to worship and exhort. They would also pass around a sack for the purpose of receiving an offering to support the ones going out. He said that the norm was for people to give all they had to support the mission. He writes, "There was no holding back." Being that almost all were simple farmers, it was a truly sacrificial offering. Sometimes there would be those among them who had absolutely nothing materially or financially to offer. so they would, "men and women alike, with tears streaming from their eyes, literally get into the offering sack when it came to them. They wanted to signal to God that their lives were all they had to give and they were willing to give them for His glory."

How does that contrast with our giving lives here in the west? We speak a lot of being givers and of being generous. By our own standards, we may be, but by the standard of those simple Chinese believers? They don't see giving to HIm as a matter of percentages, but of totality. After we give our "percentage," how many of us really see all that is left as also being His? Completely His? How many of us are willing to put much into His "sack," but not ourselves? How many of us have invisible lines drawn in our lives as to just how much of ourselves we will put into His sack when it passes by? 

How many times have we read or heard Jesus' telling of the rich Pharisee and the widow in poverty? The Pharisee gave a large offering and felt he'd won God's approval. The woman gave two pennies, which was all she had. Jesus said it was her offering and not the Pharisee's that the Father found acceptable. The Pharisee gave out of his riches. The widow gave all of hers. It was not the amount. It was their heart that moved the heart of God. 

How like that Pharisee are we really? Do we put much into the sack and feel we've really worshipped Him, all the while holding back what it is He most desires....ourselves? All that is us, our past, our present, and our future. Our hopes and dreams. Our desires. Our wounds. Our failures and our sins. All that we are given over to all that He is. All of ourselves in His sack. Nothing kept back. Nothing is ours. All we are and have is His. We give our all and all for His glory.

We don't need to wait for our next worship gathering to make this offering. We can do it now in our own time of personal worship. The sack comes to us. What is it that we will put into it? 2 Chronicles 16:9 reads, "For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him." As His eyes fall upon us, on you and on me, do we offer Him parts and pieces of our lives, or all of our lives? 

Blessings,
Pastor O

Extravagant Faith

 "When He entered the house, the blind men came to Him, and Jesus said to them, 'Do you believe that I am able to do this?' They said, 'Yes, Lord,' " Matthew 9:26...."God has called us to live in impossibilities.....We've been conditioned not to believe extravagantly." Chris Tiegreen

Scripture says that true faith "believes all things." This doesn't mean that Christ's followers are naive or that they believe whatever someone, say a preacher or leader tells them, though sadly, some fall into such a category. They're in the minority. The Bible understands that Scripture to be applied to have the kind of faith that can believe the Lord for anything that He has promised....no matter the seeming impossibility.

Tiegreen says that He has called us to live in impossibilities. That means He will lead us into places that are impossible to overcome or succeed in by our own strength and ability. Places that unless He comes, we will fail, fall, and even perish. We're not to fear the impossible when we know that He's the One who has led us there. Those who live in surrendered faith have come to know His voice and recognize His leading. He may and likely will lead us into places that everyone around says are impossible. He tells us that all things are possible for Him who believes. Maybe you once believed this. Do you believe it now?

Tiegreen also says that we, the church, have been conditioned to not believe extravagantly. Extravagant faith believes all things. Extravagant faith believes for miracles in the midst of the impossible. Extravagant faith knows the Lord it follows and trusts Him completely.

Someone said that every child believes in miracles until some adult tells them that it's not possible. That's true in the world and sadly, true in His church. We come to Christ in faith. We believe He can and will do miracles in our lives. We believe for miracles and in our early walk, we experience them. Many enjoy our exuberant expressions of faith, but just as many, maybe more, are made uncomfortable by them. They're uncomfortable for a number of reasons, but the most common I think is that they have simply grown used to depending on themselves, others, knowledge, science, Doctors, psychologists, and politicians. They develop a worldview that's not based in Scripture but in the world's value system. They doubt the reality of miracles. They no longer really believe for all things. They believe in Him, but they don't really believe Him. They're uncomfortable being around those who still do, so, though well-meaning, they tell these others that what they're believing for, expecting from Him, isn't reasonable. They're the adults telling those with child-like faith that miracles aren't really possible. Or, they admit that miracles can happen, but it's just not realistic to expect one here. And so, a faith that once really did believe for all things, adjusts itself to take a more "realistic" view of this impossible place.

Today, where you are, are you one who has an extravagant faith in Jesus Christ? If not, why not? He is Lord of the impossible and He lives in us by faith. God of miracles. God of the impossible. He asks, "Is anything too difficult for me?" Extravagant faith answers "no." How do you answer?

Blessings,
Pastor O

Prepared?

 "And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I am." John 14:3...."The mansion may be ready for you, but you are not ready for it." J.B. Chapman

Believers, especially older ones, are often prone to say something like, "If I'm still here, God must still have ways He wants to use me." I've often harbored those same thoughts, but I'm seeing things a bit differently these days. Someone said that "heaven is a prepared place for prepared people." How prepared are we, you and I, for an eternity in His Kingdom? How prepared are we to abide in the place He has prepared for us?

Life in this fallen world has conditioned even we believers to see it as the true reality. We may have the ultimate hope of heaven, but the reality of that heaven is somewhere on the back burner for most of us. So entangled in the day to day affairs of life in the here and now that we give, at best, only leftovers to the One we call Lord and the Kingdom we say we're a part of. Truly, if the Lord were to call us home today, just how ready are we to go home, to even call it home?

I believe in a life of good works. I believe that we are to be used by Him, to labor with Him as He builds His Kingdom and His Church in this passing realm, but that is not His priority with us. His focus is to transform us into full citizens of His Kingdom. Not just in name but in character. J.B. Chapman asked just how comfortable we would be in the company of those who dwell in the Kingdom of heaven? Would we fit in? Would we really be at home? Or is the truth of it that we have been so immersed in the ways and works of this life that heaven would be a totally disorienting experience for us?

I think each of us who profess to be citizens of His Kingdom need to soberly ask just how ready for the fullness of that Kingdom are we? I don't want to be ill-prepared. I don't want to look like a tourist totally out of their element. I don't want to look out of place in the place that He has prepared for me. 

I will be 74 years old this month and I never thought I would live to this age. I long for my homegoing, but I want to be ready when the time comes. I don't want things in my heart, my mind, my life, to be left unfinished. I don't want to be unprepared for the place He has prepared for me. It has become an ever-deepening prayer that I not be.

Whatever your age this day, may you begin now to dwell upon where your home really is and that you be prepared for that place, He, Jesus Christ, has already prepared a place for you. To borrow a phrase from a pop culture novel of my youth, let us not be strangers in a strange land in the very land He made for us.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Reach!

 "And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is." Ephesians 3:18

In response to Paul's prayer in Ephesians, I wrote my own in my prayer journal. Lord, stretch our minds to take in all that You are and enlarge our spirits to receive all that You give." Now, we being finite can never take in all the wonder and truth of who He is. We'll spend eternity discovering His beauty and never come to all of His fullness. But, we can receive Him to the full of our capacity....but we'll need to stretch ourselves in every way for that to be our reality. Sadly, we're spiritually lazy people, and stretching sounds way too much like work. So, we'll let Him reach for us. He may do that when He seeks after us in our lost state, but once we've come to Him His expectation is that we "seek and find Him" in ever deepening ways. We're in a dangerous time in the church when we're falling ever deeper into "cheap grace" and "easy believism," mindset.

The letter from James in the Bible is one many have problems with, especially those who overstate His grace. James' message stresses the responsibility of the believer to live out the truth of the Bible in their day to day lives. We're saved by grace, kept by grace, but grace doesn't make allowance for knowingly sinful lifestyles and open disobedience to He and His Word.

The other day I heard a young preacher who is rapidly gaining popularity say that James was in error in his writing because he didn't understand grace. Think on what he's saying. He's declaring that a book in the Holy Bible is invalid, at least in part if not the whole. Such an approach will always lead to our dismissing those parts of His Word we don't like, accepting only that which we do. Our flesh (lazy flesh) will always look for what's easiest and costless. It has no room for a cross or our dying to ourselves upon it. Voices like his have always been lurking within the church, but they're growing in this age....and many are being seduced by them. Have you?

I started off this writing by pointing to the fact that laying hold of Him and all that He seeks to be to us will involve our stretching out spiritually to do so. It will require exercising spiritual muscles that may have been dormant for some time. It will not be comfortable....but oh the results. 

I once watched the regimen of a Chinese martial arts master as he trained a young student. One of the things he did was to take the boy and place him upon his knees. He then bent and stretched the boy so as to give his muscles and tissues the needed strength and flexibility he would need to become a master himself. Was there pain involved? I'm sure there was, but the boy had yielded himself to it. His desire was to become as his master was. So too will there be pain and discomfort for us as we stretch forth to lay hold of all that He is. What we gain in the pain is a knowledge and experience of Him, of His Life, and of His power. 

He calls us to reach forward with all our being. What do we do? Stand still in our comfort zone, even in our unbelief, or.....do we reach with all that we are that we might lay hold of all that He is?

Blessings,
Pastor O

Homeward Bound

 Sixties folk duo Simon and Garfunkel had a very popular song entitled Homeward Bound. That song speaks to me today as I, and every soul that has been saved by grace, have as our living hope that we are homeward bound through our Lord and King, Jesus Christ. Always, we are to be looking homeward, living here in the knowledge that we're just passing through. This is not our home. We're on the way to the better country Paul wrote of, and Christ promises to get us there, to take us home. But the journey will not be easy. All along the way, the enemy of our souls will seek to force us off the "road," through discouragement, temptations, afflictions, and need. Our call is to stay the course, by the power of His grace. 

The world can be and is a very frightening place, fraught with great danger and challenges, and totally unpredictable. The only predictable element is that there will be trouble...sometimes a great deal of it. Jesus said it would be so. Hope will be in short supply if it is a hope built on ourselves, but never for those whose hope is a living one centered on Him. Matthew 12:20-21, speaking of Christ reads, "He will not crush those who are weak or quench the smallest hope.....And His name will be the hope of the world." He will not crush the smallest hope, but the world makes no such promise. It specializes in stealing our hopes and dreams. The god of this world, Satan, is a thief. Stealing hope is what he does. Where is Jesus when this happens? Can He remain my hope and yours when all our dreams and hopes lie shattered at our feet? Dreams and hopes for ourselves, our marriages, children, our professions and ministries? If He's the hope of the world, where is He in mine and in yours?

The answer, if we'll dare to believe, is that He's right there with us. In the midst of the brokenness He wants us to understand that while one dream may be crushed and our hopes dashed, He has a new dream for us, a better one. One that the old dream and hope had to die to so that we might lay hold of it. Hope for the rest of the journey. Hope that will go the distance.

Mark Buchanan says, "There is only one road home and to get there, you'll have to stay the course.....Do we believe that though the entire route teems with danger and death, this is still the only road home? If so, stay the course." Jesus never promised that our every dream would be fulfilled and every hope realized. What He did promise was His best life here and in the world to come. He wants us to see that out of the ashes of our lesser dreams and hopes He gives us a greater One that is fulfilled in Him. All that we have desired on this side of eternity completely diminishes in the reality of what He has prepared for those that are His. For those He has led home. 

You may be standing in the midst of shattered dreams and broken hopes....but He is there, and as He wipes away the tears, He holds a better dream for you and yours. Embrace the dream, His dream for you. The dream of the homeward bound.

Blessings,
Pastor O

Relevant?

 As a "Baby Boomer," I came of age in the late 60's and early 70's. The culture was radically changing and we were seeing the changes everywhere, especially in what we watched on TV. I remember TV shows of that era stressing how they were seeking to be "real" and "relevant." Relevant was a real buzz word back then. They believed it was key to attracting viewers. Now, in many ways, it seems the church is using the same word to attract and speak to a new generation. Movies and television were changed forever by that movement. Some of it was good, but judging by what "entertainment" has evolved, or more correctly devolved into, most of it was not. The church has changed as well, and there's a lot of good in the change....mixed with much that is not.

Before going any further, let me say I am not a "traditionalist" who hates change and resists it with all my strength. My ministry began in a traditional setting, but through the years I felt He was leading me away from that and into what was in many ways, not traditional at all. I believe that the church must have a message that speaks to and is relevant to the culture it's trying to reach. The methodology of the 60's, 70's, and even the 90's isn't going to be effective in 2024. A common catch-phrase became, "Change the methods, not the message." I would ask however, in our use of relevant methods, do we still have a relevant message? If we do, what's the evidence for that? If we do, why is our culture in the state that it's in?

We have worked awfully hard at making our churches more attractive, more welcoming, more contemporary in our efforts to reach the culture. None of this is wrong, but I fear in our efforts to make everything more attractive and welcoming to people, we have made His church less welcoming and attractive to His Holy Spirit. We may draw crowds, but what is taking place in their hearts? Is spiritual transformation taking place? Are we seeing people being made "new in Jesus Christ?" 

Those who are in Christ are meant to live supernatural lives. Lives that see the world and respond to it in radically different ways than those without Him. Yet, there doesn't seem to be anything greatly different about the life of the average believer than that of the average non-believer. We are not meant to be sanitized versions of people in the world. Christ did not come to make us a little better as humans. In the Book of Acts, it was said of Christians as they came into a city, "These ones who are turning the world upside down have now come here!" They turned the world upside down not by acts of violence, but by lives so radically transformed that those who'd been changed made a supernatural impact on their culture. History bears this out. Today, who carries the greatest impact? Popular culture or the witness of the church? We once called the spiritually crippled to "rise and walk" in Jesus Christ. What do we call them to now?

Our relevancy doesn't come from replacing pianos with keyboards, choirs with worship teams, and hymns with praise choruses. Neither does it come from innovative lighting or darkening of the sanctuary, big screen graphics and videos, or really cool pastors. None of these are wrong in themselves, (Well, maybe the "really cool pastors") but they change no one. Neither does a message that's been "dumbed down" to appeal to a biblically illiterate and very lost generation. What will make us relevant to that generation is a full gospel Scriptural message that apologizes for nothing and is preached powerfully, clearly, and lovingly. A message that points its listeners to the Jesus Christ of the Bible. The Jesus Christ who through His Holy Spirit, transforms the lives of those who confess their sin, turn from it, and receive His Life and Spirit into their hearts. This is the desperate need of the culture and of the church. 

I close with the question; When all our "stuff," our props and even our methods are gone, what is it that we have left to give to those born spiritually crippled and blind into this fallen world? Will we, can we say to them, "Rise and walk!" That message never ceases to be relevant wherever it is proclaimed. May we ceaselessly proclaim it.

Blessings,
Pastor O