redemption

To Love Is to Tell the Truth in Love

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“Anyone who sets himself up as ‘religious’ by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world” (James 1:26-27, The Message).

I’ve been watching videos on Youtube from a guy named Becket Cook. He’s a former homosexual who is now a kind of apologist for orthodox biblical Christianity. One of his tenets is that it is not truly loving to affirm anyone in their sin, whether it be in the LGBTQ camp or pre-marital cohabitation or any other sinful lifestyle. He say that the most loving thing you can do is to tell someone the truth in love.

If I believe that the Bible is true, then I must live by it and I must also be willing to abide by what it teaches when it comes to alternate lifestyles and behaviors. I must come from the place where I view my sin just as seriously as I do anybody else’s. Homosexuality or adultery is no more sinful than my pride or my judgmentalism. It’s all sin to God and we are all called to repent.

To love is to be compassionate as Jesus was. He reached out to those who were marginalized and excluded from society. He never turned away anyone who sought Him out in faith. But He also always told them the truth. He never compromised for the sake of acceptance and peace. In fact, many people quite following Him because He spoke the truths that made them uncomfortable and convicted.

We need both. Compassion and conviction aren’t mutually exclusive. We need to hold to our convictions in the midst of compassion toward those in need but we also need to be compassionate when we’re sharing our convictions about what we believe and why.

The point is not to change an aspect of the person. It’s not to get a liberal to vote conservative or to get a gay person into a straight marriage. It’s about redeeming the whole person with the whole gospel. That means that every part of the person needs to be transformed and renewed. The gospel isn’t about making bad people good or making good people better but about making dead people alive.

We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glorious standard. We all need to repent and to be forgiven. We all need a Savior who will pay the debt for those sins that we could never hope to pay. We all need a righteousness that we can’t produce on our own but has to come from somewhere else. We need Jesus.

Suffering and Speaking Out

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“If with heart and soul you’re doing good, do you think you can be stopped? Even if you suffer for it, you’re still better off. Don’t give the opposition a second thought. Through thick and thin, keep your hearts at attention, in adoration before Christ, your Master. Be ready to speak up and tell anyone who asks why you’re living the way you are, and always with the utmost courtesy. Keep a clear conscience before God so that when people throw mud at you, none of it will stick. They’ll end up realizing that they’re the ones who need a bath. It’s better to suffer for doing good, if that’s what God wants, than to be punished for doing bad. That’s what Christ did definitively: suffered because of others’ sins, the Righteous One for the unrighteous ones. He went through it all—was put to death and then made alive—to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:13-18, The Message).

The old adage says that we should preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words. According to 1 Peter 3, you will need to use words. It won’t be enough that people see you living differently. They need to know why you’re different. Why it is you don’t live like almost everybody else, and especially why you don’t react like the rest when bad things happen.

Suffering is the school where God prepares us to be ready. How we handle hard times is what gets people’s attention, but the logical next step is for them to want to know more. If all you have are your actions, then the message is unclear. If all you have are your words, you’re hypocritical. You need both.

As I was watching a podcast video earlier today, it struck me that there are no throwaway parts to your story or your life. God uses all of it. God works all of it for good. The mess becomes the message. The test becomes the testimony. God’s redemption of you becomes the billboard of God’s grace to get people’s attention and make them curious about what is unique about how you choose to respond rather than to react.

There’s always a reaction and a response. We react to a diagnosis of cancer or to losing a job or to going through financial hardships. People see how we react and ask how and why we acted that way. That’s where the response comes in. That’s where the Holy Spirit gives us words to tell people about the hope we have that makes us joyful rather than bitter.

Lord, You promised that suffering is not an if but a when. It will happen. As we walk through trials, strengthen us and enable us to endure with grace. May others see You at work in us, so that they’ll be drawn to want to know more not about us but about You. Give us the words to say that will glorify You and point others to You as their ultimate hope and salvation. Amen.

He Suffered for Us

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the Cross.” In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us” (John Stott).

Every other religion is about working our way to God and somehow managing to be good enough or obey enough rules or simply to be lucky enough to get to heaven or nirvana or whatever they believe exists after death. But Christianity is the story about how God in Jesus has come to us (and I hear Mike Glenn’s voice as I type these words). Jesus knew that man could never climb high enough to get to heaven, so He came from heaven to live among us and die for us.

It’s still a few weeks away from Lent Season and Easter, but I still think it’s good to remember that God doesn’t watch us suffering from a distance. He’s with us in our suffering. Best of all, He became one of us and suffered for us more than anyone before or since to provide redemption and salvation and freedom to all who would receive Him.

That’s a good thought for Easter, but it’s also good for any time of the year. It’s good especially for times like these when pain and suffering are the norm rather than the exception. Your King knows all about suffering and He is still here and He still reigns. One day, He will make all things right. This is our God, and Jesus is His name.

Regret

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

Since this morning’s sermon at The Church at Avenue South from Aaron Bryant, I’ve been thinking about the story of Joseph in the Old Testament a lot today. More specifically, my thoughts have been centered on Joseph’s brothers.

I’ve always wondered why it was that when his brothers came to Egypt to buy food during the famine that Joseph recognized them but none of them knew who he was.

I realize that he was probably dressed in Egyptian garb and would  have had his hair and beard styled in the Egyptian fashions of that time.

I wonder if one of the reasons he was able to spot them was that they were still stuck in that moment when they made the horrible decision to sell him into slavery over 13 years ago.

Some of you reading this are still stuck in the past. You’re frozen in time in the moment when a relative hurt you or a friend betrayed you or a spouse deserted you. You haven’t been able to move past that moment in time.

Joseph had moved on, both literally and figuratively. By the time his brothers showed up, he had been though slavery, false accusations, imprisonment, and later exaltation. He had seen how God was with him through it all.

He was able to see at the end how God used what his brothers had meant for evil and turned it into something good. In fact, God used what was done to Joseph to set up the salvation of an entire nation in the making.

You come to the place where you release the hurt and pain done to you when you realize how God has redeemed it. When you’re able to forgive those who wounded you, you open the door to the prison and find out that it’s you that you’re setting free.

God still works all things together for good– even the bad and hard things– and that includes your story. That doesn’t excuse what people have done to you and it doesn’t lessen the pain, but it does mean that your wounds and scars are not the end of the story. God has a way of redeeming and restoring what was taken from you and giving you something so much better in return.

 

 

What I Love on a Friday Night

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“The Life-Light was the real thing:
    Every person entering Life
    he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
    the world was there through him,
    and yet the world didn’t even notice.
He came to his own people,
    but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him,
    who believed he was who he claimed
    and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
    their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten,
    not blood-begotten,
    not flesh-begotten,
    not sex-begotten” (John 1:9-13).

I love how through following Jesus and dying to self you find your true self.

I love how the best expression of who we are and what we were made for is to be a “child-of-God” self.

I love how it all starts and ends with God, not me.

I love that because God started and will end it, I can rest assured that the end is already as good as done and I don’t have to fret that I will somehow screw it up.

I love how no one who ever truly wants to find God and know Jesus will ever be disappointed for all find what they truly seek.

There are lots of things I love about this passage, but those are a few.

Most of all, I love how God’s got me right where He wants me even when I have no idea of where I am or where I’m going and I can ultimately trust Him more than what I can see or feel.

 

God Can Do Anything 

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

“God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us. Glory to God in the church! Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus! Glory down all the generations! Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!” (Ephesians 3:20-21)

Repeat after me: God can do anything.

Repeat it again: God can do anything.

Once more with feeling: God can do anything.

Got that?

Nothing is impossible for God. Nothing. And your circumstances are not the exception to the rule. You are not the odd man out, the freak that God looks at and says, “I can’t do anything with this one.”

No matter what you’re facing, God is stronger. No matter how dark it gets, God can still see you. No matter how long it seems to take, God has not stopped working.

I remind you yet again of what a pastor said: “What seems impossible to us is not even remotely difficult for God.”

If God can create the universe in seven days, then He can create order out of your chaos.

If God brought Jesus back from the dead, then He can resurrect the ashes of your dreams into something far more glorious and beautiful than you ever dreamed possible.

If God loved you enough to save you at your worst, what makes you think He will stop loving you now?

Don’t trust your feelings. They lie. Anything and everything affects them, from eating too much spicy food to way too much caffeine late at night.

Make this your mantra: God works all things together for those whom He loves.

Even when your feelings, your senses, your intuition tells you other wise, this is still true. It will always be true.

 

Happy 5th of July!

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

Due to thunderstorms that prevailed over Middle Tennessee yesterday, I got to see fireworks on the 5th of July. They were great.

They actually were. From where I was seated, I felt like I was right underneath all the colorful explosions, like a canopy of color.

I realize that the 5th of July isn’t an actual holiday, but it should be. We as Americans shouldn’t choose to celebrate freedom only one day a year and then take it for granted the other 364 days (365 on those oddball leap years).

Freedom is precious. It may be free to you and me, but it wasn’t free. Somebody paid for it.

Men and women paid for it with their sacrifice of time and service, blood and (sometimes) their very lives. They died so we could have the freedoms we take for granted.

Ultimately, all freedom comes from the Ultimate Sacrifice, Jesus who paid the supreme cost so that you and I wouldn’t have to be slaves to sin but could find true freedom and abundant life.

That’s a freedom that no one should ever take for granted. I hope I never do.

On a side note, I remember how scared I was of fireworks as a kid. Actually, I was scared of loud noises. Now that I realize how there was nothing really to be scared of, I can enjoy fireworks so much more.

Do you think maybe that could extend to fears other than those of fireworks and loud noises? I think so.

 

 

Long Journey Home

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

“We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God- which is another way of saying that all our seeking will fall short unless God starts and finishes the search. The decisive part of our seeking is not our human ascent to God, but His descent to us. Without God’s descent there is no human ascent. The secret of the quest lies not in our brilliance but in His grace” (Os Guinness, Long Journey Home).

That’s it.

It’s not that I found Jesus. As one pastor I know always puts it, it’s not Jesus who was lost. I was. Jesus found me.

It may sound like semantics to you, but I think it’s important to know the difference.

Salvation is all God. It’s not like I was smart enough to figure it out or brave enough to seek it out. If God hadn’t sought me out first, I never would have sought Him in the first place.

That’s humbling. I can take no credit whatsoever for my being saved. It is all of grace.

That’s also good news. It means that if it’s not up to human efforts or human goodness, then anyone can find it (or better yet, anyone can be found). There’s no such thing as too lost, too far gone, too out of reach for God.

That helps when you’re praying for a son or a daughter, a brother or sister, a mother or father who seems hopelessly unreachable. It helps when you have a friend who seems bent on self-destructing and won’t let you help.

There are countless stories of those whom the world had basically given up on that God saved. The best example is the Apostle Paul. Maybe the next one will be someone you love. Maybe the next one will be you.

 

Four Gardens

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

I heard something new today, so I can’t take credit for any of what follows. It all involves four gardens.

The first garden was the Garden of Eden where it all went horribly wrong for all of us. Adam and Eve both ate of that dratted fruit. It doesn’t matter what kind of fruit it was or who ate first. The simple fact that out of every tree in that garden (and there must have been plenty), they chose the one tree God asked them not to eat from.

We’ve been like that ever since. Ever see a “Don’t step on the grass” sign? What’s the first impulse you have when you see that? I rest my case.

The second garden was the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus chose the cross. I know it was His destiny from the beginning and He knew all along that Calvary was His destination, but here is where the temptation to bail was strongest and here is where Jesus prevailed against such a temptation.

The third garden was the Garden of the Tomb. When Mary first saw Jesus, she thought He was the gardener. So it follows there was a garden. Here is where everything wrong was made right. Here is where Jesus’ victory was confirmed and forever validated.

The final garden is in Revelation 22. There you find a very familiar tree, the tree of life, planted by a river and located in the City of God. Here instead of a forbidding commandment is an invitation to come and partake.

Oh, and there’s the whole fruit of the Spirit thing, too.

I love how God doesn’t miss any details. Everything that was lost in the first garden gets found in the last one. Nothing that is good and pure and true is ever truly lost, but God finds a way to redeem it back.