Fathers and Sons

Therefore, be imitators of God, as dearly loved children – Ephesians 5:1

This, it seems to me, is a dangerous verse.  

I pity those who did not have my father to set an example and to emulate, not that Dad was in any way perfect.  He had a quick temper.  He was often violent toward inanimate objects.  He laughed at his own stories – I’m not sure how much of a flaw that is.  I suspect our Father in Heaven delights in His stories as well.  He was a banty badass.  If I could choose anyone who ever lived to back me in a fight, I would, without hesitation, pick him.  He would appreciate it, because he taught me value of loyalty, and I know that, regardless of the odds or the circumstances, he would not give in or give up. Loyalty may be the single virtue to which I can legitimately lay claim. 

As a son who loved his father and was loved by him, I admired him and sought to incorporate his traits in my own life.  I picked up the flaws along with the diamond, but sometimes those flaws were quite amusing.  I had a good time learning the hard way.  

That’s the way it is when you are a child.  You grow into an amalgam of your parents, if, like me, you are fortunate enough to have two parents who are complementary.  The combinations vary, which is why siblings are not uniform, plus each additional child is influenced by the ones that came before and those that come after.  Parents grow and change, and we learn that from them as well.  Jesus, the writer of Hebrews tells us, is the same yesterday, today and forever.  One cannot improve on perfection.  

As we study the Bible and pray, we bring our lives in line with our Father’s nature and character.  I don’t think it is a mistake to try and be good, to live by godly rules, and operate on a “what would Jesus do” basis, but I do think it ultimately fails.  Do not be conformed (Romans 12:2) – we have to be transformed from the inside out.  I did not become like my earthly father by consciously and religiously imitating his behavior, certainly not entirely.  In fact, for a long time, I thought I was nothing like him. It was only as I grew older that I realized my actions and attitude, my words and the way that I addressed the world grew out of the genetics as well as the mindset he had passed on to me.

All humans are made in the image and likeness of God.  We have, so to speak, the right spiritual genetics.  What we are typically lacking is extensive conversation and communion with our Father.  This comes in hearing His stories, in both speaking and listening in prayer.  It is no small thing that those disciples the resurrected Christ met on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus at last in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:31).  I become like my earthly father over beans and cornbread.  We become like our heavenly Father through communion.  We are also influenced by and learn from our brothers and sisters in Christ.  And the Lord Jesus is Himself our loving and ever-present Elder Brother. 

We can consciously follow this path, but we will be, generally, a good way down the road before we recognize how much we have truly become like the Lord and the extent to which our lives have been transformed.

Crisis, Commitment, Communion

Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. -- Proverbs 13:11

I think I heard that there were three winning tickets for this week’s huge Powerball drawing.  That’s means probably a minimum of a hundred million or so to each winner – a lot of money to be dumped into someone’s lap.  Most of us cannot even imagine what that means, and most people cannot handle that kind of wealth.  We have learned how to manage the income we have.  Poor people have acquired skills in dealing with poverty.  Show up at any Walmart or similar store the day after the monthly load of EBT cards takes place.  These people know to the minute when their money will be available.  They know to the penny how much they have -- three or four hundred bucks, or fifteen hundred, a person like that can manage with some degree of skill.  Give them access to a hundred thousand, a million or a hundred million, and they simply have no concept.

It happens to lottery winners, to athletes, and to some entertainers – especially those who become overnight celebrities.  To the rest of us, it seems strange that someone who has an inordinate amount of money should ever end up in debt and bankrupt, yet, this is a very common path.  Managing large amounts of money is a skill like any other.  It can be learned, but it is takes time.  If your money comes in slowly and your wealth accumulates little by little, your management skills grow apace.  Everything works out.

The same applies in the spiritual realm.  We get a picture of it in type as God promises to give Canaan to the Children of Israel:    I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you.  Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land (Exodus 23:29-30). 

The problem the Israelites had was that, though they had been delivered from slavery, they were still slaves in terms of their mindset.  It took time for them to see themselves as the Lord saw them.  Upon encountering the gigantic inhabitants of Canaan, the faithless spies famously said that they were as grasshoppers in the eyes of their enemies, and in their own eyes.   After being beaten down and oppressed for generations, they could not change their minds about who they were and what they were capable of.  They had come out of Egypt in crisis which led to, quite naturally, celebration and vows of commitment, but very few of those so delivered entered into communion.

I believe that conversion is a genuine experience, but, at the same time, I am skeptical of instant Christians – just add water.  Typically, I think we come to a point of crisis where we realize what we are doing isn’t working.  We recognize and embrace the truth of the Gospel.  We commit ourselves to Christ.  The riches of God’s grace and mercy become available to us, and we rejoice.  After a while, though, most of us experience difficulties.  The same old problems confront us.  The same old man too often responds to those problems.  We wonder if we were ever “saved”, or if we need to “rededicate” our lives to Christ.  Maybe it didn’t take the first time.  I have a close relative who used to rededicate about every six months.  I don’t suppose it hurt anything, but I’m not sure it helped anything either.  How many times do you need to cross the Red Sea?  It borders on magical thinking. 

What did Jesus tell us to do in the Great Commission?  Make disciples.  Disciples are those under discipline.  They are learning and developing a new attitude and a new mindset – renewing our minds is the Scriptural phrase, to go with the new nature we have been given.  When people say that we learn to pray, we mean that people learn when to pray and that prayer is listening as much or more than pleading.  We have faith, but we need to develop it and refine it, challenge it and test it in real world situations. 

It takes time.  This is why most people do not die immediately after coming up from the waters of baptism.  A Crisis Christian can immediately or almost immediately become a Committed Christian resulting in a Celebrating Christian.  It doesn’t always happen, but it’s common.  To become a Communion Christian, however, is always going to be a process.  A few of us -- for reasons known only to God, move to that place fairly quickly.  To those watching from the outside, the transition may appear seamless and sudden.  The rest of us take the long way home.  We adapt slowly.  At times it may seem that we are making no progress at all, but we can trust that the Lord is leading by the way that is best.  Some of us take more changing than others, more dying to self than others.  Do not despair or fear.  Little by little, we grow in grace. 

Going to Ground

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.  -- Romans 12:2

As humans, we alone appear to have a choice in how we live.  My cats, my dog, the deer that shred my trees, the fish in the pond, none of these creatures can see beyond itself.  The animal recognizes threats, responds to kindness, seeks a secure environment to feed, rest, and reproduce with little choice, for it is driven mostly by instincts.  Animals, at least those that are by nature predators, seem to be capable of reasoning in the sense of being able to solve a concrete puzzle that lies in front of them and working together to bring down prey.  Most animals can be trained to do rather complex things, but it is at the direction of a higher human mind guiding and channeling their instincts.  As my father said with regard to training a stock dog, “First, you have to be smarter than the dog.” 

Though my choices in life and where I have ended up are very much founded in the time and place and circumstances of my childhood, I do not believe I was bound by my past to do the things I have done.  If I was constrained by anything I would say it was more a vision of my future that drew rather than the past that drove me.  Many years ago, I deliberately set down on paper the kind of place and situation in which I wanted to live, and that is where I am.  I don’t mean to imply that I consciously took the exercise very seriously because I did not.  I had just read or heard of the idea and did it.  Regardless of how my conscious mind saw it, it apparently gave my natural life a direction.  The path here was halting and meandering, even tortuous.  This is not heaven.  It is less than idyllic.  It has disadvantages and troubles, and I sometimes ask myself what I am doing here, but it is what I pictured – what I asked for right down to some very specific aspects. 

If you stop and think about that for a moment, that is kind of scary.  Time, though, makes a lot more sense to me if I think of it, not as something going past me, but as a dimension in which I move just as I do in space.   If we don’t know where we are going in space, we are fairly unlikely to get there.  Maybe the same is true for time. 

And then there is eternity, a different attractor -- as Bob would say -- altogether.  Life might be a little like electricity.  If you have the right ground, electricity can flow the right way and do something positive.  If you let it find its own ground, it can be extremely destructive.  That’s what I like about Jesus.     

Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.”   (In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth?  He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.) (Ephesians 4:8-10)

He is the Alpha and Omega, Generator and Ground.  We come from Him and go to Him, and we are transformed in the process, becoming like Him and part of Him -- because He knows the end from the beginning. 

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.  Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.  (Ephesians 4:11-16)

Dead Reckoning

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. – Romans 6:11

The ESV is a little weak, though correct.  I just like the old KJV word “reckon” better than the more generic “consider”.  It sounds like something Josey Wales might say.  

“They say you’re dead to sin, Wales.”

Spit.  “I reckon so.”

Considering oneself dead to sin makes sense only in light of the preceding statement in verse 2: How can we who died to sin still live in it?  The truth is that reckoning has more in common with accounting than with gunslinging.  When we write down the balance in our account book, it had best be the amount that is actually in the account.  Otherwise we can find ourselves guilty of writing bad checks or perpetrating fraud – unless, of course, we are the federal government.  Come to think of it, “account” would be a better modern word than consider.

We can account ourselves dead to sin because we identify with Christ, or rather He identified with us.  He immersed Himself in human flesh.  He made His obedience and death ours.  We are drawn into and immersed in His death, or, as it is more traditionally put, we are baptized into His death.  This accounting, then, is a matter of recognizing, acknowledging, and operating in accordance with the revealed truth. 

By accounting ourselves dead to sin, we are not like the Little Christian Who Could, huffing, “I think I’m dead.  I think I’m dead.”  We are not by our heroic efforts making a hope or even an uncertainty into a reality.  The illusion is not that we are dead to sin but that we feel the need to sin. 

I suppose I should stop and make the point that when I say “sin” I am just using a shorthand for anything that is perpetrated by the old Adamic nature, anything that is done out of material or animal impulses.  A lot of us have never committed adultery because, frankly, it is a lot of trouble, and we are just too lazy to do it.   Some of us have never committed murder or stolen diamonds only because we are scared of getting caught and winding up in prison; or, we don’t know a trustworthy fence, or because cleaning up the gore after a homicide might cause us to miss “Dancing With The Stars”.  And, really, there is a reason they call it “dead weight”. 

Instead we steal time from our family and friends by shifting our work onto them.  We cut people up with cruel words.  We fill our minds with vicarious adulteries and “romances” and violence via television and the internet.  We manipulate and deceive in order to get our way or not suffer the consequences of our actions.  I could go on, but, as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows.

If we are indeed dead to the old nature, why do we feel such an obligation to it?  Why does it seem to trap and hold us so much of the time?  Everything is answered in Genesis.  And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth (Genesis 1:28 – emphasis added).  We are meant to rule.  But equally and reasonably we are meant to be ruled over.  We feel an obligation, a sense of loyalty, and we do not know to what or to Whom we rightfully owe it.  

Did you ever wonder how Lucifer could rule a bunch of fallen angels that were already rebels?  I have.  It looks to me like the devil would be so busy putting down uprising that he would hardly have time to annoy me.  But all of God’s creatures, fallen or not, are built with a sense of loyalty.  This is why we find the traitors punished in the very lowest circle of hell.  No one respects a traitor, not even those who benefit from the betrayal.  Many should be fearful. 

Though Adam has long repented his failure and the transference of his allegiance to the enemy, we followed our father in his disloyalty and rebellion under a new master.  We could not help ourselves.  We were bound to the flesh.  We could not break the curse without becoming accursed.  So it was that God divinely provided an alternative.  I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel (Genesis 3:15).  One would come born of woman but owing fealty to another Father.  He took the curse upon Himself and broke its power.

Now, if we obey only our heavenly Father, no one can account us as traitors.  While many may not desire to have the Lord be their Lord, they do not become rulers themselves but remain subject to the flesh, for all of creation will give allegiance to that which it believes is master -- no matter how base or destructive.  In the midst of a world system that operates on the power of the flesh, we must remind ourselves of the truth regularly.  It is like the illusion of a rising and setting sun.  It is easy to forget that it is a function of the spinning earth.  

… be transformed by the renewal of your mind … (Romans 12:2).

It’s Not All Split-pea Soup

The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor – Luke 4:18-19

How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how He went about doing good and curing all who were under the tyranny of the Devil, because God was with Him – Acts 10:38

In the comments on Friday’s post, Walt quoted Gagdad Bob:

"...You don't have to be a clinical psychologist to know that the average person is at cross-purposes with himself because he is inhabited by various alter-egos with differing agendas, which we call mind parasites. Mind parasites generally operate unconsciously, while the conscious mind makes excuses for them in order to confer a spurious sense of unity upon the self -- a coherent narrative.

"But this narrative is always a lie (more or less), as it is in the service of mind parasites, not Truth."

We -- meaning mainly me -- are not really interested in debate. I find most people generally unmoved by my persuasive logic and astute mental gymnastics. What we raccoons do like is something with a little bark we can climb. We like a thick limb we can amble out on to relax, sit a spell, and maybe see how things look from this angle. So we are going to interrupt the little trip we were taking through First John to think about mind parasites and demons.

Walt went on to relate GB’s statements to some of what we were talking about Friday: His quote does not contradict anything you wrote, nor am I trying to. But let's say, when I, for example, epitomize Bob's quote one way or another, to one degree or another, I probably lack the capacity to retain or contain any of the points you bring up. At those times, I project my internals onto the world, much as your lady friend did re her late husband. This may not qualify as "sin," but it's at least B-I-G E-R-R-O-R.

While that sort of thing proceeds, I don't have the capacity to relate to anyone properly -- how much less God? What part of me can receive Grace then?

I know the answers to those questions; my question is "Can we do it?" I'm simply amplifying on the details of what stops us.

According to all the Gospel accounts Jesus seems to have frequently cast out demons. Sometimes these were clear cases of what the orthodox Christian would call demon possession. The demoniac of Gadara inhabited by a legion of evil spirits is one of the best known. The Catholic Church recognizes demon possession and will authorize exorcisms where appropriate. I’ve seen and heard some priests who specialize in exorcism speak about their work. It is clear that they are using their authority in Christ to set people free from some kind of conscious, intelligent entity which is inhabiting the same psychic space if not also the same physical space as the possessed victim. Among Protestants, especially evangelicals, charismatics, and pentecostals, there is generally a belief in the fact of demonic possession. I personally know reasonable, intelligent people who have dealt with cases of demon possession and believe them to be genuine. And I think they’re right.

It is an old question as to whether or not a Christian can be possessed by a demon. I suppose, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends on the meaning of the word “Christian” and the word “possession”. What I can be pretty sure about is that demons can control Christians by anyone’s definition without necessarily “possessing” them.

We all know the mind forms patterns of thoughts. This is very helpful when driving a car in traffic. A lot of what we do operates by habit, muscle memory, whatever you want to call it. ‘A’ happens and we respond with ‘B’. We’ve done it a multitude of times. We do it because it works. Sometimes we have what appears to be ‘A’ and we do ‘B’, but the conditions are not the same. It’s not really ‘A’, so our autopilot response causes trouble. You can see this in action every winter when the first snow comes. In Dallas I think it happened every time it rained.

Because there is so much dysfunction in the world, most of us picked up bad patterns in some areas of our lives. For example, I know a woman who grew up in the care of her single father who loved her very much. Every night he would come home from work and down three or four beers before he started supper. Then he would clean up the kitchen a little before hitting the sofa with the TV on and a beer in his hand. Nearly every night of her childhood her dad would pass out on the couch. When she grew up, she did the same thing – using wine instead of beer, or, later on, vodka. Her daughter would come home from school and try to find and empty all the vodka bottles before the woman got off work.

Sometimes our patterns are not so obvious – though to the one enslaved it is never obvious. We become trapped by fears, chained by subconscious beliefs, and controlled by self-perpetuating parasites that grow on us, feeding on the psychic energy we spill when they “score”. Watch the scene where Sméagol confronts and temporarily expels his mind parasite, Gollum, in The Two Towers. Gollum claims that he is the one that has held things together, kept Sméagol alive all those years. He is very much the epitome of a mind parasite. He has a life of his own and he is determined to not only continue his existence but control his host.

Gollum returns when Frodo is forced to betray Sméagol in order to save the creature’s life. This “vindication” provides an opening for Gollum to be restored to power. He is refreshed by proving he was right all along – though that’s not actually the truth. He is able to regain control over his host’s thoughts and perceptions.

We can be awakened to our need for redemption yet still have our minds largely controlled through these patterns. Nevertheless, that is not God’s plan. As prophesied a Deliverer was sent to us. Jesus came to open our eyes to the presence of the parasites and set us free from their domination. I cite again from my favorite chapter of the Bible: Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. This ongoing renewal of our thinking, perceiving and understanding is the means of transformation. Christ’s redemptive work has made it possible by allowing the Spirit of God direct access to us. Apart from the Cross, the devil, whom Jesus acknowledged as “the prince of this world”, ruled man by right. Through the Cross, Jesus rules by right, and the devil is the usurper, operating by deception. If we are willing to open the door, the Spirit will be able to come in, give us sight, heal us and set us free.

That’s the thing – as Walt said -- Can we do it? And the answer is, to some extent, no. That’s why it is called grace. It is not of our doing. God is always working through the things that impinge upon us. That’s a knock on the door. We are simply opening the door -- it may be out of curiosity or politeness or loneliness. We may be looking for answers to nagging questions. Maybe we are in pain and will do anything for relief. Parasites are not painless, though they contend that their pain is “better” than the pain of getting rid of them.

We open the door, and light comes in. A little light leads to more light as our eyes become clearer. The thing is, of course, we never know all that is going to be exposed, though we might be aware, in some vague way, that there is something is wrong. Our freewill action of surrender to God, our acknowledging of the power of the Cross then makes possible the progressive deliverance from these strongholds. He is mercifully relentless.

Keep in mind God uses human instruments in our deliverance. Some may remain bound because they want God Himself to fix them on the spot. It happens that way, but not all of the time. Very often we are released as we walk the path with the help of prayer partners, counselors, friends, family, coons, even clergy. All of those are means the Lord is using to help us know the Truth, because knowing the Truth will set us free.