It has been Christmas day for 43 minutes by my clock. The children have long been asleep and Santa Claus has made his way down and back up our chimney, bringing presents to our 4 precious charges. This year I think we made progress with them by emphasizing the birth of our Savior more than the gifts they might receive. It’s a good thing because Santa had a tough year with the recession and all. Our youngest left a note for Santa that said she didn’t have a list because she didn’t really care what she got, because she was thinking about Jesus. Did she really mean it or was she simply saying what she thought was expected? I don’t know, but I know she wrote it down from her own soul, without any adult helping her. I am encouraged.
Growing through Challenges
This year has been challenging on many fronts for my extended family. Many in my family are unemployed this year, which is very unusual. Both my family and my wife’s have strong work ethics imprinted on their DNA from generations of hard working, barely surviving men and women. We have discussed the Father’s plan and realize that he is in the process of changing us, transforming us into the image of his Son. He has to tear down the false ideas in our hearts to build up the true ideas within us. If we don’t allow the adversities to reveal our flawed thinking so we can reject it, we will try to build the truth over the lie. We will use the form that looks like the truth but we will still be motivated by the lie, by the selfish, by the human idea of what happiness is and where it comes from. My brothers and I agreed that God is boiling us down and separating the wrong so that we can be made right. I am amazed at their courage to face their own lies and allow God to change their hearts. I am encouraged.
Relativity
Our nation is in deep, deep trouble. Everything is upside down and inside out. What is clearly foolishness is applauded as virtuous and what is true is seen as prejudice and bigotry. This is what happens when there are no absolutes, there is no true/false, right/wrong or good/bad. The nation Israel went through times like this as is indicated in the book of Judges by the phrase “there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes”. This phrase is a wonderful description of relative thinking. Relative thinking says there is no right or wrong, only opinion and every one of us has one. While this approach might seem to be the result of enlightened thinkers, it is actually a formula for chaos.
Absolutes
God offers mankind absolutes that reveal those things He has created that do not change or move. An absolute is totally true, always true, never changes and can be counted on to be the same. The Captain of a ship steaming at night saw a light ahead and radioed, “this is the Roosevelt, a 100 ft. steamer and we seem to be on a collision course, I suggest that you give way”. The radio returned fire with this, “this is the Bronson Bay station, and I am a lighthouse, I suggest that you give way.” The lighthouse is an absolute that doesn’t change or move, by which we can chart our course knowing where we are.
When absolutes are watered down or abandoned as they are today, we lose the ability to chart a clear course because everything changes with circumstances. Without absolutes to go by, every idea is relative to its context and situation. Right is right because it serves our purpose, not because of an unalterable idea of what is right and what is wrong. USA has given up its absolutes and replaced them with political correctness and hypocrisy wrapped in pretty paper. Congress is in the process of enacting economic suicide and they call it healthcare reform. Our president is willing to say anything from both sides of his mouth in order to push us into a one-world government. He serves the evil one but knows it not.
Adversity makes us Choose
Yet, in spite of the evil of our government, I am encouraged. I am encouraged because I believe what my bible says, that God uses adversity to grow His people and uses persecution to scatter His message. The day is coming and it will be sooner than we expect, when any Christian who holds to absolutes will be branded an enemy of the people. We will be called bigots and small minded because we refuse to include everyone in our theology. When we assert that homosexuality is wrong we will be called homophobes and guilty of hate crimes. When we asset that Jesus is the only name given under heaven that leads to God, we will be ridiculed and admonished to come into the 21st century. In my lifetime, I expect that ministers will be imprisoned for their faith and believe it or not, I am encouraged. We need harsh pressure to make us choose who and what we really believe and where we will stand. The adversities of our day will work good for the church, not bad. Be encouraged.
Sticking with the Truth
My church seems to be shrinking in numbers. Some of our people have been going to other churches. These churches offer bigger and flashier ministries with more people for their social life and for the singles, a better chance to find a mate. My church is not flashy and perhaps we are stuck on a method and need to change, perhaps. We could change the way we present the Lord’s message but we won’t do so to accommodate those who would have us shorten our message of truth and replace truth with entertainment. The reason is that the only way to be successful in life is to live by absolutes. When life gets tough which it is certain to do, the only thing that will hold you up is the Lord and His word. It is the truth that will free us from the pain and fear of an uncertain world because we know how to interpret the times and His will in the times. My church is committed to teach these absolutes as we know them and even though we could shine our packaging up a bit, the core of truth is there, it is steady and it will remain as long as my Pastor and I have anything to say about it. I am encouraged.
We can always find reasons to feel discouraged. Life in the devil’s world is difficult to say the least. As we grow older, life seems to get even harder. Health trouble, loss of loved ones, financial difficulties and uncertainty about the future. If you use your circumstances as your happiness, life will feel like a roller coaster ride, up and down. Instead of deriving happiness from your life situations, look to God’s word and the absolutes He offers for your comfort and encouragement. Christmas marks the birth of our Savior who has redeemed us from all of our troubles and offers us victory over the difficulties of the devil’s world. His victory over sin and death is shared with all who will believe that he did for them. We have the victory in Christ and that gives us good reason to be encouraged.
This was an article sent to me by my dear friend and fellow sojourner Cindy Lennon.
The Gospel on Offense – The Faith of Tim Tebow by Mark Earley
America ’s largest church has a capacity to hold 16,000. But while Tim Tebow
may not be a preacher, when he runs into the University of Florida ’s football
Stadium-affectionately known as “The Swamp” -his congregation numbers just over
90,000. And you can bet they’re hearing Tim’s message.
It’s not just that this University of Florida quarterback wears Bible verses
etched into his “eye-black” on game days. Tim Tebow has been making headlines
for more than simply his Heisman Trophy win as a sophomore and his two national
championships. This summer the New York Times, GQ, and Sports Illustrated, all
covered the quarterback’s strong Christian faith.
Last year, when the Florida Gators won the national championship, the
pre-game show followed Tim into a local Florida prison where he can regularly be
found sharing his testimony and preaching the Gospel.
And this top-notch athlete, who spends his spring breaks and summers
ministering to orphans in the Philippines has actually helped change the culture
of the University of Florida . According to Sports Illustrated , “Since Tebow’s
arrival on campus, and in large part because of him, the University has launched
a series of community-service initiatives.” Even coach Urban Meyer has taken his
family on a “Tebow-inspired mission trip to the Dominican Republic .”
The press seems to be fascinated with outspoken Christian quarterbacks like
Tim Tebow; Sam Bradford, the 2008 Heisman winner; and now USC’s Matt Barkley.
Only a few decades ago, it would have been taken for granted that these would be
the kinds of fellows any father would want his daughter to marry. Now they are
put under the microscope as some kind of curious anomaly-well-known athletes who
actually exhibit character.
In our doped-up, mug-shot celebrity culture, sadly these young men do look a
little out of step. And that’s to our culture’s shame. Perhaps that is why last
year when the press asked Tim Tebow a rather impertinent question-they were more
embarrassed by the response than he was. It was at a Southeastern Conference
news media event where one reporter asked in front of the crowded room, “Are you
a virgin?” Tim answered with an unequivocal yes and had yet another platform to
explain how his faith impacts every area of his life.
That platform for sharing the Gospel is exactly what Tim’s parents prayed
for before he was born. Tim’s father, Bob, a missionary in the Philippines, had
been weeping over the millions of babies aborted in America . It was then that
he prayed, “God, if you give me a son, if you give me Timmy, I’ll raise him to
be a preacher.”
Soon after, when Pam Tebow learned she was expecting, the parents’ faith was
put to the test. After a series of grave complications, doctors encouraged them
to abort the child. They refused. Born small and weak, Timmy struggled from the
beginning. But his dad continued to tell him, “God’s got a purpose for you, and
at some point, He’s going to call you to preach.”
Dad was right. God’s message would come through the roar of the crowd,
beamed to millions via satellite. But little did they know, Tim would don a
jersey, not robes, and use a stadium for his pulpit.
Tim’s a great example of an opportunity every believer has-to put our faith
to work on the field of play where God has gifted us and called us. =
This is the third article in the recent discussion of the Old Man – New Man
Biblical Terminology
The terms Old Man (self) and New Man (self) found in the bible refer to the person we were in our old life without Christ and then our new life after salvation. The terms are not actual as if we were a different person before salvation and another after we trusted in Christ. The terms are personifications that describe our personal characteristics, our beliefs, our ideas, our relational strategies and behaviors before Christ and afterward. When Paul, who alone uses the terms, refers to the old self (Rom 6:6, Eph 4:22) he is thinking about our whole lifestyle before salvation. When he talks about the new self, he is thinking about our different lifestyle after salvation. This article will delve deeper into the old and new selves by discussing the beliefs, ideas and emotions we develop and use in our old life. Notice how the different pieces of the human puzzle are presented here and put together to explain why and how we are the way we are.
Sin Nature
As discussed in the previous articles, Adam’s sin has caused all of us to inherit his selfish nature. This selfish, sinful nature causes us to view our self as the center of the universe and our self-interest as the most important issue in life. We naturally put our self first above God, others and any other concern. As we grow up and build our own ideas about life, self-interest is the overriding concern in all of our beliefs. Our thoughts and feelings are controlled by selfishness and our sin nature causes us develop views that promote self above all other concerns.
Human Needs
God created Adam and Eve and in His creation He designed the human soul. We have all inherited the basic design God created in our original parents. By design, He made us all with human needs that we are compelled to have fulfilled. We experience our needs as desires. All of us hunger and long for what we need and we know that we need because all of us have wants. Our God given human needs drive us to seek others that will love us, accept us, approve of us an include us. The human soul is empty by itself and naturally seeks relationships with others to meet our needs. These God designed needs can be observed in the raw by watching young children relate to parents and peers. All human behavior can be understood and motivation traced back to the drive to meet these basic human needs.
Knowing Nothing
We begin life as babies with no knowledge, understanding, ideas or beliefs. We are born only with some basic instincts that guide us. For example, we are born with the instinct to cry when we feel need and the instinct to nurse on our mother’s breast. Almost immediately though we begin to build our own impressions about self, others and life itself. It is these earliest impressions and ideas that form the core of our own views about our self, others and about how life works. As we grow up, we build all of our beliefs on these core ideas. Additionally, our core beliefs determine how we will interpret all further life experiences. Once our core ideas are in place they control how we view life and everything we experience in life.
Stages of Development
As we progress in years, life comes in stages. It is during these stages of human development that our ideas are constructed. These stages correspond roughly to ages 0-2 years, 2-5 years, 5-12years and 12-18 years old. Each stage brings its own developmental challenges that must be mastered for a child to grow properly into the next stage. For example, the earliest stages are focused on developing the motor skills of walking and using our bodies to negotiate our world. The latter stages focus more on our mental development, relationships and the building of a worldview. The most important development in our growth is the way we learn to relate to others. The methods we learn and develop by relating to our parents are termed our relational strategies.
Life Experiences
Beginning early with the most basic issues of life we build our beliefs out of our human experiences. From the toddler stage through our teen years and beyond we form our ideas about self and others based on how we are treated, loved and nurtured. If our parents love us unconditionally, treat us kindly and discipline us fairly we develop the healthy core idea that we have intrinsic worth and expect that others will also care for us. By contrast, if we are treated harshly, loved only when we behave and disciplined with anger, we conclude that we are worth little and expect others to care only when we produce something they want. We learn how to relate by relating to our primary caregivers, developing our relational strategies based on what works with them to gain their love and approval. Whatever works with mom and dad to make them laugh, smile and praise us, we learn to use over and over. We then store these effective approaches in our inventory of ideas where they become our primary methods of relating to our peers and the opposite sex. Because we know nothing and have nothing to think with, we base all of our ideas on our immediate experiences either good or bad.
Development Summary
We are born with a nature to put self first and driven by the need for love, approval, acceptance and inclusion with others. We are born knowing nothing and having no frame of reference on which to draw accurate conclusions about how to meet our needs. We grow and develop in stages building our core beliefs first and then constructing more complex ideas upon this foundation. We build our ideas based on our primary relationships and reach our conclusions purely on the basis of how these significant others relate to us. We learn what works to induce others give us what we need and we use these methods over and over. Based purely on our own experiences with our parents and peers we build our own life views about everything in our world. Your personal opinions and views that you hold in your heart today did not form there by accident or happenstance. Your personal viewpoints were formed by choice as you interpreted your life experiences, reached your own conclusions about these experiences, believed these conclusions you reached and then used these personal conclusions as the basis of your relating and behavior in your life.
Conclusion
We believe, think, feel and behave according to the inner program running in our heart. All of the ideas we have believed and used to live our lives form this self-chosen belief system that controls our life. Driven by our needs that feel like desires within us, we pursue relationships with people using the relational strategies we learned from interacting with our parents. Growing up in stages, we built our own ideas based on what seemed to work, seemed to induce others to care and what we hope will work to get love for ourselves in the future. We are, we think, we feel and we behave the way we have chosen using the freedom of soul designed by God. The good news is that we are what we have chosen to be. It is good because if God has enabled us to choose what we will believe and we have chosen what we are, then we can also choose to change what we are. God has made us so that we can choose making us responsible and He made us so that we can change giving us opportunity.
Stay tuned for the next discussions where we will talk about how and why we feel the way we do and what God has provided so that we can think and feel like Jesus.
Recently I have been privileged to participate in an unusual online bible study. The format is question and answer about specific biblical principles and passages. Dr. Jim Brettell is leading the studies and dialoguing with Pastor Steve Ellis and myself. We have been discussing Romans chapter 6 & 12 and drawing out principles for Christian living. I must say that these discussion have been excellent and would be helpful to any Christian trying to live the Christian life. Following are links to the audio recordings of the studies. I suggest that if you are interested in growing in your Christian walk that you catch up through the recordings and then tune in live on Sunday evenings at 7PM (central time).
Recording Links: http://brettell.org/webex.htm
Listen live: E-mail Dr. Jim Brettell and ask to be put on the list. His e-mail is brettell@sbcglobal.net
Remember to support your Pastors & leaders with your prayers, loyalty & financial giving.
This discussion will be the first in a series of articles describing the Old Man and some of the issues connected to the biblical concept. This article will provide basic definitions of necessary terms related to the Old Man (OM). We will talk about the Old Sin Nature (OSN), the Old Man (OM), OM beliefs and logic and OM behavior and actions. These definitions will help us build a foundation on which we can look at the applications called for in the bible.
Old Sin Nature (OSN)
The OSN is the selfish nature or natural tendency of fallen man. In order to understand our fallen nature, we have to revisit the Garden of Eden, look at our original nature, see how Adam corrupted his nature through sin and then passed the corruption down to all of the human race.
Original Nature
God created Adam and Eve perfect, with perfect natures. I believe their original nature caused them to put God first, as the center of their world, loving Him most and serving Him as a natural response. They naturally were in flow with God and His plan with no struggle or anything to struggle against. They lived this way for a time, we are not told how long until there was a change in Eve.
Original Sin
Eve apparently became bored with the garden, with her position in the chain of command and even with her husband. She grew dissatisfied with her place in God’s order and began to spend more and more time with her new friend, the serpent. We know the story of how satan seduced her to believe his lies and how Adam chose his love for her over his love for God. They sinned by eating the fruit and when they sinned they lost everything God had given them. They lost their righteous standing with God and He was forced to condemn them forever. They lost the garden and God was forced to curse them and the earth with thorns and thistles. Finally, they lost their perfect natures and sin corrupted their natures so that their natural tendency was to be selfish, to put self first and to sin as a way of life.
Selfish Self as the Center
After they sinned, the presence of sin itself in their bodies corrupted them. They became selfish, self centered and naturally put themselves first ahead of anyone else. It was every man for himself and everyone else was there to serve their needs, even God. Their nature now was to put their self in God’s place, on the throne of their own hearts. Their sin caused them to naturally follow the same path that Lucifer had taken, to want to be like God, to want to take God’s place. The sin nature, passed down to their children and other generations caused mankind to be totally corrupted as discussed in Gen 6.
Genesis 6:5 The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.
Every motive of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil all the time. The sin nature caused the hearts of the whole human race to process nothing but sin and evil. This desperate condition was the result of the OSN being inherited by the whole human race.
OSN Inherited from Adam
Adam and Eve’s sin created the OSN that was passed down to their children through the body. The OSN is inherited genetically from father to the child in the mother’s womb.
Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.
The one man is Adam who allowed sin to enter the world of man through his own original sin. The man is the carrier of the OSN which is passed to the fetus in the womb through his sperm. Every baby, male and female inherits the OSN when the male sperm fertilizes the woman’s egg and is born with the OSN fully operational. It was this fact of the male carrying the OSN that necessitated the virgin birth. Through bypassing the male’s role in conception, Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb and then born without inheriting the OSN from Adam. Since He had no earthly father, Jesus didn’t have an OSN, making Him perfect in His birth. His sinless life made Him the perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world.
OSN Influence
The OSN is corruption that resulted from sin that was allowed to enter into the physical body of the human race and has had an influence on all of us. The OSN causes our thoughts to be corrupted, therefore our emotions to be corrupted and we all build a system of believing, thinking, feeling and acting that is totally disoriented from God’s person and ways. In the next article we will discuss the person the bible calls the Old Man, who is the personification of our old way of life.
This article is the 2nd in the series titled The Old Man.
In a recent online discussion about Christian spirituality, the discussion turned to the Old Man, a biblical term used by the Apostle Paul to describe our pre-salvation way of life. One of the listeners, Ed, was new to the term and so in a follow up e-mail he asked the following question:
Question
I hope that you brethren can help me with the term “old man”. I don’t think I have ever heard it used with reference to an unbeliever having an old man. From implication of the term itself it seems to imply that there is such a thing as a “new man”. We know that a believer receives his “new man” at rebirth, but we also know that there are myriads of unbelievers that will perish because they never will have a “new man” because they have never exercised saving faith in Jesus Christ. I ask that you help clarify the term “old man” as referenced to an unbeliever.
The following is an answer to Ed’s question written by Dr. Jim Brettell. Dr. Jim’s excellent response is a great place to start our discussion of the Old Man.
Answer
Definition #1: The term OM is a personification. OM is the term used to personify the human soul when it is under the influence of the old-sin-nature.
Definition #2: The term NM is a personification. NM is the term used to personify the human soul when it is under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
Since every human being is under the influence of the old-sin-nature from the moment of physical birth, every human being has an OM from the moment of physical birth.
Since every human being born into this life has a genetically prepared old-sin-nature in every cell of his/her body, and the very fact that God the Father imputes Adam’s original sin to his/her genetically prepared old-sin-nature renders every human being born into this life totally depraved, lost without Christ, in need of spiritual salvation, all characterizing the UNBELIEVER – which he/ she is.
Since the NM concept is not decreed for creation or function in the plan of God UNTIL the Church Age, everything man did in previous dispensations unless temporarily endued with power was default function from his/her old-sin-nature. This included obedience to Inherent Law and Mosaic Law during their respective dispensation. This means that obedience to Inherent Law and Mosaic Law was carried out by the OM (remember definition #1).
The only reason for the NM concept is that during the Church Age God the Father has placed the standard for obedience out of reach of the OM who functions under the influence of the old-sin-nature, and He has given to Christians the proper mechanic (tool) for reaching that standard, namely, Christ-likeness by NM function.
The fact that the OM is not even mentioned in Scripture until referencing the born-again Christian in the Church Age epistles should not lead to the conclusion that an unbeliever does not possess an OM, and it should not lead to the conclusion that the OM was non-existent in the OT or the Gospels. The OM has been present in the life of every human being, except Jesus Christ, since the first procreation outside the Garden of Eden.
Since salvation does not purge the OM from the newly born-again Christian’s life, the OM comes into the Christian way of life with him/her.
In the progression of human history from the time of the Garden of Eden right up to today, the resolution of the angelic conflict in the two prior dispensations of time did not require obedience from any other source than OM function under the influence of the old-sin-nature; therefore, although every human being, believer and unbeliever has an OM under the influence of the old-sin-nature, there is no need to mention the OM in either the OT or the Gospels. It’s not until the resolution of the angelic conflict requires a higher standard that the NM becomes an issue. Hence, we learn of both the NM and the OM.
Again, it’s imperative to our understanding that just because the OM is not mentioned in the OT or Gospels, this does not imply that human beings do not have an OM. In fact, the opposite is true. By physical birth, every human being has an OM, including the unbeliever because he is a human being, BUT no human being has a NM until he/she becomes born-again.
Conclusion: Yes, even the unbeliever has an OM, but it was not worthy of mention or distinction UNTIL the Church Age standard for believer resolution of the angelic conflict required function beyond OM capacity.
As you can see, Dr. Jim gives Ed an excellent and complete answer to his question. In the following articles we will discuss the Old Man beginning with the Old Sin Nature and its resulant way of life the bible calls the Old Man.
Stay tuned for the next article to be posted soon.
I wrote and posted this article in March of this year and decided that it was worth reposting i these difficult times. Many of my friends and even family members have lost jobs and are unemployed. Their job situation will not hinder God from providing their every need.
Questions: What does the bible say about God’s provisions when the economy is down? My company is laying off and I might lose my job. I am concerned that we might lose our savings and even our home.
God is in Control
God brought the universe into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo) with a spoken word. One minute nothing existed, the next minute, the whole material universe came into being because God told it to do so. God’s creation also came into existence with natural laws like gravity and the laws of physics to govern it. When He created the earth, He made the earth, the seas, the air and the plants and animals after their kind with natural laws to govern reproduction. He made man after His own image and put into effect laws that govern the effects of sin and evil. God is the Creator, the maker of everything and the maker of the natural laws that govern everything. He is also the maker of nations, their economies and the laws that govern economies. He understands our economy, governs our economy and controls our economy. He is actually using our economy to discipline the church and offer us an opportunity to wake up from the spiritual stupor we have slid into over the last years.
Let’s discuss why God is allowing our economy to suffer, His control over the economy, the opportunity for us to learn from these times and God’s promises to sustain His children in any and every economic situation.
God Trains His Children
First, I believe God uses adversity to discipline His children to train them in righteous living. Heb 12:5-11 explains that sometimes God whips His children to help them change their ideas. In America, over the last 60 years, we have believed lies about materialism and happiness through financial prosperity. The American dream of happiness through financial prosperity is a false idea that the devil has promoted and we have accepted. One of God’s goals is to help the church corporately and believers individually rethink this view about prosperity. He wants us to understand that He has given us far more than we need and that what we call needs are really wants. He wants us to realize that we can live happily in Him with far less, in a lesser home, with an older car, with the same clothing, with less retirement, with less insurance, etc. God is training us to understand that He is our happiness and security, not houses, cars and savings accounts.
Government is of God
Second, God is in control of human history in all of its facets, including the world economy and national governments. When an election appears to reflect the will of the people, it actually reflects the will of God. Listen to the book of Romans
Romans 13:1 Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.
God is the ultimate authority over every authority system in the world. In the first century, Rome was the controlling power over the nation Israel. Jesus and His apostles didn’t fight Rome, they complied with the laws of Rome and Paul even used the laws of Rome to defend himself in court. The point I am making is that God controls the governing economic policies in a nation and therefore the rise and fall of the financial status of nations. While the 6:00 news reports nothing but bad news the truth is that God is in control. He allows the economy to rise and fall to teach us His word and His ways and He can change it anytime He decides. We should not allow bad reports and the stock market to determine the way we think about what God is doing with the economy.
Hard Times are Good Times
Third, hard times can be good times and in fact, they can be the best times for families. God uses difficult circumstances to teach us to trust Him.
James 1:2-4 Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
To lose our dependence on financial gain and redirect it toward God is a blessing of great magnitude. When children are raised during times of scarcity, they have a greater appreciation for what they do have and what is required to earn it. When we lose hope in financial gain, we can then place our hope in God’s promises and enjoy the simple things of life together. We can learn that the blessings of inner peace, capacity to love and happiness apart from circumstances are far greater and more enduring than the pleasures that money can buy. Instead of worrying about the material losses you might suffer in this difficult time, focus on what God is graciously teaching you through adversity.
God Provides for His Children
Finally, God’s promise to supply all of our needs are unconditional and not dependent on a good economy. When God brought a 3-year drought on the nation of Israel, the prophet Elijah caught in the same drought, was provided sustenance by God’s grace.
1 Kings 17:2 And the word of the LORD came to him, saying, 3 “Go away from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. 4 “And it shall be that you shall drink of the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to provide for you there.”
God provided water from a stream and birds flew in bread and meat morning and evenings for Elijah. When the brook dried up, God sent Him to a Gentile widow and made miraculous provision for him and her family. In an agricultural economy like Israel, years of drought meant starvation for people and animals. The economy was not down, it was almost non existent during this time and God was not hindered from providing for His children. Regardless of how bad it gets for us in this economy, God will provide our daily bread. The question for us is if He allows us to be reduced to daily bread and we lose many of our material blessings, will we be content with His provision.
Philippians 4:19 And my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
God will supply our needs and even our wants depending on what He decides to teach us through this economy. Trust Him for what He has promised and tell yourself that material prosperity will not bring happiness. Tell yourself that His love that sent His Son to die for you will bring happiness in this life and in the next. What He has given us for eternity is so wonderful and so secure, that nothing we might own in this life can compare. If God is trying to teach us that lesson and give us the reality of it so that we feel that way, rejoice as James says that He has decided to free your from being a slave to what you own. When we can be content in any circumstance, we are truly blessed.
As in every other discussion we have on this site, let me encourage you to devote yourself to spiritual growth through learning and using God’s word. The bible studies and resources on this site are intended to help you build a foundation in the faith and enable you to grow to be a mature Christian. There is much to learn and every promise and principle we learn about God blesses us with joy and peace.
My good friend Richard Statham, an excellent Pastor-Teacher at Palmerdale Baptist has published several articles in a blog. He and I are working together to publish some biblical literature to edify the church at large. Check out his work.
http://www.richardstatham.blogspot.com
Al
Joe was born with a debilitating disease, common to many, that he inherited from his parents. This disease was terminal in time and for many years, without a cure. One day, the cure was found and Joe was totally healed. His excitement and elation was off the scale but to his surprise, short lived. After he was cured, Joe thought that he would no longer experience any of the symptoms of the disease but soon discovered he was wrong. He continued to exhibit many of the feelings and behaviors associated with his original condition. Joe asked his friends about the situation, read articles on the internet and wracked his brain for an answer. Finally, he went back to the doctor who had given him the cure to find the answer to his riddle. The doctor said, Joe, you were born with this condition, you lived many years with it and with the problems that it caused. Your mind and body adapted to it from the beginning and formed methods of compensating for it. Your mind and body are so used to living with the disease that they are still functioning as if it were still there. What do I do about it Joe asked. How do I retrain myself to live like a man who is cured? You learn everything you can about it Joe, the doctor said. You learn about what it is like to live a healthy life, you learn all about the problems and patterns your disease caused and you learn the methods of renewing you mind and body. As you learn about all of these things, you put them into practice, slowly, daily, changing the way you think and act. As you catch your mind and body acting like a sick man, you confront the problem, stop doing it and practice acting like a cured man. It will take time but if you will commit to the process and stick with it, you will be able to totally renew your mind and body to live like a healthy man, cured of your disease. Joe’s mind was now more at ease. He understood why he continued to have the same problems and now knew what to do about it. He left the doctor’s office with new excitement and a desire to help others experiencing the same problem by teaching them the solution to the hangover behaviors.
The Analogy
Knowing that I am a Christian Pastor-Teacher and counselor, you no doubt have surmised that Joe’s story is an analogy that I created. It is an earthly story with a spiritual meaning. I wonder how many of the parallels you have put together. Let me give the interpretation of the story.
Interpreting the Story
The Meaning of Joe’s Story: Joe is any and every born member of the human race. The disease is sin that we inherited genetically from Adam and Eve passed down through our own parents. The cure is the death burial and resurrection of Jesus that paid for all of our sins. We are given the cure when we believe that Jesus died to pay for our sins and was resurrected to defeat death for us. Once we take the cure, we are saved from the judicial penalty of sin and we are secure in Christ forever. The surprising ongoing symptoms are the sins and the destructive patterns we continue to think, feel and practice after we are saved. These patterns are surprising because we are saved, indwelt by the Spirit and have the power to reject sin as a way of life, yet we don’t. The search for answers corresponds to the difficulty we all have trying to understand our own souls and why we continue to struggle with negative feelings and actions. The doctor’s answers are analogous to the teachings of the bible that explain this mystery.
The rest of this article will expand the explanation so that we can understand our struggle and have solutions to resolve it. We will discuss that all mankind is born separated from God with a sin nature, that we all develop habitual thoughts and behaviors that are brought into our new life and finally we will examine the concept of transformation where we take off our old ways and put on the new ways in Christ.
A Choice – A Disease
Joe’s disease is called sin. Originally sin was a decision to disobey God. When sin was chosen, it infested the human body and soul and became like a disease. Sin resulted in all mankind being born spiritually dead, separated from God and we also inherited a sin nature. Joe, like the rest of us was born separated from God because of Adam’s sin. When Adam sinned, he caused the whole human race to become spiritually dead. Spiritual death means that we are unworthy to be accepted by God and that we are unable to function in the spiritual realm. Let’s examine the impact of spiritual death.
Human Needs Unmet by God – Frustrated
God created the human soul with inner needs. Adam experienced these needs even in perfection. Man was designed to need God and to a lesser degree, to need one another. All of us are born with divinely designed needs that only God can meet. In the garden, God was there to meet their needs but after the fall we are born permanently separated from Him. Our spiritual death and separation from God causes us to be unable to have a relationship with Him to meet our needs. In addition, spiritual death renders us unable to understand anything spiritual that He might say to us. The result is that our deepest needs go unmet as we develop our own ideas about life. We grow up without God. As we go through the stages of human development and build our own views about life, we experience continuous frustration from our unfulfilled longings and don’t know why. Only God can fill the emptiness within the heart of man but the heart of man is cut off from Him. Driven by these needs, we are left to our own feeble devices to find a source to fulfill them. Human ability is unable to create a solution so that the human soul is left hopeless and helpless to change our situation. Therefore, spiritual death separates us from God, frustrates us as we try to meet our needs and leaves us confused about why we cannot find happiness through relating with other members of the human race.
The Sin Nature
The second result of Adam’s sin is the corruption of our human nature. God created us with a nature to love and worship Him. The corruption of sin causes us to redirect all of our loyalties away from God onto our self. This corrupted nature is called a sin nature and it causes us to view our self as the most important person in life. In contrast, the bible explains that God is the most important person and His plan is the primary goal of the universe. Our corrupted nature driven by needs, causes us to build an idea system that is contrary to God’s truth. The inner hunger we feel so dominates us that we view our self and our needs as the primary issue in life. We are loyal first to self and then to others only after we have what we need. Our sin nature corrupts the development of our ideas so that our belief system is built around self first. We believe that meeting our own needs is the most important task of our life. All of our thoughts, ideas, feelings and actions are built around meeting our needs. Our hunger for love, belonging and significance becomes our dominant goal and all of our thoughts are arranged with this priority in mind. The sin nature causes even the best of us to be selfish and build our ideas around the belief that selfishness is justified and right. From birth and beyond, we begin and live totally disoriented to God.
The Cure of God’s Grace
The disease is sin. Its results alienate us from God both judicially and experientially, both in our thoughts and our behaviors. We are born condemned to die physically and then to die a second time by being placed into the Lake of Fire forever. The disease is terminal and without a cure, all of us will die and then die again. But God, whose great love motivates Him to show mercy devised a plan to cure us from sin and save us forever. God’s plan to save man is called grace. Grace is God’s genius plan to personally resolve the judicial penalty for sin on our behalf and then offer this resolution as a free gift to the undeserving. He sent His Son Jesus to defeat spiritual death by paying for our judicial debt and then to defeat physical death by returning from the dead. Having accomplished this great mission of mercy, God offers what Christ earned as a free gift to be accepted by believing that He did it for us. When we hear the gospel (the cure), understand it and choose to believe it, God credits the work of Christ to our individual accounts. This is the cure, the only cure that God has provided. Once we accept Christ and His work as our means of salvation, God settles the issue of our sins in the courtroom of heaven and pronounces us pardoned forever. We are cured from the terminal disease of sin, never to be condemned again. Yet, our problems are not over. At first, we think we have it made and in the judicial realm we do. But in the experiential realm of beliefs and behaviors we still have a long way to go.
The Old Man
Habitual Beliefs and Behaviors: God made both the human mind and body to operate on habits. We form ideas and behaviors that become habits that we use instinctively and unconsciously when the occasion arises. The beliefs we formed when we were separated from God and on our own have become deeply seated habits of thought that fire off almost without conscious choice. From these habitual thought patterns come emotional, verbal and overt behaviors that we use to interact with our world. Before we were saved, we all formed a habitual way of life that we unknowingly carry into the Christian life. Our beliefs chosen over the course of our lives with their corresponding behaviors are deeply ingrained and operate habitually under the level of awareness. These old beliefs are called the Old Man in the bible. After salvation, we still have the same needs to be met and we are just as driven to meet them. A great difference is that after salvation we now have God to meet our deepest needs. The problem is that initially we don’t really know what is going on inside of us and don’t realize that we are still using habitual ideas that promote selfishness and sinful behaviors. Even though the Spirit indwells us, we are still unconsciously thinking the old ways and therefore acting in old ways. Some of these old ways can even look like the spiritual life but are motivated to serve self rather than God. We are saved, secure in Christ, the Spirit indwells us giving us power but we still find ourselves sinning in the same old ways. We have to find an explanation to this disturbing hypocrisy.
The New Man in Christ
After we are saved the old habitual ways of living that we developed continue to function within us. These old ideas producing sinful behaviors become apparent as we learn about Christ and see His perfection. As we know Him better, He shows us our inconsistent behaviors. As we grow in Him we also begin to feel new thoughts, feelings and practice new behaviors that are like His. This new belief and behavior system is called the new man (NM) and is created by the Spirit in the heart of the believer who learns and believes the truth. Individual pieces of truth are built together into a viewpoint of life that produces Christ like behavior when we operate from His view. We grow and build divine viewpoint into our souls so that these ideas can become our habitual, unconscious thoughts, feelings and actions. It is the new man that thinks, feels and acts like God. It is the new man that we now want to be and who we want others to see in us. It is the new man we thought we would just automatically become when we were saved. Some churches even teach that from the beginning you have the ability to say no the old and yes to the new, totally and completely. But, nothing could be farther from the truth.
The Old Way Endures
The old way has been our way for a long time and it operates under the surface, without us even knowing. It is the fruit of the old way with its sinful, destructive behaviors that blows the whistle and reveals that something is very wrong inside of us. We try to resist the temptations of the old way and fail miserably. We try harder to no avail. We study more, pray more, seek counsel from the wise and still the old way resists our attempts to put it aside. We keep our mask in place to hide our inner confusion and our habitual sins. We learn Christian words and emulate those we believe are enjoying success in the Christian life. Inside we are still driven, frustrated, fearful and we still struggle with sins that threaten to destroy us.
The Old Man Exposed
The old man is revealed through his sinful behavior. The old man is exposed through good bible teaching. None of us are able to see the truth from God’s eyes on our own. God made us so that we would need His Spirit within us and need each other to teach and encourage us. God gave each of us a spiritual gift that works in unison with the other gifts to edify the church, both individually and collectively. One of these gifts is Pastor-Teacher, which is the ability to look into the scriptures, see the truth and communicate it in an understandable way. As we listen in bible class and learn how/why the old man was built, how/why he operates and how we can put his ideas aside, we grow in our capacity to say no to his desires. To see the old man requires much knowledge and a measure of maturity. Baby Christians are not ready to take on the challenge of our deepest inner motives. When a Christian reaches the adult stages though, he/she must look beyond the surface and begin to seek change in the depths of the heart. It is at this stage of growth that we take on the challenges of transforming the inner man.
The Old Man Rejected
The old man (OM) is the belief and behavior system built into the heart by humans during the time period from their birth until they are saved and in a relationship with God. The OM is a belief and behavior system that views life without God, without God’s truth to see His perspective, without God’s power to contemplate victory and without God’s love to deal with the shame of being weak and selfish. The OM is the system we all built seeking to meet our needs in the devil’s world, using our own abilities, using our own understandings while looking to people for what we need. Before we were saved it was our only option and the only way we knew to protect our self and find happiness. After salvation though, now we have God. God’s Spirit is inside of us, His truth is in the bible that we can learn and use inside of us. After salvation we are able to learn God’s perspective, adopt it as our own and use it as the basis of our emotional attitudes and actions. Now we have the option to reject the ideas of the OM and replace them with the ideas used by Jesus in His humanity, the NM. Now we can say no to the OM because we can see that his ideas are disoriented to God’s plan and disobedient to God’s will. What was the only truth we knew has now been exposed as a lie and we have been given the power to lay it aside and replace it with what God has said in His word.
Transformation – Renewing the Mind
In the 1600’s Spinoza said “nature abhors a vacuum” meaning that nature has a tendency to fill empty spaces. This principle seems to hold true for the soul as well. When we reject the ideas of the OM it leaves a hole in the heart that we are compelled to fill. The opposite is also true as demonstrated by many sheltered college freshmen who went off to school, abandoned their parent’s morality leaving a void they filled with another type of morality. When we reject the OM, we must replace its ideas with NM ideas and allow them to become our way of life. In the bible this process is called in Greek metamorphoo, translated transformation. Transformation is the process God uses to cause believers to grow spiritually. In transformation, the believer lays aside specific ideas previously adopted by the OM and replaces these ideas with specific principles from the word of God. The transformed Christian stops believing the ideas of the OM and therefore rejects them as a basis of action and then replaces them by believing ideas from God’s word and uses them as the basis of action. The Greek metamorphoo is the root of the English word metamorphosis, a process of change that occurs in stages resulting in the emergence of a different way of life. After salvation, God enters all of His children into this process where they grow in stages, taking off the OM, putting on the NM, finally resulting in the believer being like the Lord Jesus Christ.
Summary
After salvation we retain the belief and behavior system we built before we were saved. We carry these ideas into the Christian life and operate on them unconsciously, below the level of awareness. As long as these ideas remain in the heart as an object of faith, we will continue to view life from their vantage point and use them as the logic for our actions. At the point of salvation God enters His children into a process of change called transformation, the mechanics of spiritual growth. We have to enter it willingly and endure in it and when we do, the Spirit will change our hearts to be like Christ. He frees us from slavery to the hunger, fear and self-destruction of the OM and enables us to willingly enslave ourselves to the Lord and live our life by means of the influence of the Spirit. We learn/believe the concepts taught in the bible, assemble them into a belief and behavior system called the NM. When we habitually use the NM as the logical basis for our actions, it becomes our new nature and our natural way of life. We live as imitators of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Him be the glory and honor forever.
Desires & Hurdles
Our natural tendency it seems is to wish that life was easy, without problems, and where we get everything we want without a struggle. That sounds a lot like heaven to me or like the images I have in my mind about heaven. I am not sure that even heaven will be without challenges. The reason I suggest such an idea is that problems, conflicts and challenges are what motivate us to grow. To be more specific, hurdles standing in the way of what we want, forcing us to overcome them to get what we want is what motivates us to tackle them and in doing so, we grow. Let’s put a few simple thoughts together about growing through taking the challenges in life. This article will discuss our desires which are the root motivation of the human soul, our problems that stand in the way of what we want and finally overcoming our problems by developing new skills and strength to obtain what we want.
Designed to Desire
God’s Design – Needs
First, it is important to understand that God designed the human soul to have needs. God made us with needs, some that only he can meet and some that other people are intended to meet. For example, only God can meet our spiritual needs and only another person can meet our marital needs. Keeping these needs separate is rather important because we don’t want to confuse how these different needs are met. Look to God for what he provides and look to God to provide the right people for what man can give us.
Needs Feel Like Wants
Our needs are experienced within us as desires. Our God given needs feel like longings, hunger, yearnings, cravings ie desires. The bible makes it very clear that it is desire that motivates us to action. We have desires that are sinful and that we choose to fulfill through sinful actions. If we are saved and growing spiritually, the Spirit will also produce desires in us to please God and to love God. If we are discussing our sin life or our spiritual life, desire as an expression of our legitimate needs is what drives us to action to meet our needs. A clear passage teaching this concept is Gal 5:16-17.
Gal 5:16 But I say, walk by the Spirit, & you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. 17 For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, & the Spirit against the flesh; for these oppose one another, so that you may not do the things that you please.
Desires of the Spirit
The Spirit defeats the flesh and both the flesh and the Spirit produce desires as motivators of actions. When we embrace the desires created by the Spirit and walk by means of what He says, we will say no to the desires of the sin nature and act to please God. Notice that it is by giving in to desires, the desires produced by GHS that we win the war against the sin nature. A point to ponder, focus on what you want, the wants that God puts in your heart, not the desires you feel apart from Him and your actions will follow His will and you will please Him. The point of this article is that the desires we feel inside us are what motivate us to take all the actions we choose all of our lives. We, by design, want and use our wants to guide what we think, say and do.
Growing Through Adversity
Too Easy = Boring
The second idea to think on is that there are always problems that stand in the way of us getting what we want. Dang it!! You say, I wish life were easier and that nothing would stand in my way of me getting everything I want. I want it all and I want it now!! Yet life would be so boring if it were that easy. We would wish for something and there it would be for the picking, without any effort and therefore without any growth.
God Given Hurdles
Those things that stand in the way of what we want are the God given hurdles that He uses to inspire us to grow. To get what we want, we have to find a way over, around or through the problem. To get past the hurdle, we often have to use what we have learned and bring it online in real life. For example, God has given us promises that correspond to every problem in life that when used by faith to face these problems will give us total victory over them. It is the hurdle in our way that caused us to use the promise, to believe it to deal with the problem that allowed us to see it work and therefore expose God’s power and faithfulness. Without the problem to overcome, we would not have had to use the promise and we would not have seen God’s power work through His promises. The problem blocking our desires was actually God’s grace gift that caused us to grow in our knowledge of His power invested in His promises. Thank God for our problems, in fact James says they are an occasion for great joy when we visualize the good He will bring about through them.
James 1:2-4 Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
God Given Imagination
Consider is the Greek word hegeomai meaning to guide your imagination or to purposely choose the images you visualize in your mind and the ideas you verbalize in your mind. God promises to use everything in life to produce divine good (Rom 8:28), even our difficulties. When problems occur, James says that if we will intentionally visualize and verbalize God creating this good, it will bring us joy. He also explains that the adversities are the hurdles that exercise our faith making us stronger in endurance and building us into the mature, complete Christian warrior ready for battle and able to overcome and obtain the desires the Spirit has put in our hearts.
Grace Giving
Problems standing in the way of our goals make us grow to overcome them. When we grow, we gain strength, knowledge, wisdom and most importantly, we grow in our capacity to love, forgive and give to others in grace. We grow in our ability to relate to our loved ones in ways that help them grow and in ways that build them up, not tear them down. Giving in grace means to give expecting nothing in return. Just like God gives to us, with no strings attached, His only desire is that we accept His gifts and benefit from them. One of God’s goals for us is that we develop the capacity to give like He gives, generously without reservation, freely without hesitation, confidently without fear of having enough for ourselves and in grace, expecting nothing in return. Giving without expecting a return is called grace giving.
God’s Promises are Grace Gifts
God’s promises are gifts that he gives all of His children, earned by the work of Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. These gifts are freely given and His only desire is that we use them and benefit from them. He never wants us to feel like we owe Him in return for letting us use His promises, He only desires what is best for us and only desires that we accept what He offers. Again, giving to help others, expecting nothing back is called grace giving. We please Him by taking His promises and using them by faith to enjoy total victory over every problem found in the devil’s world. We further please Him by understanding His grace giving and choosing to become grace givers as imitators of Christ. Our problems are a necessary part of building the capacity to give in grace. Rejoice that God loves us enough to give us problems that inspire us to grow to be like Him, grace givers.
Today is the Day
To finish, today is a good day to stop complaining about the problems and hurdles God has allowed into your path. Today is a good day to finally believe what he has said in His word and apply the principle that He uses all things for good. Our problems, even those we have self-induced are part of God’s plan to grow us into His own image, like His son Jesus Christ. A life without problems would be a life without growth, a life without change and we would stay the same losers in Adam for life. It is time to see our problems as opportunities to prove out God’s promises by using them to overcome the devil’s schemes to tear s down. He wants us to lose heart, complain and fold up. He wants us to use our own abilities to deal with life so that he can neutralize our witness and cause us blend in with his people in the world. Today is the day to stand firm against his schemes by trusting God for what He has promised. Today is the day to believe that your problems are God’s gift to make you a grace giver like Jesus.
