You Shall Not ......

The old covenant law contained many "shall nots" which had a purpose that is now fulfilled. We are not under that old legislation anymore. Now we are under the new covenant where God provides all for us as a gift and we are free in Him. This covenant also contains some "shall nots" - yet they are so different from the old "shall nots" - rather than making me feel depressed and guilty, they make me feel safe and warm and joyful in Him! They are focused on our secure relationship with God rather than our erratic behavior, for the New Covenant has a relationship focus and not a works focus. These are the "shall nots" I have found in the new covenant. I only used Jesus' words in John. I'm sure if I looked through the rest of the New Testament, I could find many more! Anyway, here are those "shall nots" that I found:

His promises to us in the New Covenant of grace:

1 - You SHALL NOT hunger, but shall be fully satisfied with Him (John 6:35).

2 - You SHALL NOT thirst, but shall have within His very Spirit as an ever-flowing fountain of eternal life (John 4:14).

3 - You SHALL NOT walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life (John 8:12).

4 - You SHALL NOT be a slave to sin or the devil's lies, but shall be free indeed (John 8:32-36).

5 - You SHALL NOT perish, but shall have everlasting life (John 3:16).

6 - You SHALL NOT be snatched from His hand, but shall be safe (John 10:27-8).

7 - You SHALL NOT come into judgment, but have already passed from death to life (John 5:24).

8 - You SHALL NOT follow a stranger, but shall know and follow your Shepherd (John 10:4-5).

9 - You SHALL NOT have your joy stolen, but shall rejoice with great joy (John 16:22).

10 - SHALL NOT be left desolate, but shall have the His Spirit with you always to comfort you (John 14:16-18)!

With His very Spirit inside us as our best friend and LIFE, holding us, loving us, keeping us, living through us AS us, how can we go wrong? If God is for us, who can be against us? We shall not be put to shame but will always be led in triumph, love and grace! All as a gift through Jesus' work for us and His wonderful grace, not ever through our efforts! What a wonderful covenant the New Covenant is!

- Under the Waterfall

He Offers His Gifts Free of Charge, Why Not Take Them

“The heart of man finds it difficult to believe that so great a treasure as the Holy Spirit is gotten by the mere hearing of faith. The hearer likes to reason like this: Forgiveness of sins, deliverance from death, the gift of the Holy Spirit, everlasting life are grand things. If you want to obtain these priceless benefits, you must engage in correspondingly great efforts. And the devil says, ‘Amen.’

We must learn that forgiveness of sins, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, are freely granted to us at the preaching of faith, in spite of our sinfulness. We are not to waste time thinking how unworthy we are of the blessings of God. We are to know that it pleased God to freely give us His unspeakable gifts. If He offers His gifts free of charge, why not take them? Why worry about our lack of worthiness? Why not accept gifts with joy and thanksgiving?”

— Martin Luther

Living Moment by Moment - Part One

LIVING MOMENT BY MOMENT – Part 1

This is the beginning  of ch. 8

In the previous chapter we learned that even though your old self was crucified with Christ and is dead and buried, you still have a mind cluttered with his baggage; and whenever the door just above your heart is closed to Christ’s life, the enemy tempts you to dabble again in the garbage resident in your mind, causing you to live a replica of the life you did before becoming a Christian.  We thought, does this sound like abundant life?  What could be God’s purpose in all of this be?  His purpose is actually quite ingenious.  It is to make your life moment by moment full of joy, excitement, and authenticity!  How?

…Relationships ever flow; what makes them wonderful is not so much what happened in the past, but what is happening in the present moment…

…God has the aspiration to be in fellowship with us moment by moment; He has a plan to bring about His wishes.  First of all, He must destroy the old self that dwells within and replace it with the life of His Son.  If this is not done, then no fellowship with Him is even possible.  The next thing that He does is to leave all the baggage and residue from the old man in the mind.  When through unbelief a person closes the door to His life within and consequently cuts off fellowship, of necessity all the baggage, garbage, residue, lying emotions, false feeling, old idols, inaccurate identity, and every manifestation of the flesh arise.  In fact, this one is now more miserable than dwelling in the world.  God will strive to build the believer’s awareness of a desire to be free from those miseries 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour, 60 seconds a minute, yes, moment by moment.  It is then that God can do business!  You see, God structures our lives in such a way as to keep us ever near His side.

…It must be firmly planted in our minds that victory is for one moment at a time, and that in any given moment we are participating in eternal victory or eternal defeat.

We need to keep in mind that one of the biggest problems in helping Christians “get out of the wilderness” is far too many preachers, teachers, writers, professors, etc. IGNORE the biblical truth that the “old, Adam life” has been crucified and is dead & buried.  Gone.  No more.  To keep that “Adam life” around is to excuse behaviors in Christians that Jesus has given us His Life to overcome.  So, it is exciting to enjoy Michael addressing life as a Christian from this important biblical truth.

Now that we can focus on the “old mind” (and will & emotions…the rest of the soul we were born with) that is cluttered with the baggage of the “old self,” we can begin to move toward victory!  It is disheartening to hear Christians say, “the devil made me do it,” “the devil has been working me over today,” etc.  That’s not truth!

Michael gives us a step-by-step picture of God’s “ingenious” plan of the life Jesus spoke of in John 10:10…”life (His Life) more abundantly.”

1. God destroys the old self that dwells within an unbeliever and replaces it with the life of His Son when one becomes a Believer.

2. God leaves all the baggage and residue of the old man in the old mind.

3. God now works in the Believer to build an awareness of a desire to be free from the miseries that arise when the “old baggage” of the flesh arise.

4. It is then God can bring us to the realization that victory is for one moment at a time.

(the rest of the book moves us forward into that victory…)

Now, how much easier for a Christian can it be?  God is in charge.  God is orchestrating all to “keep us ever near His side.”  Trust, rest, release control.   We just need to trust Him to give us truth that will set us free completely.  He has.  We need the revelation.

-  Mike Wells

Cheap Grace and Consumer Christianity

The “cheap grace” Gospel sells well in America. We live in a culture of consumerism that conditions us to habitually look for “the best deal.” We’re more or less trained from birth to live in the question; “How can we get the most for the least?” We think this way about our houses, cars, clothes, food, entertainment, and (tragically) even sometimes our relationships. So it’s not surprising that many
Americans are tempted to think this way about religion. We shop.

When the consumer mindset infects the Church, salvation begins to be viewed as a product that Christians are supposed to pedal – a “Salvation Amway” sort of thing. Christianity is reduced to a salvation-product franchise, and individual churches compete for a larger share in the religious consumer market. The salvation-product is offered for the price of a prayer, while fringe benefits are sometimes piled onto the offer to make it more attractive. (In the competitive world of religious consumerism, one must be clever!)

Though Jesus always warned about the heavy cost of following him, many salvation-product peddlers now promise that the salvation-product not only gives you guaranteed fire insurance, but also that it will make you wealthier and healthier and happier right now. All for the small price of a prayer. What a deal!

The trouble is, there is nothing about the consumerized Gospel that remotely resembles anything like the Good News proclaimed in the New Testament. It’s a tragic, grotesque, distortion of the Kingdom revolution Jesus came to establish. And at the base of it all, I suspect, is this legal transaction view of the atonement that I discussed in my last post.
You can see why I said earlier that thinking about the atonement is anything but a merely academic affair. It has huge practical consequences.

I ask you to start considering the possibility that when you accepted Jesus, you weren’t just cashing in on a legal-transaction two thousand years ago that gives you eternal fire insurance. You rather were trading in your civilian clothes for a military uniform. You weren’t signing up in the “wait-to-go-to-heaven-for-free club.” You were rather enlisting as a guerilla warrior in a subversive revolution. Yes, you’ll go to heaven. But that is a mere by-product of the transforming revolutionary life you surrendered to in the present.

If the main thing Jesus did centered on a legal transaction in heaven that took place when he died, then the main thing the Church is about is getting people to give mental ascent to this. The Church thus becomes mainly a religious society consisting of people who believe they are saved by believing Jesus gets them “off the hook.”

By contrast, if the main thing Jesus was about centered on overturning condemnation and overcoming evil by unleashing the unsurpassable power of self-sacrificial love—which I argue for in so much of what I write and preach—then the Church must be seen primarily as a community of people who do the same thing. In this view, we can’t even talk about what Jesus did for us without in the same breath talking about what Jesus is doing in us and through us.
Because of what Jesus did, we are being caught up into the reality of God’s conquest of evil through the power of self-sacrificial love. This reality is what Jesus identified as the Kingdom of God. The evidence that we’re being caught up into the Kingdom is not merely that we prayed “the sinners prayer,” but that we are beginning to individually and collectively manifest Jesus’ self-sacrificial love.

The Kingdom is not a legal-transaction kind of thing. It’s a caught-up-into-a-new-reality kind of thing.

This is why the New Testament stresses so strongly that we are united with Christ. Jesus identifies with us so that we may be identified with him (e.g. Rom. 6:1-8; Gal 2:17-21). His life, death and resurrection becomes our life, death and resurrection. Everything Jesus was about is what we are to be about, for we are, fact, united with him. This is also why Jesus not only takes up the cross for us, but also calls us to take up the cross in imitation of him (Mt 10:37-40, 16:21-28).

Imitating Jesus’ love, participating in Jesus’ love, identifying with Jesus’ love, and being transformed by Jesus’ love, is the essence of the Kingdom Jesus came to establish.

Theosis and the New Self

How would you summarize the basic message of Christian salvation? If you look at the early theologians of the church from the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries, you'll find a lot of statements of this sort: "For He was made man that we might be made God" (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54). This is the doctrine of theosis or deification: God assumes human nature in order that humanity can become like God.

Of course, the ancient theologians did not imagine that we somehow merge with God to become a single being. There will always be a distinction between ourselves and God; but we will be raised from the lowly limitations and conditions in which we currently exist, and we will take on a mode of being that is more similar to God's. One of the ways in which we do this is by the resurrection: we no longer die after being resurrected, and in this way we participate in God's immortality.

Now I think the doctrine of theosis was so ubiquitous throughout the early centuries of the church because it is ubiquitous in the scriptures. One of the finest discussions of theosis comes in Paul's letter to the Ephesians:

For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Eph 4.21-24).

Here we find that becoming a Christian, as I've said before on other occasions, is a matter of becoming a new person. Now what exactly does this new person look like? Paul says that this new person is created in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. This is clearly to say that our new identity is one that is like God's, with a mode of being and a way of life that is similar to God's.  We become like small Gods in the world!

Of course, this is nothing new in the Bible; it wasn't invented by Paul, but it was taught in Genesis. There we read that mankind was created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1.26-7). Mankind was created to be like God. The Greek word used in the Septuagint translation of Genesis is εἰκών, from which we get the word "icon." Human persons are meant to be living icons of God in the world, representations and presences of God in the creation.

This is what happens as we become Christians. It is a lifelong process, obviously, because we do not reach the pinnacle of righteousness immediately after baptism. But just as we should forget what lies behind us and what we were, we also must look forward to what we are becoming; and when we look to our goal, what else do we see except Christ, the image and likeness of the invisible God (Col 1.15)?  

Christianity is Finding Your True Identity

Who are we? What are we here for? Are we of any value, do we have any significance, or are we meaningless, purposeless, valueless, randomly assembled conglomerations of atoms which will someday come apart never to be reconstructed?

Recently I've been talking about the process of becoming a Christian, which is the process of assuming a new identity. I've said that it involves forgetting your previous identity, and assuming a new one which is like God. There's another important thing to remember, however, and one which makes the process of becoming a Christian that much more exciting: it is also a matter of discovering your true identity.

I wrote earlier that Christian salvation can be understood by the doctrine of theosis: we become like God. I want to emphasize that this theosis is not a matter of our becoming something unlike or unnatural to us, but rather that it is merely becoming what God had intended for us from the beginning.

As I cited earlier, Genesis teaches that humanity was created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1.26-7). We were made to be living icons of God on the earth, to represent him and to embody his presence to one another and to all creatures. This is the purpose of humanity, this is the calling and direction that God gave it. We lost this image and likeness, however, through sin and through downfall of the human race. Rather than being loving and forgiving, we became hateful and angry; rather than having knowledge, our minds were futile and darkened (cf. Eph 4.17).

There is another thing to notice here, too. Those who live their life in sin and who think that this is the way for them to live, according to Paul, are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart (Eph 4.18). They don't understand things properly, and that means that they don't understand who they are, either. They don't know what they are, what they are here for, what is the right way for them to live, and so on.

Becoming a Christian is having your mind enlightened to your true identity, to your true calling, to your true place in the world. It is a matter of discovering who you really are, and finding that you are the image and likeness of God! That's the gift that God gave humanity: to be like him. Christianity is the lifelong process of discovering and enjoying this gift.  

Powerful Connecting

Powerful connecting rarely happens in the Church, or anywhere, for that matter.  Why do we often feel impotent when faced with the deep pain of another?  Should we advise, refer them to counseling, try to listen more attentively? 

What would you say to the following man who is courageous enough to share his anguish with you?
"This was a time of extreme anguish, during which I wondered whether I would be able to hold on to my own life.  Everything came crashing down -- my self-esteem, my energy to love and work, my sense of being loved, my hope for healing, my trust in God...All had become darkness.  Within me there was one long scream coming from a place I didn't know existed, a place full of demons." [1]
Would you simply try to listen to the man?  Assure him of God's loving presence?  Refer him to counseling? Suggest that God is trying to teach him perseverence?  Expose his insecurities and hang-ups, his false beliefs?
The suffering man in our story, by the way, was Henri Nouwen; a spiritual giant to many who had authored 39 books by the time of his death in 1996.

Failure to connect
Larry Crabb, author of the groundbreaking book, Connecting, says that one reason we fail to connect powerfully with others in a way that could actually heal them is because we often operate with a "Therapeutic Model."  Crabb calls this the "Treatment/Repair" Model, where we attempt to fix what's wrong in the other. In this model,

"The first step, of course, is to figure out what is wrong [diagnosis] and face it, then courageously work through the often long and painful process of coming to grips with the internal damage and learning to approach life in healthier ways [therapy]."

In order to fix what's wrong, we uncover the underlying psychological forces influencing their behavior.  We analyze the hurting person's past, look into underlying patterns and suggest coping mechanisms and re-framing approaches to insure a healthier outcome for them.  The people that offer the most insight become the person's heroes.   Counseling often buys into this model; and though it can often provide insight and suggest more healthy, adaptive behaviors, it may not actually heal the person. Insight may not translate into healing.

Under this find what's damaged--fix what's wrong model, we might recommend that Henri Nouwen see a counselor in order to get at underlying damage, expose faulty belief systems, and recommend treatment for depression. We might even send him Scripture verses to encourage him so that he can believe there's a light at the end of his dark tunnel.  But this model may yield little healing fruit. Crabb points out that, "Our power to influence lives does not come...from revealing to people the details of their internal mess."

What does powerful connecting look like?
Crabb rightly suggests that God does not often use a Therapeutic Model [Find and Fix What's Wrong] in order to heal us.  Rather, God does three things:
1.  "First, he provides a taste of Christ delighting in us -- the essence of connection; accepting who we are and envisioning who we could be."

2.  "Second, he diligently searches within us for the good he has put there -- an affirming exposure; remaining calm when badness is visible, keeping confidence that goodness lies beneath."

3.  "Third, he engagingly exposes what is bad and painful -- a disruptive exposure;" in order to uncover the goodness beneath the mess - "a goodness that is more defining of who we are than our badness...When we look at the bad, we must always be looking harder for the hidden good."    [#3 should happen less as we use the approaches of #1 and #2.]  Crabb adds, "A careful exploration of the redeemed heart does not sink us in a cesspool; it's more like mining for gold in a dirty cave." 

We are not primarily damaged people:  We are foremost saints, gifted with new-hearted vitality and power; a vitality that may be buried beneath a mess, but not subverted by it.

Did help come for Henri Nouwen?
So did Henri Nouwen find any who could help him?  Yes, from an elderly priest who understood how to powerfully connect with him:
"During the most difficult period of my life, when I experienced great anguish and despair, he was there.  Many times, he pulled my head to his chest and prayed for me without words but with a Spirit-filled silence that dispelled my demons of despair and made me rise up from his embrace with new vitality." [2]
Something powerful was poured out from the elderly priest into the broken-hearted younger man; arousing something buried, but alive and strong in Henri.  That power was the quickening life of Christ Himself.

We connect well with others when we...

• give them a taste of God's delighting in them,
  
• relentlessly search for the God-given good urges beneath their pain and mess,
  
• refuse our impulses to fix what's wrong; and instead, take our cues from Jesus, asking, "How can I join You as You release what is most alive in me, pouring that Life into them, in order to release what is most alive in them?"