Living in the Moment

One of the greatest lessons that I have been learning this year is the necessity of living in the moment. Upon inspection, it is apparent that living in the moment cannot be done just for the sake of the moment as so many people suggest by the choices they make. For example, you cannot claim to be living simply because you choose to fall through the air after having jumped from a perfectly good airplane with the hope that your parachute opens! The momentary feeling of weightlessness does not, in and of itself, constitute life. Indeed, living in the moment well comes from an understanding of what the moment is for!

I was forced to use myself as an example this morning as I was thinking about a recent visit to a convalescent home. I went to offer some of my time to an elderly woman I have gotten to know but found myself full of annoyance with the expectation that she was going to be paranoid and bitter. She was this for a time and I sat back and listened to her complain without realizing that the PURPOSE of my visit at that moment was to inject LIFE into her surroundings. I was visiting a friend on the verge of death and not doing my utmost to row her away from the doldrums and into the life giving breath of The Spirit. No, I simply fell asleep on her. I couldn't even read the bible to her without dozing off. And that's the third visit in a row that has happened!

What's humbling and revealed to me a heart of transparent duty as opposed to overflowing love, is that I gave my friend the dregs of my day. I had been in school for eight hours and was exhausted. Of course I was probably going to fall asleep and fail to have the energy to take the conversation to better terrain. Life comes when it is gifted as a first fruit offering from the abundance of the heart as opposed to a last
fruit offering from what is left over. I only wanted to offer the leftovers because that is what the drudgery of duty conjures up. My next visit, therefore, will be in the morning when we are both bright eyed and bushy tailed!

Praise The Lord, for He rejoices over you with singing!

C.S. Lewis (from Reflections on the Psalms) provides an amazing perspective on why we should desire to praise Jesus, the Lover of our souls:

"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses, but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are, the delight is incomplete till it is expressed."

It is written in Zephaniah 3:17 that,

"The Lord your God is with you,
    the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
    in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
    but will rejoice over you with singing."

He expresses His love and enjoyment for you by rejoicing over you with singing! How will you express your praise for Jesus today?

The Cynic in all of us

Avoid cynical people. Examine your heart when you are one. To paraphrase Paul Miller and C.S. Lewis, those who think they can "see through" everything end up spending all their time looking at nothing. When all you ever see is an agenda, all you end up with is a bitter heart. Ironically then, the cynic's use of cynicism is a perverse lens with which to view the world. He looks through the colored lens for ulterior motives of the heart. Such terrain is not meant for our advances. The heart is God's territory. Spend your days in the presence of Jesus and His people who have an otherworldly hope. Consider His crimson stained glasses who, in perfect fellowship with His Father, "for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." The exhortation then for us who are in fellowship with one another and The Father is that, "since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith." LOOK to Jesus! Use His eyes of mercy and grace and a world of joy will open up before you as you bathe in His love.

Picture courtesy of: Holes Kaleidoscope Glasses by Pam Tietze

Hidden in Christ

Hidden in Christ. What does the term mean? A friend of mine named Ragan who is serving on mission in Papua New Guinea related to me a wonderful example she heard. Concerning our assurance of salvation we often forget that we have been made new in Christ. We fail to put that concept together with the statement that we are "hidden in Christ" and tend to consider Jesus as the proverbial fig leaf that Adam and Eve used to cover their shame from the sight of God. However, Christ is not simply a covering like the fig leaf that serves only to hide the man. No, his covering is one of righteousness and transformation from the inside out. In other words, if we have surrendered to Jesus, our hearts HAVE BEEN changed so now the way we will live WILL BE different! We do not "put on Christ" and simply remain the same ashamed person underneath.

Consider the thought exercise Ragan gave to me:

"We often think that Jesus is like a towel: He is our shield and comes between God and us. As a result, when God looks at us, He sees Jesus Christ and HIS perfection in place of our sin. We often try to hide our sin, or just look the other way. Then, when we realize that we've made a mistake, we quickly put he shield of Jesus Christ up between God and us. We say, 'Oh God, I'm so sorry. Forgive me and look upon Christ's perfection."

That is not the gospel at all. Christ has broken down the barrier between us and God. It is finished. We no longer have to hide. We are IN Christ. When Christ died upon the cross ALL our sins were in the future. God has forgiven us once and for all. We are a new creation!"

Whether a person is saved or not, they will always only ever do exactly what they want in any moment. The difference between a disciple of Christ and a disciple of the world? The disciple of Christ learns to "destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). That is the radical, gospel-centered life of Christ's disciples for it shows that what they want to do is surrender themselves over to be used by their loving Father.

You are not here for worldly comfort

You are not here for worldly comfort. You are here to strike a blow against evil. Live your life as arrow's fired from God's bow of righteousness. Search out evil and destroy it. Find those in need and given the provision. Seek out those in distress and point them to the God of Comfort! Surrender yourself over to the God who found YOU in the darkness and revealed to you the majesty of His glorious light! If you don't know how to do this, remember that God holds the bow. He will send you.

I was reminded of the new song by Need to Breath. Here it is!

Mysterious ways

Life is so full of inspiration when The Spirit of The Lord is dwelling in your heart! Today I just have to brag on Jesus for a bit as He really blessed me with the love of a friend who has very little life left to her. Her name is Delphia and she lives at a care clinic here in Escondido. Jesus blessed me with her as friend after my old office manager (Delphia's daughter) told her about me and my faith. Being a Christian and desiring more company, she asked her daughter if I would be willing to come visit her. I agreed to the proposition with the thought that such occurrences happen rarely in life. When The Spirit offers such an opportunity on a silver platter it is best to take it!

I wanted to befriend and serve this woman with the desire to bless her. It is easy as a young, 32-year-old man, to believe that the blessings would be a one way street. After all, what can an old woman who pees in her pants and can barely walk anymore do for someone who seemingly has his entire life before him? Whereas her talk is about whether or not to get a catheter and how much longer her cancer will permit her to have, mine is about mission trips to Utah and beginning massage therapy school. But these comparisons show the limit of what the world offers. We can call them "circumstances" (whether good or bad). Such worldly vanity is where the flesh stops and God takes over. He is not the God of circumstances and He was desiring to show me that I was not there to bless her so much as we were put into one another's lives to bless one another and ultimately give Him the glory of sacrificial love.

I was relating to Delphia some stories about a remarkable woman I knew and gearing myself up for the pious platitudes most old people (ok, almost all people) say when an eligible bachelor or bachelorette is speaking about the matters of the heart in relation to the opposite sex. My favorite such platitudes are, "Don't worry! You'll find someone when the time is right!" Or, "Keep putting yourself out there!" Or, "You're such a good person! I'm sure someone will come along soon and you'll snatch her right up!"

As if meeting the "right woman" is a matter of chance, my desire, my goodness, or my willingness to exert myself!

She spoke no such thing, however, but stopped me dead in my tracks after I said "I think I'm almost ready to meet someone." She simply replied, "No. It is not about when you are ready but when God is ready." Her wisdom cut to my heart because she not so subtly suggested that my pursuit of God was of ultimate importance. Seek first the Kingdom of God and all things will be added to you, as the scripture says. It was a breath of fresh air to have the guard around my heart pierced and find that my words had been used frivolously. Oh, that we would all seek to find and impart wisdom as if it were buried treasure! Her comment ended with a word of compassion that spoke to her own personal struggles. "Wait upon the Lord".

Neither of us knew where that scripture was exactly (indeed, it is all over the scriptures), but upon hearing I considered what I wanted to read to her from the Bible and settled on Psalm 27 as one of my favorite verses comes from King David's heart of hearts. He writes simply:

One thing have I asked of the Lord,
    that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
    all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
    and to inquire in his temple.

Great blessings and delight came at the end of the psalm, however:

WAIT FOR THE LORD;
    be strong and let your heart take courage;
    WAIT FOR THE LORD!

Delphia and I laughed and laughed. We also cried. How good was God in that moment though? Delphia was so burdened with the meaning of her life, being effectively restricted to a hospital bed. "Wait upon Me" was all Jesus wanted her to hear. I was bringing attention to myself and my own plans and all Jesus wanted me to hear was, "Let me bless you in my time. I am so good and I love you so much. Receive the fullness of My joy!"

^{Proverbs 6}
There are six things the Lord hates,
    seven that are detestable to him:
        haughty eyes,
        a lying tongue,
        hands that shed innocent blood,
        a heart that devises wicked schemes,
        feet that are quick to rush into evil,
        a false witness who pours out lies
        and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

Community. God hates its destruction. He instituted community in a specific fashion to bless and protect his people. This protection acts not only to restore those who have been hurt by others but also to restrain behavior that would lead to that wounding. We can be hurt by multiple sources: The world, with its constant grinding and hopelessness, people, who bite and devour one another and Satan, the destroyer and deceiver. We can be responsible only for ourselves and the way we offer ourselves to others.

We can use the proverb above as a template to see what our relationship to the community is, for the seventh thing God hates relates perfectly to the first six. No community of people, whether believers or not (but especially believers) will ever be strong when riven by haughtiness, lying, blood letting, scheming, evil, gossip, and belligerency.

This desire should produce in the children of God a strong desire for the gospel. The desired (if not always realized) expectation of community is that it be a place of love and grace; a place of healing and comfort. The gospel should bring about a desire for reconciliation and, indeed, Jesus takes His children out of this world and places them in community. We are one body, bound together by ligaments and sinews of love and grace. Let us seek one another out and express such a love!