daily java

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.

daily java

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.

daily java

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.

daily java

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.

daily java

Daily Java:

In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. … So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son. (John 1:1-2, 14).

Before he came to this earth, Jesus was the infinite Word of God

The infinite Word of God became a finite human being to show us two things. God wanted us to know he knew what it was like to be human and to give that perfect sacrifice so that we can know what it is like to be divine. In Jesus, God was human, with us. In Jesus, we are divine., with God.

Without that incarnation, we could easily say that the infinite God, Lord of heaven and earth and all powerful and omniscient, did not know how hard a life his creations had.

And that was to a large point true. Yes, he was all-powerful. But his view of us and his relationship with us was one of distance, not closeness, one of sympathy but no empathy.

When Jesus became manifest in the flesh, all of a sudden, the Lord of the Universe who was living in many ways vicariously in Jesus, knew what it was like to be a helpless baby, totally dependent on his mother and father.

As Jesus grew up, he found out the effect of raging hormones. He felt hunger, he experienced real thirst. He found out what it was like to hurt his foot on a rock.

These are all little things, all part of the human experience. They are all things we take for granted. But not God. He only knew them second-hand.

Jesus gave him first hand knowledge.

But Jesus also gave us first hand knowledge of God. What would God be like if he were human. There was Jesus. How would God react to things? Look how Jesus reacted.

Could God really live his whole life and never once do something wrong? That is, if he were really human? The answer was yes.

But it took the power of God living in the humanity of Jesus to do so. Jesus was that perfect fusion of God and man that we could be, but never are able to be.

With Jesus, we know that God knows what it is like to be like us. But with Jesus, we know what it is like to be like God. Jesus brought God to us and brings us to God.

He is like that transformer on a high wire high voltage line. God is the high voltage that if we touch it, we die. He is too holy. But Jesus was the transformer. He was God so he could touch God; but he was also God in the flesh, so he could touch us.

And through him, we could touch God.

That is the point of Christmas: the entry into this world of the Son of God in human form.

He just wanted to know us better, so we could know him better.

1001 posts

To tell you the truth - and I really do not know why I wouldn't, having 1000 posts kind of set me back. That is a lot of writing.

But I am back, for those who are reading.

God bless you.