I was raised in a Christian home, but that’s not why I am a Christian. I know lots of people who had similar upbringings who now have nothing to do with faith of any kind. Being raised in a Christian home and going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than hanging around auto mechanics and car repair shops makes you an expert with car repair.

I am not a Christian because I was smart enough to figure it out. It’s not because I knew the right people. It’s simply because Jesus sought me when I was a stranger, to borrow the words from an old hymn. I love God because He first loved me even before I knew what love was.

I became a Christian by the grace of God, and I remain a Christian by the grace of God. It’s not about my big faith in God but my faith in a big God. When I get to heaven, I won’t get in because I was a superstar believer or a legend in the faith. They won’t say things like “Well, if anyone deserves to be here, it’s this guy” because no one deserves to be in heaven except God the Father and Jesus.

My reason for being in heaven will be the song that I will be singing into eternity:

“When my spirit, clothed immortal,
Wings its flight to realms of day,
This my song through endless ages:
Jesus led me all the way;
This my song through endless ages:
Jesus led me all the way.”

I was reminded today of a church sign that I saw a long time that make me chortle. That’s when you do a cross between a chuckle and a snort. The sign read “Pobody is nerfect.” I love that.

Nobody is perfect. No one will ever even get close to perfect in this lifetime. God calls for us to strive for maturity and completion, not perfection. And isn’t it telling that perfection is not a fruit of the Spirit. But joy is. So is peace. So is patience.

So much of the life of faith isn’t about getting to a place and resting on your laurels, thinking you’ve finally got the Christian life down pat and can stop working on your life and start “helping” others by pointing out their faults and shortcomings. The life of following Jesus is a daily process of being a little less my sin and a little more like Jesus. It’s a little more of joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and self-control each day.

There has only been one perfect person, and He didn’t spend His time lording it over everyone else. He came not to be served but to serve. He came to give His life as a ransom for many. He came to heal the sick and to save the lost and to break bread with sinners and to wash dirty feet. And He calls us to do the same.

He said that whatever you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done it unto Jesus. So maybe we need a little less striving after perfection and more serving of the people. And loving Jesus.

“The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented— as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

Wise words, indeed!

“Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One Who is leading. It is a life of faith, not of intellect and reason, but a life of knowing Who makes us ‘go.’ The root of faith is the knowledge of a Person, and one of the biggest snares is the idea that God is sure to lead us to success.

The final stage in the life of faith is attainment of character. There are many passing transfigurations of character; when we pray we feel the blessing of God enwrapping us and for the time being we are changed, then we get back to the ordinary days and ways and the glory vanishes. The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting. It is not a question of sanctification; but of something infinitely further on than sanctification, of faith that has been tried and proved and has stood the test. Abraham is not a type of sanctification, but a type of the life of faith, a tried faith built on a real God. “Abraham believed God.” (Oswald Chambers)

I love that. The life of faith isn’t always mounting up with wings, but walking and not fainting. It’s not usually mountaintops and ecstatic experiences, but a daily grind where day after day nothing seems to change but when you look back a year or two later, everything’s different. Or more accurately, everything about you is different.

You may think that you’re the same day after day until one day someone cuts you off in traffic and you don’t blow up like you would have last year. It’s when someone disappoints you without meaning to and your life doesn’t come to a screeching halt like it would have two years ago.

Mature faith is when you don’t have to feel God to trust Him, when you don’t need His manifestations or gifts as much as you need Him and Him only. And it comes not from soaring with eagle’s wings but from walking and not fainting.

“…we’re facing some big things, Lord.
And You whisper: “Child, look — look at Me.
Now You’re facing the Best thing, who dwarfs all the other things.”
And we exhale.. and we get it, God, because that is the thing:
Prayer isn’t so much to remind our God of what all the problems are —
but to remind all the problems of who our God is.
And You cup us close tonight and tell us: No matter what you’re facing, look into My face — and know it, feel it:
Your God is greater than what you’re trying to face,
your God is bigger than what you’re trying to escape,
your God is better than anything you’re trying to chase.
And our problems fade in the light of Your gentle face, Your tender embrace….

#SharingPrayerTogether (Ann Voskamp)”

That’s just the thing. We tend to think of prayer in terms of reminding God of all our desires and wishes and problems, as if He’d at some point forgotten since the last time we prayed and needing constantly to be reminded and motivated. We tend to think of God as like us, only smarter, bigger, stronger, faster . . . . but He’s not. He’s completely other.

God knows every prayer of every saint throughout time and space. He knows every single one, just as He knows every single one of those who offered those petitions in the first place. He knows your name. He knows what you’re asking, even when you don’t.

What prayer does is remind your problems of who God is. It’s a reminder to the one praying that prayer still moves mountains. It’s to call our minds throughout history to all the times when God has delivered His people, granting to them in their hour of need what they needed most.

I love what Oswald Chambers said:

“To say that ‘prayer changes things’ is not as close to the truth as saying, ‘Prayer changes me and then I change things.’ God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things. Prayer is not a matter of changing things externally, but one of working miracles in a person’s inner nature.”

Back in ye olden days, I learned in Sunday School that the rainbow was a sign of God’s promise to Noah to never again destroy the world by flood. It would be present after every storm as a reminder to God’s people of God’s faithfulness to keep His promises.

When I saw this double rainbow this afternoon, it reminded me that God has always been faithful to keep all His promises that He has ever made. Even when those promises seemed delayed or slow in coming, God’s people could rest assured that they were delayed but not denied.

Not only does God keep His promises, but He fulfills them at the perfect time. With God, there is never a moment too soon or too late. There is never bad timing or the wrong day or “you caught me at a bad moment.”

It’s not that God’s promise isn’t ready, but that I’m not always ready to receive it at that moment. I believe that if I got everything God had for me all at once, it would be too much for me to handle. It would destroy me, not because God’s gifts aren’t good but because I wouldn’t have the maturity to use them for good.

Above all, God’s greatest promise is God’s presence. He said He’d never leave me nor forsake me. That’s the promise I cling to above all others, the one I rely on when I have nothing else, the one that makes every other promise meaningful.

A friend posted this on Facebook and I was blown away by the sheer sacrifice. It’s how each of the original apostles died according to church tradition. I knew some of it, but not all. It always convicts me how comfortable American Christianity has become. Maybe that’s why there’s so much compromise and so little conviction.The Church has always flourished the most under persecution, yet in this country, we talk about church growth in modern buildings with comfortable seating and all the amenities. It’s no wonder that so many are walking away from this Americanized gospel that purports to be different yet more and more looks just like the culture it’s trying to save. Check this out about the disciples of Jesus:

“1. Matthew. Suffered martyrdom in Ethiopia, Killed by a sword wound.

2. Mark. Died in Alexandria, Egypt , after being dragged by Horses through the streets until he was dead.

3. Luke. Was hanged in Greece as a result of his tremendous Preaching to the lost.

4. John. Faced martyrdom when he was boiled in huge Basin of boiling oil during a wave of persecution In Rome. However, he was miraculously delivered From death.
John was then sentenced to the mines on the prison Island of Patmos. He wrote his prophetic Book of Revelation on Patmos . The apostle John was later freed and returned to serve As Bishop of Edessa in modern Turkey . He died as an old man, the only apostle to die peacefully

5. Peter. He was crucified upside down on an x shaped cross. According to church tradition it was because he told his tormentors that he felt unworthy to die In the same way that Jesus Christ had died.

6. James. The leader of the church in Jerusalem , was thrown over a hundred feet down from the southeast pinnacle of the Temple when he refused to deny his faith in Christ. When they discovered that he survived the fall, his enemies beat James to death with a fuller’s club.

This was the same pinnacle where Satan had taken Jesus during the Temptation.

7. James the Son of Zebedee was a fisherman by trade when Jesus Called him to a lifetime of ministry. 

As a strong leader of the church, James was beheaded at Jerusalem. The Roman officer who guarded James watched amazed as James defended his faith at his trial. 

Later, the officer Walked beside James to the place of execution. Overcome by conviction, he declared his new faith to the judge and Knelt beside James to accept beheading as a Christian.

8. Bartholomew. Also known as Nathaniel. He Was a missionary to Asia. He witnessed for our Lord in present day Turkey. Bartholomew was martyred for his preaching in Armenia where he was flayed to death by a whip.

9. Andrew. He Was crucified on an x-shaped cross in Patras, Greece. After being whipped severely by seven soldiers they tied his body to the cross with cords to prolong his agony. 

His followers reported that, when he was led toward the cross, Andrew saluted it in these words, ‘I have long desired and expected this happy hour. The cross has been consecrated by the body of Christ hanging on it.’ He continued to preach to his tormentors For two days until he expired.

10. Thomas. He Was stabbed with a spear in India during one of his missionary trips to establish the church in the Subcontinent.

11. Jude. He Was killed with arrows when he refused to deny his faith in Christ.

12. Matthias. The apostle chosen to replace the traitor Judas Iscariot. He was stoned and then beheaded.

13. Paul. He Was tortured and then beheaded by the evil Emperor Nero at Rome in A.D. 67. Paul endured a lengthy imprisonment, which allowed him to write his many epistles to the churches he had formed throughout the Roman Empire. These letters, which taught many of the foundational Doctrines of Christianity, form a large portion of the New Testament.”

Again, it’s tradition and not necessarily gospel truth, but I think each of these men gave their lives for the true gospel because they absolutely believed it with every fiber of their being. And John, the only one to live to old age, ended up exiled on the island of Patmos. I believe God spared him so he could be the one to pen the book of Revelation, where we see all the martyrs through the ages finally rewarded for their sacrifice.

May we be as willing to lay down our lives for the sake of Christ. Maybe then we will see true transformation and growth in our churches.

In other words, just eat the bacon and be happy.

I recently was reading in Joshua 6 about the famous battle of Jericho. From a human perspective, it has to be one of the worst battle strategies ever designed. March around the city walls once a day for six days, then march around them seven times on the seventh day and give an almighty shout? That’s your plan?

Actually, that was God’s plan. It might have seemed ridiculous to the people at the time, but they were faithful to obey, and God honored that obedience with success in battle.They completely destroyed the city, leaving alive only Rahab and her family. There aren’t too many examples of God’s people actually doing what God said to do, but when they did, God always fulfilled His end of the promise.

I keep thinking about that verse lately in regard to my own church. We’ve been trying to start renovations on our new property, but we lack one stamp of approval on one piece of paper from one department. That’s all. We sent in the paperwork months ago and have been in bureaucracy limbo ever since.

Maybe the solution isn’t lawyers and litigation, but praise and worship. I was walking the property when I believe God spoke to me. He said, “When you worship loud, the walls fall down.”

I’m not claiming to be any kind of a prophet or anyone who has special revelations from the Lord. I’m not much into people who are always hearing a word from God. I believe that the Bible is the final and complete revelation of what God has spoken.

I do believe that God can speak to people within the context of the Bible to specific circumstances. I believe that God will never say anything that goes against His established and written Word.

I believe that the Bible says God can turn the hearts of kings like water, so He can turn the hearts of a few city council members. I believe God can grant us favor with the city and provide the approval we need. And I believe in my heart that He will when the time is right.

Until then, maybe it’s time to turn the worship up loud.

“We raise our glasses and drink to a love that never gave up.”

Whether your glass has wine or grape juice or sweet tea or just water, I hope you will find time sometime before the day is over to raise a toast to this Easter love that found a way through the cross and the tomb to find you in your moment of darkest despair. I hope you will drink to the reckless love of God that spared no expense to buy you back when so many said you weren’t worth saving.

Because of Easter, everything has changed. We’re no longer outcasts and strangers to the promise. We’re no longer without hope in the world. We’re no longer dead in our sins and trespasses and enemies to God because of our rebellion against everything He stands for.

Easter love is hesed love, the love that gave absolutely everything to those who had the right to expect absolutely nothing. Easter love is the essence of unconditional love with the sacrifice of life for those who would ultimately ridicule and reject it. Easter love is where God so loved the world — that God so loved you and me — that He gave His one and only Son so that we might not perish and be lost forever but have an eternal and abundant life with God.

We drink to love that never gave up every single time we take the cup that symbolizes the blood shed and the bread that symbolizes the body broken. Every time we take Communion in remembrance of Jesus, we are eating and drinking to this love that never quit.

“Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him” (Romans 5:6-8, The Message).