"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)
As regular readers know, these verses were brought to our attention by Mr. or Ms. Anonymous in a comment a few posts back. Although we do not often comment on comments, we did on that one. It is always a welcomed experience when we hear something from the Holy Spirit and it is almost immediately confirmed by someone else who heard the same thing. What follows is an expanded version of what we believe God is trying to tell us with these verses.
These verses from Ephesians 2 are so familiar to most Christians that any further expansion of them could be tiring or redundant. Most of us heard them beginning at our own born-again experience and have repeated them to people we were witnessing to since that time.
There is one point in these verses that is usually missed. We tend to think the word "saved" refers exclusively to being born-again. If you did not think that, you can still be part of "we." This can be an act of patience for you as the rest of us catch up. One of the things this author enjoys most about writing is he learns so much during the process--and from the comments that are made later.
As we began to say, being saved only starts when we are born-again. A quick study of the Greek grammar here shows us that the word "saved" in these verses is from a verb that literally means, to be delivered from any and all suffering and judgement. (The dictionary definition would take more room than we have here.) Furthermore, the tense shows us this action was completed at some point in the past. Putting that all together, we see that sometime ago, all suffering and judgement were eliminated from us. Where there is no judgement, the grace of God has free reign to accomplish His works. Although it was the death of Jesus on the cross that made it possible, this happened for each of us individually when we activated grace by an act of faith. That act, of course, was making Jesus Lord of our lives. I can see you are not all as excited about this as I am. Wait, you get more.
"He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32)
The grace that drew us to God and compelled us to make Jesus our Lord, began to work salvation in our lives at that very moment. It is the same grace we activate every time we believe what God is telling us to do, and act on it. We cannot simply verbalize that we believe a thing and not do something in response to that belief. (James 2:18) When we really believe anything, we act on it. That is the way human beings are wired, if you will.
Having been born-again, we find things are different than they were before. We think differently. We act differently. We begin to understand our lives are not the same anymore. No matter what comes against us, the grace of God helps us through it. That is salvation at work in our lives. Whatever we need is included in our salvation and provided by His grace. Our part is to simply believe--then act on what He tells us to do.
Perhaps the Lord is speaking something to you right now. Demonstrate your faith by acting on it, whatever it is. Just as salvation came to your house when you made Jesus Lord of your life, salvation will come to your house to meet your every need. God bless you as you do!
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Change Your Mind
I have a friend I do not play chess with anymore. Truth be told we only played one time, over two decades ago. That was enough for me. I thought the game was going well. I knew he was smarter than I am, but I was holding my own. Tom moved a piece and announced, "Check Mate." As I said we do not play anymore. It is not so much that I mind losing (God knows I have done enough of it to accept that it happens.), it was just crushing to think I could play with someone smarter and technically better than I was at the game and then have reality come crashing down on me.
My mother-in-law gave me a word from the Lord around the same time I had played that game of chess. As I recall, her exact words were, "David, the devil is setting a trap for your soul." Okay, thanks Carolyn. That was about it--until the devil blind-sided me within the next month and knocked my life sideways. Bad news for him though: I'm baaaaaaack. I am not playing with him anymore either. (Starting today I hope.)
Yesterday was a pretty good day. I saw a couple friends who go back to high school days or thereabouts, visited with a more recent friend over Starbucks, and talked an online friend out of committing suicide. Other than that it was pretty uneventful. In case you're wondering, there were a couple minor setbacks, but we are not talking about them. Life happens.
Life happens whether we are paying attention or not. Life happens while we are doing the things we think we have to do, the things we want to do, and the things we do when we are not even thinking. The friends I met with yesterday were all between 55 and 60 years of age. Where did those years go? My children are mostly over 30 now. My babies are having babies. When did that happen?
In my personal opinion, at this point in my life, the most difficult thing the Lord ever asks anyone to do is "Take no thought for tomorrow."(Matthew 6:34) Some of you are ahead of me in this so please be patient. This is one area in which I have not gained the rest of God. (Hebrews 4)
There is a video of a sermon streaming into my ear-buds as this is being written. It is a fairly long sermon. The point is that when we carry our own cares we have made ourselves the source of our supply. The speaker claims that is the essence of pride. I donno, it sounds pretty American, self-sufficient to me.
I got my first job when I was sixteen because there was not enough money in the household to stretch as far as it needed to. Well, not as far as I wanted it to anyway. One of the things I did with my first paycheck was to go have my hair cut by a professional. Mom really tried, but she never did get very good at it. I think the artistic bent in the family, such as it is, comes from the other side.
I paid my way through college. The Lord had to make me quit two jobs while I was there. (You all know I am a slow learner.) Then He gave me the perfect job--at exactly the right time--so I did not run out of money before I ran out of school bills.
I used to be a world-class worrier; not so much anymore. Now I only worry when an occasion arises and only on days that end in "y." One last thought. I am going to claim this one is from the Holy Spirit. It came so naturally to my mind it almost seemed like I might have made it up. Here it is. It is ridiculous to believe God will suddenly stop providing for all our needs.
Apparently the point here is to get us thinking about these things because this is the end. God bless!
My mother-in-law gave me a word from the Lord around the same time I had played that game of chess. As I recall, her exact words were, "David, the devil is setting a trap for your soul." Okay, thanks Carolyn. That was about it--until the devil blind-sided me within the next month and knocked my life sideways. Bad news for him though: I'm baaaaaaack. I am not playing with him anymore either. (Starting today I hope.)
Yesterday was a pretty good day. I saw a couple friends who go back to high school days or thereabouts, visited with a more recent friend over Starbucks, and talked an online friend out of committing suicide. Other than that it was pretty uneventful. In case you're wondering, there were a couple minor setbacks, but we are not talking about them. Life happens.
Life happens whether we are paying attention or not. Life happens while we are doing the things we think we have to do, the things we want to do, and the things we do when we are not even thinking. The friends I met with yesterday were all between 55 and 60 years of age. Where did those years go? My children are mostly over 30 now. My babies are having babies. When did that happen?
In my personal opinion, at this point in my life, the most difficult thing the Lord ever asks anyone to do is "Take no thought for tomorrow."(Matthew 6:34) Some of you are ahead of me in this so please be patient. This is one area in which I have not gained the rest of God. (Hebrews 4)
There is a video of a sermon streaming into my ear-buds as this is being written. It is a fairly long sermon. The point is that when we carry our own cares we have made ourselves the source of our supply. The speaker claims that is the essence of pride. I donno, it sounds pretty American, self-sufficient to me.
I got my first job when I was sixteen because there was not enough money in the household to stretch as far as it needed to. Well, not as far as I wanted it to anyway. One of the things I did with my first paycheck was to go have my hair cut by a professional. Mom really tried, but she never did get very good at it. I think the artistic bent in the family, such as it is, comes from the other side.
I paid my way through college. The Lord had to make me quit two jobs while I was there. (You all know I am a slow learner.) Then He gave me the perfect job--at exactly the right time--so I did not run out of money before I ran out of school bills.
I used to be a world-class worrier; not so much anymore. Now I only worry when an occasion arises and only on days that end in "y." One last thought. I am going to claim this one is from the Holy Spirit. It came so naturally to my mind it almost seemed like I might have made it up. Here it is. It is ridiculous to believe God will suddenly stop providing for all our needs.
Apparently the point here is to get us thinking about these things because this is the end. God bless!
Sunday, November 13, 2011
God Uses the Stupid Things
Perhaps the most stupid bumper sticker I ever saw, with the possible exception of the one that reads, "Bumper Sticker" is the one that reads, "Everywhere I Go, There I Am." Well duh. At least that is what I used to think.
Yesterday, I took the day off. I left on a personal road trip early in the morning and returned a little before bedtime. I was feeling as though my life had run into a dead end. As I shared that with my loving wife, she suggested I get out of Santa Maria for a road trip (three times). She knows I usually return from those times in a better frame of mind.
I had one mission the Lord wanted me to accomplish in Santa Barbara so I headed south. Having accomplished that, I continued south. My mind was running over a few of the people I knew in Ventura. The name of a pastor came to mind. As I thought about it, it has been almost exactly 34 years since we had seen each other. He lost his wife of 40+ years to cancer this year. I ended up stopping by his house and we talked and prayed together for half an hour or so.
Since I had no agenda and no timetable, I could head any direction from there. Well, I would not have gone very far west since Ventura is a beach city (for those of you in other parts of the world). State Highway 33 heads north from Ventura, through Ojai and down to connect with Highway 166 between Cuyama and Maricopa. From Ojai it is a lonely, winding, desertish road that heads up to Pine Mountain pass just over 5,000 feet above sea level before heading down to the thriving metropolis of Ventucopa, population 92--according to the sign on the highway.
Somewhere between the mountain pass and Ventucopa, it dawned on me that it did not really matter where I went, I would still be there. I did not even have time to get the "Well duh" out when the following thought rushed in. Nothing is ever going to be right until I am right.
The reason I even needed the road trip is because I had been a little self-absorbed. I felt as though my life had hit a dead end. What I had long wanted to do is not working at this point. Without that working, I did not see how God is going to accomplish any greater good through my life. It mostly seems like I am just spinning my wheels. My real problem at the time was, I could not even find anyone else to blame.
Sometime I might yet write the book, "The 8 Faces of Pride." The Holy Spirit gave me that title over twenty years ago. I still do not even know what all eight of them are. One of them, however, is what Charles Shoemake at LIFE Bible College taught me many years ago as, "the pride of the worm." That is the one represented in the previous paragraph. We might sum it up as, "It is all about poor me." I have no doubt some of you had already counted the "I, me, and mys" in that paragraph and figured it out so that is for the rest of us.
To wrap this up, as I was whining to the Lord about the dead end that was all I could see, He reminded me of Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." I was still meditating on that when I arrived home. I opened my email to see a message with a sermon attached entitled, "God Has a Plan for You." The first person to mount the platform after worship at church this morning started what she had to say by quoting Matthew 6:25, "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?" Does anyone else see a pattern here? It only takes me two or three times hearing the same thing in different ways to get a message. Well, that is usually all it takes. I will let you know when this all resolves. God bless.
Yesterday, I took the day off. I left on a personal road trip early in the morning and returned a little before bedtime. I was feeling as though my life had run into a dead end. As I shared that with my loving wife, she suggested I get out of Santa Maria for a road trip (three times). She knows I usually return from those times in a better frame of mind.
I had one mission the Lord wanted me to accomplish in Santa Barbara so I headed south. Having accomplished that, I continued south. My mind was running over a few of the people I knew in Ventura. The name of a pastor came to mind. As I thought about it, it has been almost exactly 34 years since we had seen each other. He lost his wife of 40+ years to cancer this year. I ended up stopping by his house and we talked and prayed together for half an hour or so.
Since I had no agenda and no timetable, I could head any direction from there. Well, I would not have gone very far west since Ventura is a beach city (for those of you in other parts of the world). State Highway 33 heads north from Ventura, through Ojai and down to connect with Highway 166 between Cuyama and Maricopa. From Ojai it is a lonely, winding, desertish road that heads up to Pine Mountain pass just over 5,000 feet above sea level before heading down to the thriving metropolis of Ventucopa, population 92--according to the sign on the highway.
Somewhere between the mountain pass and Ventucopa, it dawned on me that it did not really matter where I went, I would still be there. I did not even have time to get the "Well duh" out when the following thought rushed in. Nothing is ever going to be right until I am right.
The reason I even needed the road trip is because I had been a little self-absorbed. I felt as though my life had hit a dead end. What I had long wanted to do is not working at this point. Without that working, I did not see how God is going to accomplish any greater good through my life. It mostly seems like I am just spinning my wheels. My real problem at the time was, I could not even find anyone else to blame.
Sometime I might yet write the book, "The 8 Faces of Pride." The Holy Spirit gave me that title over twenty years ago. I still do not even know what all eight of them are. One of them, however, is what Charles Shoemake at LIFE Bible College taught me many years ago as, "the pride of the worm." That is the one represented in the previous paragraph. We might sum it up as, "It is all about poor me." I have no doubt some of you had already counted the "I, me, and mys" in that paragraph and figured it out so that is for the rest of us.
To wrap this up, as I was whining to the Lord about the dead end that was all I could see, He reminded me of Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." I was still meditating on that when I arrived home. I opened my email to see a message with a sermon attached entitled, "God Has a Plan for You." The first person to mount the platform after worship at church this morning started what she had to say by quoting Matthew 6:25, "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?" Does anyone else see a pattern here? It only takes me two or three times hearing the same thing in different ways to get a message. Well, that is usually all it takes. I will let you know when this all resolves. God bless.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
I Might Be Onto Something Here
I am not quite prepared to say, "Eureka" or claim to have had an epiphany yet. I am still scratching at it, praying about it, meditating on it. As always you can let me know what you think via comments to this post. They always get published, unedited, in their entirety. Drumroll please.
The reason the grace of God often is not at work in our lives is that we do not let it work. That is it. Simple really. In order for grace to work in our lives we must yield to it, allow it the chance to work. To the contrary, the human condition, the sin nature, the needing to have things be happening all the time, compels us to circumvent the working of grace by getting involved in and aborting the process.
A good friend of mine has been heard to refer to Christians' desire for things to happen as "microwave Christianity." That goes right along with, "God give me patience, and give it to me now." That is not the way it works. Gaining patience is a process. First there is the tribulation, then the patience. (Romans 5:1-5)
There was a television commercial when I was a child (that is long enough ago that most of you will not remember it) that asserted, "Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time." Ecclesiastes 3:1 tells us, "To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven." Just as wine takes time to ferment and attain its full body and flavor, grace works little by little in accomplishing God's purposes in and through His people.
Just as Jesus performed His first miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee when He changed water into wine, (John 2:1-11) God is able to cause His grace to work instantaneously. In fact, many times it looks to the observer as though grace came upon someone quickly. That is because the observer does not know when the process began or how long it actually took. Someone remarked to Kenneth Copeland that his ministry had taken off overnight. His response was that if that were true, it was the longest night in recorded history.
One does not have to read far into new reports or watch very much television news to know there are a lot of people experiencing greater tribulation than they ever have. We consider that a bad thing for the most part, but ponder this: if tribulation does indeed work patience, with the ultimate result being a greater hope in God, is not tribulation a good thing? That is not to say we should enjoy tribulation (sorry James).
Tribulation comes because we are not who God wants us to be. The proper attitude would be to embrace the tribulation that we are involved in to discover what the lessons are. That is no small task. We do have the Word of God and the fellowship of the saints to assist with that. Often when we cannot see what God is doing in our lives, others can. We typically pray the wrong prayers. We ask God to shorten the tribulation rather than asking Him to give us the grace to see the situation as it is and to make the necessary course corrections. When we have done that, the tribulation has worked correctly. We want to cut the process, but cutting the process also means we do not learn the lesson.
Please be encouraged to, "...let patience have its perfect work..." (James 1:4) God bless!
The reason the grace of God often is not at work in our lives is that we do not let it work. That is it. Simple really. In order for grace to work in our lives we must yield to it, allow it the chance to work. To the contrary, the human condition, the sin nature, the needing to have things be happening all the time, compels us to circumvent the working of grace by getting involved in and aborting the process.
A good friend of mine has been heard to refer to Christians' desire for things to happen as "microwave Christianity." That goes right along with, "God give me patience, and give it to me now." That is not the way it works. Gaining patience is a process. First there is the tribulation, then the patience. (Romans 5:1-5)
There was a television commercial when I was a child (that is long enough ago that most of you will not remember it) that asserted, "Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time." Ecclesiastes 3:1 tells us, "To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven." Just as wine takes time to ferment and attain its full body and flavor, grace works little by little in accomplishing God's purposes in and through His people.
Just as Jesus performed His first miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee when He changed water into wine, (John 2:1-11) God is able to cause His grace to work instantaneously. In fact, many times it looks to the observer as though grace came upon someone quickly. That is because the observer does not know when the process began or how long it actually took. Someone remarked to Kenneth Copeland that his ministry had taken off overnight. His response was that if that were true, it was the longest night in recorded history.
One does not have to read far into new reports or watch very much television news to know there are a lot of people experiencing greater tribulation than they ever have. We consider that a bad thing for the most part, but ponder this: if tribulation does indeed work patience, with the ultimate result being a greater hope in God, is not tribulation a good thing? That is not to say we should enjoy tribulation (sorry James).
Tribulation comes because we are not who God wants us to be. The proper attitude would be to embrace the tribulation that we are involved in to discover what the lessons are. That is no small task. We do have the Word of God and the fellowship of the saints to assist with that. Often when we cannot see what God is doing in our lives, others can. We typically pray the wrong prayers. We ask God to shorten the tribulation rather than asking Him to give us the grace to see the situation as it is and to make the necessary course corrections. When we have done that, the tribulation has worked correctly. We want to cut the process, but cutting the process also means we do not learn the lesson.
Please be encouraged to, "...let patience have its perfect work..." (James 1:4) God bless!
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