Sunflowers are really cool: flowers made with a message. I passed fields and fields of them in Transylvania; several million I’d bet if you could tally them up. And invariably they had their faces full open to the sun. Morning pose: bowed to the east. Noontime posture: erect and looking up. Evening position: nodding to the west. It’s a great parable for me right now.

I’m back in Sarajevo and feeling grateful and rested, but troubled. Been seeing some things, and reading up on other worrisome trends in the church: teachers, healers, “prophets”, “miracle workers”… many of them quite quirky. It weirds me out completely, (and embarrasses me for unbelievers), to watch some of the antics on YouTube that we so quickly attribute to the Holy Spirit.

For several days now I’ve been asking God to sort out some of this stuff for me. Been reading lots of scripture about discernment, false teachers, sound doctrine, and deceptive spirits. It just feels like we’re blithely embracing just about any happy-clappy thing that comes down spiritual pipeline these days. A friend reminded me this morning: “You just gotta keep your eyes focused on the simplicity of Christ”, (like those sunflowers seem to do). When Jesus walks onto the scene, whether in the face of a stranger, in a revival meeting, or at the end of the age, I want to be looking in the right direction and recognize the genuine lover of my soul. Don’t wanna fall for some cheap counterfeit.

Romanians can steal your heart. They tend to be small, passionate, and full of fun. In this part of the world they’re far and away the most responsive to the gospel and the most eager to answer the call to missions. I expect this may be God’s way of honoring the thousands of Romanian martyrs who died under fifty years of Communism

Yesterday when I spoke on the Kingdom I had to keep stopping to catch my composure. Something about the way the Holy Spirit was at work and the beautiful openness of these students kept getting caught in my throat. I love it when God does that, but It’s really very hard to teach when you’re fighting back tears. The great joy of this week has been watching the young people come alive to the idea of God’s Kingdom.

Next week we’ll do it all over again in Macedonia.

The town Square in Medias, Romania.

The Medias Discipleship Training School

Spending a week at home, I’m learning a few things about the hidden aspects of this battlefield we find ourselves in. For as far back as I can remember my tired little hometown in Western Maryland has been a quaint community where neighbors cared for each other and local excitement was mostly confined to an occasional house fire or George’s Creek overflowing its rocky banks. Overall it’s a pretty safe place to raise a family.

But Alleghany county is also a region of quiet hopelessness. Few people in these parts embrace change, dream big, or think creatively. Welfare rolls are high, industry is sluggish, and properties sink into shabby disrepair.

I believe it has to do with hidden forces at work opposing the Kingdom at every turn. “…though we’re human, we don’t wage war with human plans and methods. We use God’s mighty weapons, not mere human weapons to break down the Devil’s strongholds.” (2 Cor. 10:3-4) Evidently in a Biblical world there are spiritual forces of passivity, hopelessness, and poverty overshadowing this community.

God’s Kingdom is spiritual / natural, and by far the easier part to understand is the natural: “Feed the hungry, stand up for justice, and love your neighbor in practical ways.” But the hidden part of the battle consists in dark, spiritual strongholds that incessantly whisper, “The hungry need to look out after themselves, standing up for justice will just get you knocked down, and those neighbors are so cantankerous that no one could love them!”

Kingdom people have got to learn to see the whole picture, to embrace both the practical as well as the spiritual. Hard work, wisdom, and even money have limits that only prayer can break. So here at home, as in every place I go, I’m asking for eyes to see what’s really happening behind the scenes.

Just read this morning, quite randomly, that Bach stamped his feet when he played.  That makes me feel happy.  I do the same thing, and take a lot of grief about it.  He also wrote at the top of every one of his compositions, “Soli Deo gloria“, “For God’s glory alone.”  Yay!!  

I’m all in a panic this morning.  Tonight Trinity will be having a book discussion of “The Shack”, (by William Young), and it looks like I’ll be doing a fair amount of the facilitating. So naturally I’m doing my homework and trying to bone-up the book’s messages and themes.  GOODNESS, there’s so much criticism out there!  So just to zero out the baggage for myself and my friends who find themselves here: I believe in the Christ of the Bible, of Isaiah, of the gospels, the epistles, the Nicean, and the Apostle’s Creed, and I believe there is salvation in no other name.  I also believe God’s word, (the Bible), is inspired and contains the revelation of God’s heart and his plan for the human race.

My conviction is that apart from the Bible, there is probably no other book on the face of the planet that is 100% pure truth.  Therefore we need to always read prayerfully and discerningly, spitting out the bones and swallowing the meat.  Growing in Truth is an incremental process, and these people on the Internet who pride themselves with having a ministry of sorting out heresy make me very nervous.  I, for one, am grateful that the love of Christ, (along with His blood), covers me while I work through all the foolish and wrongheaded things I believe.   I also like to extend to others the benefit of a doubt.  Unless a person is preaching some obviously twisted version of Christ, I think he deserves the courtesy of not being labeled a heretic.

The Shack is NOT a perfect book.  Yet I believe it contains some stunning insight into humanity, God’s love for the human race, and the Trinity itself/Himself.  (Don’t know which is proper since the Godhead doesn’t fit into the laws of grammar).

I’ll restate what I told my class on Wednesday night:  YOU are responsible to take anything I teach, write or say, (along with every book I recommend), and to hold it up to the light of Scripture and the scrutiny of the Holy Spirit.  The very last thing I ever want to do is to lead someone away from the TRUTH. 

Whew!  THANKS for letting me get that off my chest.  Now… back to The Shack.   

“… every student well-trained in God’s kingdom is like the owner of a general store who can put his hands on anything you need, old or new, exactly when you need it.”  (Matt. 13:52 Peterson).   The disciple of the kingdom commands the entire world and perceives the holiness of everything from morning solitude to, (as my friend, Tommy points out) “aisle seven at the supermarket.”  

I’ve been thinking of it like an extra dimension, as if I spent my first 45 years squished between the pages of an encyclopedia in the company of pressed flowers, photographs, circles, squares, and printed words – until the kingdom popped me right over into the third dimension.  And now it’s a world of objects and balls, boxes, bodies, and botanical gardens.  No wonder Jesus made such an issue of having “eyes to see” and “ears to hear.”  Unless a man or woman encounters the living Christ, it’s not merely difficult, but impossible to see the kingdom.”  (John 3:3)  A natural man can no more experience the Kingdom than a photograph of a man could enjoy a meal.

 So my prayer today is, “Father, give me eyes to see, and ears to perceive your Kingdom.  I was made for more than this stuffy, flat world.    

These political campaigns are dragging me down. In my lifetime I’ve never felt so discouraged about the direction of America or its leaders on the horizon. For me it’s a clear wake up call. As long as the US is hopeful and robust it’s a huge temptation to rest in her shade and let kingdom matters trail along behind. (Some of us, during the “good” times even fall into the scarier deception of thinking America is synonymous with the kingdom of God, though we’d hardly admit it.)

Anyway… it’s a good reminder for us to put our trust in the real Kingdom, which is unshakable, and which has nothing to do with silly elections, big bucks, and empty campaign promises. That kingdom will eventually fill the earth with justice, mercy, and the beauty of God as surely as the waters cover the sea. (Hab. 2:14