Guard my mouth

This should be a regular prayer for those that follow Jesus: Psalm 141:3, 4 Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth; Keep watch over the door of my lips. Do not incline my heart to any evil thing, To practice wicked works With men who work iniquity; And do not let me eat of their delicacies.

Promises for a new season

I'm totally taking this Scripture as we go into this new season: Isaiah 41:9, 10 You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, And called from its farthest regions, And said to you, ‘You are My servant, I have chosen you and have not cast you away: Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.’

Living differently

Ever wonder what the will of God is for you? He wants you to live differently than the world does, because we have been freed from the entrapments of the world. We need to change our thinking so that for us it is "on earth as it is in heaven" we don't have to be like them to build relationship with them it is up to is to live out an alternative that is attractive to them, not the opposite.
Romans 12:2 Do not be conformed to this world (this age), [fashioned after and adapted to its external, superficial customs], but be transformed (changed) by the [entire] renewal of your mind [by its new ideals and its new attitude], so that you may prove [for yourselves] what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God, even the thing which is good and acceptable and perfect [in His sight for you].

swords and manhood

I know this is pretty crazy two blog post in the same evening.  But I just had to share this too.

In much world mythology the sword first has a positive meaning: a person’s ability to be discriminating and decisive. The sword helps a man separate his feelings from the issues at hand. It helps him name and maintain appropriate boundaries. A man with a sword knows who he is and who he isn’t, and what is worth protecting.

The sword has also borne a negative meaning, killing and death. Spiritually speaking however, it’s necessary to kill or at least distinguish the dark side, the small egocentric self.  Also for a man to be born, boyhood and “keeping all my options open” must die, and this is painful especially in a culture that encourages perpetual adolescence. So even in its negative sense the sword can become a symbol of the healthy warrior and an expression of his spiritual side. ~Fr. Richard Rohr

“It is a good day to do great things.”...again

This is partially a repost from last year, but it just seems fitting for today being fathers day. First of all I want to thank my dad, there are many things that I learned from you but two things that really stand out are how to fight and work hard despite how you felt or what your circumstances were. I also want to thank the other fathers that I have been blessed with through the years the ones that spoke to the treasure that Abba placed in me and called out the warrior I was meant to be. Thanks and blessings to you all, wouldn't be what and who I am today without you. And I especially want to thank Abba for creating me to be a man of purpose and for revealing His incredible heart to me so that I can share it with others.

A few years back I was recommended a book written by a Fransican Monk named Richard Rohr. He has an incredible grasp of the spirituality of man and how it works in the supernatural realm we are supposed to live in.  Here is a quote from one his books:

According to legend, the Great Plains warriors would say to their sons first thing in the morning, “It is a good day to do great things.”  If we can’t say something like this, we will not experience the quest.  We need this kind of desire and expectation…  We to allow our souls to be stirred by a magnificent ambition – something that makes us jump out of bed in the morning that calls us to be some kind of hero in our own kind of story, even if we know we have more than one tragic flaw. ~Fr. Richard Rohr

It's time to have our inner hero awakened and set free to do what he was destined to do.

Forgiveness

Clothe yourselves therefore, as God’s own chosen ones (His own picked representatives), [who are] purified and holy and well-beloved [by God Himself, by putting on behavior marked by] tenderhearted pity and mercy, kind feeling, a lowly opinion of yourselves, gentle ways, [and] patience [which is tireless and long-suffering, and has the power to endure whatever comes, with good temper]. Be gentle and forbearing with one another and, if one has a difference (a grievance or complaint) against another, readily pardoning each other; even as the Lord has [freely] forgiven you, so must you also [forgive].  ~Paul in his letter to the church in Colossae

The other morning God and I were talking about forgiveness and the dangers of unforgiveness.  There were a couple of people in my life that were brought to mind that have a tendency to hang on to unforgiveness. Many times you can see the tendrils of the root of bitterness that grows out of dormant unforgiveness, offenses are picked up without even realizing they are there and these feed that root. 

One of the key things that He was showing me was that forgiveness needs to be unconditional, just as He forgives us we need to forgive others.  When we do something and we go to Him and ask for forgiveness, He doesn’t say: “No, I’m not ready yet” or “I need to process it first” or “My feelings are still hurt so you have to wait until I feel better.”  1 John 1:9 says: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” And in Romans 5:8 Paul says: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

When you look at how we were forgiven and the lack of conditions that are set upon us to receive forgiveness from Jesus, it sheds a whole new light on what it means to die to self.  We are called to demonstrate and be a reflection of His love and to pour out the same grace and mercy that poured out on us.  He demonstrated His love by dying for us on the cross so that we could enter back into relationship with Him. Sometimes, we need to set ourselves aside, are to live by faith and not be feeling.  Our feelings while valid will lie to us and keep us from doing what we are supposed to be doing.  I’m sure if Jesus let feelings be His compass when it came to forgiving, we would all be in trouble.  But imagine if He let feelings guide His ability to forgive on the day He went to the cross.  He is hanging there nailed to the cross beaten and bloody and the guy hanging next to Him recognizes Him for who He is and asks to be remembered when He gets to His Kingdom.  Jesus didn’t say “you know I have had a really bad day today, they took My clothes, pushed this crown of thorns down into My head, beat Me and nailed Me to this cross.  I really don’t feel like forgiving you for your sins right now, I think I’ve had enough for one day.”  Instead He turns to him and says “Surely this day you will be with Me in paradise.”   Jesus didn’t say: “I need to heal some first, you know you are part of the reason I’m hanging here, or I think you need to suffer in your guilt for a while.” He said, “I forgive you.”

I think that one of the things God was showing me in this is that forgiveness and healing are two separate processes.  Forgiveness is not dependent on healing; however, healing is fully dependent on forgiveness.  Forgiveness is a key to release healing, sometimes miraculous healing, but definitely complete healing.

Some say that “time heals all wounds”, in fact I used to say that too.  But I don’t really think that is true anymore.  I do believe that sometimes healing can take some time to complete and that with time pain subsides making it easier to get through the healing process.

But when we leave wounds unattended or un-dealt with then what we usually end up with is an ugly mass of scar tissue.  This scar tissue gives the appearance of healing that happened, but the underlying wound starts getting infected and festers.  This wounded area becomes tender and sensitive, sometimes when its touched it causes you to lash out because the pain returns and the memory invoked brings you back to the original time of being wounded.  What happens is this underlying gunk will eventually want to find its way out. Sometimes that manifests itself in something ugly like cancer or some other life stealing disease.

I have an example of this; a few years back I was working with wood and got a pretty nasty sliver in my hand.  I dug in and got what I thought was the entire sliver.  After some time the areas healed and I didn’t think about it much, but every once in a while I would hit that area on something and it would hurt a little. Being the tough guy I never really wanted to address what was causing the pain just kept going knowing it would stop soon.  After a few months, I had a growth start on my hand it looked kind of like a wart.  I figured that was the source of the discomfort having forgotten about the sliver.  Again being a guy as this thing kept growing and becoming more obnoxious I started digging at it with my knife to see if I could get rid of it.  Then I noticed at the center there was something that looked different than the skin around it so I started to squeeze and out popped a chunk of wood and a bunch of pus.  I proceeded to properly clean the wound and now you can’t even see a scar where it happened.  I had come to realize that my body knew that chunk of wood didn’t belong in my hand and since I hadn’t dealt with it properly, it rejected it and forced it to the surface.

That’s what happens with us when we allow offenses, hurt feelings and unforgiveness to lay dormant in us.  It starts to fester and our spirit knows it isn’t supposed to be there and will do things to bring it to the surface, but usually don’t want to deal with it so we let more scar tissue build up.  Then it crops up as something else, and many times the source of it is never found, because we spend so much time trying to find physical means to bring healing to spiritual wounds.

There are two main keys to getting healed:

1.       Forgiveness – Remembering that we don’t forgive out of feeling, we do it out of obedience following the example and model that Jesus gave us.

2.       Being open and vulnerable to the Holy Spirit. We need to allow the Great Physician to come in and do His job.  We need to let Him do whatever needs to be done to bring about complete healing.  Sometimes with old wounds that can be painful.  It can involve cutting away the old scar tissue or dead skin, maybe re-breaking a bone to have it set properly and made functional again. Sometimes in this process He will use other people to help, guide and support you.  But the deepest cleaning happens when you let Him go as deep as He needs to go to get at the root, to bring complete and total healing.

Who's the Judge anyway?

I had a vision while I was reading a book called “TheUltimate Treasure Hunt”, by Kevin Dedmon.   The author was talking about how Jesus came to serve (minister) and to provide forgiveness and healing.  In the vision I was preaching to a crowd, not sure where.  I was admonishing the church, telling them that they needed to love the prostitutes, and that the gay and lesbian communities needed to be reached with love.  As I was sharing I got the sense that the people in the crowd were getting angry and offended at what I was saying.

Then I saw a picture of the church setting up its own throne and judgment seat in front of Jesus.  The judgments that came from the fake throne were spoken from a spirit of religion and provoked hatred, a spirit of fear was the driving force behind the whole thing.  The throne was situated so that anyone that tried to enter The Throne Room was blocked by the fake throne and people were denied access to Jesus.   I then saw Jesus on His Throne and he was grieved by the false throne and that no one was making it to Him and He wept.

In 1 Corinthians 5:9-13 the Apostle Paul is giving instruction on immorality, the people in the church were turning their judgment to those outside of the church, yet Paul’s focus was inside the church.

9 I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. 10 Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.

In verse 11 Paul explains that anyone that is named brother, in other words anyone that is a part of the church, that participates in these things that you should not have fellowship with them, in fact he says to not even eat with them.  In my opinion this would be reserved only those that persist in this behavior not first time offenders, I think ultimately we should work toward restoration.  Paul lays this out to protect the people from being drawn into the same behavior.

¹² For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?

Paul says that it isn’t even his job to judge what is outside the church, but we do have responsibility to judge what it is in the church.

¹³ But those who are outside God judges….

In Matthew 28:19 Jesus instructs us:  Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

And in Mark 16:15-16: And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.

We cannot “Go make disciples of all nations” or “Go into the all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” if we are sitting in judgment of those we are called to reach.  We are called to demonstrate His love not judgment.

Ephesians 2:4-5 (AMP): But God--so rich is He in His mercy! Because of and in order to satisfy the great and wonderful and intense love with which He loved us, Even when we were dead (slain) by [our own] shortcomings and trespasses, He made us alive together in fellowship and in union with Christ; [He gave us the very life of Christ Himself, the same new life with which He quickened Him, for] it is by grace (His favor and mercy which you did not deserve) that you are saved ([a]delivered from judgment and made partakers of Christ's salvation).

We so easily forget where we came from and the love and grace that was shown to us. It is not that we need to remain strapped to our past, but we do need to have memory markers showing where we came from.  We should never forget what was granted to us.

Another thing we need to look at is our discipleship process.  This process needs to be more about helping believers develop a deep personal relationship with God.  It should be more about learning to hear God’s voice, finding your identity in Him, being quickly obedient and accepting of discipline that comes from Jesus.  It has nothing to do learning about spiritual laws, qualifying for nursery duty, guilting others into service or propagating a judgmental religious spirit.

When we look at the world outside the church too many times we have a viewpoint of it is US vs. THEM.  Which brings us down to a level below what we are called to, we forget that we are victorious and He has authority in all things.  Instead we need to look at the basics of God’s heart and why He sent Jesus for us.

John 3:16-18 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.  “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

God’s Desire: That the whole world be saved because of His love of His creation

The World’s Condition: Broken and full of sin and sickness, because of broken relationship with God caused by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

God’s Solution:  Jesus, the final sacrifice for our sins, the mender of our relationship with Abba

Church’s Condition: Creating worldly structures driven by a spirit of religion to invoke fear in the hearts of the people in the church and keeps those that need Jesus the most from being able to see Him, know Him and be able to receive His love.

God’s Solution:  A great shaking that will remove these structures from their foundations, so that their foundations will be exposed. The churches that truly have Jesus as their chief cornerstone and built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Eph 2:19-22), they will remain intact, but the others are going to need to do a remodel, they are going to need to go back to the basics and to do so under attack and persecution like Ezra and Nehemiah faced when they rebuilt the wall and the temple. But only those that receive a mandate from The King will be successful, the others will fall away because of the devastation that all they thought they knew and were building was exposed as a lie. It will then be up to the saints that have a strong foundation to reach out to these broken ones and bring restoration and the truth.