That’s a tough one. The whole loving your enemies thing is something you can only do through the power of the risen Christ indwelling inside of you, because it’s not a natural reaction but a supernatural one.
I still remember reading that the key to Christianity isn’t so much loving Jesus as it is loving Judas. Remember that Jesus loved and served and prayed for Judas knowing full well that he would betray Him. He forgave the ones who were in the very act of killing Him and then He died for them.
It helps to remember who you were before God saved you. It helps to think about what you could have been apart from the grace of God. As bad as any Hitler or Stalin who has ever lived, that could have been me under the right circumstances and without the intervening mercy of God.
That’s why grace and mercy are so important. And above all, forgiveness is key. Especially when you consider how much God has forgiven you. Jesus even said in the Lord’s prayer that we should pray for God to forgive us as we have forgiven others.
That’s why I won’t ever give up on anyone or quit praying for them, because I know that God could very easily have given up on me all the many times when I was obstinate or unloveable. My prayer is that I will show the same grace that I have received. Actually, that’s my prayer for all of us.
Maybe that’s how God shapes us. Perhaps He smooths us and refines any rough edges primarily through irritation. After all, that’s how those rocks in the river bed get so smooth. All those years of water and sediment running over them wears away any of the roughness.
All those times I got upset with God. All those times I didn’t understand why God was allowing those people and those circumstances was because He was looking at a bigger picture than I could see at the time. He was looking at a finished product that I couldn’t (and still can’t fully) comprehend.
Sometimes, He chisels away like a sculptor working on transforming a block of granite into a statue. Each whack and blow is painful, but each brings us closer and closer to a vision that the Artist alone can see in His head.
I’d rather skip all the irritating, painful, inconvenient parts and get right to the part where I’m a brand new creation. But I’m skipping the very part that makes me new and not just a slightly improved version of the old me.
My prayer lately is “Lord, whatever it takes.”
Even if my flesh rebels. Even if I’d rather go the easy route.
If the end is looking like Jesus, then whatever God puts me through will be worth it.
It’s easy to get caught up in the tyranny of the urgent. We can get so bogged down and stressed out over so many little details, like death by a thousand tiny paper cuts. We let things like paying bills and finding relationships and family illnesses rob us of our hope and our joy.
But if we do what Billy Graham did and turn to the last page of the Bible (not the concordance but Revelation 22), then we can see that everything is going to be fine. In fact, everything is going to be way better than fine. It’s going to be perfect. It will be like the original garden of Eden, only better.
I can be so short-sighted sometimes. I can get hyper-focused on the present and completely forget the future. I can envision all kinds of worst case scenarios, none of which have God anywhere in the picture. I can end up fretting and forgetting to pray.
But God has promised that He will work all things together for good to those of us who love God and are called according to His purpose. He who began a good work in us will finish it. Those aren’t nice sentiments or wishful thinking. They’re promises from the God who keeps His promises.
Anything we go through now can’t compare to what’s coming. That’s also a promise. The best is truly yet to come. The best is also right here with us now in the person of Jesus and in the loving arms of a loving Father and in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Sometimes, you need a break from the serious for a bit of levity. I found this fantastic meme giving funny interpretations of all those annoying lights that show up on your car dashboard from time to time. My favorite is probably the drunk robot.
With my history of driving older cars, I am familiar with a lot of these symbols. I’ve learned it’s important to pay attention to them when they start flashing at you. Ignoring them leads to more flashy icons on your dashboard and your car not running.
But in the meantime, enjoy the meme for what it is. Remember that the day after tomorrow is Friday. And for those of you like me who are already overheated and tired of summer, remember that in a few months, fall is coming.
I sometimes think I could use a day between each day so I could catch up on my sleep and rest for the next day. But then that would mean there were two Mondays in one week. I just don’t think I could handle that.
But Jesus promise that if those who are weary and heavy burdened will come to Him, He will give them rest. My friend Michael Boggs came up with the above quote, and I think it’s appropriate. We need rest, but we so often will ask for anything and everything but that.
Rest isn’t always a nap, though I am a big fan of naps. Rest doesn’t always mean sleeping late on a Saturday or turning off the alarm for 15 extra minutes of sleep. I think that rest sometimes looks like the calm assurance of being in the center of God’s will. It looks like when you do what God has called you to do, no more and no less. It means finding your yes, so you can say no to anything that isn’t it (which I borrowed from Mike Glenn).
Rest means putting margin in your day to make room to spend time with God and hear His voice. It means you reprioritize your time so that what is most important doesn’t get pushed aside by what is most urgent.
There’s a story where Dallas Willard and a friend were talking and Dallas asked his friend how he would describe Jesus in one word. The friend thought and thought but couldn’t find one word that adequately described Jesus. He asked Dallas, who responded with the word “relaxed.”
It’s because Jesus was never in a hurry. He was never too busy to be present with those who needed Him and were right in front of Him. He wasn’t apathetic to the world — He was known as a man of sorrows who grieved over the lostness of Jerusalem — but He refused to bow down to the tyranny of the urgency of that world. He lived at His own pace, the pace of His Father in heaven. He lived at rest, so He could offer rest to those who followed Him and needed it most.
May we be a people of rest who can offer rest to those weary travelers around us on this journey of life.
“…maybe at the end of a long day of unspoken brokenness that is all we can pray, all that matters, all that counts: Lord, make all we want only be God’s will. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else” (Ann Voskamp).
I’ve been learning through the course of my life that God knows a lot more than me what I need. He knows the desires of my heart better than I. He knows what will benefit me and what could potentially destroy me.
I’ve noticed that sometimes it seems like God says no a lot more than yes. But maybe that’s because I take all the yes answers for granted. And even when He says no, it’s really a yes to something different, something better, something I would have asked for had I known what God knows.
So my prayer lately has been Your will be done. No ifs, ands, or buts. Just asking God’s will, no matter what.
It’s a scene from my favorite Narnia book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis. In this particular moment, Lucy on board the Dawn Treader as it sails into a sea of darkness so think that you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. It’s the place where nightmares become real. Lucy is afraid.
She sees an albatross flying overhead. She whispers a prayer to Aslan (a type of Christ in Narnia) to help them get through. Suddenly, the albatross flies near and whispers in the voice of Aslan, “Courage, dear heart.”
We all need to hear those words sometimes. We’re not asking God to take away the fear or the scary situation, but for God to give us courage in the midst of it. In the book, Lewis writes that Lucy’s immediate circumstances did not change but that she did begin to feel a bit better.
In the same way, God doesn’t automatically remove the hard things from our lives our immediately still the storms in our lives. He does remind us of His promise to be with us through the waves and the flames and any kind of adversity.
When we get to the other side, it’s generally with a stronger faith and a story to tell. God comforts us in the midst of adversities so that we can turn around and comfort others in the same kinds of trials and tribulations with the same comfort that we ourselves received from God. It becomes a way of letting others know about the goodness of God that they can experience firsthand if they will only put their trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior.
That’s the phrase some of you need right now in the middle of whatever your facing: “Courage, dear heart. God is near.”
“He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed” (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God).
I read The Divine Conspiracy many years ago and was blown away by the concept of Jesus as the most brilliant man who has ever lived. I was particularly struck by Dallas’ views on the Sermon on the Mount, which the book is based on.
It’s one of those books where once I get to the end, I almost want to start over at the beginning and go through to the end. I’m sure there’s so much that I’ve missed or haven’t really grasped when I was listening to it in the car.
I’ve never heard anyone else with his perspective. His view on the Beatitudes is unique in that he doesn’t look at them as prerequisites for being blessed or good character traits. He said, “The Beatitudes, in particular, are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings. No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on, or that the conditions listed are recommended ways to well-being before God or man. Nor are the Beatitudes indications of who will be on top ‘after the revolution.’ They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.”
He goes through each part of the Sermon on the Mount to show that it’s not about outward piety through keeping rules but a change from within as we allow the Spirit of God to transform us through the discipline of training as disciples and not casual or cultural Christians. Our obedience is the overflow of a life spent with Jesus and growing not by gaining information but by being transformed as we are doers of the Word and not hearers only.
The book was written almost 30 years ago but seems prophetic in describing churches that teach a kind of sin management with the result that there are many who profess to believe in Jesus but whose lives are no different than nonbelievers. Just about every section is an exercise in having my mind blown by teaching that is solid and biblical yet is rarely heard from pulpits in America these days.
I’d recommend it whether you listen to the audio book or find the e-book or pick up an actual physical copy of the book. I’ll include a link to the Amazon page if you’re interested:
Personally, I’d rather skip to the good part. That’s the danger of the DVR age where you can record stuff off of the television and skip all the commercials and boring parts. We think that somehow God owes it to us to remove us from the boring or painful parts of life and take us directly to the good stuff.
But the boring and painful parts are where we learn and grow and become the people who are ready for the good stuff. I’ve heard and I truly believe that if God gave us everything we wanted right now (even if it was all good and godly things), it would destroy us.
Part of God’s timing is getting the thing we’re about to receive ready. Part is getting us ready to receive it. Both are necessary. Also, we learn to appreciate the good more when we’re in a season of bad. Or just in a season of not as good.
Sometimes, God uses this life to remind us not to settle down here. We need to be reminded that this is not our forever home. The world as it is is a beautiful but broken place, and we are wonderfully made but also broken people living in it. Until both are fixed, it’s not fit for eternity.
So God uses the parts I’d rather skip to teach me. He uses the parts that at the time make no sense to prune me and mold me and shape me into someone who looks and sounds and acts a whole lot like Jesus. He takes those seemingly never-ending boring parts to cultivate in us a spirit of patience and longsuffering and joy and peace that we would not otherwise learn if life were all fun and games and good parts.
Our part isn’t to figure out what God is doing or to try to manipulate Him into skipping the parts we don’t like. His part is to make us like Jesus and into people who are ready to receive what He’s prepared for us from the foundation of the world. Our part is to trust and obey.
“We talk about ‘circumstances over which we have no control.’ None of us have control over our circumstances, but we are responsible for the way we pilot ourselves in the midst of things as they are. Two boats can sail in opposite directions in the same wind, according to the skill of the pilot. The pilot who conducts his vessel on to the rocks says he could not help it, the wind was in that direction; the one who took his vessel into the harbour had the same wind, but he knew how to trim his sails so that the wind conducted him in the direction he wanted. The power of the peace of God will enable you to steer your course in the mix-up of ordinary life.
O Lord, unto You do I turn, unto You. I am but a homeless waif until You touch me with the security of Your peace, the sweet sense of Your love” (Oswald Chambers).
This reminds me of what Corrie ten Boom once said about riding on trains. She said when that train goes into a long dark tunnel, you don’t jump off the train. You stay on and trust the conductor. That’s how it is with life when the proverbial seas swell with storms. You stay on board and afloat and trust the Pilot.
I love the verse in Isaiah that speaks to those God will keep in perfect peace whose minds are stayed on Him. That’s not a haphazard kind of faith driven about by every wind of emotion and circumstance but a firm determination and a resolute mindset developed by years of discipline that remains unmoved by any amount of wind or wave.
That’s what it means to have God’s peace. It’s to have a calm assurance in the midst of unrest and turmoil that you are in good hands. In the best hands. In God’s hands.
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