What do you think about when you are hurt?

But Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.”

                                                                              Luke 23: 28 - 29

Jesus has been up all night through five different trials, has been deserted by his closest friends, and subjected to horrific abuse and torture. And when he hears the women of Jerusalem, his heart is touched by their cries. He sees what is happening to him and what is going to happen to the people of Jerusalem through the lenses of the Old Testament prophesy and his compassion is for these women.

He is not thinking about his rights.
He is not concerned about the injustices that he is suffering.
He is not focused on the wickedness of his enemies.
His mind is filled with the plight of those who will be there in 70 A.D. when the Romans will completely destroy Jerusalem after one of the worst historical sieges that has ever occurred.

When I think of how incensed I can become when I am the victim of someone's wrongdoing or thoughtlessness and how the sense of injustice "against me" can completely fill my mind and then think of Jesus in this passage, I am humbled. He doesn't just teach us God's way, he shows us.

Who are you listening to?

But they kept urgently demanding with loud shouts that he should be crucified; and their voices prevailed. 
                                                                       Luke 23: 23

"The sqeaky wheel gets the grease."

Somehow it seems way too trivial to think of Jesus's death coming as the result of "the squeaky-wheel-gets-the grease" adage coming true. It trivializes something very profound and dangerous. Pilate listens to the crowd and makes the worst mistake of his life.

Talking with a friend the other day who brought up something that I saw happen a lot
in my work at Dallas Christian School. Bosses seemed to make their choices based
on who had caught their ear at the time. Instead of listening to everyone to see all the
different perspectives and then acting out of principle and consideration of what is
good and right for all, their decisions seemed to be determined by who had just caught
their ear. If a person(s) came to them with a lot of passion and a lot of clout, the boss
would make his decision accordingly. Just like Pilate.

So who do you listen to?

Find a time and a place in your life where you listen very carefully to the One who you should listen to.

The One who never will lead you wrong.
Who always advises in love.
Who is wise above all.
Who you want to be like,
No matter who is yelling at you and all around you,
Make your decisions based on His voice.
Turn off the other clamor.
It is just noise.

It is so important who you are listening to.

When everyone is against you

I am slowly reading through the book of Luke. This morning I read 23: 6 - 12. The last verse might seem a little strange, an afterthought - after saying that "even Herod and his soldiers treated Jesus with contempt," why did Luke bring up that "on this day Pilate and Herod became friends?"

Luke brings it up, I think, because it is a fulfillment of prophecy, Ps. 2:

The kings of the earth set themselves,
   and the rulers take counsel together,
   against the Lord and his anointed

As had been prophesied, all the relevant earthly authorities, Jew and Gentile, were united in their attack against Jesus, God's Messiah.

The Love of God: A fundamental orientation toward life

Jesus tells us that the most important command is to love God with everything that we have. This is a command that first came from Moses when he was relaying the words of God to the Hebrew people in the wilderness. 

Think about it: as a people, the Hebrews had been languishing in Egypt for 400 years. They had been rescued by their God but soon would be fighting for their lives in the wilderness and the "promised land." As a people, they would know famine, defeat, exile, and every kind of evil as well as harvest, victory, conquest and joy, and in the middle of it all, they are being told that the most important thing that they can do is to love God with everything that they are.

We are supposed to love our Creator. We look at the world and our own lives, and our fundamental position should be that we are in love with the One who made it all. This orientation of our lives to the love of the God who makes and control all that we can see and all that we don't see has profound consequences. It puts us in a position of constant wonder and gratitude.

I know that love is expressed in our obedience. The one who obeys God is the One who loves him. That is a fundamental truth that must not be ignored. However, I think that I can forget to love God "with all my heart, soul, mind and strength." To understand this, read the psalms with their passionate embrace of God, and then consider all the great men of God who loved their Creator passionately. They would consider who he is and what he has done and the way that he takes care of man and beast, countries and creation. The ones we love, we think about; we consider their good qualities, we wonder at their goodness and beauty. This is part of our love for God. The time we spend loving God in this way will reorient our lives.  Who knows? Our anxieties and struggles might begin to look differently in the light of love. In fact, they might - at least for a little while - seem to disappear altogether.

Learning to Rule

 ‘Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.’ 
                                                                                                         Luke 22: 31 - 32

It helps me to have this example of Jesus' prayer. Here Jesus says that he has prayed for Peter's faith not to fail and that once he has "been sifted" by Satan, that he would "turn back" and strengthen his brothers. Peter has free will, but Jesus prays that God will strengthen his faith. This helps me to know that it is a good thing to pray for what is going on in the hearts of those we love. It reveals a spiritual truth: God interacts with us as we focus our attention on the good of others. At our request, he will find a way to strengthen another's faith.

I don't think that praying for another's spiritual condition means that the person whom we pray for does not have free will. I do think it means that our wills are not always adequate to fight against Satan's attacks. Peter, like me, is weak. He loves the Lord, but in many ways he is not strong. He needs God's strength to help his faith when he is at his weakest, as he will be when he realizes the extent of his failure. He agrees with God's purposes for him, but he needs God to strengthen his faith when he is afraid or after he has failed.

So we pray for others, knowing that God finds ways to interact with our hearts to sustain us in our best hopes and desires. Praying like this is one of the ways that we extend the kingdom, encouraging God's reign in others as well as in ourselves. We are learning what it means to take care of what has been entrusted to us within his kingdom. Praying for others' faith - it is one of the major ways available to us to learn God's ways and "to rule."

Haven't you prayed for people to come to the Lord, or to come back to the Lord or to have their faith strengthened during difficult times and seen it happen? This is a great blessing because not only are their hearts being strengthened, but you are being made stronger as well. When you are praying for them, you are wanting what God wants, learning to see what he sees, and participating in God's life and work.

Basing My Life on Reality: Or what am I doing here, really? Part 2

The lyrics from "Beautiful One" expresses exactly what I felt about 40 years ago in the summer of 1972 when I begin to understand more deeply who God is and how he felt about me:

You opened my eyes to your wonders of anew
You captured my heart with this love
‘Cause nothing on earth is as beautiful as You

This personal feeling informed my understanding for my life and work for years and still does. He loves the world and that world includes me. He captured my heart; I find him incredibly beautiful; he fills me with wonder. I feel passionate about sharing the good that I am finding in him. While this understanding of my purpose is good and biblical, I have been learning that it needs to be filled out with a larger understanding of God's purposes for us.

God's word insists that we human beings have "a high calling;" we are made for greatness. We are made in God's image, and from the beginning we were called to have dominion, to rule over, creation. We are the ones who reflect God in his creation, who do his work in taking care of all that we see. Obviously we have made a mess of it: we bear God's image, yet we kill each other and exploit creation for our own good instead of caring for it as treasure created by God.

But the good news is that God never gave up on us, sending his son Jesus as his own rescue project for us and for the world that he created. In one fell swoop, in Jesus, God forgave us our sin, our complete disregard of his purposes and our wickedness toward each other, and put Jesus on the throne as the earth's new ruler. Ascending to heaven, Jesus was raised to the right hand of God in order to rule.

As John says in Rev. 1:5, Jesus is now the ruler of all the kings of the earth (and consider the implication that John says this at a time when those kings were often torturing and killing disciples of Jesus all around the world). At the present time in Rev. 5 John says that this new reign of Jesus and our place in it is expressed in song before God's throne in these words:

You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed people for God, saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on the earth (9 - 10).

This is the reality. In a world where so much seems out of whack with God's purposes, we live in the age in which Jesus presently reigns and everything is subject to him, although - as the Hebrew writer says in chapter 2 - we do not see everything in subjection to him - yet. But it will happen. Paul says in 1 Co. 15: 25 - 28 that the process is ongoing, that ultimately Jesus will put all enemies under his feet, the last enemy being Death.

All of this is according to God's purposes. God worked through Jesus to rescue man and creation. God had Jesus become King through suffering and dying on the cross. Then, God raised him from the dead. By God's plan, Jesus reigns now - even though we may question that rule because we see so much evil and so many things that don't make sense to us.

But just like God worked through Jesus to initiate his rescue of the world, Jesus now executes his reign through us. When Jesus ascended to God's throne to rule, he released his Spirit and gave it to us so that we could be empowered to carry out his rule.

So where does that put us? We are Jesus' agents, given his Spirit and made part of his Body, through whom Jesus does what he does to effect God's will on earth as it is done in heaven. We are Kings and Queens who are learning to do what Adam and Eve were designed to do, to take care of God's creation, to reflect God's rule throughout his kingdom on earth.

Normally, I have thought of God's reign in very personal terms, meaning I think of his reign in me and my need to have him help me overcome sin in my life. And that is an important concern and can't be neglected. But I want us to think about our call to reign, to extend Christ's kingdom here on earth.

God has given us a unique ministry for us to fulfill. As Dallas Willard points out in The Divine Conspiracy, each of us has a kingdom where we reign. It is the kingdom of our lives, composed of the things and situations that we directly influence. There are a lot of things that we may feel we have no control of and little impact on, but there are dominions that we rule or, at the least, impact with authority. And in the kingdom that God has given us to rule, we ask that God's will be done as it is done in heaven.

One of the realms that we have is in the workplace. For me, as a teacher, my realm includes my classes and students. God's call for me goes beyond "being a good example." Of course, I am called to be a good example. But I am called to more than that: I am called to look carefully at my students, what I am teaching, what my goals are and pray, "God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

This is an entirely different reality than what I tend to live by. The reality that I think that God wants me to see is that I have been called to reign; I have been given the authority to rule; and I am participating interactively with him as I learn from him how to take care of the dominion given to me. I am learning to see things with his eyes, to talk to him about what needs to be done, and to depend on his life-giving power to accomplish his work of healing, feeding, and liberating. As someone whom Christ has put in charge of this part of the world, I am being called to reign in a way that reflects God's image, that extends his will into the world. It is a matter for prayer. Everyday.

Here is a very important consideration for reigning. If we miss this, we will only affect a parody of God's rule and cause others to hold him in contempt. Our reign is not executed in the way that the Gentiles do where everything is done to bring us glory, power, and to fulfill our needs. Instead it is done God's way, which means that we do what we do - we reign, we take care of God's creation - for the sake of others' welfare and good. Doing things God's way now in this present age does not mean glory or prominence or praise. What it means is humility, service, suffering, and sacrifice. That's just God's way. It is the way that Jesus became king. It is the way that we exercise our royal ministry now.

God has given us responsibilities and gifts, just the right ones for just the right time. We have all the resources that we need. Pray. Let him use you. And stand back and watch what he does.

Basing my life on Reality: Or, what am I doing here, really?

After celebrating Christmas, Gabe, age 7, and Hallie, age 4, made a video to thank their grandparents for their gifts. In his speech Gabe rattled off the gifts that he had received and all of his "thank-yous," then ended his talk with "amen." Realizing that he had mixed genres, he first smiled, then scowled and covered his face, then finally went into his full "Charlie Brown" head-and-shoulder-slump. Watching the video, we howled: he was unbelievable cute. His mix of prayer and "thank you speech" was funny; his reaction to his mistake, even funnier. We never felt that he was stupid, had humiliated himself or the family, or had offended anyone. We could not love him more. We didn't mull over the far-reaching consequences of his mistake other than to consider the fame that he could have if the video were posted to YouTube:) But Gabe felt completely shamed.

We have a reality that we live by and then there is the Real Reality - the way things truly are. As Christians, we think that God tells us the way things really are. But we are much like Gabe - we get so caught up in our own perceptions and concerns that we let our emotions and reactions be guided by our own realities rather than what God says is true.

There are two central realities, both rooted in scripture, that have had a lot of meaning for me in my life and the work that I have been called to do. The first reality is that I have been given riches to share.

During my teens I don't think that I ever considered that I had riches to share - especially "spiritual" riches. As a Christian teen, I had little if any appreciation for the grace of God, for his goodness, beauty and love. When I reflect back on my life, I think that maybe I did not appreciate these treasures because I had not heard a message of grace, love, and the beauty and goodness of God. I was raised by Christian parents, went to a Christian school, and attended church "every time the doors were open," but somehow I did not understand or experience God as treasure. What I understood more than anything from my religious training was the call to be morally pure, to be constantly on guard against sin, and to believe and conform to laws regarding worship and ecclesiology. I was continually hearing "repent," and my motivation was to fear God who, in the end, would judge me and would throw me into hell for any infractions. Not a lot here to feel warm and fuzzy about.

Of course, repentance is a good, necessary, and very biblical concept - and I needed to hear it - but in my immaturity it was difficult to be thankful for that message. Without a doubt, I needed to change my agenda: I needed to change from the pursuit of my agenda that was getting me nothing but disappointment and was leaving a trail of hurt along the way. But during my teens I was hearing the message of repentance as part of an oppressive scheme that I feared and hated. Later, after "hitting bottom," I was "hit" by the love of God - I "heard ... and understood God's grace in all its truth" (Col. 1: 6). I began to realize the treasure that I had in God. Instead of being petty, vindictive and mean spirited, God was good, beautiful, loving, and full of grace. He loved the world, and the world included me. As I read his Word and attempted to follow his instructions for life, I began experiencing his presence. Instead of feeling fear and dread, I felt wonder and joy fill me.

Immediately, this understanding and experience of God created purpose for me. I needed to share this good news of who God is and what he has done and is doing. I related strongly to the lepers of 2 Kings 7 who had been starving along with the rest of their people during a siege of their capital city, Samaria. When they find food and riches in the deserted camp of their enemies, they know that "this is a day of good news" and they could not keep it to themselves. They had treasure to share.

In my work and life at Dallas Christian and everywhere else, this idea has formed a basic understanding for what I am supposed to be doing. I have good things to share; I need to be pointing people to the treasure, telling them the good news. We have a loving God who has forgiven us all of our sin and given us life, who has done and continues to do everything to heal, support, and empower us, showering us with beauty, goodness and love.

While this understanding of my calling continues to resonate with me, I don't believe that it captures the fullness of God's intention for us. While it is true that we are called to be witnesses to what God has done in Christ and what he continues to do, so much of our lives and our work does not fit the paradigm of sharing treasure - especially when we think of this sharing as a verbal witness to God's grace and love. When we are able to tell others about this great and beautiful God who has saved us and given us life, the ones with whom we share often do not hear our message as "good news" or find it to be treasure. Instead, they may hear our good news as fairy tale or as an offer for self-imprisonment. In my next post I will write about what I think is a more comprehensive understanding of our calling as Jesus' disciples that is helping me in my life and work.