Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Our Freedom is to Respond; to React is Bondage


“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).

One of the ways, as an immature Christian, that I let myself be “burdened again by a yoke of slavery” was, and sometimes still is, by being drawn into someone else’s drama on their level, or creating a drama of my own.

Then one day—I don’t remember how or when—I experienced God’s revelation of the problem: I was reacting instead of responding.

Reacting, as I came to understand, acts first and thinks, if at all, later. It causes or exacerbates disturbances.

Responding, on the other hand, thinks first; it ponders (notice the word “respond” contains the first four letters of ponder?). Responding prevents or dissipates conflict and disturbances.

When we react, we reveal, I believe, a lack of quietness of heart, whereas when we respond we remain steadfast in quietness of heart.

James 1:19b-22 says:

“But everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger; for the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God. Therefore, putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls. But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.”

The clincher is this: while standing in the thick of things—a temper tantrum (be it that of a child or adult); an hysterical accident victim; a spiteful co-worker, relative or teacher; or discovering that someone has gossiped about or misrepresented us or our cause—while standing on the receiving end of whatever it is, we not only receive the turmoil, we receive the “word implanted, which is able to save” us. 

And it is this Word, which we are wise to become familiar with, that in moments of crisis saves us from the sinful recoil which would prevent us from being doers of that very Word. 

“A gentle answer turns away wrath,
But a harsh word stirs up anger.” Proverbs 15:1

“A fool does not delight in understanding,
But only in revealing his own mind.” Proverbs 18:2

"He who guards his mouth and his tongue,
Guards his soul from troubles.” Proverbs 21:23

“When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable,
But he who restrains his lips is wise.” Proverbs 10:19

“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.” Philippians 2:3-4

And finally, lest we perceive that this calls for us to condescend to or enable another person’s sin, or to check our Christian discernment at the door, it does not.

“...we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the Spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”

Therefore, laying aside falsehood, SPEAK TRUTH EACH ONE of you WITH HIS NEIGHBOR, for we are members one of another. Be ANGRY, AND yet DO NOT SIN; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity...
Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” Ephesians 4:14-27; 29.

I included this long passage because our ability to react will continue to predominate, I firmly believe, if we do not heed, internalize and desire to live out all of what Ephesians prescribes.

Finally, in heeding this Word, the reward is that, not only do we stand firm in Christ in our response to the sin around us by lovingly not condoning it, we stand firm in Christ so that we, too, do not join in that sin through fleshly or worldly reaction.

In this, we do not grieve the Holy Spirit within us. The Ephesians verse continues:

“Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:30-32).

Our change in worldview since becoming saved by Christ does give us discernment; it allows for sound Christian judgment about morality, right and wrong, and priorities in serving.

Yet first Corinthians 10:12-13 provides a caution within our freedom:

“...let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall. No temptation has overtaken you but such is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.”

We withstand becoming enablers and doormats to sin when we do the following:

“Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted...For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself” (Galatians 6:1; 3).

Notice than in these two passages of Scripture, the only manner in which we are to focus on our self is in the very denial of self in lieu of Christ.

Yes, we are called to gently and patiently warn others of their trespass, in order to, what? restore them! Not to badger them, say “I told you so,” or to prove we are right and they are wrong.

Our purpose in conflict in which someone is caught in the trap of sin—sin which may be manifesting simply as an inability to keep calm in the moment due to emotions and immaturity—is to restore them, not to destroy them so that we can “win.”

Jesus asks, in Matthew 16:26,

“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

We must soberly accept the truth of all of God’s Word. Though He is “gracious and merciful; slow to anger, and great in lovingkindness” (Psalm 145:8),

and though his

“compassions never fail” and “are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22b-23a),

God also shows no partiality (Romans 2:11).

Therefore, we can be sure that God is impartial with the entirety of His Word, holding out all of it in equal importance, so that the hard truth is received and cherished by us as fully as the easier truth.

And this is a hard truth:

“But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment” (Matthew 12:36).

As harsh as this sounds (and I encourage us to, in personal study time, delve further into what the above actually entails), I read Matthew 12:36 in sorrow at how often I have been careless with my words, and how it hurt myself or others.

I am grateful I can repent, but I must acknowledge the sad consequence of my past actions—the main consequence being the regret that I did not have God’s Word written on my heart at the time I spoke rashly.

Hard teachings of God are there because He knows we live in a hard world. We are continuously threatened by the temptation to re-enter again the dead realm of darkness.

But the hard teachings of God only sound hard when we fail them. They are life and light to us when we obey.

The first command of Jesus is to love the Lord our God, and the second is like it, to love others as ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40; Luke 10:27).

There is a reason the command to love God comes first, and it is this:

“Jesus replied, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching” (John 14:23a).

Only when we first love Jesus will we be able to obey. Only when we first love Jesus will we obey.

Only when we first love Jesus will we be able to love others as our selves. And only when we first love Jesus will we love others as our selves.

And only then will we be able to respond, to obey Christ, in Christlikeness, and only then will we respond in Christlikeness.

We will be able to respond in love and no longer react in hardness of heart.

We will be able

But will we do it?




Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Eyes to See


The following quote is from a paper written by Susumu Uda, who at the time, 1974, was a professor in the Japan Christian Theological Seminary and pastor of the Kugayama Presbyterian Church:

"As man cannot, dare not, see himself as he is, he cannot and will not see God as he really is." 
Susumu Uda



"Then Job answered the LORD and said, 

"I know that You can do all things,
And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.
'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?'
Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know."
'Hear, now, and I will speak;
I will ask You, and You instruct me.'
"I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;
But now my eye sees You;
Therefore I retract,
And I repent in dust and ashes." Job 42:1-6


"When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that He was eating with the sinners and the tax collectors, they said to His disciples, 'Why is He eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners?' And hearing this, Jesus said to them, 'It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.'" Mark 2:16-17



Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Abide



I know that God will use me every single day in my steadfast abiding in Christ--enabled solely by Christ's abidance in me.

Every day God will use me as He wills, with me allowing, not obstructing.

Abiding in Christ is really the only thing, and any situation and any person that comes my way becomes just a part of my committed continuance to abide in Christ.

It doesn’t matter what the day brings, good or bad, scary or pleasant: I abide in Christ and He in me.

copyright Barb Harwood



"Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing." John 15:4-5




Sunday, January 21, 2018

Lee Strobel on Syncretism


Christian apologist Lee Strobel, in a 2007 interview:

     "Many people are picking and choosing what they want to believe about Jesus, discarding the more difficult teachings about sin, repentance or the doctrine of hell and instead merely focusing on the love of Jesus, the forgiveness of Jesus. They are coming up with their own versions of Jesus that may not bear any resemblance to the real Jesus. It's called syncretism--the piecing together of various beliefs, many of them New Age beliefs, and creating their own 'stew' of beliefs about God and Jesus Christ.

     The problem with that is that it's really irrelevant what you or I think about Jesus. I am free to believe that Jesus was a magician who used ancient incantations from Egyptian rites and was married to Mary Magdalene and had a family and never rose from the dead and who taught that we're really gods, not sinners who need forgiveness. But that does not mean my beliefs are true. The question is, who is Jesus? Our role ought to be to discover what the evidence tells us about His identity and His teachings and His claims, not to come up with our own concoction of who we wish He were."
Lee Strobel


Friday, January 19, 2018

Attaining the Victory


Have you ever woken up and, during that day—and ensuing days—the realization of a grand spiritual victory sinks in and becomes apparent in actions and responses?

The uniqueness and novelty of this overarching victory is that it is not just in quiet time with God that we feel it; it is that in the daily ins and outs of life we know it, and now live it, when we were incapable before.

I can only describe it as a major breakthrough among smaller breakthroughs that have accompanied the Christian life.

We may now hear our spouse say, in moments that used to challenge and stress us, “Wow, that isn’t how I expected you to respond. You're handling this so well!”

We may greet God in our mornings empty of an anxious mind, finding that ten minutes have gone by and we have yet to bring anything at all to Him in prayer! 

And then, when we do commence praying, it is not for ourselves or what once bothered us, but for others and their burdens.

Although we have long ago ceased to recognize the person we were before we became born again in Christ, even now we begin to not recognize the person we were even last week!

It is truly as if the thing (the gnarly entwined knot of variables) we were praying for to be excised from our inner being for the last 15 years has indeed come about—strikingly so yet almost imperceptibly—as if God, progressively unleashing His answer in bits, has brought all those bits to culmination and has now added the last jot to His answer, releasing us to victory in the spiritual battle He has been waging within us.

In my Christian walk, certainly there have been individual and specific answers to individual and specific prayers. They may or may not have been related to the larger frontlines in which I was positioned: they may have been campaigns within the larger war, or stand-alones, in and of themselves.

But in the big picture, when the thing, the uniquely unrelenting and widely encompassing downfall of each individual spiritual life—Paul’s “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”—when this thing, this elementally frustrating thing that has polluted and tormented us, is at last vanquished via the power and investment of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in our lives, it must and can only be known to our hearts and minds as unwavering and steadfast Victory!

Once we taste it, we shall wonder why it ever took so long in coming.

Each of us knows what our personal logjam to this victory is.

And we must understand it will be busted through—shattered beyond all recognition so as to never block our Christian life again—only by our demanding it in the power and Spirit of Christ working for and in us. 

It requires our being reliant upon the tools of spiritual battle He willingly provides for our maturity in overcoming.

Desire this Victory. Do not settle for less. No matter the time it takes. Persevere in His Spirit.

“Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.” 1 Peter 4:12-13

This victory in Christ is His glory revealed on earth.


Copyright Barb Harwood



"Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!" Romans 7:25a





Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Let Us Not Set Aside the Grace of God


“For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God...” Galatians 2:19-21a

I read Galatians 2 in its entirety this morning, but when I read, “I do not set aside the grace of God,” I paused and put my Bible down.

How often I have set that grace aside. Even after spending quiet time with God, in a few hours I can find myself setting aside His grace.

And this morning, understanding His grace as dying to the law; living for God; being crucified with Christ so that I no longer live; and Christ Himself living in me so that now the life I live is by faith in the Son of God, who loves me and gave himself for me....

I think I may have not understood His grace, and that is why I could so easily set it aside.

A bit further in Galatians, we find this:

“So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16).

I think grace, for me, was still my attempt to live out the Spirit of Christ, not connecting it to Paul’s clear teaching of what grace actually is; the definition we find in Galatians 2:19-20.

Although I knew I have the Spirit and ought to listen to it, I believe the reason I could so often set His grace aside is because I was only half way there in comprehension.

I have not, in total confidence and commitment, remembered daily the life of Christ in me and the corollary of death to myself.

And although grace must be lived out in Christ through a material body of skin, brain, bones and muscle, which obviously still lives with every breath and heartbeat, a regenerated spirit within us also lives.

The previous spirit--the unregenerate one--the “I” before Christ, no longer exists. It died under the blood of Christ; a death we agreed to in our repentance to Christ (which means committing to Christ to turn away from that self). 

Our former self is dead.

It is when we stubbornly or carelessly allow the habit of the former self to tiptoe back in to tempt the redeemed self into returning to the actions and thought-life of its old self that we set the grace spelled out in Galatians 2:19-20 aside.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:7-9).

We do not live out His grace by our attempt to control or tap into the Holy Spirit in us, as if we can reach in and help our self to as much or as little grace as we think the situation calls for.

Nor do we abide in His grace by the mere knowledge of the Holy Spirit in us, as if we could somehow succeed by telling our self, “I should be of grace in this moment because the Holy Spirit lives in me.”

We live out grace in that “we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Corinthians 10-11).

We die. That is how we live out grace.

We do not trust or put faith in our knowledge of the Holy Spirit, but trust and have faith in the Spirit Himself.

We rejoice in our death and continual dying and go forth in the daily new birth that is real and tangible.

“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1-2).

Notice our role here is to “lay aside,” not grace, but “every encumbrance and sin.”

And note how that “sin” is described as something that happens “easily.”

In other words, if we wonder why we are setting aside God’s grace, perhaps it is because we are not setting aside the sin that comes so easily!

Set aside the sin and God’s grace prevails!

Also notice our other role is to endure by “fixing our eyes on Jesus” who is “the author and perfector of faith.” We cannot muster up our own faith that in Christ we can be a person of grace. Our faith must reside in and derive from Christ Himself.

And finally, Hebrews 12:2 brings us full circle to where we began with the Galatians passage. Our going forth in God’s grace is grounded in—not to be severed from—what Jesus accomplished, in love for us and “for the joy set before Him,” on the cross.

It is in that love and joy—not just the remembrance of it but the actuality of it—that grace is not to be set aside.


Copyright Barb Harwood