Resurrection Thoughts

A tad reflective this week. My dad is spending his first Resurrection Sunday with the One who made it all possible this year. I have to admit that I am somewhat jealous. Have you ever wondered what this week must be like in heaven? What thoughts go through the minds of those assembled before the throne of their God? What thoughts go through the mind of Christ when he reflects on his finished work? Is his heart heavy for all those who refused to believe then and those who refuse to believe now? I have always thought that if I could travel through time, this time roughly 2000 years ago would be the time I would choose to visit first.Not because I need the proof like Thomas, to see with my own eyes, but more because I really want to see first hand what my Savior suffered on my behalf and to experience the glory of that first Resurrection morning. To watch all that unfolded with the various people who were affected by his resurrection.I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Sanhedrin as they considered the implications of what had just happened. I will bet the conversations were interesting to say the least. There has been an awesome series from Answers in Genesis regarding the Resurrection and the proofs thereof. I highly recommend the series. This series should give all of us a few tools for giving an answer to the hope which lies within us to the lost and fallen world around us.
Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4
Article 5
Article 6
Article 7

Then there is also this very powerful commentary which has so many great sentences that I am hard pressed to pick the best comment. The Spirit and the Bride

Finally I want to close with a poem that I wrote roughly 2 years ago.  

Behold the man
Behold the man.
The first Adam.
Created in the image of God for companionship.
Created in perfection for the purpose of worshiping God.
See in the garden, he makes a decision, and falls into temptation.
In this garden sin, death, and despair enter into the world.
He is now afraid, spiritually dead.
Physical death in the future follows.
All who come after are tainted as well.
But a promise is given.
Behold The Man.
The last Adam.
 Eternal God taking on flesh, come to earth to dwell.
Willing to suffer humiliation.
Born to die.
See His sinless life The Lamb of God who will remove the stain of sin from us all.
Beaten for us, by His stripes we are healed.
He prays in a garden, submitting to God’s will.
He is stripped naked, crucified for all to see.
 He bears God’s wrath in our place.
Laid in a borrowed tomb in a private garden
In this garden death is conquered.
O death where is thy sting and grave where is thy victory?
Life and hope enter the world in this garden.
A promise kept.
Two thousand years ago Pilate proclaimed-Behold The Man.
That call rings down through the ages today.
What will you do in this here and now?
With this Man Jesus, The Christ, The Way.

Tribute to Dad

We are here to celebrate the life of my father. It is never easy to capture an entire life in the snapshots of a few moments in time. I don't know much about dad's early life because he rarely talked about his early life. A few comments here and there but not many. Like the time his mother took his comic books away, banned them from the house because he and his brother had dish towels wrapped around their necks shouting Shazam while jumping off the couch! As another example, imagine my shock to find out that our new neighbors in Arizona were my dad's very good friends from high school. I didn't know my dad had any good friends in high school other than Dale. My dad was also the only one that I know who went to Bob Jones because his parents DIDN'T want him to go there. It was a distance thing. Most people don't know that my dad worked his way through college in the bakery at BJ. I asked him once if he could make some of the biscuits but as all his recipes called for pounds and pounds of flour, quarts of milk, and gallons of lard they weren't very practical for a family of 4. My dad was a man of many talents and passions. He loved being outdoors-hunting, fishing, camping, canoeing. Maine as far as he was concerned was God's country and the family camp in northern Maine was a favorite place. He never did shoot a deer but one year he did shoot the top off of a balsam fir for our Christmas tree. He thought for once he had avoided his usual Charlie Brown tree but alas this one was just as Charlie Brown as all the others. He and the guys used to take people out snipe hunting and sometimes they would go on overnight canoe/fishing trips. Photography was another passion. As a child I remember him taking pictures of my brother and I for the family Christmas card and then developing them in the kitchen sink in the glow of red electric Christmas candle lights. I was his model for his portrait photography class and had to pose for a few hours while he fiddled with lights, f stops and the like. When I went on an MIS trip to China, he bought me a brand new very nice 35mm camera. He felt it was the trip of a lifetime and I should have a decent camera for the occasion. It was a trip that he would have loved to go on himself but was never able to do so. I have to note that he took massive quantities of slides and was never without his camera on any trip or family occasion except for one. Believe it or not he had to run out and buy a camera on my wedding day because he had forgotten his at home. He also like woodworking although he pretty much cut off a couple of finger tips one day. Rather than call my mom to tell her about the injury he wrapped his hand up and walked home-about a quarter mile or so. He was rather matter of fact about the whole thing. The one thing he was handicapped by for a bit of time was his left handedness. My mom would tell him to turn right and he'd turn left every time. It was so bad that when my brother was very young he yelled from the back seat-"Dad it's the shoe with the "r" on it." My mom and dad lead me to the Lord at a young age. They encouraged my dreams and my activities. They told me there was nothing beyond my abilities. My dad was certainly the patriarch of the family but he was never above changing diapers, cleaning toilets, doing laundry or cooking a meal. Quite a role model of what to look for in a husband. While I certainly didn't appreciate it at the time, his sea of red ink on all my papers in high school made college English a snap. My parents both gave me a love of reading but my dad introduced me to some of the greats of Science Fiction, a genre I love to this day. I remember watching him comfort my mother through a mostly closed door as her father was dying, holding her close, just being there for her. I remember the tears in his eyes on my wedding day as he walked me down the aisle. The look of joy on his face when he was introduced to his grandson Trevor after driving 1900 miles with a giant Mickey Mouse riding shotgun. When I was a very little girl I would bounce up and down on his chest giggling all the while. It must be something in the genes because we have many pictures of his grandkids wrestling with Papa. He loved every minute of it. He thought his grandkids were the best in the world. Finally I have experienced many emotions since his passing. I am sad and I mourn but it is a selfish sadness and mourning. I am sad for the times that we will not share on this earth from now on. I mourn that he is gone from my life and from the family circle. It is selfish because he is certainly in a better place and is healed from his many illnesses. He is in the Presence of his Savior and God, reunited with those who have gone before and for that I envy him. I have peace because I know where he is at this time. I am filled with happiness when I remember the good times that we had as a family. I am filled with joy when I reflect on the future whether I die before Christ comes or am alive at that time, one day I will be reunited with him. (And I should probably note that he would have said that there were too many words in this-he believed in being succinct and not wordy)

Exclusive or Inclusive or do all roads lead to God?

John 14:6 Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Say you want to establish a scholarship to honor a loved one. You work hard and earn the money to fund this scholarship. You decide that this scholarship to honor your loved one is going to be offered only at the university that your loved one attended and only in the same field of study that they worked in all of their life. Anyone is welcome to apply for this scholarship as long as they go to that particular university and choose to study that particular discipline. Would you give this scholarship to someone who didn't attend the university in question even if they were in that same field of study? Would you give this scholarship to someone who attended the university in question but wanted to study something else? Of course not. The money is yours, the scholarship is yours to bestow on the people who qualify according to the standards you have set up. You wouldn't expect to have to change what you have set up just because someone else thinks it should be different, doesn't like the rules ,or doesn't think that the rules apply to them because they after all are in the same field of study or hey they go to that same school. God has set up how we reach Him. The way is narrow but all are welcome and all are asked to come and find rest. The problem is that we want to do it our way and with our own works or our own rules. Folks it doesn't work like that. Everyone is welcome to come to God but we do it his way. That way is through Christ alone. All other religions and belief systems are what we have to do to work to reach a God. Biblical faith and Christianity is realizing that there is absolutely nothing we can do in our own efforts to reach God but that He stepped out of time, became flesh (Merry Christmas) dwelt among us, died for us and rose again for us (Happy Resurrection Sunday or Easter). All we are required to do is believe in what God has done to reach out to us and rescue us. Other belief systems have some commonality with the teachings of Jesus. Makes sense though. If I were going to develop a belief system meant to deceive people and lead them further from the truth I wouldn't develop a belief system that was made up of complete lies. The difference between the complete truth and a complete lie will deceive some people but most people would be able to see the difference and make decisions accordingly. Converts might be easy to get but pretty hard to retain. However take the feel good parts of the truth and mix it with some lies and a whole lot more people are going to be deceived and they will be much harder to dissuade that they don't have the truth because they have a little bit of truth.

Worldview and politics

I've been reading a lot of post election blogs and articles on why the Republicans lost the Presidency. One recurring theme is "the Republicans need to get away from social issues like abortion and gay marriage because we can't change people's minds on this and all it does is shove people away from the Republican camp." While that is to an extent true, no meaningful change can be made to politics without changing the culture and ultimately the worldview of those in the culture. Rotten worldview leads to rotten culture which leads to rotten politics. So what's a worldview? It is the lens through which we view the world, what happens in the world, and most importantly of all how to fix what is wrong with the world. Everyone has one whether they think so or not. Marxism, Fascism, Naturalism, Statism, Socialism, Communism and all other -isms will all come up with somewhat similar responses to the following questions: 1-Who am I? 2-Why am I here? 3-What is wrong with the world? 4-How do we fix what is wrong with the world? Even differing religions will come up with differing responses to these questions. Then there are the liberal Christians vs the traditional Christians-again the answers are going to differ but that is because the liberal Christians have tried to combine some of the -isms above with Christianity with disastrous results. So the answers to these questions will obviously form the basis for our culture and from there our politics. The wrong answers lead to the wrong solutions. Like it or not, politics does have a moral basis and if the wrong morality wins the day, well we're going to get bad results in politics.

Self Worth

Where does your self worth come from? What should be the basis of our self worth? If we have the wrong starting point we won’t end up at the right point. Many people in our area like to visit San Diego. Who would start out their trip to San Diego by driving to El Paso first? We took the long way to Holbrook once. Traffic was bad on the freeway so we took an alternate route to Sedona. We took the little detour to Sedona to purchase something, decided rather than backtracking to the freeway we would go up Oak River Canyon. What should have been a 6-hour drive via the freeway with detour to Sedona turned into a 10-hour extravaganza! Society would tell us that reason we have feelings of worthlessness and problems with self esteem is that our parents and teachers didn’t make us feel good about ourselves growing up. Maybe it is because your boss, friends, co-workers don’t make you feel good about yourself. That may well be true in some cases but as a general policy it is a pretty shaky foundation. Maybe you feel worthless because you just don’t think you measure up to your own standards for behavior, job, possessions, and physical appearance. If we base our sense of self worth on how others feel about us, how we feel about us, or how we think others feel about us, we’re going to be tossed around like a boat at sea in the middle of a storm without an anchor. So as with other things our self worth should be based on an unshakable foundation and that foundation is God and His Truth.

According to Genesis 1:26 we are created in the image of God. We are not just higher animals as evolution teaches. Evolution strips of us the innate dignity we have as image bearers of God and mars our relationships with others. If you allow the concept that we are all image bearers of God to really make inroads into your life, I guarantee that you will see other people differently and treat other people differently. Maybe not consistently but you will end up different. You will end up treating other peoples like you want to be treated! The Golden Rule doesn’t make sense if we aren’t beings created in the image of God.

The Psalmist tells in Psalm 139:14 that each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made. The human body is so intricately designed I still get amazed even after all this time of studying and working on the body. God says He has revealed His existence in the created world (Rom 1:20) such that no one has an excuse to not know God.

God told Jeremiah that He knew Jeremiah before he was even in his mothers belly and had ordained him to be a prophet to the nations (Jer 1:5). So God knows us before we are even conceived because He is outside of time. He knows everything about us before we were even a twinkle in our parent’s eyes. He knows our gifts, our strengths, and our weaknesses-nothing about our life takes God by surprise. We might end up surprised but He never is surprised.

So what does God think of us? Well, we know from the Bible that if we are outside of Christ God considers us enemies (Rom 5:10) and sinners worthy of death (Rom 5:8, Rom 6:23). The Good News is that we don’t have to be enemies of God. God thinks so much of humanity that He stepped into time, became human, and was born, died and rose again to redeem us and to provide a way to be reconciled to God. Obviously God thinks quite a bit of us-He made the ultimate sacrifice for people of all times and all places. He died for those who love Him and those who hate Him. Do we do nice things for our enemies? Not so much most of the time. He planned on making this sacrifice from before the foundation of time (1 Pe 1:20).

What about our feelings? Well maybe some of the feelings are justified and maybe some are not-we need to take careful stock of our lives and make sure we are diligently seeking after God and doing whatever He has called us to do for Him in this world. If we are then our feelings stand a good chance of being wrong. The Bible tells us that the heart is deceitful and wicked, who can know it? (Jer 17:9) So we shouldn’t be basing our self worth on our feelings or anyone else’s for that matter.

When we belong to God, life doesn’t necessarily get easier; sometimes it gets tougher! God promises to be there by our side, helping, guiding and comforting. Matthew 6:25-42 reminds us of how God cares for the earth and the animals so how much more will He care for us. Verse 34 cautions us to only concern ourselves with the day we are in and not to worry about the tomorrow because each day has enough for us to concern ourselves with never mind tomorrow. He will never leave us or forsake us (Heb 13:5) and no one can take us out of the hand of God (John 10:28-29).

Christ told us that our foundation matters. Remember the parable of the wise man that built his house on the rock with a deep foundation and the foolish man who built his house on sand? The house that was built on rock, with deep foundations could be battered in a flood but did not fall. The house built on sand was completely washed away. We can build on the solid rock of God’s truth and overcome that which comes our way or we can build on the shifting sands of public opinion, worldly philosophy, or our own feelings and be destroyed.

Life Lessons

Recently I discovered, much to my dismay, nodules in my hands signifying the start of arthritis. Well that would explain some of the pain but really? I’m not even 50. My entire career rests on my hands & dexterity. God how could you allow me to have arthritis when that could seriously impact my work & what you called me to do? Then it hit me-this wasn’t a huge surprise to God. He knew before He even called me that this was going to happen AND the kind of impact it could have. I then started reflecting on how over the course of my life events & things have come up which have made me wonder how I was ever going to be able to continue to do that which I firmly believe God has called me to do. As this appears to be an ongoing process with many instances to learn I thought I would share with you 5 things I have learned & relearned.

1-God is still on the Throne of Heaven & He still reigns even when times are tough, things look bad, & all is most definitely not right with the world around us or just our personal world. We may, like Job, not understand what is going on or why it is going on but we can learn that we need to trust the One who is all-powerful and all-knowing. Our Father really does know best even when we don’t think so. I can say that I am really thankful that God did not answer every prayer I ever prayed the way I wanted-what a disaster my life would be if He had done so even though at the time the experiences were painful. Jeremiah 29:11 tells us that God has good plans for us, to give us hope & not for harm.

2-When you try to do what God has called you to do or live the way you should live in your own power, in your own strength, you should be prepared to fail & maybe even fail big. We can do all that God calls us to do but only if we remember where our strength & power has come from-Christ. (Phil 4:13) We can overcome in all that comes our way because God has given us the Holy Spirit to comfort & guide us in our daily lives. How often do we tap into our resource of God’s power in our daily lives?

3-God uses imperfect, flawed people & gives them what they need to succeed. Moses had a stutter & yet was God’s mouthpiece before Pharaoh. Paul may well have had significant problems with eyesight & yet he was the most prolific writer of the New Testament! When God calls you to do something He gives you the tools you need to prosper, flourish, & do the job. God doesn’t promise us the easy way but the doable way.

4-God is faithful. Faithful is He that calls who will also do it. (1 Th 5:12). It may be someday that God will call us to do something different but in the meantime He will be faithful in empowering us in the here & now. That isn’t to say that life or any change that comes is painless but the One who calls is faithful in all instances.

5-God’s timing & my timing were rarely the same. The Bible tells us to wait patiently on the Lord. Perhaps we need to be prepared. Moses was 80 years old before leading the nation of Israel out of Egypt. Several years passed between David’s anointing and assuming the throne. Look at how long it was before Abraham and Sarah had Isaac. Noah worked on the ark for over 100 years before the flood actually came. God promises us that if we wait patiently on Him we will have the strength of eagles and not be weary (Is 40:12). Have you noticed that many times we consider verses only for the spiritual aspect of our lives & not the temporal? We need to stop compartmentalizing our lives into spiritual & temporal. God is not interested in just our spiritual lives but also our temporal lives. His power is ours for the asking for all aspects of our lives. So I can see looming disaster in my hands or God’s sovereignty. God knows where this will lead and for now that is enough.

Our Father's eyes

How does God look at our world and how does He deal with our world? When He originally created it, He saw that it was a good and perfect place. Then humanity chose to place their wants and wishes above God’s commands and authority and the world was no longer good and perfect. There then came a time when the world was so full of evil that God felt compelled to destroy what was once good and perfect except for eight who believed and seized hold of God's deliverance. God asked Noah to tell those around him about the coming destruction and offer them the safety of the ark. The people of that day, like Adam and Eve, chose to trust in their own authority, ideas, wishes and perhaps their culture and society rather than in God’s authority and provided way of deliverance resulting in their destruction. Many probably didn’t believe what they were told of the coming destruction. Only the eight survived. The Exodus generation of Jews were offered the Promised Land but chose to believe 10 who said it was impossible rather than the 2 who said God has said He would give us this land. As a result the offer was withdrawn from that generation and given to the Wilderness generation who accepted the offer. Only the two who believed would be allowed into the Promised Land. Even though the people repented and were forgiven, God still allowed the punishment to stand. God told His people the land was theirs but that they would only be allowed to enjoy the land and receive blessings from Him if they kept His commandments and especially did not go after the pagan gods of the land. A long cycle of forgetting and remembering ensues through the times of the Judges and the Kings. Finally, enough was enough and God sent His people into captivity for their persistent worship of idols. At the end of their captivity, they were restored to the land and to this day the Jewish people do not worship idols made by man. God provided the Law to show Israel how much they needed Him yet the only thing the Law really did was show just how feeble their efforts were at trying to reach God. So God sent a more perfect sacrifice in Christ so that all could be restored to God. Our day is somewhat like the days just before the flood; people would by and large still rather trust in their own ideas, wishes and especially in culture and society rather than take the deliverance provided by God. There are many Noahs out there telling of God’s ways and His deliverance. Unlike the original Noah however, we face much more than ridicule. The stakes are a bit higher this time because the deliverance is not a boat made by human hands but God himself. With such love on display, Satan has increased his attacks beyond mere ridicule to include death for some who proclaim God’s Word.
So back to our original question. God sees a world of broken people that He loved enough to die for even while they were estranged and enemies. Because He is eternally the same, neither His definitions of sin nor His love for people has changed. He still punishes wrongdoing even while providing Grace and restoration. Because we as Christ followers are to be transformed into the image of Christ we should be seeing our world with the very eyes of God. We should interact with our world as Christ interacted with our world. While He was on this earth He called sin sin and did not change the definition to accomodate society or culture. He rebuked sin sometimes sternly and sometimes with love. When Christ interacted with those called "sinners" by the religious leaders, we see that the sinners changed and came into agreement with God not the other way around. So we should see our world's brokenness. We should not change God’s definitions of sin to suit cultural and societal whims or put the Word of God in a place under that of man’s ideas. We should see that those around us are as we once were , in dire need of God and His deliverance. We should show them love in spite of their flaws and sin. We should not look down on them. We should not excuse their sin or call it something else. We should love them with God's love. Amy Grant had a song "My Father's Eyes" that was quite popular. The narrator in the song had one desire and that was to see the world around her with her Father's eyes. I wonder how many of us desire to see our world through the whole lens of our Father's eyes and not just the parts of His sight that we like?