My way, your way, their way, our way ... but all that matters is His way

In Shrek, the ogre, having had his swamp disturbed by Donkey, Pinocchio, the three pigs, the wolf and many other Fairy Tale creatures, decides to address their eviction with Lord Farquaad. On leaving, he shouts, “Fairy tale creatures, don’t get too comfortable”.

It is in the nature of all creatures to settle. No matter what kind of circumstances we find ourselves in, we will soon tame it and make it as comfortable as possible.

The problem with settling, is that it can be at odds with God’s agenda. There are times when His spirit stands still, but such seasons of settlement are never an end. The Kingdom is always advancing.

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The path of the bride is converging with the groom as we enter the climax of the ages

I am told that Voltaire once referred to the Apostle Paul as an “ugly little Jew”. How he even drew his conclusions so many centuries after the great man lived and died, is a bit of a mystery. That said, appearances never defined great men. Rather Paul referred to the sweet fragrance of Christ in His life, the powerful essence that endows the faithful with a regal air. Paul added, that the same fragrance, whilst alluring to many, remained a deep offence to others.

Now Paul also alluded to one of the key factors for that sweet fragrance. In Ephesians 4 he makes the point that, despite many differences in administration there is still one Lord, one Faith, On Baptism, One God and Father over us all.

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Giving the finger to God, a sign of the dark times we are now entering into

Some time ago I was in the Louvre museum, enjoying a Renaissance section of the museum, when my eye caught a very offensive gesture in a crucifixion scene. Off to one side, a bystander in the crowd had raised his hand to flex a rude hand signal to the dying Christ. I have tried searching for the painting in question, to no avail, but it is out there somewhere.

I think it was on the same trip where I saw a Muslim in Hyde Park, wipe his backside on the bible. The act may have been symbolic, but the gesture carried a full weight of meaning.

There was a time when such offences were frowned on by society in general. Nowadays, if anyone dared say a word out of place about Mohammed they would be in quick and serious trouble. Indeed, so sensitive has the world become to the Muslim cause, that US authorities have approved a mosque within sight of ground zero. I don't want to debate that, but I am concerned by the way that everyone is so desperate to appease Islam, whilst having no concern about blasphemous use of the name of Jesus in movies or the offensive portrayal of our Saviour in gay or lewd contexts. 

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Less is more, more or less, until less becomes less and more becomes more

A friend appropriately encouraged me by SMS to keep things simple and to take more of God's truth at face value. He closed by saying, "Less is more".

Now, whilst in essence I agree with his challenge and indeed as a family we have significantly simplified our lives of late, I still have some dilemmas, most notably that it is just too easy for outsiders to oversimplify the realities of others.

How do I tell my wife and children that we should find ways to simplify our prevailing challenges, without provoking a cynical response? How do I tell them it will all be okay, whilst in reality it is anything but? How does my friend reconcile mounting debts against a non-existent income? Or how does my missionary friend, who lives in a completely off-the-beaten track village in Zambia, rationalise his trust in God whilst his resources are being consumed by the disease that is threatening the life of his child? I could go on, suffice to say that for those in crisis, life is rarely simple.

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The unchanging ways of the Great I am, give us an objective faith and great hope

Our fathers have a great penchant for saying, “Later”. The cat’s in the cradle song put it well, saying, “We’ll get together then and we’ll have a good time then”. For so many of us, a father’s word is somewhat flexible, offering well-meaning promises with no guarantee of fulfillment. This is not a go at Dads – I am one and I know how imperfect I am. Its more about contrasting the consistency of God.

Hebrews 12:4 confirms that our fathers discipline us from time to time according to their whim or at their own pleasure, but God chastens us for our good so we can share in His glory. What that means is that God is not capricious, but I will go further in suggesting that God does not even dispense favors. He is not a heavenly butler or vending machine, He is God.

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Will this age of compromise lead us astray or will the Lord of the Harvest intervene?

Early this morning I read that Isaac Newton was a closet Arianist, which means that despite his public testimony, privately he questioned the Trinity and believed that Jesus was created, making Him less than God. Later a friend invited me to join a group which advocates a Trinitarian position, but I chose to write instead.

Arius was a dissident of the Nicene position, the council commissioned by Constantine the Great to canonize the bible and its doctrines. He preached his alternative theology around 250 to 336 AD and was significantly influenced by Lucius of Antioch. However, proliferation of Arianism helped to reinforce and cement the Nicene view of a Triune God.

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Praying effectively: What role does Jesus play in our daily trials and struggles

According to Romans 8, "The Spirit makes intersession for us according to the will of God". I don't wish to be contentious, but Romans 8:26-27 is not about the Holy Spirit (in spite of any Greek subtexts in the passage).

The context is about Jesus and His role in sustaining our walk of faith. Thus Paul opens the chapter saying, "there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ", whilst adding later, "if anyone has not the spirit of Christ, He is none of His." It is Christ's indwelling life that sustains us in our journeys of faith, thus bringing about the transformation of our minds that ultimately reconciles us to the Father's will.

Therefore the interceding Spirit is Christ and the text is not an argument for speaking or praying in tongues. According to a number of New Testament writers (1 Timothy 2:5), there is only one mediator between God and man, and that is Christ. He alone is the great High Priest so adequately described by the writer to the Hebrews. To that end, Hebrews 2 argues that He had to be made like Hs brothers (verse 17) so that He might become a merciful and faithful High priest. No one else was more qualified to intercede between us and the Father, than the Lord Jesus Christ.

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There is empirical evidence that prayer heals, as reported by AFP

The following was so intriguing I replicated in full to be true to the originator, AFP:

Washington - Prayer heals when it's close-up and personal, and there's a study to prove it.

It's not just any kind of prayer, but "proximal intercessory prayer", or PIP - when one or more people pray for someone in that person's presence and often with physical contact - that was found by a team of doctors, scientists and religious experts to have remarkable results in healing some patients.

A team of medical doctors and scientists led by Indiana University professor of religion Candy Gunther Brown found in the study, conducted in rural Mozambique, that prayer brought "highly significant" improvements to hearing-impaired participants and significant changes to the visually impaired.

Fourteen hard-of-hearing and 11 visually impaired study participants were recruited at meetings of Pentecostal Christian groups in Mozambican villages and towns.

They were tested with a handheld audiometer or vision charts, depending on their impairment, before and after they took part in a prayer session.

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Its time to let go and move on, time to walk on the waters and live again

No matter what part we play in initiating our own crises, more often than not there is a degree of injustice in it all. If you think back to David's struggle with Saul, you might argue that David got ahead of himself and thus provoked the king to jealousy, but the ongoing persecution of David was still unwarranted and unjust. Yet David submitted to God and did little to defend his own cause until Saul fell on his own sword. The resulting closure enabled David to move on and live again.

Similarly Moses, who had done astonishing things, was challenged by Korah and his sons. Instead of defending himself, Moses turned to God, surrendered his rights and submitted the issue to divine counsel. When the disputing parties met again, God made His own position very clear by causing the earth to open up and swallow Korah and his family. God, not Moses, saw that justice was done.

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In the living years: settling accounts whilst we can so we leave with peace

In the beautiful movie, "The blind side", Lee Ann Touhy bemoans the fact that Michael, her adopted, black giant of a son, so struggles to remember his school work. Her husband then interrupts to say what will stay with me forever: "Michael's greatest gft is forgetting". After years of being rejected, forced to forage for food, facing cold and lonely nights or walking in the rain, Michael learnt to forget, let go and move on.

Today my own father told me of the reasons he wants to die and go. I told him stuff I can't fully share here, except to say that there are many outstanding accounts in his life. I urged him to call in each of his children, to forgve them and secure their forgiveness - as an act of release.

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Poem: Time only time - its all we have, our greatest and most underrated resource

By silver light, the watchman

walks on shadowed walls,

until the night’s last stand

heralds the waking morn.

A sigh goes up, how long

‘ere the break of day,

when all the trees by song,

shall dance to gilded ray?

Soon, he shouts, very soon,
the golden orb shall breech:
for methinks its overdue -
so be gone, blackness, flee.

But then inquires another
“by what means can you tell -
or can this day be summoned
as flows the village well?”

What man could bid the day,
or by the hour the sun?
His light though soon or late
plumbs the line of time.

Raised wrists n’er defined
nor moved the hand divine,
what heav’n alone decides
that now, at last, its time …

.. for by the same decree
grey seasons come to pass,
so fade the stars that lead,
until day dawns, at last …

… to resurrect, by sure degrees
let none say can or can’t,
what God alone decrees -
this day be thus advanced

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net

Poem: Starting again - to the end of every season, comes a new beginning

To every brokenness

of our personal hells,

each empty soul ends,

what started so well.

The naked cry of souls,

in search of covering,

to make the broken whole -

is a long road, unending.

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Seasons come and go - does God orbit our lives or do we orbit His?

The comings and going of seasons are never because the sun moves, but because we move around a fixed sun. So much for the science lesson – I am sure you knew it was always that way, even if the dark ages had the sun dancing around our insignificant orb.

The principle is as true of our relationship with God. We move into and out of seasons, but God never moves. He is the independent variable of this universe. The picture of a divine constant is also seen in heaven, where the glory of God is its eternal light.

The point here is potentially as radical as the moment when the inquisition finally buckled under the compelling evidence of Galileo’s heliocentric universe model.

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Flying the meatball to find the sweet spot of God

One of the most demanding skills around involves landing a high powered jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier. With only 500 feet of landing space on a surface that often heaves on the sea, it is a very dangerous activity.

There are all kinds of support systems, including approach guidance systems, flight deck communications and a triple arrestor system that is used to snag the plane’s arrestor hook and bring it to a safe, albeit quick stop.

One of the systems used is the long range line-up system or Lens, which uses a number of green, orange and red Fresnel lights supported by a gyroscopically stabilised platform. If a jet has the right angle of approach, the pilot will see what is called, “The meatball” – the amber lights in line with a row of green lights. If coming in too high, the green lights will be above the orange lights. Too low and the pilot will see red light.

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Where do we stand?

One of the greatest causes for human crisis results from misrepresentations of God. The dark ages marked a significant eon of human crisis driven by ignorance about God and His heart for humanity. Fear of the unknown reduced all unknowns to the devil’s work which enslaved humanity to ignorance, suspicion, superstition, fear and all the more obvious consequences of that age: dungeons, death and disease.

Aside from many other obvious social deviations, we each have our own personal misconceptions of God. It all reminds me of a little Church Mouse cartoon, which shows a mouse saying “Lord, just look at what is now available in the Internet”, to which a voice in heaven replies, “I’d rather not”.

Okay, enough of the more patently negative aspects of human attitudes to God. To me it is more tragic that believers are getting into trouble because of their misconceptions.

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Experience builds hope

In Romans 5, Paul contends that Hope is a product of experience. His contention brings a very practical angle to an otherwise spiritual debate. Believers are very good at over-spiritualizing life. That alludes to a branch of logic in psychology called paranoid-schizoid defenses that describes how the mind develops internal bulwarks against threats.

Splitting … involves a process of simply dividing the world into two and identifying the more attractive world as friendly, thus reducing everything else to a wrong or a threat. It sadly erodes all sense of hope, because it denies reality and inhibits real experience.

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Work in progress

Wendell Phillips said, “Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake”. Of course there is a double meaning, for our world as we know it was as much formed on the scaffold of the stone-mason as on the scaffolds where truth died to spare the lies of thrones. Our own lives are also under the scaffold, an incomplete work whose time must surely come.

Many years ago I lay on the floor of the Sistine chapel to admire Michelangelo’s profound adornment of the ceiling. At the time the last supper was under renovation, masked behind scaffolding and workers sheets. For all the wonder of that equally famous painting, I was denied something of its true greatness.

At the time many other great buildings across Europe were undergoing renovations, so I found similar scenes of scaffolding and workers tools in a number of cities. Right now my own part of the world is facing similar refurbishment, so many of our buildings and other public places are encased in their own frameworks of scaffolding.

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Rebuilding the walls

Darius’ decreed that Nehemiah should start restoring Jerusalem, became a significant prophetic marker, because the moment meant so much to God. Nehemiah enjoyed the favor, blessing and authority of God – a very important consideration, given that the same authority had sent once sent His people into captivity, some 70 years earlier.

Thus the Jewish Diaspora came full circle. They had been exiled for as many years as the Sabbath years that they had once dishonored, but with Darius’ decree the matter was closed and God moved on.

However, Sanbalat resented the Jews and did all he could to stop their recovery. Although Nehemiah had authority to take wood from the king’s forest and to quarry for stone, Sanbalat would have none of it. Guess who he characterizes?

So Nehemiah made rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, his priority. He knew that as long as they were exposed to Sanbalat, all other efforts would be fruitless. They were so single-minded about their approach that they built with their swords by their sides, ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

The story is analogous to our own human struggles. We also neglect truth and end up in exile. We are also taken captive by life and dragged off to work the thankless systems of this world. Yet when God redeems, He gives us the vital authority to rebuild our lives.

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Naked before God

I knew a man who had the privilege of meeting Richard Branson. He had a great idea and Branson was interested. A helicopter took him to Branson’s island, where he disembarked with a studied look, his laptop on his arm and determination in his heart.

He was led to a room where Branson sat in a large Turkish bath, sans any clothes. My friend was taken aback, but Branson was unmoved. Clearly the laptop would never do in the bath and yet it was clear that no meeting would happen unless they both shared the bath, to “break bread” as it were. So my friend took the plunge, stripped off and joined Branson in the bath. Then they talked man to man about his idea.

Branson cared little about the technical brilliance of his presentation, but did want to see if they could be real and open. I suppose he felt that if my friend could not be vulnerable it was not worth doing business with him.

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Small beginnings, great outcomes

As has become a pattern in my life, I am surrounded by people in various stages of crisis. Maybe my own years of crisis were meant to equip me, but that might imply that God imposed crisis on me. Sadly, I have to say that I was the common denominator in every crisis. It was me that had to change and keep changing until my heart knit with His and my mind transformed.

Rick Warren, a most respected teacher, stated yesterday that in all crisis we must choose whether to groan or praise. I have to say that there is a third way. Praise can be denialist and Elizabeth Kubler Ross cautioned that crisis does indeed provoke denial. Of course I advocate praise, I must do, but the bible emphasizes a walk of faith, which is far more reflective of the tearful petitions of the great psalmists.

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