Discontent with deeds alone

Last night I had the unexpected opportunity to teach the Wed. night service at the church we fellowship with here in Mesquite when we're not traveling. It's too long of a story to give details as to why this took place, so I'll summarize: My brother, who pastors the church had to spend the day at a hospital in Las Vegas with a former family member who had been stabbed out in a small Nevada town and then was Life Flighted in to Vegas for treatment. His body will heal, but he is in major need of a spiritual overhaul--pray for Randy if you think about it.

When I found out at 5:00 a.m. that I'd be teaching in just over 13 hours, I immediately sought God's direction on what He would have me share with His people that might be a source of challenge and encouragement considering all that is happening in the world, in the U.S., and in many of their lives.

I settled on an interesting request made by Moses in Exod. 33:13. For him to ask God to "show me Your way," was astounding, based on the depth of relationship Moses already had with God and the incredible deeds he had seen God accomplish. Moses was on a continual pursuit for more and more interactive relationship and thus knowledge about God and it was this desire that prompted his request.

Unlike the majority of the nation of Israel, Moses wasn't content to know God only for His deeds--deeds graciously done on their behalf, deeds that brought them pleasure and comfort and blessing. Their problem was that if God wasn't constantly acting in this way toward them, they immediately questioned His goodness and regularly longed to be back in slavery.

And God did respond to the cry of Moses' heart. Psalm 103:7 makes clear that He did show Moses His ways, but Israel only saw His deeds because in their mind that was all that mattered, God meeting their needs as they understood and defined them.

And so it is with many of His people today. It is so easy for our heart's cry to be for God to act, to do great deeds, to do the things that we think He should do for us so that we can have pleasure, an easy life, more convenience, and so forth.

With Moses, I want to know His ways--His pattern of thinking, His manner of making decisions. I want to have understanding His priorities and to grasp the wisdom behind what He does and what He permits that moves everything towards His ultimate goal. I long to know His ways too, so that regardless of what He permits in to my life, I'll be able to trust that it has come with his permission and in some way, will move me towards being able to glorify Him more effectively.

I closed with Psalm 86:11,12. Check it out.

Refugee suicide...my first exposure

On Tuesday of this week, one reality of ministry to refugees forced its way into my life for the first time. I received a call informing me that one of the Karen refugees that attends the church in Phoenix--a young man in his early 20's, had taken his own life earlier that day!

He had been in the U.S. for a year already, had been working, had purchased a vehicle, and yet was struggling learning English and adjusting to life in America. He had been in an accident a few days before, an accident that didn't cause any injuries, but which totalled his car. What pushed him over the edge?

It could have been his inability to communicate with those involved in the accident, the police at the scene and his own insurance company. It also could have been the reality that the pay off from the insurance wasn't sufficient to cover what he owned on the loan of the car and he was now looking at owing a few thousand dollars and having nothing to show for it. Ultimately, only God and the young man really know why he did what he did.

But personally, I know one thing for sure. I need His grace to be able to minister to these people so that the abnormally high suicide rate among Southeast Asian refugees isn't reinforced by the Karen or Chin people.

I'd appreciate your prayer for them individually and as a group, and for Helen and I to be able to love them and help them make the huge adjustment to life in America--an adjustment that seems so challenging to some that they would choose death over trying to make it.

LIFE and LIGHT, a summation

As you can probably tell, I've only scratched the surface of what the Lord has shown me regarding LIFE and LIGHT. And to be honest, it would take much more time than I have to give in order to express on this blog even half of it. So I think it's best for me to summarize as succinctly as I can the key points I've learned and then leave it alone.

In John 8:12, Jesus said that He was the LIGHT of the world and that those who follow Him will no longer walk in darkness, but will have the LIGHT of LIFE. To follow Jesus is to no longer walk in darkness, where proper interaction with everything external to us, never actually takes place. Because He is the LIGHT, He brings illumination, He makes it possible to see everything as it really is--as God designed it to be seen. But that's not the key point. The key aspect of His being the LIGHT of the world and illuminating things properly, is that now those things can be interacted with as God intended them to be. This is crucial to understand and it's the thing I had missed for so long.

And in His LIGHT, seeing everything properly, God Himself is also seen in a new and proper way. When He is seen for who He really is, there will be an insatiable desire to interact with Him properly. And when we take that step to interact with Him properly through the death and resurrection of His Son, we actually receive LIFE as He intended us to have it.

For the first time ever, we begin a proper, ongoing interaction and exchange with our Creator--dependent on Him and receiving an "abundance of LIFE" that we had never experienced before. This is a "fullness" of LIFE, where we are alive at every level, as we were originally designed to be. And once He gives us this LIFE--proper interaction and exchange with Him, He then gives us the desire and the ability to interact and exchange with everything else around us in the way He originally designed us to do so. He is in His proper place and everything else in its proper place--all of which magnifies His greatness, His splendor, and His glory, yet also brings satisfaction to us.

If you think about it, one of the things that made the earthly LIFE of Jesus so unique, was the fact that He interacted with everything: God the Father, the Holy Spirit, HIMSELF, the devil, His parents, His siblings, and every other person--He interacted with all of them in a way that no one else ever has--because He did so in the way God designed--for His glory, and their good!

As followers of Jesus, we now have and live in His LIGHT--which makes true LIFE with our Creator possible. And because we now have LIFE as He intended us to have, we then can function as LIGHT in the day to day world in which we live, interacting with everything in the way He designed, and having the blessing of perhaps being a vehicle of providing LIFE to others.

Another ALS connection...prayer needed

Earlier today I spent about twenty minutes on the phone with a woman named Jan, a woman in her mid-50's that is very successful in business and was recently diagnosed with ALS. Through a good friend of mine who met a good friend of hers, I was made aware of her situation and her friend cared enough about her to call me and ask me to give her a call.

Her legs have weakened to the point where she is now in a wheel chair and it has only been about 8 months since she first noticed her foot was acting strangely while she was exercising.
Although I don't have ALS, (but do have something similar: SBMA,) I've been down the path she is just beginning and I sense that God gave me a special ability to encourage her and challenge her during our conversation.

Please keep Jan in prayer. Her business was expanding and life was in many ways better than it had ever been--and now this! It was clear in talking to her that she needs the life that can come from knowing her creator and I'm convinced that she is open to considering Him at a level she never has in the past. Pray that Helen and I will be able to meet with her and her husband and be an expression of His love and truth.

And of course, continue to keep the situation in Myanmar, (Burma) in prayer.

"Eternal" LIFE pondered and defined

With the fresh understanding God gave me of what LIFE and LIGHT mean, so much more of the bible and my own life began to be more understandable. The common understanding of "eternal" LIFE never did sit well with me. Limiting the concept to a LIFE that never ends, that goes on forever and ever, although true, just doesn't express what it's really all about. Jesus had much to say about LIFE, and as the very essence of it and creator of all living things, it's definitely worth the effort to really try and understand what He was talking about.

As sort of a study "geek", I'm big on trying to find the real definition of things and then expressing them in a simple way. And I've learned over the years that it's valuable to listen to those whom most people would consider experts on any given subject--those people who actually work within a certain field as their primary vocation. What would their definition be? So, it makes perfect sense to me to look at what Jesus Himself had to say about "eternal" LIFE and to discover whether He Himself may have given His definition of the concept. And sure enough, He did, in John 17:3. According to Jesus Himself, "eternal" life is: knowing God the Father, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom God the Father has sent into our world.

According to Jesus, the primary meaning of "eternal" LIFE isn't living forever, although that is an aspect of it that is brought out in other places. No, the key thing to understand is that "eternal" LIFE is "knowing" God the Father and His Son. The word "knowing" in the original language was the word that expressed experiential knowledge of something. In other words, the knowledge that is the result of constant/regular, interaction with something--not just intellectually but also emotionally, physically, and so forth. It's not just mentally acknowledging facts as true, but actually having a personal interaction with that which is external to us. Just a life itself is interacting with and exchanging with that which is external, so "eternal" LIFE is interacting with and exchanging with that which is external to us: God the Father and His Son! It's an interaction and exchange in the context of relationship.

With what I've written so far as a bit of a backdrop, I'll try to bring this all together next time by sharing what I now understand Jesus to mean in John 8:12 Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I am the light of the world, he who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the ligh of life."

Until then...

A breather for an update...

I've been on the run again the past few weeks. I was in Phoenix last week and I'm actually writing this from my hotel room in Farmington, New York. I'm representing Shepherd's Staff at the pastor's conference held here at CC Finger Lakes. I head back to Philly tomorrow afternoon and then back to Vegas on Saturday morning.

God has revealed what He would have us do regarding the incredible need of the Karen refugees now living in Phoenix--we'll be moving to Phoenix a couple of days after Christmas. If you've been seeing the news at all about what's happening in Myanmar, (which is the country of Burma,) you're seeing why the Karen are now refugees in our country. The Karen's homeland is Burma, (Myanmar,) and the same government that you're now seeing deal with protesters is the government that has been trying to exterminate the Karen and other minorities for many years. Please keep the situation there in prayer.

I'll share much more detail later, but for now, please keep us in prayer as we need to step into "missionary status" to take this step. More on that later too. And I will continue sharing my thoughts on life and light once I'm back to a normal schedule next week.

Meanderings on LIFE, part 4

I concluded last time with John 1:4, where the apostle John says that in Jesus "was life". He's already said in the previous verse that everything that was created was created by Jesus--or to say it another way, without Him, nothing was made that was made...which would include all LIVING things. And now in verse 4, He makes clear that LIFE itself is in JESUS...implying that Jesus IS LIFE--has it as part of His essence and that He is then the source or originator of everything else that is alive.

Now think of the burning bush incident recorded in Exodus 3:1-14. What caught Moses attention wasn't just a bush on fire, it was the fact that the fire was burning, but the bush was not being consumed. For fire to exist--to be alive--as with every other thing that's alive, it must have an interaction and exchange with something outside of itself. In other words, fire must consume fuel, just like everything other living thing. This bush was on fire, but the fire wasn't consuming it. It gave off light, it surely did illuminate it's surroundings, but the main issue was: it didn't need anything external to itself to be what it was...sort of like it...had LIFE in itself.

From the midst of that fire, God begins a conversation with Moses. A few verses later, Moses asks God what he should say to Israel when they ask him what the name of the God of their fathers is. When they ask, "What is His name?" Moses wants to know what he should say.

God's response is: "I AM WHO I AM" and then God summarizes by telling Moses that he should say to them "I AM" is the one who sent him to them. What does "I AM" declare? That He is the one who exists, who has always existed, who has LIFE in Himself. The fire that Moses stands before, a fire that needs nothing outside of itself for its continued existence, is a visual proclamation of the reality that God has LIFE in Himself, that He is self-existent. What the Creator has permitted us to discover about LIFE apparently doesn't apply to Him. We were certainly created in His image and according to His likeness--like Him in so many ways, yet clearly unlike Him in others.

Enough for now....