if we walk in the light, as he is in the light ... the blood of Jesus, his Son, keeps on cleansing us from all sin 1 John 1:7

While sharing on this passage the other day the following question came to mind. “Why, if we are walking in the light, would we need the cleansing of the blood of Jesus Christ?” There are two thoughts that come to mind.

The first has to do with being cleansed from the defilement of our own sin. Sin is not a popular word in our culture, but the apostle John reminds us that if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves (verse 8). The point is that light reveals what was formerly in the dark. Many who first come to Celebrate Recovery (a Christ centred 12 step program) are aware of just one issue. Perhaps it is an alcohol addiction or pornography or co-dependency. What I hear over and over in this program, is that as recovery starts to take place, the Lord reveals other problems, problems that may have lead to the addiction in the first place. Unforgiveness is huge and it poisons us, but I am not here to give a comprehensive list of sins. I will leave it to the Lord to nudge you in this in the right place at the right time. He has a different priority than we do, He knows how fragile we are and knows the right pace to go, in bringing wholeness to us through His forgiveness and cleansing.

The other other aspect of the cleansing of His blood has to do with the defilement we experience as we walk in the World. The closer we get to Christ the more the former things we did, and still see in others, bother us. We all know of the ex-smoker who has an evangelical zeal to stomp out smoking. On the one hand it is certainly wrong to be self righteous about these things, but on the other they can be what we call triggers, temptations to go back to the old ways that brought us so much pain. It is hard for our friends to understand. Off colour jokes that once seemed harmless and brought us together now leave us with a bad taste in our mouths. This is not because we have suddenly become prudish or judgemental, but because as we walk in His light we start to see how degrading they are (usually at the expense of others) and displeasing to the Lord. So then what I am saying is that the pollution of sin, our own and others leave us feeling defiled and dirty. But, Praise God, the blood of Jesus, his Son, keeps on cleansing us from this sin pollution too.

Principles, power, presence

In our ministry in the local penitentiary we are leading a Christ centred 12 step program, where we identify our higher power as Jesus Christ. There are many advantages over the usual higher power “god as you understand him.” I tell the men, if your higher power is a tree, I don't know how much help you are going to get from it. For some their higher power is their mother, but where will they find help when she is gone? For some it is their friends, but friends can let you down. Jesus Christ will never do that!

I came to believe that the Bible is the Word of God bit by bit as over and over I would recognize that “This book knows me.” I saw this, to mention just a couple of things, from the deceitfulness of my heart (my ability to tell myself lies in order to do what I wanted to do (Jeremiah 17:9), and from the principle of reaping what we sow. About this, the choices we make have consequences, and for me the choices I made came back to haunt me, to bite me in the rear end.

There is so much wisdom in the ancient texts. In fact the Bible show us the right path, it tells us where we got off the path, it tells us how to get back on the path, and it tells us how to stay on the path (2 Timothy 3:16). The Bible is full of practical principles and wisdom that secular Psychology, when it gets it right, is only just starting to discover in its slow progress towards truth. The principles of the scripture bring life to those who are willing to follow them. They brought life to me.

But there is so much more to having Christ as your higher power. In particular there is power. We are told in Philippians 2:13, that when we fully cooperate with Him, He works with us to change even our desires. And on top of that, He gives us the wherewithal to do what we deep down know what we need to do (or not do!). I discovered that I could not do this without Him, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13).

So yes in a Christ centred 12 step program there are principles and there is power, but for me the thing that crowns it all, the thing that puts the cherry on the top, is the presence of God in my life. They say love makes the world go round, but many of us have a huge love deficit. In other words we have little or nothing to give in this area (yet another area where the Bible knows us). When we come to Him in full surrender and stick with Him, He pours out His love in our hearts (Romans 5:5), and then that love flows through us. You even get to like yourself! So yes there are principles, and yes there is power in a Christ centred 12 step program, but all this is nothing compared to knowing and feeling His tangible extravagant healing love in our lives. It makes it all worth while, it makes it all possible. It gives us hope, and it is freely given to all who wholly and fully turn to Him.

Sometimes it takes a while before we are willing to come to Him in the sort of surrender I am talking about here. I only came to Him when I came to the end of myself, when I bottomed out so to speak. Are you there yet? Have you suffered enough yet from the consequences of your own and others' choices? He is waiting, and He tells us “He who comes to me I will in no wise cast him out (John 6:37). How will you, how do you respond to His extravagant healing love? I tried doing it my way and messed up big time. So now for me His way is the only way to fly!

The heart of the matter is the heart (continuing Feb 18th's post)

In his prayer to the Ephesians Paul prays that they be given a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, enlightening the eyes of their heart (Ephesians 1:17,18). The last phrase is a literal translation of Greek, which also follows the word order. The implication (missed in many translations) is that a spirit of wisdom and revelation is the vehicle by which the eyes of the heart are enlightened. This is important because to know Him is to know that He is Love (1 John 4:8). In particular the enlightening of the eyes of the heart includes the revelation of His unconditional extravagant healing love for me and for you. Without this ongoing progressive revelation we will not be able to bear some of the other aspects of the enlightening of our hearts (John 16:12). God's primary goal in the enlightening the eyes of our heart is for us to have an ever deepening heart connection with Him.

It takes two to make and maintain a heart connection in any relationship. In the cross God has done everything necessary, from His side, to make it possible for us to have a heart connection with Him. From our side there are many blocks (or it would already have happened), and we need both a revelation of His heart for us, and a spirit of wisdom to get past the rationalization to even see, let alone dismantle, these blocks.

In this post we will be examining the blocks that prevent a heart connection with Him, and we will be saying more about the Love that enlightens the heart. In subsequent posts we will be considering our response to the enlightening of our hearts and the results of the enlightening of the heart.

The Greek lexicon defines heart (as used in this context) as the centre and seat of spiritual life, the fountain and seat of the thoughts, passions, desires, appetites, affections, purposes and endeavours. That the eyes of the heart need to be enlightened is clear from Matthew 5:18 where Jesus tells us that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony and slander.

As part of my journey to faith I went through a broken marriage where I initially placed 100% of the blame for what went wrong, on my former wife. At the time I had no doubt about this, and I had murder in my heart. The scarey thing is that I am not at all sure that I would not have followed through, if I had thought I could have gotten away with it! Sometime later the Lord opened my eyes as to my own part in it all, and I came under heavy conviction of sin, selfishness and pride. I saw that I had been blind to my own substantial faults.

After I was saved I came across a verse in Jeremiah 17:9 which says that the heart is deceitful above all and desperately wicked. It was a major step in my acknowledging that the Bible is the Word of God. This book knows us, this book knows me. This revelation would have been devastating had I not known I was loved and forgiven. Gently He started to show me my almost limitless capacity for self deception and rationalization. I started to know something of the depth of the depravity of my heart. I have gotten into trouble for sharing this even with other Christians. As a result of this I have come to the conclusion that many Christians don't even have a clue how easily their hearts deceive them, and just how much our thoughts, passions, desires, appetites, affections, purposes and endeavours need to be enlightened.

As I said, this revelation of the deceitfulness of my heart would have been devestating were it not for the spirit of revelation of the Father’s Heart. With the enlightening of the eyes of my heart came the understanding of how much He loves me (and you). When Paul was enlightened he could say “The Son of God love me, and gave Himself to be the atoning sacrifice for my sin" (Galatians 2:20). When, through this spirit of revelation I see the cost of the sacrifice and the personal nature of it (for me!), I also see that God loves me in spite of the state of my heart. For me this is the saving grace.

This revelation of His love is so much more than a rational understanding of the fact that He loves us, it is to know His love in the three ways that I discussed in the previous post. That is that the revelation of His love comes, yes through an intellectual understanding that He does, but it also comes by the Spirit (who testifies with our spirit that we are the children of God Romans 8:16) and by experience, as the love of God is poured out in our hearts (Romans 5: 5). This tangible revelation of His Love is meant to comfort our hearts, to strengthen our hearts, to bring peace and security, and to equip us to be all that we can be in Him. The heart of the matter, is the heart!

Knowing and experiencing the unconditional love of the Father enables me to get honest with myself, and creates a safe place with Him where He can enlighten the eyes of my heart without destroying me. In the safety of His unconditional love I can increasingly bear the truth about my incompleteness and know that just as a loving earthly parent loves his or her child even when they have done wrong, so He continue to love me even in my imperfections. In the security of this love I can allow Him to deal with what needs to be dealt with in my life, and so be transformed by the enlightening of my heart. Truly the heart of the matter, is the heart

Needed: a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him

The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians (perhaps the most mature Church in the New Testament) prays that God would give them a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. That he would think this was necessary for the mature church speaks volumes of how much it is needed today. But exactly what is he praying for?

In the secular West our view of what we know is primarily about logic and reason. Certainly reason is important since we are told to love the Lord with all our mind, but it is not the totality of how we know. In fact there is a “trinity” of ways we know. So yes, we know by reason, but we also know also by intuition and experience. Perhaps we learn to trust only by experience.

Regarding intuition, Einstein tells of how he discovered the theory of relativity laying on a grassy grassy bank gazing at a sunbeam through half closed eyes and wondering what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, when the theory of relativity came to him intuitively. He goes on to say that he then went to his laboratory and proved it. Notice the relationship here between the rational and the intuitive. On the one hand, it was not by a series of logical steps that he arrived at his conclusion, on the other he needed the logical steps in order to prove his theory. What I am trying to say here, is that the three ways of knowing are not independent, they intricately interconnected, they are a trinity.

By analogy we know a person by words, by that persons' spirit (the intuitive aspect), and what we experience of him or her at a sensory level. Knowing their words is obvious, the spirit perhaps less so. A person with a spirit of negativity is perhaps the easiest to discern. It is, for example, easy to spot a spirit of bitterness, or anger, or greed, or arrogance. Less obvious perhaps is a gentle spirit, a spirit of humility or of trustworthiness. We are talking here about the character (good or bad) of the person we are encountering, and we often discern these things first through our feelings, our senses.

The Scriptures tell us that the mature have their senses exercised to discern between good and evil (Hebrews 5:14). That they do need to be exercised is clear. It is not innate, it is something we learn, something we grow into. We can start with noticing the tension in the air that we feel when someone is angry or someone is trying to manipulate us. Jesus often sensed what was happening in the natural. He was given words of wisdom and words of knowledge (1 Corinthians 12:8). We too can access these things, and many times they come through our senses, by what we feel.

Applying all this to what Paul is praying, we see we need to know God in this way, through His Word (the Bible), through His Spirit (manifesting His character through His faithfulness, mercy justice etc., etc.) and through encounter where, for example, we feel the love of God poured out into our hearts by the same Spirit (Romans 5:5). We all need more and more of this. It is in and through such encounters that we loose the orphan spirit that permeates so much of our culture. To use a secular turn of phrase, we need to have our love deficit cancelled by allowing God to fill up our “love tanks.”

Without such encounters we will likely continue to seek love or fulfillment in all the wrong places, through our various addictions be it substance abuse or perfectionism or Workaholism etc. And this is where the spirit of wisdom comes in. We need the spirit of wisdom to unveil our wrong beliefs. I remember a friend (who has given me permission to share his journey) who was convinced that he was a looser. It was what he experienced and continued to experience though self fulfilling prophecy with his confidence level at zero. During one of our sessions the Lord gave him a word of wisdom for himself. He suddenly blurted out “This belief is evil isn't it?” It was the last thing on my mind, but I immediately knew it was true and of the Lord, and this revelation allowed him to repent of believing it, and to start to recover a sense of worth and confidence in his (awesome actually) abilities.

So then we need a spirit of revelation to know Him, and how much He loves us, and we also need the spirit of wisdom to know what of our ungodly beliefs are currently keeping us from a deeper relationship with Him. We need to pray this prayer (I do) for ourselves and those we love.

The testing of your faith: A perspective on trials

James in his epistle has a perspective on trials that we don't immediately see in the natural. He tells us that trials are there to test (and hence strengthen) our faith. To James' Jewish Christian audience, this would be a familiar theme from the old Testament. For example God tested Abraham concerning his son (Genesis 22:1), and the Israelites were tested in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 8:2).

The stated purpose of the long drawn out wilderness experience the Deuteronomy passage refers to, was to humble and test the Israelites so as to know what was in their hearts. Most of us do not know our hearts (Jeremiah 17:9), but our hearts are revealed many times in our response to the trials of life. Israel had blown it at the beginning of the 40 year period of their wanderings. These wanderings would not have been necessary if they had responded to their challenges with faith. We too can save ourselves long drawn out wilderness experiences if we learn to respond to our circumstances in faith. In the end the Lord will have His way with us anyway, and it is surely better to quickly submit rather than to be humbled and then finally, in the end, to come kicking and screaming into acceptance.

I don't pretend that is it easy, in the midst of the trial, our focus tends to be on the trial itself, and the pain we are suffering. Because this is so, we may not immediately recognize that our faith is being tested, nor the value of such testing. When we see that our faith is being tested, and that God has purpose in allowing it, the Christian can perhaps see more clearly that he or she is in fact given a choice.

For many years in my own life all I could see or feel was the pain of my trials. I did not see my circumstances as an opportunity to put my faith in Him, rather I tried to work it all out in my own strength and wisdom. In fact things had to get very much worse before I finally got a hold of the truth being discussed here. Only then did I start to respond in faith to the trials and tribulations that He had allowed. With 20/20 hindsight I am also painfully aware that, like unbelieving Israel, my own unbelief resulted in my family being dragged through the wilderness with me. And I can now say clearly from the School of hard knocks that we need to enter this process of becoming whole (for that is what it is) not only for our own sake, but also for our families and those over whom we have influence.

What I am trying to say here, is that unless or until we start to understand that the trials we encounter are in fact testing our faith, we are unlikely to choose to respond to them in trust and faith, and so by His grace learn to rise above them. We do need His help for this (I do). Someone put it this way. “We need to learn to stop fighting the people and circumstances that God allows in our lives with the purpose of making us more like Him.”

In all kinds of trial, count it all joy

One thing that many people do not seem to understand is that the deeper the trail the greater the potential to enter into the reality of the peace and joy promised to the Christian. It is in the deepest trials that the promises of the Bible are the most relevant and the most empowering. We are told for example “You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee (Isaiah 26:3).” We are also promised joy. Here in this command from James we are commanded to rejoice (count it all joy) but joy is also part of the fruit of the Spirit. We are not just talking about a superficial happiness here. In the context of various trials (the very same phrase used in James) Peter speaks of a joy that is too great to be expressed in words. The various translations have it as joy unspeakable, glorious joy or joy so great it is inexpressible (1 Peter 1:6-8). But how are we to experience this, and why is it that the potential for these positive things increases with the difficulty of the trial?

Here is one of the many upside down principles of the Kingdom. When the trial is small we can simply suck it up, we can tell ourselves to get a life. The secular self help literature does this in spades. We are told not to sweat the small stuff, and that it is all small stuff. But it is not small stuff if you lose a child, or if you are abused, and to pretend that this is small stuff is to live outside of reality. Secular self help also tells us that life is a gentle teacher, but it many times it feels more like the school of hard knocks. In particular as the pain and/or difficulties of our circumstances grow, it becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible to rejoice. At this stage the advice given here can be completely incomprehensible. They will think you are mad if you suggest it.

But the person of faith knows that the increasing pain and difficulties bring us to a crossroads, to a choice. Will we choose to trust? Will we choose, in the words of Paul, to believe that somehow (we may not know how) God is actively at work for our good in the trial (Romans 8:28). Will we accept, in the words of Peter, that the testing of our faith is precious, and that it will produce praise honour and glory at the revelation of Christ?

In the midst of my own fiery trial, the Lord put a devotional book into my hand. The title is revealing. It is called “I can't, God can. I think I'll let him.” This is akin to the first couple of steps of any twelve step program. We start by admitting we are powerlessness to rejoice in our suffering, to admit that without His help we cannot do it. The point is that when we fully surrender and cooperate with Him, He makes up for what we cannot do. He even changes our desires (Philippians 2:12,13). It's about coming to the end of ourselves and then choosing to believe.

This is where the depth of the trial is helpful. When the trial gets deep enough, and goes on for long enough we come to the place where we start to understand that with us it is impossible. We start to see the inadequacy of the power of positive thinking alone to bring us out of the desolate pits into which we have fallen. We become desperate, desperate enough to fully surrender, to put our faith money where our mouth is. When we do we find that "underneath are the everlasting arms" (Deuteronomy 33:27). This builds our faith so that surrender in the next trial is not quite so difficult. So then it is the depth of our trials that increasingly bring us out of our denial and more and more fully into the embrace of God.

Nobody is saying this is easy, nor that it is instantaneous. We may not be there yet, the trials may not yet have gone deep enough or lasted long enough for us to fully surrender. We may still think we can do it without Him. We need help even here, and we need help as we choose to count it all joy in the midst of it all. Without Him it is impossible, but with Him all things are possible. It is a process, and the book of James tells us many of the Scriptural ingredients that we need to take note of, if we are going to keep moving forward to appropriate the promised fruit of our faith and obedience.