new beginnings

Ella and me in 1971

Jordan and Emily Shikles married tonight

So Jacob worked seven years to pay for Rachel. But his love for her was so strong that it seemed to him but a few days. (Genesis 29:20)

It is a new year. 2012. Sounds so science-fictiony. By now we ought to be wearing Mylar clothing and driving flying cars and eating from a tube or food pills. By now we should have a colony on the moon with men already on Mars. By now things should be going better.

But we still have gas-guzzling cars on wheels, we have stopped the space program and it has been over forty years since men were on the moon. Our clothing is cotton and wool (except for fleece clothing – that is cool) and it seems things are no real different than they were.

But on the other hand, morals are almost in the toilet, dishonesty is common, people admit openly to lying routinely in college or in business to get ahead.

So that is why it is so good that we started off the new year with a new marriage. Another life together. Jordan and Emily got married yesterday evening. There were a lot of people there to help celebrate, both at the church and at the dinner afterwards.

I was thinking of my own marriage beginning. January 9, 1971, I was a tall, straight, clean-limbed, incredibly fit soldier and Ella was beautiful. We got married on a Saturday morning at 10:00 in a relatively simple wedding with a large group of people attending. I only had one groomsman and Ella only one bridesmaid. I think there were 35 of each at this wedding last night.

We committed ourselves to being together until death do us part, just like Jordan and Emily did last night. So far, so good. Neither of us have died. But it looks like it will hold. I am no longer straight, clean-limbed nor fit, but Ella is still beautiful.

As with our own marriage, it is a great way to start off a new year. We get to looking at new years with a jaundiced eye figuring it will be nothing more but the same as it was last year.

But we have the chance to have a new year, with new relationships and closer to being with God in glory.

I always use that passage above when I marry people. I didn’t have to work to get her (I was larger than her dad) but we have had to work to keep it good. Nobody, no matter what anybody says, just goes along for a life-time without hard work on the part of both in a marriage.

But as with a new year, it is worth it. In the new year we move on to God, coming closer and closer.

May God’s blessings be on Jordan and Emily as well as all of us in this new year.

new year's resolutions

I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us. (Philippians 3:13-14)

Okay. So you are going to make your New Year’s Resolutions. You want to be better this year so what are you going to do?

There are those who say they make no resolutions. But resolutions are good and have a place in your life. When you make them, you are saying that you want to be better.

You can get goofy with them, of course. Resolving to lose 125 pounds in 2012, or becoming fluent in Russian or becoming independently wealthy or going to live in the space station. There are some things you probably will not do.

But really, resolutions are your own desire to be better. And you need them.

Otherwise you are just floating along through life with no real destination, no course charted.

You need some direction.

This year I want to accomplish these things:

1. I want to fast and pray more. Back when I fasted regularly, I had a better relationship with God in most ways. I want that again and I need his direction in my life. Fasting is not easy, but there is great power in it.

2. I need to get back in shape. I have really let myself go and need to feel better. I know I will never be the bull I was when I was younger (back when I could pick up refrigerators, tear telephone books in half, jump over tall buildings, etc) (I did see a t-shirt once that said, “The older I get, the better I was”) but I can still be an effective servant of God physically.

3. I need to read more good stuff. I tend to read a lot of books anyway, but here lately, I have gotten into a western kick and have read a lot of Louis L’Amours and stuff like that. I need to read better things, things that build me mentally.

4. I need to dump some things that have happened to me and re-find my ministry. It took an odd turn this year and I still feel the draw of God as a pastor. I am going to have to find what God wants this year. He has called me. now I have to listen.

Join me. if you are interested in fasting with me, tell me. We can have an online prayer and fasting time.

But you have a chance to be better. And you need to take it. Press on in 2012 and know God more.

daily java

Daily Java:

And I solemnly declare to everyone who hears the words of prophecy written in this book: If anyone adds anything to what is written here, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book. And if anyone removes any of the words from this book of prophecy, God will remove that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city that are described in this book He who is the faithful witness to all these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon!” Amen! Come, Lord Jesus! May the grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s holy people. (Revelation 22:18-21)

I have just finished this year’s reading of the Bible. I have a One Year Bible program (http://www.oneyearbibleonline.com/index.html if you are interested) that has a piece of the Old Testament, a piece of the New Testament, a Psalm and a couple of Proverbs every day.

I have read through the Bible several times now. And I always have the same reaction that I had today. When I read the last of Malachi and the last of Revelation, I always feel is a combination of being glad I have done it again, with a certain amount of sadness that I always feel when I finish a book of any kind.

Disciplining yourself to read the Bible daily is an undertaking that is a labor of love. It isn’t easy. There are a million things that come up in the year that try to take you away.

But that is the point of reading: to bring you closer to God and his written will. Hopefully, the more you read, the more you understand.

I have known some people who  have managed to read the Bible through several times, yet never understood what they read on anything but a purely superficial level.

They are like the women spoken of in 2 Timothy 3:7: forever following new teachings, but they are never able to understand the truth.

That’s the sad thing. You can read your Bible cover to cover, year after year, and never really understand it. To do so, you have to first know God. Unless you know God, all you are doing is reading. The stuff you read hits a mental barrier. It is interesting on one level, familiar enough to be enjoyed, yet never makes it into your personal heart of hearts. It just kind of floats to the surface.

That is why you hear bad guys in movies quoting scripture. They sound like they have quite a familiarization with God’s written word, yet they are still bad guys.

The things they read are on the same level as Shakespeare or Milton or someone like that. They are there and they can recall them and quote them, but they really do not understand them nor their power.

There is no power in the words, but in the God behind the words. So reading the words will do no good unless you know the God behind the words.

So I am finished for this year. I start again tomorrow with Genesis 1, Matthew 1, Psalm 1 and Proverbs 1.

May I know him like I know his word.

daily java

Daily Java:

“The words of a priest’s lips should preserve knowledge of God, and people should go to him for instruction, for the priest is the messenger of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. But you priests have left God’s paths. Your instructions have caused many to stumble into sin.  (Malachi 2:7-8)

Being a pastor is one of the hardest jobs you can imagine. With most jobs, you deal with the subject matter and maybe interacting with people, doing things that may be important on one level.

But as a pastor, you deal with people on a different level. You deal with the hearts and minds and souls of people. You help them to determine their ultimate destination. You teach and you guide and much of what you do and how you act will result in their either accepting the gospel message of Jesus or rejecting it, of accepting God or rejecting him.

The old joke of a pastor only working one day a week really kind of grates on most pastors. A pastor, a teacher, dos things no one ever knows. And one thing for sure, if he does not study and prepare for his “one day a week,” it will show.

Preserving knowledge and transmitting that knowledge to others is one of the biggest jobs a pastor has. He has to be one that his people know will tell them what they need to hear. And they will know that if he does not know, he will tell them that too. There are some things you cannot know, and he will not pretend to knowledge he does not have or cannot get.

He will keep the paths to God open in his own life so he can share those paths with others. That is not to say he will be perfect, because no one is. But he has to do his best to be godly and above board in all he does.

The writer James said: Dear brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers in the church, for we who teach will be judged more strictly (3:1). I will admit that I enjoy the teaching, the preaching parts that come from being a pastor. And it is that which attracts so many young men. But James said remember the responsibility that comes with it. God is going to look at his pastors differently than he does those they guide.

In 1 Timothy 1:7, the apostle Paul wrote: They want to be known as teachers of the law of Moses, but they don’t know what they are talking about, even though they speak so confidently.

There is nothing worse than a pastor or teacher who only does what he does out of greed, either for attention or for profit.

Hard stuff for a pastor to read.

daily java

Daily Java:

If you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you. (John 14:15-17)

I was reading about someone who was irritated at Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos quarterback who bows and prays openly on the field. He is not reluctant at all to display his Christianity.

The person whining was complaining that by doing this, he cheapened his religion. The person went on to say that any of the Republican candidates who run on a God agenda cheapen and pervert their religions by mentioning them and displaying their faith.

The writer’s idea of Christianity? "Something sort of somber and serious and deep." In other words, nothing that touches your life in any way. And certainly nothing that you display.

If these kinds of people go to church, they recite the liturgy, sleep through the sermon and feel at the end that they have done God a favor by coming. There is no connection, no meaning to what they do.

I had an email discussion with a man who only used the King James Version of the Bible. He had no use for modern translations. I asked him why. As the discussion went through maybe three or four responses from each of us, it came out that he was, after all, Church of England and they dealt far more comfortably with tradition. KJV was traditional, therefore KJV was preferred.

I ended by saying that if all you wanted was nostalgia, that was fine. But if you wanted something greater – like a touch from God through his word – you needed something that could be understood.

That’s the problem with the world. it cannot understand the things of God. Jesus said, in this passage, that he would send someone to be with us that would be totally incomprehensible to the world. they cannot understand him because they are on different wavelengths.

Jesus said, obey my commandments. What commandments? The ones where he said to love. He is not talking about the 67,000 things that people often put as commandments of Jesus. He is talking about love.

I read a booklet once that had all the commands of Jesus in a convenient little booklet. That was you could check them off as you did them, I suppose. The problem was, Jesus didn’t give commandments like that. We are not saved by what we do anyway. We are saved by who we are – children of God. And as children of God, we will love God and love each other.

Those are the commandments Jesus spoke of. Do that and the Spirit will come.

But know this: when he comes, the world will not appreciate it, and will get mad at you. After all, they got mad enough at Jesus that they killed him.

If they didn’t like him, it will be no surprise they do not like you.

And they hate you when you start being a Christian in public.

daily java

Daily Java:

The LORD works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed. (Psalm 103:6).

As has just about everybody else, I have been reading about the Occupy groups. Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Portland, etc. the idea is that there is a body of people unhappy with the distribution of wealth in this country and they want it changed. They want to go to a more socialist idea and an equal society.

Several times, I heard God invoked and this scripture (or part of it) used. God wants justice for the oppressed, someone yells through a bullhorn. If Jesus were here today, they proclaim, he would be here squatting on this land with us. He would be angry at you for not giving me money to do what I want..

I have often thought the co-opting of Jesus when you want him and ignoring him when you don’t to be the height of foolishness. It was Jesus himself that said, in Matthew 12:30: Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. He is not there to score political points or support political or social agendas. He is there to change men’s hearts.

God is a God who loves justice. And he loves the oppressed. But he also loves righteousness. He doesn’t just look to delivering oppressed; he looks to saving them.

Deliverance without salvation is useless in his eyes. He wants to occupy your heart, not just your city. He wants to deliver your heart, not just your body. He tells us that society will only change and people will only be free when our hearts belong to him. One cannot have true justice without righteousness.

The problem is, though, that those who are using him for their social agenda are afraid of him getting in their hearts. That is why they fight him and his power tooth and nail in every other part of life. They just want the part that sounds like what they want.

They don’t mind Jesus interfering with society as long as they can predict what he will do. It is when he becomes unpredictable and starts moving in their lives in ways they do not want that they get angry.

Real justice will come when righteousness comes. And not before. As Jesus said: Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. (Matthew 6)

four things I do not understand

There are three things that amaze me—
  no, four things that I don’t understand:
how an eagle glides through the sky,
   how a snake slithers on a rock,
      how a ship navigates the ocean,
         how a man loves a woman. (Proverbs 30:18-19)

It is the funniest thing to see. A boy falls in love for the first time. And when he does, his whole life is changed.

At the same time, falling in love is so strange. A guy looks at a lot of women and, while they may be alluring, interesting, fill him with lust, etc, he does not fall in love until he sees the one.

My son had a girlfriend and one of his friends remarked that she was not his type of girl. His answer: your type of girl really doesn’t matter when you meet the one you want to marry.

Good answer. And absolutely true.

The moment I met the girl that I would one day marry, I loved her. or at least I saw in her the potential for me to love her. She was standing in the midst of a group of girls that were, quite frankly better looking – and would have been available to the right guy – but it was her that attracted me.

How? I do not know. What makes a guy fall in love with a girl anyway? What is the chemistry?

I remember a guy I knew who was in a musical, My Fair Lady. He had several scenes, of course, with the leading lady. However, at one point she walked out on stage from a staircase. And he was smitten. Why not before? He had been with her for a long time. Why not before he saw here there?

A guy and girl are friends for twenty years and then one day look at each other and realize they love each other. Why then? Why not before?

Out of all the girls in the world, I picked Ella. I was a man about town, an interesting character. I could have had my pick of a lot of girls. It was not that I was smashingly handsome or anything, but I was older and had a good job and a car that ran and dressed well and was witty. (I knew I would never be handsome so I tried to become interesting.) But out of all these girls, Ella caught my eye.

My father-in-law waited ten years for my mother-in-law to grow up so he could marry her. why? Why not any of the other girls?

When that boy falls in love, he passes out of one phase of life into another. And he changes.

I had girlfriends and dates and kissed girls and all. But until I met Ella, I had never been serious about a girl. It was not necessarily that I didn’t want to be, but she was the one that activated the serious gene.

And so it has been. It is not that I have not noticed other women, but I decided at the age of 19 to pledge my life to this one. And I married her at the age of 21.

Our marriage has not been without rocky times, mostly due to me. But she was the one I would stay with and love.

And now that she is disabled, I promise her at least once a week that I will be with her and take care of her until one of us dies.

However it works, I love her.

just an ordinary kid with an extraordinary mission

Eight days later, when the baby was circumcised, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel even before he was conceived. (Luke 2:21)

The baby is born, the shepherds come and worship and maybe the wisemen. The next day, things are back to normal.

Joseph is a new father, Mary is a new mother and is sore from the delivery, the baby needs feeding and his diaper changed.

The animals are still eating, the census is still going on, the sun is still shining, the dust is still blowing, people are still being born and dying, and the King has come.

We tend to think about the earth shifting on its axis when Jesus was born, that everybody on earth felt a tremor in the ground at the moment of his birth. But they didn’t. And the earth didn’t shake.

Romans 8:22 says: all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And it had been and still is. When Jesus was born, the whole creation shifted on a different level. Now the King was here and things would be different.

But the groaning is still going on in our own lives and in the lives of those yet to come. When Jesus came, it changed everything on a spiritual level. But not necessarily on a physical level.

Life went on. People were still being born and dying.

The birth of Jesus was so ordinary. The conception was miraculous but the birth was ordinary. The life was ordinary. His death, although undeserved and brutal was ordinary to a point. He was not the first nor the last to be crucified.

The difference between him and all the rest was the resurrection. By his resurrection he showed himself to be extra-ordinary.

But there was nothing really all that special about his birth. And God meant it that way.

It even could have been that Mary and Joseph were expecting something amazing to happen, but the baby just lay there and slept. And gooed. And wiggled. And cried. And messed his pants. And finally walked, and ate solid food, and learned to play games, and grew.

Nothing special, except maybe for the time he was twelve in the temple. Otherwise, it was just a kid growing up in a family.

But what a kid. One who was the King of Kings and Lord of Lords incognito. I don’t think he even knew it himself until that day of his baptism when he went into the wilderness for forty days.

Just an ordinary kid with an extraordinary mission: to seek and save those who were lost.

daily java

Daily Java:

Rejoice, O people of Zion!
      Shout in triumph, O people of Jerusalem!
   Look, your king is coming to you.
      He is righteous and victorious,
   yet he is humble, riding on a donkey—
      riding on a donkey’s colt. (Zechariah 9:9)

When Jesus came, he came as a little baby, helpless and human. What people wanted was for him to come as a powerful person raised in royalty and splendor. And they still want it.

Try to tell some people that the baby Jesus was not aware as an adult is and they get almost angry. In their minds, they can see the little baby counting down the years until he is killed in all the legends, he blesses the shepherds and the wise men, he blesses other people doing things for him and his family at various times. Some of the apocryphal writing even has him doing miracles as a child.

But the thing is, if Jesus came as a super-aware baby, he was not a real baby. And if he was not a real baby, the whole divine project was a sham. If Jesus didn’t live as we did, and die as we did, it was all worthless.

On the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, Jesus rode a young donkey into Jerusalem. What they wanted was a big white horse. He wore ordinary clothing. What they wanted was for him to wear fancy, kingly robes.

The problem was, God never did things the way people wanted it.

When Jesus came, he came to an ordinary young couple, in fact conceived out of wedlock. The young couple were transients, traveling to register in the census. He was born in a stable and laid in a manger. God announced his birth, not to wise men, but to shepherds. When wisemen came, they had to hunt for him.

He grew up in an ordinary, nondescript household. He ate regular food and wore regular clothes. He worked a regular job. He never married but that was about the only thing out of the ordinary for him.

And he only preached for three years, after which he was killed. His Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem as a king was on a young donkey with twelve ordinary guys with him.

But even that couldn’t hide his kingship. Even that couldn’t hide the fact that here was the King of King, Lord of Lords.

Thank you, Lord, for sending Jesus to us. Make us worthy.

daily java

Daily Java:

For a child is born to us, a son is given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)

It is Christmas Day! I can almost hear bells ringing like in the movies except that I don’t think any do on Christmas. Sometimes there is a set of bells near our apartment, but I do not hear them now.

But today is the day he came into this world. For nine months he has been growing in Mary waiting for today. And now he is born. The angels sing, all creation sings, the plan of God is here in the flesh and Jesus is born. Divinity has become humanity and the age old plan is begun.

God talked about this all the way from Genesis 3:15. He told Adam and Eve that they were no longer allowed to live in the garden. And he told the serpent, the devil, that one day a man would come who would crush him.

He will crush your head but you will bruise his heel.

Jesus would come, live a sinless life, yet die for our sins. He would be raised again to live and to make us live in God. Jesus would indeed crush satan’s head in that he would take away the sins of the world.

But satan would also bruise Jesus’ heel. Jesus would have to become human, live here for 33 years and die a brutal death. Not only that, 1 Corinthians 15 tells us that until he comes again in his power, he is not like he was, part of that Godhead. He is limited, waiting for instructions from the Father.

Satan did bruise his heel. But in that bruising we are blessed. Isaiah 53 says by his stripes we are healed. By that very act of self-sacrifice, by his becoming human, by his death, by his resurrection – we are healed. And the healing is more than physical. We are healed in our souls.

The King is here! Praise be to his name! Sing his praises today.

merry christmas

After this interview the wise men went their way. And the star they had seen in the east guided them to Bethlehem. It went ahead of them and stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were filled with joy! They entered the house and saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasure chests and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. (Matthew 2:9-11)

It is Christmas Eve, and Ella is asleep, or will be soon. She is one of those people who can go to sleep in no time. It takes me forever, but she is gone almost the minute she hits the pillow.

I am about to go and fill her stocking for Christmas.

I was raised in a family that believed in Santa Claus and I have good memories of it. She was raised in a family that did not so they never had fun Christmases. Add to that the fact that we were raised in a church that didn’t believe it was permissible to celebrate Christmas as  the birth of Jesus. So the fact that Santa was there made it fun for me.

But she never had Santa come visit her until we got married.

The first Christmas we were married, I told her about the Christmas stockings. It sounded fun but she didn’t really know what to do. I told her that Santa had to come while we were asleep. So at some point in the night, we each got up without waking the other and fixed the stockings.

I fixed her stocking brimming with presents, falling out, candy and apples and oranges and stuff galore spilling out of it. She fixed hers with a couple of things. She had never done a stocking before and had no idea of how. When  she saw my masterpiece (I had gone all out for my new wife), she even took a few of the candies in hers and put it on mine.

But needless to say, her stocking was the best. And I liked it.

Of course, the next Christmas she had all year to plan and she went all out.

We have done that each year. At some point in the night we get up and Santa comes.

This year, we are almost broke. However, I had enough to get her a few things and – what do you know? Santa came. The stocking is full. A little inexpensive jewelry (she is amazingly easy to please), some candy, a body wash and a red pear. And voila! A Christmas stocking.

Christmas is not about Santa nor about the stockings. But they add extra to the day. And they make us each feel good in the giving.

Merry Christmas.

daily java

Daily Java:

They hurried to the village and found Mary and Joseph. And there was the baby, lying in the manger. After seeing him, the shepherds told everyone what had happened and what the angel had said to them about this child. All who heard the shepherds’ story were astonished, but Mary kept all these things in her heart and thought about them often. The shepherds went back to their flocks, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. It was just as the angel had told them. (Luke 2:16-20)

It is hard to imagine the first time, but here it was. The shepherds were sitting around minding their own business and suddenly, a choir of angels began to sing. It was probably frightening.

When the angels told them to go to Bethlehem and see the baby, they went. They probably had no idea which baby or where, but they were not about to disobey angels. You can almost imagine them thinking about going house to house when they just kind of gravitated to the stable. There, among all the people and all the babies who were probably born that night, was one who was the King of Israel. And they found him.

It startled Mary and Joseph when a bunch of smelly shepherds came into the stable. Joseph’s first impulse may even to have been to jump in front of Mary and the baby to defend them.

He soon realized that they were from God.

But why shepherds? Why someone so lowly, so menial, so far down the social level? Why not someone better and greater?

He soon found out that Jesus had come to the world, not the “powerful and important.” He came to shepherds as well as kings. He came to everybody.

Soon though, the shepherds left. And Joseph was left with Mary and the baby, his new family, his new responsibility. It was not his child, and he – along with the entire village of Nazareth – knew it. But he loved Mary, and because of that, he loved Jesus.

And life went on.

Glory came down and then everything went back to normal. But meanwhile, the grace and love of God in the form of a baby lay sleeping, dreaming whatever dreams babies dream, waiting for the day he would sacrifice himself for humanity.

Mary adjusted his blanket and went to sleep herself. And Joseph waited. He wondered if something else was going to happen tonight.

daily java

Daily Java:

An adulterous woman consumes a man, then wipes her mouth and says, “What’s wrong with that?” (Proverbs 30:20)

I read several websites every day that give me the news. I read both conservative and liberal.

But one thing I notice: when I read about crimes committed, the conservative news sites will bring out the fact that the people committing the crime don’t know why so many people are making such a big deal out of it.

They will have shot their mother, or robbed their grandmother to buy an X Box, or taken something from a friend, or gotten angry with a McDonald’s employee and injured them in some way. But almost always, they will have a reason.

His mother was always griping about him not taking his dishes to the kitchen when he got through eating. He finally got so fed up with her bossing him around that he shot her.

His grandmother had plenty of money and he wanted an X Box. She could afford it but refused to give it to him. So he knocked her out, took her money and went and got one.

The McDonald’s employee gave her fries that were not hot enough so she threw his hot coffee on them. It was their own fault for not treating her as she deserved to be treated.

In every circumstance, the person committing the crime felt entitled in some way and cannot for life of him figure why people are so mad.

There seems to be a total lack of perspective today. In the Proverbs passage, when the woman finishes eating the man, she cannot figure out why people are angry at her. I mean, she was hungry, you know.

Sometimes the most horrible crimes are committed and all the while, the defendant, who is clearly guilty cannot understand why such a big fuss is made. He was entitled to whatever he wanted, she needed what she took, the person was standing in her way and had no right to do so.

And we watch, both fascinated and appalled at the this creature, almost a monster, totally devoid of any human compassion or conscience, trying to rationalize what had been done.

People have always done wrong, people have always been sinful creatures, some of whom went far overboard. But it seems that, as our culture decays – and decaying it is – this becomes more and more common.

Our schools teach our children that they deserve whatever they want, that they are each unique and special and that life owes them things. Then when they become older, they figure that if they do not get the things they deserve, they can take them. And anyone who stands in their way is just being mean.

The whole Occupy Wall Street thing is this idea gone crazy. Those involved do not want to work, but instead want everything handed to them. And they will tear up whatever they need to in order to get it.

This is not the first country or culture to become this way. But it surely hurts to see this great nation fall into the toilet. May God have mercy on us.

daily java

Daily Java:

And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her first child, a son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them. (Luke 2:6-7)

The King of the Universe lying in a feed trough. Although it was probably more comfortable for him than what passed for inns at the time. They were known to be lice-ridden and a place for thieves to operate.

But Joseph and Mary didn’t have to worry about that. There was no lodging available for them, so they stayed in a manger. But the manger had the advantage of being warm and probably a lot less expensive.

So the King of the Universe comes. Born to young people, but conceived out of wedlock, born in a transient shelter, lying in a feed trough, surrounded by animals.

You would think that he would come in all the pomp and circumstance God could make. But the point was, his life would never be fancy. It was humble and common. Jesus didn’t come to impress us with his life; he came to save us by his death.

He came to share with us in life. And as he mentions again and again, there were a lot more poor people than rich. To identify with the world, he wouldn’t come as a king in luxury.

To identify with us, he came as a commoner, one born in humble surroundings, just like we are. And in so doing, he gave us God in the flesh.

As the song says, “What a strange way to save the world.”

daily java

Daily Java:

 “From the least to the greatest,
      their lives are ruled by greed.
   From prophets to priests,
      they are all frauds.
 They offer superficial treatments
      for my people’s mortal wound.
   They give assurances of peace
      when there is no peace.  (Jeremiah 6:13-15)

The Nobel Peace Prize seems to me to be one of the most worthless things in the world. it has been given to person after person, and still there is war.

And not only that, there will always be war.

In the 1960’sand 70’s peace was the rallying cry. I wore a peace sign and flashed the V peace sign everywhere I could. Performers protested for peace, riots broke out in the name of peace, people sang about peace, dreamed of peace, imagined world peace.

And still the world fought.

The problem is that peace will not be realized in our lifetimes. It is not something you broker, or imagine, or strain real hard to get. Peace is internal. And if it doesn’t come from inside, it will not come no matter how often people talk about it.

The wars in the Middle East go back to the conflict between Isaac and Ishmael, two of Abraham’s sons. The hatred between the two groups has always been and always will be.

In our own lives and our own culture, there has always been fighting and always will be. Peace will not come until we all become children of God obeying him.

And even then, it may not.

In the book of Philippians, one of the most upbeat books in the Bible, written to a good church with a lot of positive things in it, there is a plea by the apostle Paul that two women quit fighting. Even though the church is going good, still there is war inside it.

Calling peace, declaring peace, mandating peace will not work. Peace has to come from inside or it is worthless, a sham.

It can only come through giving yourself to God. Anyone who tries to get it any other way will be doomed to failure.

daily java

Daily Java:

Then the voice from heaven spoke to me again: “Go and take the open scroll from the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.” So I went to the angel and told him to give me the small scroll. “Yes, take it and eat it,” he said. “It will be sweet as honey in your mouth, but it will turn sour in your stomach!” So I took the small scroll from the hand of the angel, and I ate it! It was sweet in my mouth, but when I swallowed it, it turned sour in my stomach. (Revelation 10:8-10)

Reading the Bible is good. And a lot of people take a lot of comfort in reading it. If you go to visit an elderly person, and you just sit and read to them, it is comforting.

But obeying the Bible, that is another animal. That is where it gets tough.

I really think that is why so many like to read the King James Version. It just sounds good. But it also sounds removed from real life. The language, the vocabulary, the phrasing is four hundred years old. And reading it is kind of like reading an old familiar history book. It sounds good but since it doesn’t make a lot of sense doesn’t feel relevant.

Now you read a new translation. That feels and sound relevant. And sometimes people get angry at the newer translation. They will talk about translation practices and texts and stuff like that.

But what it will boil down to many times – in fact more than not – is the fact that the new translation baldly states things where the language of the old translation obscures it.

It is easy to hide the need to do things in the language of the old. God’s word is hidden in nostalgia.

When John ate that scroll, it tasted great. But when it became part of him, it was sour.

The same thing happens when we really begin to apply Jesus to our lives. He said that himself. He said that unless we eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, we have no part in him (John 6).

What he meant was that it was easy to look at Jesus and see the good guy, the gentle Jesus, the one that kids liked. But it was hard to look at Jesus and see the man that made the authorities so angry they killed him.

It was hard to see the Jesus that demanded of us that we leave our entire lives behind, even to the point of cutting off an appendage if necessary, so that we could follow him.

It is hard to see the Jesus that said that following him would necessitate leaving all you knew behind, even your parents and loved ones if necessary.

It is hard to see the Jesus that said that in order to live, you had to die.

That is sour stuff. The sweet little Jesus, walking a little off the ground, looking like he would be blown over by a strong wind – that was not the Jesus John was talking about. And the word of God that spoke of Jesus that John encountered in Revelation 10 was not that Jesus. He was the living, breathing, Word of God made manifest in the flesh.

He was God.

Sometimes kind of hard to take when all you want to do is use Jesus to sell alternative energy, or vegetarianism, or class equality.

Jesus never gave a flip about any of these thing. He just went his way doing the will of the Father who sent him. And making people stomachs hurt in the process.

daily java

Daily Java:

For God so loved the world that he gave his uniquely begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

The Beatles said: “All you need is love.” And you know what? For once they were right.

Today is the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love. It is the day we focus on the very nature of God and his love for humanity.

The Beatles were right. All you need is love. But not like they thought. Not free love, or any of the weird things that went with it. What we need is real love.

The world makes do with a counterfeit. And after a while it gets to thinking that it is normal. It is kind of like that fake cheese stuff that is sold in individual plastic wrappers. It isn’t cheese. It is cheese food. Fake cheese. It isn’t quite as bad as that soy stuff – cheddamelt – but almost.

We used to tell the kids it was children's cheese so we could save money on the real stuff by eating it ourselves. They figured it out sooner or later.

If we eat it enough and pretend enough, it may taste like cheese. And it is the same with love. If we go with the fake stuff, we may settle for it. But it isn’t the same.

Fake love is sex, or tolerance, or smiling on each other, or maybe even living together without fighting. But it isn’t love. Love is a real thing that changes those it affects.

When we are loved, it affects us. And when we love it does the same. Love touches us in a real way that, when we feel it, we recognize the artificial easily.

God’s love is a changing love. It calls us to better things, it makes us want to be better. And he showed us his love by sending Jesus.

What’s more, 1 John 3:16 says: We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters. God showed love by sending Jesus. Jesus showed love by coming. A lot of love going around.

Love shown by sacrifice. Love shown by giving something up for the betterment of someone else. Only real people do that.

Next Sunday will be the celebration of that love. We’ll celebrate the Christ child come into this world and love made manifest in the flesh.

Don’t miss it. Anything else you do will be just children’s cheese.

daily java

Daily Java:

Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ. Then, whether I come and see you again or only hear about you, I will know that you are standing together with one spirit and one purpose, fighting together for the faith, which is the Good News.

(Philippians 1: 27)March 2, 1970 I stepped off the train in Germany at my base in Kaiserslautern. I had been in Germany for a day or two, having flown into Frankfurt. Now I was where I was supposed to go.

I traveled from Frankfurt to Kaiserslautern by myself on the train. That doesn’t sound like much until you have been somewhere where you do not understand anything said or written.

It was a totally alien experience. And I began to appreciate how children feel when they cannot read at all. But in this situation, I could not only not read, I couldn’t make myself understood.

I couldn’t event ell where the toilets were. After a while, I recognized the word Toiletten and figured that was close and went in one. To my joy, it was a restroom.

It was exciting to be somewhere so alien. The people were basically the same, they drove cars and ate food and wore clothing (most of the time). But things were different too.

One of the first things that really struck me was that the women didn’t have the same sense of modesty that American women had. Of course, you figure America came from a Puritan background. Europe came from a barbarian background. So the moral sense and backgrounds were so dissimilar.

At the swimming pool, people would change into their bathing suits out in the open. Girls bending over to look at produce in the European version of the mini-skirt would just about cause wrecks.

But in general, it was fascinating. I enjoyed going out and getting myself lost and finding my way back to the base. I almost became German. When I went back and married Ella and brought her back over to live for my last six months, we tried as hard as we could to become German in looks.

She was from German stock anyway, but I wasn’t. I was also a lot taller than the average German. But I got my hair cut at German barbers and wore German clothes, including shoes.

A lot of GI’s would wear German clothes, but would wear the black brogans from their dress outfits. That was an automatic giveaway.

We wanted to fit in. when we did, it seemed that we had a better time and didn’t stand out.

But even so, we were foreigners. We were American and had no desire to give up that citizenship. We were subject to German laws to a point, but ultimately, we were subject to American laws.

We became like them to a point, but were still strangers in a strange land.

That’s how we are as Christians. We live here, work her, do all the stuff here, but ultimately, we are citizens of a better place.

Even though we live here, we wait for a better place. And that place is heaven.

daily java

Daily Java:

Then I heard a voice from heaven say, “Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.” (Revelation 14:13)

I remember reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as a young man. The stories, at times, verged on horrible. Many times, those who had died for Jesus died painful deaths. There were periods in which being a Christian was a dangerous thing.

It is that way again today in many of the Muslim countries. Islam demands conformity and if you are not Muslim, you are automatically guilty of heresy. Since many of the Islamic countries are run as a religious government, that charge of heresy carries the death penalty.

We have it so easily in America that we forget the rest of the world. even though there is a war on Christianity, at the same time, we really do not have much trouble worshiping as we please. Sure, we have trouble at Christians with the fools who try each year to kill the national celebration. But even so, we live in a blessed situation. We can boldly walk into a church, we can write on our blogs and in our letters about our faith, we can tell others about it and even wear Christian symbols if we wish.

A great big batch of the world cannot do that under penalty of death.

And it has always been that way.

In the early church, the Bible records Stephen as being the first martyr to the Christian faith in Acts 6. It is interesting to see that the Jews of the first century had much the same mindset as the Muslims of the twenty-first century: our way or the highway. Do it like we say or die.

I suppose the only difference was that the Jews of the first century were not bent on converting the world. they spent their time on internal purity. Muslims today want to forcibly convert the world. to Islam.

But, even so, if you were a Jew in the first century and you became a Christian, you were in trouble. Not only that but later on the emperor Nero decided to make Christians the nation Roman scapegoat. He would kill them by the hundreds and use their bodies as torches for his parties.

It would be hard to be a boldly professing Christian in such a situation.

James came next in Acts 12. James was an odd martyr. He was one of the Twelve, the inner circle of Jesus’ followers. Why God allowed him to die is sometimes beyond me. he needed all his apostles, yet James was martyred.

But even so, he died, and a lot of others died throughout the first centuries and all the centuries following. Sometimes the deaths were by other Christians over internal disputes. In the fourteenth century AD, John Wycliffe, called the “Morning Star of the Reformation” was burned at the stake for having the temerity to translate the Bible into English. In the next century, Martin Luther was condemned for the same and for preaching against the excesses of the established church.

All though Christianity today, people try their level best to bend others into their way of thinking, even going so far as character assassination and vicious condemnation. All because of theological disagreements.

How does God feel? He says that those who die for him, or those who suffer in his name – even if by others who also bear his name – are precious to him.

He sees it. He doesn’t stop it, which it seems he would, but at the same time, he sees it. And those who die for him can know that they are precious to him

daily java

Daily Java:

“Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israel forever; his Kingdom will never end!” (Luke 1:30-33)

She was deep in thought. The wedding was a few months off and her family was getting ready for it. She was proud that she was going to marry Joseph. He was tall and strong and handsome. He had a good business and made a good living. And on top of it all, he loved her.

She had always known, as had all the girls, that she would one day marry the one her parents chose for her. As a young girl, she had spent a fair amount of time wondering who it would be. She would look at all the men in Nazareth and try to figure who it would be.

Would he be older, like Ezra, the butcher? He was a good man, but he was a lot older than she. He had lost his wife a couple of years ago and was beginning to think about remarrying. He did have two children that needed a mother.

Or would it be Solomon, or Benjamin or one of the other boys? She was so glad when they told her that Joseph had asked for her hand and they had accepted. She knew that as an obedient Jewish girl, she would have to defer to her parents in their choice of her husband. But oh she hoped he was handsome and near her age.

But then it happened. As she walked along thinking about all this, she almost bumped into a man. When she looked up at him, she knew instantly that he was an angel. And she was afraid.

She fell on her face. Why was he here? There was the story that when you died you saw an angel come to get you, but she didn't think she had died. She felt fine. What was he here for?

He lifted her to her feet and spoke to her in a voice that was so otherworldly. She had never heard anything like it before in her life. It wasn’t roaring or any of the ways you would think an angel would speak, but it had such authority and such power. It was the kind of voice you didn’t talk back to.

The first thing he said was Don’t be afraid. A little late for that. And how was a girl who was only fourteen years old not supposed to be afraid when she saw an angel?

Then the angel told her something that completely changed her life, both for the better and the worse. You have found favor with God.

And he told her she would have a child. Wait a minute. She was a virgin. She had been saving herself for her husband. How could she have a child? What would everyone think when she became pregnant?

She was more afraid. The angel had told her: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God.

The Son of God. The Messiah. The Prince of Peace promised to her people for thousands of years. She would be his mother. His mother! She!

She felt the power of God wash over her in a way she had never felt before. And when she did, she knew she was pregnant with God’s Son.

Oh, what a fortunate woman she was! Any woman would jump at the chance to be in this situation! And she was chosen. She!

She was so blessed, she thought, and her soul magnified the Lord.

Now what in heaven’s name was she going to tell Joseph?

anger towards God

People ruin their lives by their own foolishness and then are angry at the Lord. (Proverbs 19:3)

My wife has fallen five times in the past two days. She has Multiple Sclerosis and has a lot of problems with her legs and her feet. She really had a bad day Sunday, but in the morning services the church prayed over her. she said she felt a feeling like a layer of pain went away.

Since then she has fallen five times, she cannot lift her right foot into the car, she can barely walk.

She was better off before the prayer.

I looked for a scripture to go with this as I always like to find one. The one above is the only one is the Bible that I can find where someone is angry with the Lord (other than Jonah and he was angry that Nineveh turned away from sin and that the plant that shaded him had to die – a little different situation.). But this verse seems to indicate that anger at the Lord comes from someone wasting their lives by being foolish and then blaming God.

And that doesn’t fit here. Not only that, but it really grates on me. Do I have no right to be angry with God? Even Job was not condemned for his anger and his frustration. God just told him that he was God and that was that. Kind of the same situation.

Ella is a good person, one who simply loves and trusts God, one w ho freely and totally worships him. And he has treated her like this.

It fills me with a certain rage. There is no reason for her to suffer like this. And certainly, there is no reason to make her worse after she has been prayed for. I I had known that, I would have had her stay home from church. She felt better for a while and even testified Sunday night. But Monday it was different.

She felt a touch of the Lord all right. She felt a back-handed slap.

I have devoted my life to his service, as has she, being, as she was, trapped in my world.

And now, we are broke – almost destitute – and she is in pain. The pain, to make it worse, is not from the MS. It is from the falling. Every time she falls, she hurts herself. She has a considerable number of bruises and sore places.

Now this is not the normal way people talk of God and I know it. But on the other hand, this is not what God promised his people. The Bible is full of comments that if we are in him, he will bless us.

Where is the blessing? And why pain instead of blessing? If we were being persecuted, that would be one thing. But this is worthless. It serves no purpose and only makes one of his loving children hurt more.

The Bible says that God as a father is better than we are. But this I know: as a father I would not allow my children to be hurt if it were in my power to stop it.

I am not all that great a person. Why could it not be happening to me. I probably deserve it. But not her. she does not deserve it, and has done nothing to warrant it.

I started this blog to share my heart. But today my heart is angry. And I see today a God who does not care. What is more, I hear nothing but cloying aphorisms from friends, trite little sayings that make me madder than anything else.

People feel compelled to defend God with stupid little sayings about his love and how maybe we aren’t on his wavelength and all that BS.

But God has begun to ignore us and I do not know why. And I am in pain from it in my heart, while my sweet little trusting worshiping loving wife is in pain in her body for no reason.

Hear me Lord.

daily java

Daily Java:

Then I saw a scroll in the right hand of the one who was sitting on the throne. There was writing on the inside and the outside of the scroll, and it was sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel, who shouted with a loud voice: “Who is worthy to break the seals on this scroll and open it?” But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll and read it. Then I began to weep bitterly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll and read it. But one of the twenty-four elders said to me, “Stop weeping! Look, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the heir to David’s throne, has won the victory. He is worthy to open the scroll and its seven seals.” (Revelation 5:1-5)

In 1970, I had the great idea of sending a tape to my girl-friend (who is now my wife). I would talk into the tape and stuff and it just seemed like a good idea.

The only problem was, she didn’t have a tape recorder and I chose a tape that was fast becoming obsolete.

I chose a reel-to-reel tape at a time when they were going away and cassette tapes were the next big thing. I did this because a friend had a massive tape deck that I could use. Unfortunately, Ella had a tape from me and no way to play it. She went everywhere until she finally found a small one for sale somewhere.

The finally she could hear my tape.

Imagine getting a letter full of wonderful things and not being able to read it. Maybe it was in some language that no one you knew could read. Or it was in a file that was encrypted, or in a format different than any program you had. You just cannot read it and you want to so badly.

The old apostle John stands before the throne room of God and there is a scroll with wonderful things in it. But nobody can get it open. There is a lock on the front and no one has a key. Whatever is in that scroll is absolutely inaccessible,

And you want to read it so badly it makes you weep from frustration.

But you were wrong. There is someone who is strong enough, holy enough, powerful enough to open it. He steps forward, full of power and strength, picks up the scroll and pops that lock right off. He can read it. He understands the language, he has the encryption, his is the understanding. And not only that, he can explain it to you so that you too can share in this great and wonderful knowledge.

He is the King, the great Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and he is not going to let some lock mechanism, no matter how strong, stop him from bringing the Word of God to the world.

He is Jesus.

daily java

Daily Java:

Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the reign of King Herod. About that time some wise men from eastern lands arrived in Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star as it rose, and we have come to worship him.” King Herod was deeply disturbed when he heard this, as was everyone in Jerusalem. He called a meeting of the leading priests and teachers of religious law and asked, “Where is the Messiah supposed to be born?” “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they said, “for this is what the prophet wrote:
‘And you, O Bethlehem in the land of Judah,
      are not least among the ruling cities of Judah,
 for a ruler will come from you
      who will be the shepherd for my people Israel.’”
Then Herod called for a private meeting with the wise men, and he learned from them the time when the star first appeared. Then he told them, “Go to Bethlehem and search carefully for the child. And when you find him, come back and tell me so that I can go and worship him, too!” (Matthew 2:1-8)

Jesus was a blessing to all who were around him. At the same time, he was a threat to all that was around him.

He was a blessing because he was the Savior, the Prince of Peace come to this earth to save men’s souls, to bring us back to God. In that respect, he was the gift of God promised throughout the ages, that which the world looked toward since Adam brought sin into the world.

But he was also a threat. He represented change and change is never welcome. Everyone around would be affected. But some would like the change, would appreciate and love being affected. Some, on the other hand, would not.

King Herod did not. He didn’t appreciate the change at all. In fact, he did everything he could to stop the change, including the wholesale murder of all children under the age of two in the city of Bethlehem in hopes of killing that agent of hope. He didn’t want to worship, he wanted to stop Jesus.

But that agent of hope was not going to be stopped by someone as pathetic as King Herod. Yes, the king was powerful, but God had something better in mind.

God had Jesus in mind. And Jesus was going to come to this earth, no matter what a king of anyone else thought.

That is the problem with Jesus. He is Change. And the world hates to be changed from what it is to what it could be. That is why the world, governments, Hollywood, everything else fights him so hard. He is good, they are not. And they resist him.

But he will win, no matter what else may happen. His is superior strength and has endured for over 2000 years. And it will endure until God is through.

preaching my first real sermon in front of real people

Preach the word. (2 Timothy 4:2)

I still remember preaching my first real sermon in front of real people.

It was in Osceola, TX, in 1975, the church met in a small, cubical church building. I remember it as being as high as it was wide or long. Old church pews made of slats, no sound system because the sound just kind of rolled around inside.

A fellow led singing that sounded like an opera singer. It was Church of Christ, non-instrumental, so there were no instruments with our singing, just a bunch of country people singing away in a small country church.

My friend, Gene, preached that morning, while I led singing. I preached that evening. We got paid $50 for the day, $25 each. As we were coming back home, I asked Gene what he was going to do with his money. $25 was quite a bit in 1975. He said, I am going to buy some food and shove it in my mouth. He was quite basic that way.

But I remember preparing as if it would be the sermon of the ages and delivering it with all the gusto I could pack into my young preacher’s life. I was 25 years old and in a seminary in Dallas, TX, that was attached to the Churches of Christ.

I was known for my singing and for the fact that I could get up and talk for a long time about nothing (an assignment once – to speak about something you knew nothing about until someone caught you in an error. I spoke for over ten minutes on automatic transmissions before I finally just quit.)

But I carefully chose one of my two suits (the brown plaid one) and shirt and tie, combed my hair and mustache and mounted the sacred desk to deliver unto the people the word of the Lord.

I was probably a pretentious guy who knew little or nothing of what he spoke. But I meant well
 and I wanted to teach the word of God.

After almost forty years, I still do. I have grown tired of ministry, been whacked around enough in the name of God, but I still want to teach.

I teach on Sunday nights at Firm Foundation in Boonville. It is a casual affair, more of directed discussion, trying to make people think.

But every once in a while I think of the young man in the pulpit in Osceola, TX, pounding out the word.

He was an idiot. But he meant well. And I think he had a good heart, even if it did get broke

daily java

Daily Java:

“The time is surely coming,” says the Sovereign Lord,
      “when I will send a famine on the land—
   not a famine of bread or water
      but of hearing the words of the Lord.
 People will stagger from sea to sea
      and wander from border to border[g]
   searching for the word of the Lord,
      but they will not find it.
 Beautiful girls and strong young men
      will grow faint in that day,
      thirsting for the Lord’s word. (Amos 8:11-13)

The Lord said there would come a time when there was not a famine of food, but of knowledge. There would come a time when people would be dying from knowledge malnutrition more than anything else.

And it seems to be now. But in such an odd way.

We have an overflow of knowledge today. With the advent of Google, we can find out just about anything with one click on our computers. In the past few days, according to my Google link, I have found out a number of things. Definitions of words, biographies of people and of rock bands, cake recipes, Christmas jazz stations, what kind of dog a corgi is, an English to Klingon dictionary, a Greek interlinear Bible, the words and chords to “Me and Bobby McGee,”

I have always had a fascination with knowledge and the computer is a way to almost glut that desire to know more.

But yet, with all the knowing more, we really know less. Things are so easily attainable that we lose the perspective that comes from study. Reading a book and thinking about it brings wisdom. Finding a quote brings just knowledge. Disciplined study brings wisdom, scattergun Googling brings knowledge. That kind of knowledge is great for parties where you are looking for something to talk about, but in general, it is worthless.

We are in an age of wisdom famine. People seem to have no perspective on things, no ability to think things through. We are an impulse society, and impulsive people are never happy nor are they well balanced.

And the knowledge we have is mostly trivial. Looking at the Google bar and what I have looked for on the computer, I see that it is mostly nothing, just trivial things. The idea of sitting with a good book and just reading is almost alien. And it affects me. I want to know something and I want to know it now. I finally have something that can give me instant information. In fact, I get irritated at having to read all the posts on the first page of the Google search just to find my scrap of information.

It breeds impatience, and wisdom can only come through patience.

And we can only come to God through patience and learning to listen to him and know him. He is not Googleable. You cannot know him quickly, nor can you know him thoroughly without a lot of time spent in looking for him and listening to him.

Without him? We grow faint, no matter  how well off we may be otherwise.

daily java

Daily Java: 

But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ. For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. (Ephesians 2:13-15)

Today is the Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Peace.

My generation placed a lot of emphasis on peace. We talked about it, wore symbols to show we were for it, we sang about it – peace was everywhere, on our lips, chests, posters. It was everywhere but in our hearts.

That is the problem. You don’t get peace by thinking about it or singing about it or even wanting it. You only get peace in your life through surrender to Jesus.

It sounds simple, to simple in fact. But it is true. That’s the thing. Sometimes the simple things are the answers. Sometimes we work so hard trying to get something when it is right under our noses, available if we would just reach out and get it.

And those who talked about it the most were generally the least peaceful. Their peace (if it were to be called so) came from outside sources – drugs, sex, others – and was only temporary. They were almost frenetic in their search for peace. They wanted it but looked for it, as the song said, in all the wrong places.

Peace doesn’t come through a conscious decision. It doesn’t come through government mandate, or everybody just getting along together. For one things, people do not get together very well even under the best of circumstances.

Peace processes do little or no good because the underlying conflicts and angers are still there. Just because two people sign a sheet of paper doesn’t mean anything.

Peace cannot come by laying down weapons. It can only come through laying down hearts.

It is only when we lay our heart at God’s feet and give ourselves to him that we get real peace.

And this is the real thing. It is the peace that remains even when the world about you is in tumult, when wars are raging and pain is suffered. It stays through troubles and problems. It is not something that is achieved by cessation of violence, but by sacrifice of your own self to God.

It is, to paraphrase a famous saying, not a cheap peace. It is achieved at the expense of your life. It is gained by the loss of yourself. And it is kept in your heart, where the problems of the world cannot touch it.

It comes from God and he alone can give real peace. And he will if you let him.

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Daily Java:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.  (John 14:27)

I really have never been a peaceful man. Some are naturally peaceful people. They are able to let things kind of flow off their backs. Not me.

I carry things around and think about them, I analyze myself and my motives until I have wrung out all of the good in them. I worry and I brood and all those things.

There have been people who tell me that I cannot be a Christian if I do that, that I must Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you (2 Peter 5:7).

While it is true that I give my cares to God, people who say that usually do not have the slightest idea what they are talking about. It is also not an easy thing to do.

My mind is, at times, a maelstrom of thoughts turning over and over in my mind, dealing with things that happened forty years ago and might happen tomorrow, that I have done or wish I had done, that I am thinking about for no reason – just a giant mental jumble. And sometimes it is overwhelming.

The apostle Paul was the same way. I don’t think he flopped off to sleep the minute he blew out the candle, either. He worried himself sick about the churches and situations they were in. But he still felt peace.

Paul wrote about his life situation in 2 Corinthians 11 and 12. A lot of bad things happened to this guy in the course of his ministry. And on top of it all, he writes, Then, besides all this, I have the daily burden of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak without my feeling that weakness? Who is led astray, and I do not burn with anger? (11:28-29)

Yet it was also he who wrote: Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7)

Bad things can happen but you can still feel peace.

A lot of stuff to think about. I have had a lot of things happen to me in my almost forty years of ministry, both good and bad. That is not to mention all the other things that come along in life. Yet, as Paul said, there is a peace. Even in the storm, there is a peace.

It is not a smiley-lips peace, walking around looking stoned. It is a peace that is internal, that says no matter what happens, my God is real and he is alive, and there is a better place than this.

Knowing that brings peace, even when things are falling apart around you. That is the peace Jesus brought. Not peace like the world thinks, where nothing bad ever happens and we all stand around holding hands singing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

But real peace from inside. That is God’s gift through Jesus to us.

daily java

Daily Java:

Lord, help us!
   The fire has consumed the wilderness pastures,
      and flames have burned up all the trees.
   Even the wild animals cry out to you
      because the streams have dried up,
      and fire has consumed the wilderness pastures. (Joel 1:19-20)

There are times when things look bad, when it seems that life is absolutely bleak. And they will come into the lives of most people. Rare is the person that has a life of continual joy and happiness. In fact I have always doubted either their assertion or their sanity, one or the other, when someone tells me they never have a bad day.

But it seems worse with some people. It felt this way with Elijah, the great prophet of God. Here was a man with awesome power given him by God and who was undeniably even by those who hated him, a spokesman for God. He was a powerful man who used his God-given power in such a way that there never was any arrogance or hubris involved. He just did what God wanted and God was pleased with him.

He was such a great man of God that he is one of only two people in the Bible that didn’t die. Instead, the Bible shows him as having been taken up into heaven in a burning chariot.

He was a strong enough person that when the Old Testament is mentioned, it is called Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets. He was so dominant that his name stood for the whole Bible other than that part Moses was responsible for.

But even so, he became afraid and ran for his life, thinking that he was the only faithful one left in Israel.

In 1 Kings 18, there was contest between God and the prophets of Baal, the primary Canaanite deity. The power of God was shown so greatly that day that the nation temporarily turned back to God. But the next day, Jezebel, the queen of Israel, old someone that when she saw Elijah, she would kill him.

He ran and hid. When God came to him, his comment in 1 Kings 19:10 was: “I have zealously served the Lord God Almighty. But the people of Israel have broken their covenant with you, torn down your altars, and killed every one of your prophets. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me, too.” Everybody has turned from you and I alone am left. In fact, he said this to God twice in the chapter in two different instances.

God told him that there were more like him, that he was not alone, to just do what God wanted. And he did.

There are times when it seems the world is conspiring to kill you and that no one cares. And sometimes it may even be true. There may be no life grass around you, no shade from trees in your life, even the wildlife are suffering from your spiritual drought.

But as with Elijah, when it comes, and it will, do as the prophet Joel did here in this passage. Cry out to the one Source that will save, who will help in the only meaningful way.

He is there, even in the drought. And he will save.

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Daily Java:

And now my life seeps away.
      Depression haunts my days.
 At night my bones are filled with pain,
      which gnaws at me relentlessly.
 With a strong hand, God grabs my shirt.
      He grips me by the collar of my coat.
 He has thrown me into the mud.
      I’m nothing more than dust and ashes. (Job 30:16-19)

Depression is a strange thing. It affects people in so many different ways.

Jeremiah had it, seeing his people torn apart by their own stupidity. Elijah had it. Why I am not sure, unless it was just part of his nature to see things badly. I am sure that Moses suffered from it in the time between Egypt and being called of God. A lot of others you can kind of read between the lines and see their depression.

In Matthew 5:4, Jesus said: God blesses those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Jesus here was talking about the fact that one who is in tune with God will naturally feel sad when things are not as God wants. And it is hard to look at the way the people of God react and not feel sadness.

And enough stuff happening can make that sadness grow until it permeates every part of your life. Depression is not necessarily caused by outward bad things, but enough outward bad things can surely cause depression.

I was listening to someone today tell me that a pastor had told his wife that if she took depression medicine, she was sinning, not allowing God to work. He was a fool because that is not true. It is, however, easy for someone to say. It makes the person saying it feel righteous and godly, when actually they are just being foolish.

Does God deliver people from depression? Yes, he even delivered me for a time. But he did not deliver Elijah. And he doesn’t deliver a lot of people, just like he doesn’t heal a lot of people.

So what do they do? God without when there are things that will help them? That is foolish. It is like the people who tell cancer victims they do not need to take their treatments because God will deliver them. God makes no guarantees of deliverance. After all, how many ill people were in Judea when Jesus healed the ones he did. Not all were healed then. And not all were healed today.

Those same people have made the comment that a person dies of cancer because their husband or wife didn’t have enough faith.

The simple truth is: God does not heal everyone. His answer to Paul in 2 Corinthians 11 when Paul prayed for healing was No. Deal with it. Would Paul have been justified in taking medicine? Would God delight in the suffering if he had not given the healing?

Of course, the question still remains about depression. Is it from God or the devil? Of course, no good and perfect thing can come from the devil and no evil thing can come from God. But why would he allow it to stay and color someone’s life?

And color it does. It reduces all around it to gray and tinges everything with sadness. It makes everything sad. It takes the fun out of everything and renders the sufferer almost inert. It brings pain – even physical pain , but especially mental pain and makes it hard to do even simple things.

Why is it here? I don’t know, but I do know I have suffered with it most of my life.

And why would God deliver me from it almost 20 years ago only to allow it to come back in such force?

I hate it and it has sapped my life away. The problem is, though, that the medicine to alleviate it causes more physical problems than I want to deal with. The cure is almost worse than the curse.

Oh, God, take it away.

daily java

Daily Java: 

Gazing intently at the high council, Paul began: “Brothers, I have always lived before God with a clear conscience!” (Acts 23:1)

I have never been one to accept stuff at face value. And I have always promised the Lord that when I could no longer ethically teach in a denomination, I would leave. I have to be honest.

I started life in a completely different place than now as I end life. I started out in a church that had all the answers. Their doctrine was complete and had been arrived at years before. Their job now was to defend the faith once delivered. Since it had been delivered and the forefathers of the denomination had “re-discovered” it, it was our job to maintain it, to preach it, to defend it, to keep it safe from harm and above all, from change.

Then I began to see cracks in the system. There were certain inalienable doctrines that were indeed alienable, especial if you began looking at them in the light of context rather than single scripture.

The more I saw the more I changed. And the more I changed, the more I moved out of that denomination. One cannot be a part of that particular church without accepting all of the particulars as God-given.

At the age of 44, I left my life-church. I moved from there to another denomination, one which shared a common root with the one I had grown up in. The problem was, except for a couple of things (non-instrumental music as mandate), it was basically the same. I began to see holes in the structure.

After several years and a total mind change with the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I moved to a third. Unfortunately, it too was to hide-bound in its doctrine there was no room for individual thought. So after a lot of pain, I changed again.

The fourth church was, in many ways a good church with a very normal outlook on things. Unfortunately, I hit one of the churches in the denomination that would not change from traditional ways of looking at things.

Now I realize that this does not speak well of me in some ways. I appear wishy washy or maybe just too hard to please. And I suppose in some ways I am.

But the problem is that I changed my mind as I went along through life and I was aligned with churches in which that was not allowed.

There was no growth, no forward movement. It was all maintenance.

I remember someone telling me years ago that it was interesting to read about how the Restoration people restored the church back in the 1800’s. The person mentioned that it was like reading about the buffalo hunters of the 1800’s. Even though there were no buffalo left to hunt, it was interesting to see how they hunted them.

After thinking about that for a couple of years, my thought was NO. if all truth has already been arrived at, what is the point of study? Is there no more forward learning, no more finding new things in the word of God. Is that word so static that it has been totally plumbed and there is nothing left?

The answer, of course, is no. we search out our own salvation, we seek God ourselves. We do not go to others to see what he had to say. We have that relationship with him alone.

No church can tell us what God says, or what the will of God is. No church can tell us that they alone have discovered the will of God. That is sheer and absolute arrogance.

And this is true. If a person doesn’t change his mind at least a couple of times during his life, he doesn’t have much of a mind.

And the church that will not allow that is a sad and dead church indeed.

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Daily Java:

My people are being destroyed because they don’t know me. (Hosea 4:6)

One of the most powerful sermon illustrations I ever saw was with this verse. The preacher was speaking and he said, “As the Bible says in Hosea 4:6,” and then he stopped. He looked through his Bible, the front, the back, he leafed a bit. It was obvious he could not find the book of Hosea. He finally went to the table of contents and found  the page number.

The congregation was obviously embarrassed for him. He finally finds it and reads (from the King James Version) My people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge. Wow! That hit home so hard. He wasn’t lost. He was making a point.

And it was a point that I have kept for the next forty years.

Hosea says that God did not turn away from his people simply because they had done bad things. He turned away because they refused to know him.

When Ella and I were dating, we would talk about our commonalities, things we liked and disliked. We got to know each other. Favorite colors, favorite music, favorite food. we were looking for ways in which we were alike. And we learned to love each other.

The young man dates the young woman and he tells her about himself and how he is, how he feels, and that he loves her. In return, she says “Meh.” She doesn’t care to know who he is. In fact, she is not even sure why she came on the date.

When it comes down to it, he cannot form any kind of relationship with her simply because she will not learn to know him. She doesn’t care about him.

It may even be that they form some kind of relationship and he is devoted to her. But she is not devoted to him. She may marry him to get away from home, or for his money, or some little romantic feeling. They may even be married for a while, but she really, deep down inside, doesn’t care enough about him to get to really know him.

For him, it is a deep relationship. For her, it is shallow. She really doesn’t care.

Finally, it becomes apparent to him that she just doesn’t care. She runs around on him, she neglects him, she slanders him among all her friends, She makes it plain that she does not want to get to know him.

Israel made it plain they did not want to know God. They wanted to know a God, just not this one. They wanted a God they could manipulate, that they could order around. YHVH God was just too strong for them. They wanted someone a little more manageable.

The same holds true today. People want a God that they can handle, that will participate in their stuff with them, that cares about the same things they care about, who they can use to advance their programs.

But God is not like that. He goes his own way. And quite frankly, any God you can control would not be that powerful a God in the first place.

God’s people sinned greatly in the Old Testament. But it was not their sin for which God punished them. He turned away from them because they did not care about him.

They were destroyed because they refused to get to know God/

daily java

Daily Java:

The Lord gave this message to Hosea son of Beeri during the years when Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah were kings of Judah, and Jeroboam son of Jehoash was king of Israel. When the Lord first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, “Go and marry a prostitute, so that some of her children will be conceived in prostitution. This will illustrate how Israel has acted like a prostitute by turning against the Lord and worshiping other gods.” (Hosea 1:1-2)

Two things occur to me today. One is that it is not always a blessing to be called by God to preach his message. And two, sometimes the actions of God do not match his nature.

There are odd things that God does in the Bible, things that seem to go against his nature. In theology, these are called opus alienum, Latin for works alien to God. In other words, they are things that God does that seem absolutely contrary to his nature.

One of these things is when God called Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God hated human sacrifice, yet calls one of his faithful to do it.

The book of Hosea is another example. God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute and have three children. They will be named Jezreel (Hebrew for God will sow), Lo-ruhamah (not loved) and Lo-ammi (not my people). Hosea’s wife (Gomer – a weird name anyway) goes back into prostitution and he ends up buying her as a slave and taking her again as a wife.

The point of wrecking Hosea’s life? To show how Israel had turned from God and debased themselves.

But to do it, he wrecked a man’s life and the lives of his children.

And how did he use this? I am not sure, but surely he didn’t parade his wife and children around the city shouting all the circumstances of their lives and both and meaning of their name. That sounds bizarre. I am sure that everybody around knew who she was and, since they all spoke Hebrew, knew what the names meant. But I wonder exactly how he used these lives.

Some of the same thing happened to Job. Job was a holy, righteous man that God respected. Yet God let the devil rip his life apart just as part of a cosmic bet. The devil said Job would curse God if everything was taken from him and God said he wouldn’t. God won, but he never tells Job any reason for killing his children and ruining his life. Instead, he says, live with it.

It bothers me. I know that God is good and that he is love. Yet these things are disconnects, conundrums of sorts. How can a God of love actively hurt his people like this?

I do not know and I cannot reconcile it. And I will have to admit that on a day when I feel so physically lousy – a cold that will not go away – this is my Bible reading. Deuteronomy 29:29 says: The Lord our God has secrets known to no one. And that is absolutely true.

A God that is predictable is not a real God. Any God we can second-guess will not be that powerful. And God is all-powerful.

But still, that with Hosea was just not fair. And odd thing, this opus alienum. And an odd being, God.

daily java

Daily Java:

Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2:10)

Joy is something we are in short supply of. As a society we are unhappy. The Occupy Wall Street thing that was recently so in the news showed a strong undercurrent of unhappiness in people.

Road rage, going postal, fights at the grocery checkout counter – all look to a distinct lack of joy. After all, people that are joyful wouldn’t be doing these things.
Of course, there is a great deal of difference between joy and happiness. Although happiness  would probably come as a result of joy.

But the angels in the verse above didn’t tell the shepherds that the Savior would come to make everybody smile real big and laugh a lot. Anybody that tells you Christians do that is full of religious beans.

He came to bring us internal satisfaction. And internal satisfaction – the knowledge that everything will be fine and that your life is not worthless – is joy.

It is something that people will see, of course. It sure shines from my wife’s face. I tend to be an overly analytical guy who thinks too much and carries too much around for it to show a lot, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

It just doesn’t necessarily show itself in smiley lips.

The angels came to the shepherds when Jesus was born to tell them one thing. They came to say that ordinary people, just like those shepherds, would also have joy in life. Joy was not something you buy or inherit or get as a result of doing something.

It is an internal feeling, an internal knowledge, an internal satisfaction that someone loves you, that someone cares for you.

That is joy. And today is the Sunday of Joy in our Four Sundays of Advent.

Think about it. Get in touch with your inner self and feel and know that joy. If Jesus is in  you, it is there. You may have to look for it, but it is there.

He gave it to you.

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Daily Java:

As I was standing on the bank of the great Tigris River, I looked up and saw a man dressed in linen clothing, with a belt of pure gold around his waist. His body looked like a precious gem. His face flashed like lightning, and his eyes flamed like torches. His arms and feet shone like polished bronze, and his voice roared like a vast multitude of people. Only I, Daniel, saw this vision. The men with me saw nothing, but they were suddenly terrified and ran away to hide. (Daniel 10:4-7)

For the most part, I hate Christian art. And the part I hate most are  the pictures of Jesus. He looks like such a wimp.

Pictures like the one Daniel saw are my idea of what Jesus should look like. I mean, here is the King, the Saber, the Pre-Incarnate Word of God, the One. And here he stands in all his glory. A body like a precious gem, face like lightning, eyes like torches. Arms and feet of polished bronze and a voice like a multitude of people.

That is a picture of Jesus. This is not the little wienie wimpy Jesus so often displayed in “religious” art. This is the Jesus the devil is terrified of. This is the Jesus that rules the universe. This is the Jesus who descended into hell to take back those the devil had taken.

This is a mighty Jesus. It is a lot like the picture of Jesus in Revelation 1 when John saw his picture of the glorified Christ.

And standing in the middle of the lampstands was someone like the Son of Man. He was wearing a long robe with a gold sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white like wool, as white as snow. And his eyes were like flames of fire. His feet were like polished bronze refined in a furnace, and his voice thundered like mighty ocean waves. He held seven stars in his right hand, and a sharp two-edged sword came from his mouth. And his face was like the sun in all its brilliance. (Revelation 1:13-16)

There was a Jesus to contend with.

This is not the Jesus who would wander around looking sweet and mild, the one driving a Prius and eating only vegetables so he wouldn’t offend vegetarians, the ones complaining that the government hadn’t paid student loans, the one used as a corporate shill for so many causes.

This is a Jesus who is absolutely above earthly stuff, yet loves his people.

This is the Jesus I worship.