Grace Transforms

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Philippians 4: 23

 

Here is a blessing that cuts to the very heart of our ability and our capacity to live with the peace, joy, strength, and purpose that God desires for each of His children. Although we may understand grace as that uniquely God given gift of His love and forgiveness that comes our way despite our total lack of merit, most of us don’t do such a good job of taking in that grace so that it resides deep within us and acts as a continual agent for transformative change in our hearts and minds. Yet, that is God’s real intent when He grants His grace to us.

 

When I realize that no matter how big a mess I make of my life, how far I wander from God’s righteousness, and how difficult I am to love that my Lord will remain faithful to His promise to never leave me, I am, at first, humbled; then, His Spirit works within me to start to change the ways that I think and act so that I am made more like the God-image bearer that I was created to be. As grace works in and on us, we should begin to see that it also cries out to be shared with the world around us. The Spirit of Christ filling our spirits with His love and grace should be leading us to need to pour out this same grace upon our families, friends, neighbors, and communities.

 

The transformation that receiving grace can accomplish in our own lives can also be the force that brings about true change in our world. Grace needs to be taken in deeply, but it should never be held onto as if it is a finite and irreplaceable commodity. Instead, we should make it the filter through which we view the rest of our world. Then grace can become the way that we connect with others in a way that brings the living Christ into their lives.

 

 

True Worship

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to His name; worship the Lord in holy array.

Psalm 29: 2

 

Yesterday was Sunday; thus, it was time to worship God. This is the day where we set aside a few hours for this purpose, and that is a good thing to do. Maybe your dedicated time for worship is on Saturday; perhaps, it is on Wednesdays, or you give some time throughout the week to spend with God. All of that is good and worthy; yet, none of it truly responds to the sort of worship that the Lord wants us to give to Him, and it doesn’t correspond with the desires of our own redeemed and transformed hearts, either.

 

When I consider the sort of credit and the praise that is due to God based upon what He has done for me and the work that He continually performs in me, in other people, and in the world, I am faced with a task that is impossible to perform in a limited amount of time or in any one specific location. God’s glory is the light that brings life saving clarity to challenging situations, and it provides the heat that melts away the heart-numbing chill of sin. The glory of God reaches into every corner of this world and seeks to provide a loving and a nurturing environment for each individual soul on this planet. In order to truly recognize the Lord and to give Him the credit that He is due, I need to make worship the primary activity of my entire life; thus, the way that I live, the manner that I deal with other people, and the respect that I exhibit for creation are continual acts of worship for God, the Creator of it all.

 

Additionally, the Lord does want me to dress in my “Sunday Finest” when I engage in worship; however, I really don’t think that He cares much about what it is that I am wearing. The Lord wants me to respect Him and to honor Him by seeking to grow deeper in my knowledge of His ways, in my understanding of His will, and in the continual practice of righteous love. These are the garments of a truly holy array; for, God wants the world to see Christ when I interact with it. When that happens, true worship is the result.

 

 

The Kept Life

The Lord will keep you from all evil; He will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in

from this time forth and forevermore.

Psalm 121: 7, 8

 

Alright, I admit it; these verses are actually taken from a children’s fairy tale. They were written by someone who wanted to provide a rosy-tinted, false sense of security to some young people so that they would go to sleep and stop bothering their adult care givers. Well, no. That simply isn’t true, either. These lines come from one of that wonderful body of writing that is known as the Psalms of Ascents. These are traveler’s tales. The sorts of reminders that whole families would recite and sing together as they took the often dangerous journey from their homes to Jerusalem so that they could worship God together with their entire nation. Although they were intended to ease the journey and to make the miles go by faster, they had a much greater purpose than that.

 

These songs are intended to remind the singers of God. As the travelers recited the lines from them their hearts were being prepared to enter into deep and transformative worship. The author of these lines was not attempting to gloss over the hardships of life. Instead, he deals with them from the perspective of an extreme realist. In these verses we see the great challenge that confronts all of us as we go about our own travels. Evil is out there; it is everywhere. It crouches and lurks among the shadows of the street where we live. It comes at us from far away, and it even attempts to set its traps in our own homes. Evil tries to worm its way into our minds and whisper the lies of Satan to our hearts. Although defeated by Christ, evil just hasn’t gotten that message; so, it is relentless in its desire to disrupt the lives of people who do know God.

 

Since this was the world that these ancient travelers knew, they sang about the truth of God’s protection, preservation, and salvation. As this same reality is ours, we can do the same thing. There is an old popular image of a person who is walking along a dark and frightening lane; so, in order to get his courage up, he starts to whistle. This idea was expressed in The King and I as Anna sings, “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid.” There is one very big difference between the experiences of these fictional characters and those of God’s people. Their courage was a façade; it didn’t penetrate to their hearts. However, we can trust that God is truly protecting us. He will take us along the road that we are traveling, and our souls will be safe. There is danger in the journey, but the outcome of it all is never in question. During every minute of each day, Christ holds us close and keeps us secure.

 

 

Scattered for Blessing

Therefore, those who had been scattered went about preaching the word.

Acts 8: 4

 

One of the most important things that people gain when we enter into a relationship with Christ is the unifying effect of God’s Spirit; for, through this miraculous event in which God comes to reside in our previously sin-separated bodies, everyone who believes in Jesus is adopted into a single family. We are given the gift of a core unity of heart, mind, and purpose; and we gain the strength and the sense of security that comes from that larger group. The word scattered means: to be dispersed far away from each other, and one of the images that comes to my mind when I think about scattering something is that of how farmers, in the days before machinery, used to take handfuls of seed from a bag and toss them about as they walked through a field. Satan also works at scattering God’s people.

 

In the situation that Luke was describing in Acts, there was large scale, aggressive, and violent persecution of God’s people; in other times, large numbers of believers have been arrested by those in power and removed to new locations; and most of us have been impacted by the sort of scattering that happens when the normal connections of our lives are changed through job loss, relocation, or other forms of life change. Regardless of what causes the separation, it is often hard to regain that former feeling of connectedness and to become fully involved in serving Christ in the new setting.

 

Yet, engagement, involvement, and pursuit of our calling is exactly what the Lord wants us to do; therefore, it is precisely what Satan wants to keep us from doing. When there is disruption and interruption in the normal flow of our lives, we need to seek God’s wisdom and find His purpose for us in the new setting, for there is one thing that I am certain of and that is that God always has a plan for each and every situation and circumstance that I will encounter in my life. Although it is honestly and legitimately uncomfortable to be that seed in the hands of the Lord and the speed of the flight and the impact of the landing can be very harsh, our God promises that He will feed, water, and care for us in the new field where we have been sent, and that field is full of people who need to experience the love of Christ as He delivers it through our hands.

 

 

Peace! Be Still!

And Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be Still!” And the wind ceased and there was great calm.

Mark 4: 39

 

On some days it feels as if God is truly asleep. The waves of outrageous misbehavior are crashing onto the deck of your life and drowning is the surest thing on the horizon. Angry words and malicious thoughts are being hurled your way with the force of a hurricane. At the same time someone has set you out to sea in a very inadequate boat that was provided with a crew that is amateur at best. This is a very bad day, and it promises to get worse as it goes along. Yet, the journey that you are on does, in fact, have purpose. You know that God has set you on this particular course, for His hand has been visible in so much of what has transpired in your life to put you in this place at this time.

 

The experience of living has demonstrated in your own life what has also been depicted with great clarity in the lives of generations of people in God’s Word. God is faithful, and He goes with us through everything that comes our way in life. He has answers for all of it, no matter what form or who that particular it might be. There is no force of nature or certainly any force of man that is beyond God’s control or outside of His capability. However, we must realize that we are traveling in a danger zone. There are constant storm warnings posted for this life, and God does not attempt to stop all of the turmoil that evil stirs up from impacting this world or our lives. What He does say to us is, “Trust me. Rest in me. Know that I am here, and you are secure in and through it all.”

 

In that storm tossed boat on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus wasn’t asleep because He was indifferent to their situation. He was able to rest fully in His trust of the Father under all circumstances and in each moment of life. Christ asks us to do the same. Trusting in God doesn’t mean that I become complacent or fatalistic about what is happening in my world. I still keep handy that bucket for bailing out the water, and I make sure that the pumps are working before I set out to sea. Still, I can be certain that the storm will come, and the tortured waves will try to overwhelm me. Despite all of the chaos that is surrounding me in this time, I can hear the voice of my Lord, and He is speaking to my soul, “Peace, my beloved child. Be still and know that I am God.”

 

Under Christ’s Feet

And God put all things under Christ’s feet and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.

Ephesians 1: 22, 23 (italics are my clarification of personal pronouns)

 

The idea here is an important one to grasp, but it is not an easy one to understand. It is even harder to actually live like this is true. God, the Father, has taken all that is this world; with its sin ravaged architecture, resultant depravity, and rebellion unto death; and He has placed it in the hands of Christ. He is the One who has overcome all of the forces and effects of humanity’s fatal turn away from God and toward the human self-god. Christ died for us, His body was fully dead, and He was literally raised from that death into life as a culminating act in God’s defeat of Satan and the contemporary and eternal effects of sin.

 

Yet, the world where we live does not much resemble a place where Satan is defeated, and sadly, most of our lives demonstrate more of sin than of Christ’s love, redemptive grace, and healing mercy. The struggle of evil against God is not over. The result of the conflict is certain, but the carnage of battle continues unabated; so, the bodies will still pile up and the pain of loss will be experienced for some time to come. I think that this is the point of what Paul is saying here. There is one way to live in this world at this time and to do this in a manner that embraces victory. This requires each person who desires to live with the assurance and the reality of this victory to enter into a relationship with the One who has overcome death, Jesus the Christ. In Christ we find eternal hope and understanding, meaning, and purpose for this life.

 

This Christ, who now stands above and victoriously on this world, is positioned by the Father as the King of this same earth where we live. The subjects of this kingdom who Christ trusts and empowers with the task of bringing God’s love and peace to bear upon this planet are those of us who accept Christ as our Savior and Lord. We are given the absolute assurance by God that nothing in this world can truly harm us, that all pain and grief are temporary, and that our submission to Christ will be made fruitful by His working through us as His body. This is our time to submit to Christ the King, today is my day to live for His kingdom, and now is the moment to surrender all of me to serve Christ. The Lord calls us to go out into the world and to live for Him as people who are victorious over sin.

 

The Perfect Tool

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the heart.

Acts 4: 12

 

Here it is, friends and neighbors, the ultimate household tool! There is nothing else that you will ever need to own in order to take care of all of those difficult, messy, and seemingly impossible tasks that you encounter during the preparation of the meal that is life. The next thing that our minds are conditioned to expect to hear is the easy payment plan and the extra value added items that we will receive if we act now. That is about the point when this parallel between hundreds of infomercials and this Holy Spirit inspired statement of truth breaks down. In God’s economy, there is no amount of money that we can send that will begin to pay for what has already been purchased for us by Christ, and there is absolutely nothing else that we will need to make that relationship complete beyond what God has already gifted and delivered to us.

 

The word of God came into existence through the actions of the Holy Spirit, and its words remain actively viable throughout all of time because of the presence of that same Spirit in the hearts and the minds of people who know Christ and who read the words. The words and the books that they are printed in are not sacred, and the translations of the words, although these are usually the product of people who are passionately committed to presenting God’s word in forms that are accurate and accessible, are not to be worshiped. Yet, the life and the clarity of the truth that is found within the word is sacred, for that is where the Spirit of God communicates with the minds of people in order to make these words a vitally important part of the on-going dialogue that is at the center of our relationship with God.

 

The Word of God will answer every question that we have in life, and it does respond to each of our individual situations with the sort of honest insight that cuts through all of the surface issues and distractions. With the precision of the finest cutting tool ever made, the sharp edge of truth exposes the real issues that our heart and mind need to be focusing on. Then, the Spirit will provide us with a type of understanding that brings righteous thought and action into view. The Spirit also has this annoying habit of showing me the intentions of my heart; for then, as I give up my futile thinking, He has cleaned away the last remnants of the fatty waste that sin has formed in my thinking, and this precise tool that is the word of God has given to me the ability to enter more fully into the great feast that is the Lord’s banquet of life.