The Kingdom

Discovering our true personality

5 Comments

C.S. Lewis says we never actually receive our true personality until we receive Christ.

“There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerers have been; how gloriously different are the saints.” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

In a novel or a play, non-entities are brought into being when the Author introduces them into the story.  Yet even after he walks onto the stage he remains of no consequence to the story until he is assigned with personality, motives, desires, and purpose.  Apart from accepting the Author’s intention for us we will wander about the stage, bumping into props and generally getting in the way of the story in progress.

As I see it, there are at least three things necessary in the process of becoming our true selves: The first is a voluntary surrender to the wisdom and will of the Author. Characters cannot invent themselves! This is what Lucifer tried to do. With a life borrowed from the Creator, he set about trying to destroy the very drama God was writing. (Thankfully, in the wisdom and sovereignty of the Author, the story went through a massive re-write to undo this tragic turn).

The second necessity is a growing awareness of the Author’s good intentions not only towards my character, but towards everyone on the stage. Apart from trusting His kind heart none will have the courage to face the twists and subtleties of the story as it unfolds in our lives. We’re all faced with daily challenges, and each challenge must be met with a confidence that the Author knows what he’s doing, and where he is going.

And finally, we must have an understanding of the story our Author is writing: it’s a kingdom tale that reveals his intention to restore all that has been lost by the fall. Such an understanding gives us the context to move forward with joyful confidence. God’s story will end only when he can pen the closing words, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Until that moment, the story isn’t finished.

Grace, The Love of God

Returning to grace

14 Comments

Freezing temperatures here in Maryland have nudged me into editing my old journals. With nearly forty year’s worth of writing, I’m hoping the weather breaks before I get through the whole lot of them.

Two streams have clearly marked off my days: law and grace. Or more accurately, there’s a stream, and a catchment pond of do-it-yourself religion, law-keeping, and failed attempts at being a better Christian.  Paul refers to the catchment pond as a “veil over the hearts of the people. “Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But the moment anyone returns to the Lord, the veil is gone.” (2 Corinthians 3:15-16)

Forty years distilled into dead religion or life and freedom, and I’m betting I’m not alone in this.  Some of you – or maybe many of you – might even feel today like there’s a veil over your heart.  God seems distant, disengaged or disappointed with you.  I believe this can only mean one thing: we have returned to the law.

The stream of grace is the Spirit himself flooding our hearts with hope, encouragement, and a clear conscience towards God.  It’s unleashed not by religious activity, but by simple faith in the risen Christ.  So come with me, and let’s return to the God of grace, who offers all of Himself to unworthy sons and daughters who have nothing to give in return.  Lets believe again that Jesus has taken every possible obstacle out of the way, (especially sin and the law), and extended His love to us freely and without merit.

“So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord – who is the Spirit – makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

The Kingdom

Everything is ours

10 Comments

“…we are receiving a Kingdom that is unshakable…”
-Hebrews 12:28

Years ago the Holy Spirit spoke to me as I drove down the Interstate, “Son… if your world became smaller when you came to me, then you didn’t get the Kingdom, you only got religion.”   It was a liberating word for my skinny-hearted soul, and a foundational truth of the Kingdom.

I wasn’t even dry from my spiritual birth before religion began drawing boundaries around my world and walling things out:  “Hollywood is dangerous.” “Don’t hang out with unbelievers!”  “Secular music is a poison, and entertainment is a waste of time.”  “Draw the curtains close on the world, and stay focused on the church.”  Living for Jesus became more of an exercise in avoiding danger than a walk with my Father in the cool of the day.

IMG_2177It took years of empty avoidance and the clear voice of the Spirit to reintroduce me to the world as a gift from above, from the Father of lights…  “The heavens are the heavens of the LORD, But the earth He has given to the sons of men.” (Psalm 115:16)  Beauty is His.  And Truth. Laughter, joy, the great stories of literature and film, and the wonders of friendship with believers and unbelievers alike – all these things belong to the the Father and He shares them freely with His own.  We are heirs of a vast and glorious Kingdom !

“Now if we are children, then we are heirs–heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” (Romans 8:17)  Did you catch that?  “If we share in His suffering,” – in his agony over a lost and estranged world – then we share as well in the glory of His redeemed world.  When we, with Jesus can point and declare, “This belongs to God!  And this,  and this as well!”. . . then the world will be righted and “the King will say… ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world.”  (Matthew 25:34)

News & Stories, The Kingdom

A plan and a people

6 Comments

We are at the same time living in a nation of weak, absent leadership with “no strategy” for moving forward in the face of evil, and in the world of an unshakable King whose strategy has been abandoned by His own people.  One is a people without a plan, and the other is a plan without people.

I need a daily debrief from the Spirit just to keep from drowning in the hopelessness of the news.  It’s not just Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola and the Islamic State, but also the passivity and sweeping ignorance of the church towards the Kingdom that sends my heart into despair.  Last night I listened to Somalian-American leaders in Milwaukee describe how young fatherless boys are being drawn into radical Islam because they are looking for a place to belong and a story to live.  Great news!  Our young are being drawn into an ideology that promotes beheading people in the name of a new world.

Have we no better plan?  No greater drama to offer?  Is it not a tragedy that America’s young people must choose between the “grand cause” of Jihad, the “grand cause” of Marxism, or a fatalistic Christianity biting its fingernails in hopes that Jesus will soon rescue us from this mess?    Where is OUR Story?  Do we tell it in our Sunday gatherings?  If those young Somalis wandered into our meetings, would they walk out with hope burning in their hearts, or with a conclusion that the American Church is pathetically disengaged and irrelevant to the crises of the age?

Now is the hour.  This is the divine moment for the church shout, “WAIT!  There is another way!  There IS a better story, a beautiful, grand possibility that answers all the churning needs of your heart, and heals the broken world besides.”  It’s both a plan and a people.

The Kingdom

Wings of the Kingdom

7 Comments

Airplanes and birds need two wings to fly, and so does the Kingdom. The greatest tragedy of the modern church is that we have clipped one wing or the other from the Gospel and sabotaged the flight of it’s message.  The twin wings of the true Gospel are Personal Salvation and a Changed World.

Gospel Bird

Today’s evangelicals champion the wing of personal conversion.  “Come to Jesus and receive forgiveness and eternal life.”  This glad and glorious message is as true today as the day Jesus told Nicodemus, “Unless a man is born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”   The wing of personal salvation will lift us into the heavens and circle us about in thermals of joy.  Though it is a strong medicine for the soul, evangelicalism often goes silent in the face of poverty, injustice, hope for a better world or strategies for transforming cities.  The born-again crowd mostly expects darkness to grow until Jesus intervenes, nukes the world, and spirits us off to heaven.

Hope for the future rests mostly on the shoulders of mainline liberals who focus like lasers on injustice, environment, and reforming society.  Never mind that a conversion-less gospel is no gospel at all, and doomed from the start.  It too is a one-winged plane so cumbersome it cannot even lift off the ground.

The gospel of the Kingdom is a bird that soars on both wings.  Born anew in the life of the Spirit, it engages the world with power, hope, and transformation.  It’s time the church returned to the full gospel that pulls evangelicalism and liberalism together again.    The good news of the Kingdom begins in the heart and spills out into every crevice of a needy world.

 

Worldview & Truth

Born-again hearts and Babylonian brains

9 Comments

I first heard Darrow Miller say it in a 1997 Worldview Seminar that changed my life: “Many Christians today have born-again hearts but Babylonian brains.”  That’s not a crack on the intelligence of anybody, but rather a sad commentary on the condition of the church.  We’ve given our hearts to Jesus and our heads to universities, politics and pop culture.  

Much of it happened during the twentieth century when our enthusiasm for Heaven began to eclipse our vision of the Kingdom.  Faith divorced reason, and the children went up for custody.  Genteel Heart went to Jesus, where the church tickled her emotions, coddled her feelings, and told her magical stories of Heaven.  But the troubled sibling – Mind – got fostered out to whoever would do the hard work of challenging opinions, digging for truth, and searching out answers.

Now the world is in free fall, and few of us have done our homework.  We can tell you whatever you want to know about sin, heaven and the cross.  But when questions arise about government, poverty, economics, education and such, we divert our eyes like school children from a teacher’s gaze.  What do we know about these things?  Does God even have opinions about that?  Gosh… I wish I’d done my assignment.

The truth is, the church has been given a road map and a commission to declare the Way home to a lost world.  “You are the light of the world.”  (Matthew 5:14)  Instead we’re like last night’s TV drama, where the Native American guide abandoned the greenhorn explorers in the Everglades without food and water among the alligators and wildcats. We’ve done as much, leaving godless academics, corrupted politicians, failed Marxists, and Comedy Central entertainers to lead the way.

Today I have an assignment, if you’ll accept the challenge:  Take a Bible in one hand, a pen in the other, and with the help of the Spirit begin formulating what you believe about:  People, Government, Hope, Calling, Poverty, Education, and any other thing God brings to mind.

Worldview & Truth

Finding my voice

15 Comments

VoiceIn case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been pretty silent both here and on Facebook for several months now.  But I think I’ve found my voice again.  I realized today that it’s an old tactic of the enemy to silence the people of God.  They crucified Jesus, beat Paul, imprisoned Peter, and sent the early Believers to the lions all because of the inconvenient and unacceptable things they had to say. And then there’s me. Like the weenie-warriors in Saul’s army it took only a few taunts from a perceived Goliath to intimidate me into retreat.

The irony first hit me when I was in Romania and Lebanon last month.  I suddenly felt a greater release to speak freely in these two former Soviet and Middle Eastern countries than I do here at home.  It was the beginning of a wake-up call.  Freedom is a spiritual thing that lies at the heart of the Trinity, and it’s a defining characteristic of the Kingdom.  While Jesus hushed his enemies with a simple word of Truth, Satan employs threats, fear and brute force to silence those who oppose him.  The suppressors of free speech are enemies to God.

One of my commitments at the beginning of this year was to renounce the false god of Political Correctness.  PC is an idol that demands absolute obedience.  It tolerates no other God, shuts down opposing voices, and punishes it’s defectors with false charges, lost employment, scorn and social stigma.  Political correctness wars against the Kingdom of God by opposing truth.

Today I’m reclaiming my voice.  I will not be ugly or judgmental, but neither will I be bullied into silence.  “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.” – Jacques Barzun

The Kingdom

The Kingdom or chaos

6 Comments

There are some “things” that are not things at all. Darkness is not some “thing,” but rather the absence of light. It’s the same with cold, (the absence of heat), hunger (the absence of food), ignorance (the absence of knowledge), and chaos (the absence of order). In the strictest sense, you can’t honestly speak of these concepts as “things” because they are each understood only by removing something which actually exists, (light, heat, food, knowledge, and order).

As far as I’m concerned, this fully answers the question of why God “created” evil. He did no such thing. God created what exists, not what doesn’t! Every thing he created was good, including Lucifer and free choice. But when Lucifer and his angels freely turned away from God and led creation into the same rebellion, humanity divorced itself from the Good, and chose to live with our backs to God, complaining with darkened minds that He had no business creating evil in the first place. We are like runaways whining about the distress of being orphans!

E. Stanley Jones points out that, “It’s either the Kingdom or Chaos.” To reject the Kingdom is to embrace disorder and confusion. Like it or not, the Creator has a meticulous plan for the way His universe will operate: Matter obeys certain laws, electricity honors other rules, as do biology, economics, agriculture, and the human heart. We marvel at natural laws and honor the way they work in the real world, yet insist on making up our own way when it comes to life and human endeavor.

The Messiah says, “There is a way home; a way to put this Humpty-Dumpty world together again.” And then He steps into Human flesh and declares, “I am It! I AM the way! I am what man was always intended to be. Follow me and lets turn this mess around again.” The world has lost it’s way. Our failure to choose the Way is a choice to remain lost. It’s a choice between something or “no-thing”, the Kingdom or chaos. For me, that’s a no-brainer.

Grace

Preaching against sin

13 Comments

We Christians have earned quite a reputation for making a front-and-center issue out of sin. (Let me be clear before I go further: Sin IS a serious issue. Not only does it kill and destroy, but it cost Jesus his life to free us from it’s poison).

But isn’t it curious that the Jesus of the Gospels seemed to preach so little against sin? (In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus never mentions the word “sin” even once!*) He never seemed to think it was necessary to lecture Zaccheaus about dishonesty, to confront the sinful woman about her prostitution, nor to have the good Father lecture the prodigal about his selfishness and debauchery. Instead Jesus went about inviting people into relationship, and seemingly forgiving them before they asked. “Come unto me, you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” “Believe in me, and you will never thirst again.”

Why do we assume that preaching the gospel means hammering on sin? Indeed, is “preaching against sin” even necessary to proclaim the good news? I’m convinced our neighbors already know about their sins. They don’t need us to point out their lies, their affairs, their selfishness and addictions. Most honest people are already painfully aware of their offenses towards God. (The exception seems to be religious people, who were the ones Jesus most often addressed about the subject). What our neighbors DON’T know is the love of a Savior who accepts them right where they are, the delight of being alive and adopted into God’s family, and the hope of a Kingdom that is making all things new.

It may take awhile to rebuild our reputation, but I believe it’s past time we hang up our fixation with sin and begin offering grace to the world.

* Since posting this, one friend pointed out that it depends on the translation. I was using the New American Standard Version at the time of writing.

The Kingdom

Saint Francis and Cesar Millan

7 Comments

I just came in from holding puppies at the pet shop.  It’s a sure-fire elixir for my heart when world-weariness demands a quick pick-me-up.  And just between you and me, when there’s no pet store handy I sometimes fall into looking at puppies online or watching reruns of “The Dog Whisperer” on Netflicks.   Old friends marvel at this change that’s come over me after years of a skinny-hearted religion that had no serious room for animals.

Who doesn’t delight in the stories of Saint Francis preaching to birds, or leading the village’s terrorizing wolf into repentance?  As certainly as the human heart longs for beauty and redemption, it dreams of a garden where man and beast live together in loving trust and harmony.  Eons before National Geographic turned it into a TV series the Dog Whisperer was scripted into our hearts by a loving Father.  “So the Lord God formed from the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would call them and the man chose a name for each one.” (Genesis 2:19).  Our good Father gave pets to Adam and invited his Son to name them.  “Fill the earth and govern it”. (That’s kingdom language.)  “Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” (Genesis 1:28).   We were created to love the animal world, to train our furry friends, and to bring them into their full potential.

Before Cesar Millan, (the “Dog Whisperer”),  was Saint Francis;  Before Francis was Adam;  And before Adam was Yahweh dreaming of a Kingdom, and writing His dream in our hearts.  Those little fellows at the rescue shelter?  They’re anticipating the Kingdom, too!

Hopeful glimpses of the Kingdom of God