Seasonal Greetings

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. -- 1 Corinthians 2:12

The earth has completed another circuit of the sun, yet we are not in the same place we were this time last year.  The sun has moved accompanied by the myriad of stars and bodies of light and darkness that lie around about us.  There is nothing new under the sun yet nothing is the same as it was.  I am not the same, my life has changed completely; nevertheless, I look much the same – a bit more haggard and white-haired, a few more cracks and creases but recognizable.  I have the same memories and scars, though I could not have imagined on this day a year ago what I would be where I am.

 The spirit of the world or the spirit of the age has become more confused, more desperate, fearful, corrupted, and perverse.  It cries, Peace, constantly, while having no hope for peace of any kind.  It blusters even as it cowers, empty of understanding, ignorantly mocking its own ignorance. 

God, the Apostle Paul told Timothy, has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-control (2 Timothy 1:7).  We can live in liberty, no longer governed and controlled by fear and intimidation, no longer manipulated by passion and worry.  We can rest in the love of God, knowing that He cares for us, empowering us to meet every challenge in life and to live above the animal impulses of the body and the emotions and rationalizations of the soul. 

Tomorrow is both a known and an unknown, mystery and opportunity.  The spirit of the world alternatively exults and recoils from the future.  The Spirit who is from God reminds us to look not at the calendar but at the seasons – life, death, renewal, and rebirth.  We sleep; we wake.  There is a time to lie quiet and dormant, a time to produce and be fruitful.  The spirit of the age, trapped by time, imprisoned by instincts, can only follow trends and fashions, blown about by the winds of rhetoric and the selfish desires of the soul. 

Through Christ, we live the everlasting life in tune with eternity and controlled by truth.  Every day starts a joyous new year.

Down By The Riverside

… [A]s we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. -- 2 Corinthians 4:18

All that is seen is temporary.  I look at photographs that captured the images of a moment.  Perhaps I can go back to the spot and some of the same things are there, but nothing is the same.  That moment in the stream of time has moved beyond us. 

The Missouri River is not the same water traversed by Lewis and Clark.  Why do we call it by the same name?  The water is seen, the stream bed may even be seen.  The water in the river changes constantly as does the exact course over which it runs.  That which is much more lasting is this great and vast drainage, these many watercourses coming together and pouring into this channel. 

Spiritual reality is much like that.  The experiences, events, and existences that we see in time are but the current manifestations of that which underlies and creates.  The present is always pouring out of and over eternity, being created and shaped by the eternal which may not now be perceived directly.  Just as the water’s surface can tell us something about what lies below, we may learn much about the nature of unseen reality by that which is manifest to us.  In addition, like a topographical map of terrain or a depth chart of a body of water, special revelation gives us greater insight into truth. 

The unseen is not invisible; it is not yet visible.  Scripture tells us that the elements will be consumed by fire and the heavens will roll back like a scroll.  There will come a point where the temporal and the eternal will converge and the veil of transience will be put aside and cast away. 

The wise will not ignore the visible but will look through it to that which lies behind.  They will see the impermanent for what it is and be neither seduced nor intimidated by it.  We will know the Truth, and we will be free.

The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place (Revelation 6:14).

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed (2 Peter 3:10).

 

Image Maker

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.  -- 2 Thessalonians 3:5

Bob was talking about imagination and education last week, which started me thinking about imagination in Scripture.  Oddly enough, the word imagination appears more frequently in the King James Version of the Bible than in modern translations.  A good example is Genesis 8:25 which in the KJV read, in part, “…for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth …” where the ESV reads “… for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth …”. 

Meanwhile, I did find two occurrences of the word in the ESV, first, Proverbs 18:25 – “A rich man's wealth is his strong city, and like a high wall in his imagination.”  The other occurrence is Acts 17:29, “Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.”  Well, of course, the imagination makes images, but they can be useful, correct images or erroneous images.  We can use the imagination to understand what is unseen, such as the electrons on an atom.  We can also use the imagination to mislead and deceive ourselves, as we were talking about a little yesterday. 

Perhaps there is a connection between heart, spirit, and imagination.  We can have a self-directed imagination, or we could have a God-directed imagination, one that is a vehicle of the Spirit to bring truth into our lives.  We can use our imagination to indulgence in fantasies and daydreams, or it can be an agent of spiritual understanding and transformation.  The icons, images, trappings, and rituals of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity are meant to engage the worshipper’s imagination.  The same is true of music and the lyrical poetry of worship songs in much of Protestantism. 

There is something of a conflict between the “normal” world of sense perception, of everyday language and common, superficial reality and the world that opens to use through the imagination.  I think of the several writers and poets who used alcohol, often to excess, to quiet the common in order to connect to the sacred space of imagination.  Prayer ought to be a place where we surrender our imaginations to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to direct us and guide.  This seems to me to be what Paul is saying to the church at Thessalonica. 

We cannot sense the love of God or the perseverance of Christ through touch, taste, hearing, smell or sight.  There must be another channel through which we can perceive and grasp these realities.  As we study, worship, and pray, may our hearts be open to the Spirit and what He wants us to see and experience with our spiritual sense. 

Following, Knowing, Becoming

Let us strive to know the LORD. His appearance is as sure as the dawn. He will come to us like the rain, like the spring showers that water the land. -- Hosea 6:3

Continuing the thought from yesterday, to have a heart like God’s that is big, open and accepting means that we must know Him.

You always become like your god. That’s just the way we are built. A people who know a bloodthirsty, hard-hearted god are a bloodthirsty hard-hearted people. People who actually know the true God -- the loving, forgiving, merciful God -- become loving, forgiving and merciful. The prophet says, “Strive to know the Lord.”

Many people, even many Christians, know only a caricature of God. Perhaps they learned it as children and never bothered to go beyond that. Perhaps their own life experiences have been so traumatic that they have difficulty believing in a genuinely GOOD Divinity. You see it often among atheists and agnostics. Their concept of God is ludicrously limited and twisted. While you might not blame me for refusing to believe in a cartoon version of the Almighty, it remains my responsibility to strive to know the truth.

The good thing for me about Hosea’s admonition is that it includes a promise. If I make the effort to know God, He will certainly respond. As James echoes, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” As surely as dawn breaks over the horizon to dispel the darkness, the light of God’s truth will dispel the darkness of ignorance and doubt in my soul.

Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is. -- 1 John 3:2

Some want to become god-like without becoming like God. It is a bad idea.

There is still more to the promise. As we draw near to God we not only receive light, we receive life. “He will come to us like the rain.” One of the reasons God gave the Israelites the hill country was to teach them dependence. Unlike the “well-watered valley of the Jordan”, the hill country is only green and productive when you are getting regular rainfall. Without my seeking after the Lord, my life becomes dry and barren. As I follow on to know the Lord, however, He comes with the water of the Spirit to revive and refresh.

Father, today as I look for You, let Your grace rain down upon me that I may become like You in righeousness, in love and in mercy, in all things.

Barbie versus Jesus

”Don’t cling to Me,” Jesus told her, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to My brothers and tell them that I am ascending to My Father and your Father – to My God and your God.” John 20:17

Jesus met Mary Magdalene near the tomb after His resurrection. The grieving woman did not expect to see Him alive and did not recognize Him until He spoke her name. It seems natural that she would have rushed to Him and thrown her arms around Him, perhaps kneeling before the Master and clinging to Him.

Commentators will tell us many things about this passage, often focusing on the “not yet ascended” – which is significant. There is much here for deep theological discussions about atonement and the blood of Christ. Yet I think there is a simpler lesson as well that can help us in our daily walk.

I have two cats and a dog. I love them and care for them, but they are mostly outside animals. The dog has a very nice house of her own, and the cats like to sleep it the safe confines of the barn. They don’t come in the house often. One of the cats occasionally likes to come into my office and drink out of the toilet bowl in my bathroom. She was in here a day or two ago and I was reminded of her brother. He was a very large, very distinctive-looking creature. In fact the two of them have similar markings, but she is lower to the ground. He followed me everywhere when I was outside, and he had to come into my office every morning. We had bonded and were close. A person who hated me took advantage of an opportunity to kill my little friend. I did not see it but I know what happened, and it oddly corresponded to a dream I had some months before.

I felt great sadness when I realized my buddy wasn’t coming back. Even worse, perhaps, I didn’t have the closure of having his body and burying him. I had no choice but to forgive the person and place my loss in God’s hands.

As I looked at my cat walking around, checking the vents, just as her brother always did, I heard the verse I quoted above. “Don’t cling to Me.”

We focus on forms. Sometimes it is difficult to see past a form. Jack Ingram does a song called “Barbie Doll” wherein he warns a friend against a girl who is “real good-lookin’ but she’s got no heart at all” – rather like Barbie.

I am neither deist nor pantheist. God is in this world, speaking to us, working on us, manifesting His love and will, for the most part, by way of our fellow creatures, human and not so human. My gracious little friend was just such a manifestation, as are those that remain with me.

The risen Christ tells Mary not to cling to the form to which she had been so devoted. He would ascend to the Father, but not just His Father – your Father and your God, and mine. He had dwelt with them, but must depart. He tells them in John 14:17 that the Holy Spirit will not only be with them but in them, and through the Spirit, Jesus remains forever with us.

There are many beautiful things in the world. They are all temporal and passing away. No matter how much we love a cat, a dog, or a person, at some point, we will see them no more, or they will see us no more. Yet the love remains, just as the Spirit of Truth remains.

Despite all the ugliness and disappointment we face in life, there is no such thing as lost faith, lost hope or lost love. Don’t cling to a form. Rejoice in it as it fulfills its purpose. And cling only to God.

Wisdom's Vindication

A would-be disciple came to Nasrudin's hut on the mountain-side.

Knowing that every action of such an enlightened one is significant, the seeker watched the teacher closely. "Why do you blow on your hands?"

"To warm myself in the cold."

Later, Nasrudin poured bowls of hot soup for himself and the newcomer, and blew on his own. "Why are you doing that, Master?"

"To cool the soup."

Unable to trust a man who uses the same process to arrive at two different results -- hot and cold -- the disciple departed.

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For John did not come eating or drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon!’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.


Spiritual truth cannot be received by natural minds. The natural man may see the same things and hear the same things as the spiritually alive, but he does not understand its significance. Logic and reason are useless. The blind cannot be argued into sight. The dead cannot be reasoned to life.

It is not surprising, then, that the flatlander finds fault with the ways and words of those who live in other dimensions. Seeing only in the horizontal he cannot comprehend the motivations or the true being of those inhabiting the vertical. It is rather like my cat watching the neighbor drive by with a stock trailer full of cattle. She recognizes the phenomenon. She’s tracking movement, calculating distance and size, but there’s just a whole lot going on that she can never understand.

It’s not that I have a persecution complex as a Christian, but non-believers tend to judge Christians pretty harshly. I have often thought that George W. Bush’s troubles began when he said that Christ had the greatest influence on him because He had changed his life. The left-wing, mostly godless faction in this country pounced on the statement as indicating that Bush was stupid. Atheists assume that they are smarter than theists. That someone would profess a real Christianity is indicative of moronically low intelligence. Never mind that Bush attended Yale and has an MBA, or that he was fighter pilot, the requirements for which probably include an above average intelligence. He is a Christian so any stick may be used to beat him.

“Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

The older versions read more like:

“Yet wisdom is vindicated by her children.”

Jesus was challenging more than one group when He spoke. He was speaking to the godless, of which there were many in His day, to the activists who believed government was the answer, and to the religious who trusted in the institution of religion. Those who don’t believe in anything they can’t see have always been around. Today they would attribute the miracles of Christ to the power of suggestion. They might try to relate His love, compassion, and self-sacrifice to a mutated gene. I’m not sure how they dealt with it back then but they were just as skeptical and just as cynical. There were zealots even among the Disciples who wanted the Kingdom established through the restoration of Israel. They wanted a son of David to sit on a throne in Jerusalem and they looked to Jesus for that. They hated the Romans and wanted the gentile dogs expelled from their country. Then there were the traditionally religious who loved to look down their noses at sinners thinking they served God while hating their neighbors.

He called the skeptical to consider the changed lives that followed in His wake – the broken are made whole, the blind see, and the dead live. He called the subversives to consider the true nature of the Kingdom – it does not come with observation but it is within you. He called the superstitious to look beyond their dogmas – to see that God dwells not in buildings, that His ultimate temple is the human heart.

So, they crucified Him.

As He hung on the cross, they mocked Him. “If you are the Son of God, then come down from the cross now.”

He died in agony.

“Yet wisdom is vindicated by her children.”