“Paul often referred to himself as a ‘slave’ of Jesus Christ. Because we’ve grown up in an American democracy, few of us understand the radical nature of Paul’s description.
Paul was literally saying that Jesus bought him. In His death and resurrection, Jesus paid for Paul. Jesus bought his career, desires, dreams, talents—his total life!
Paul had no will of his own, no dreams of his own. They all belonged to Jesus.
Christians often exclaim ‘Jesus is Lord!’ without much thought to what we’re actually saying. When we say this, we’re saying: ‘Jesus owns us. He’s the boss.’
We’re committed to doing WHAT Jesus says to do, WHEN He says to do it, the WAY He says to do it.
Our lives are not our own. We’ve been bought with a price—a terrible, unspeakable price. And how we live now tells the world exactly what we think of Jesus and His death for us” (Mike Glenn).
I sometimes think that if we truly meant what we said when we proclaim that Jesus is Lord, our lives would look totally different. At least mine would.
Can I live in open sin and truthfully say that Jesus is Lord? No.
Can I be permissive about what the Bible forbids and say that Jesus is Lord? No.
Can I call my own shots and ask God to bless what I’ve already decided to do and still claim that Jesus is Lord? Absolutely not.
Can I sing about the joy of the Lord and then live with a sour face and a sad disposition because my true greatest joy is in something other than God that can be taken away, then shout at the top of my lungs that Jesus is Lord? No way.
If Jesus is my Lord, then I have no rights. What He says, goes. Period. I submit to His will 100%. Otherwise, I’m just paying lip service and I am still my own lord. Not Jesus.
The irony of the Bible is that true freedom isn’t doing what you want because then you become a slave to your whims and desires. True freedom comes from being a slave to Jesus and finding your true self in the process. You’re not beholden to anything or anyone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
May we live like Jesus as Lord as often as we say Jesus is Lord. Then more people will want to know Jesus as Savior and Lord.
“For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).
In the Bible, you see that pride is not something to celebrate but instead something to crucify. The Bible says that pride goes before a fall. Not just some of the time but all of the time. Why am I sharing that?
Because pride is something I deal with on a daily basis. I am prone to be proud in one of two ways — either thinking too much of myself and my abilities or thinking too little of myself and still keeping the focus all on me.
The antidote to pride, as the old saying goes, is not to think less of yourself but to think of yourself less. That comes from focusing on others more, and above all, focusing on God most.
Very often, I find that those trials God puts me through that I’d rather avoid are precisely the ones I need most. Those are teaching me to put away pride and embrace humility and dependence on God. Every time I think that I won’t make it and still somehow wake up to another day is another reason to lean hard on God.
The ultimate irony of the life of faith for someone like me is that it’s easy to get prideful about my humility. It’s easy for me to boast (even if only to myself) about how much I’m trusting in God. It can become a show where I’m the main attraction. In that case, I’ve missed the point entirely.
The older I get, the more I understand what Jesus meant about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. It means that as I work out my faith, sometimes those qualities that I pray for and long for can come out of me without me even being aware of it. Sometimes, I can see it in others without their being aware of it.
That’s why in-person one-on-one community is vital instead of being isolated and connecting only through virtual and online. But that’s really a topic for another day.
Jesus said that pride isn’t something to boast about but something to put to death. That means that every time I see it rising up in me, I need to take those thoughts and intentions captive and pray for God’s grace to keep me humble and surrendered. That’s when God can truly show up and show out.
Today is Palm Sunday and marks the beginning of the last week of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the week leading up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I’ve been here before, but I feel like so many times I’ve rushed to get through it to what’s next.
This time, I want to slow down a bit and sit under the cross. I want to be still long enough to hear God speak a word over me about what this week means for me and for all those who call on the Messiah out of a genuine faith. I want to be moved to tears and fully take in the price that Jesus paid for me.
I finished an incredible devotional by one of my favorite writers, Charles Martin. It’s called It Is Finished and spends 40 days walking the path that led from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, sparing no details and leaving no stone unturned. It was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, and I hope to read it again some day.
I want Easter to mean more than the Easter Bunny or Cadbury chocolate eggs (though I am very much a fan of both). I don’t want to look at the date on the calendar and miss the point of the day — Jesus who knew no sin became sin for me that I might become the righteousness of God in Christ.
I don’t want to be the same person in seven days as the person who is now writing these words. I want to be more like Jesus, more aware of the sacrifice He made, and more willing to count the cost and take up my own cross. I want to be more of a disciple and less of an admirer. I want to be more of a follower and less of a fan. I want to be a truly biblical Christian and not a watered-down, American Christian.
I’m thankful that God is far more patient with me than I am with Him and takes far more time with me than I ever have with Him. At this point, I say, “Lord, do whatever it takes to make me Yours, Your disciple, Your own. Have Your way in me. Amen.”
“It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom. But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely” (Galatians 5:19-23, The Message).
I think that says is all perfectly. Trying to live any other way than the way of Jesus is a facade. It’s like a carnival funhouse where things you encounter may be amusing, but none of it’s real. Everything is an illusion or a deception.
But that’s not how it is with God. What you see is what you get. Or sometimes, what you don’t see is what you get. It’s about trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse, as I heard it put one time. But it’s also living in the unshakable confidence that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God, that suffering is temporary, that the best really is yet to come.
The Christian life is really just a series of oases in the wilderness where we can rest and be refreshed. The wilderness is where we grow and learn. As much as we want our lives to be one continual oasis, God knows we’d never learn dependence on God that way. We’d never mature beyond baby believers. Plus, God is with us in the wilderness as He was with the children of Israel, leading the way the entire time.
Here’s my favorite lesson I’ve learned recently. Jesus + nothing else = everything. End of story.
Tonight at Room in the Inn, we had our annual Q & A instead of the usual Bible study for the homeless guests. There were four of us who each took one theological question and gave a roughly five-minute answer. The one that stays with me is when Tommy Woods did the question on what is the gospel and why does it matter.
It wasn’t so much in what he said but how even talking about the gospel got him emotional. Talking about the magnitude of what Jesus did for us on the cross brought him to tears. I was moved by the passion behind the emotion.
I sometimes wonder if we really understood what Christ went through on the cross, how much he really suffered, and how great the pain of bearing a whole world of sin felt, wouldn’t it bring us to tears every single time? How could I not be moved by the One who moved heaven and earth to get to me in my lostness and rescue me from my own rebellion?
I think if we knew how much God really paid for the free gift of our salvation, we’d sing a lot louder. We’d worship more boldly. We’d live more sacrificially. We’d never stop being a thankful people instead of a grumbling and complaining people.
Jesus once told the story of two debtors: one owed $50 and the other owed $500. He said this to defend the woman who broke a jar of expensive perfume to bathe Jesus’ feet while using her hair as a towel. He said the one forgiven much is the one who loves much.
If we think we’re basically good people with a few minor hangups and faults, we might feel a little entitled about our salvation. If we think we’re bad people who needed to be made good, we might offer up a token prayer of gratitude. But if we know that we were dead in sin and God in Jesus made us alive, we’d spend all eternity in thankful praise. And one day, we will.
“Entering into this fullness is not something you figure out or achieve. It’s not a matter of being circumcised or keeping a long list of laws. No, you’re already in—insiders—not through some secretive initiation rite but rather through what Christ has already gone through for you, destroying the power of sin. If it’s an initiation ritual you’re after, you’ve already been through it by submitting to baptism. Going under the water was a burial of your old life; coming up out of it was a resurrection, God raising you from the dead as he did Christ. When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets” (Colossians 2:11-15, The Message).
I don’t always love the Message paraphrase. Sometimes, it gets a little too loose with the text. But sometimes, it captures the nuances of the original Greek or Hebrew better than any traditional translation. I think this time Eugene Peterson got it right on the money.
Living a fulfilled life as a child of God isn’t about keeping all the rules and regulations. It’s not a matter of dotting all the i’s and crossing all your t’s in terms of having the absolute correct beliefs and doctrines about every little matter of faith. It’s about once being dead in sin and now being alive to God, all thanks to Jesus.
Elsewhere in the Bible, it says that what we could not do for ourselves in terms of fixing our brokenness and making ourselves right with God God did for us in Jesus. As I heard a pastor say, every other religion is about finding a way to get to God while Christianity is the story about how God in Jesus has come to us.
The beautiful story of the gospel is that Jesus has done for us what we could never in a million tries or in a million years do for ourselves. Jesus is 100% God, 100% man, and 100% for us. That’s the hope we have.
I saw this testimony on Facebook and I had to share. It’s the power of Jesus to save and transform anybody at any point to be a true disciple. I’m copying and pasting the post but also providing a link to the original post in case you want to check it out as well:
“I get a lot of messages from gay men and women asking me how I came out of homosexuality. Many of them tell me they want out of the lifestyle but they still feel sexually attracted to the same sex. What do I do they say and they all ask that same question.
There is no shame in asking those questions or feeling that way because in His time he will show you.
I didn’t want out of the gay lifestyle when Christ came to me. I was happy being gay. I had a boyfriend. I saw no need to change. Christ came to me while I was yet a sinner and began to deal with my heart FIRST. He came to me FIRST while I was living in my sin. I hadn’t repented or anything when he began to deal with my heart. That’s important to note. So many times we want people to repent at an altar in front of everyone and people don’t even know why they are doing what they are doing or why they are even repenting. As Christians we need to be sensitive to the needs of sinners.
When God began to deal with my heart I began to see in the Word of God where I was wrong about the way that I was living. I still felt gay but I began to read in the Bible things that I didn’t want to do…..BUT YET I began to follow what the Word said and NOT how I felt. And so I repented of my sins but at times I still felt gay.
If you will follow the process of Jesus Christ then he WILL change your life! God gave me a poweful revelation of the Love of God that immediately broke the chains that held me bound to that lifetsyle. I felt instant freedom but I still didn’t feel convicted about it.
After repentance I walked away from a lifestyle that I knew and loved and began to follow after a man that I didn’t know and his name was Jesus…..but still felt gay. I told God that if he would help me that I would never go back to that life and it’s now been 6 years now and I have never one time went back to it and I have never slept with a man since then. Never ever.
It was about 2 years into my walk with Christ after repentance that Jesus began to show me why I was wrong. I’ll never forget the day that conviction came to me over the lifestyle that I once lived. I felt so
ashamed that day. I cried like a baby. 2 years AFTER becoming a Christian Jesus Christ sent a strong conviction to me. Think about that. I felt so grieved that day knowing that I had grieved the heart of Christ with my old sinful lifestyle but it was 2 years later. Why are we rushing new converts?
I am free from that life today, thank you Jesus!!!
Here’s what I want to tell you today. Repent of your sins whatever they are and wait on the Lord. Do all that you know to do according to the Word of God. Don’t live by how you feel but rather by what the Word says and Jesus Christ will lead you into ALL truth.
Christ is a powerful process if you will just follow. He will deliver you in his time….not someone else’s. He has changed my life little by little by little. Not with BIG things but with the smallest things. He’s still changing my life today.
Today I am delivered. Today I am not gay. Today I don’t have the feelings that I used to have. I am free in my mind. I am so thankful to a God who has saved my soul from eternal fire.
Listen to me when you’re coming out of this lifestyle I want to be honest with you…..most Christians do not know how to help you. It’s no fault to them. They just don’t understand AT ALL. If you are putting your trust in man then you are going to be let down. I want to encourage you to TRUST in God and TRUST what the word of God says….with your whole heart. There are mean ministers who slam gay people for that sake of handclaps from the audience. I’ve been in those services. There are mean Christians who hate the way the way you are. There are mean people everywhere especially in the world. Don’t keep living like you are because someone was mean to you. You are seeking something else because when you lay your head on your pillow you feel deep down that something isn’t right.
When you start coming to church you’re doing to deal with all kinds of nonsense but let me tell you what else I found. I found a group of Christian people who know the power of God and how he changes lives. They have loved me while Christ was changing me. They have helped me more than I ever thought possible. You might be surprised who is sitting in your congregation who have been exactly where you are right now. The enemy wants to bring meaness to the forefront but the LOVE of God is the most powerful thing that there is! Jesus loves you even when others don’t. He died for YOU!
Be honest with God. Tell him exactly how you feel. Tell him that you still feel attracted to the same sex. Talk to God. He knows. He understands. Be honest with him but walk away from anything that doesn’t align to his word. Then give him time to bring you OUT of it.
I found out what coming out of the closet really means….it’s when I came OUT of the world and into His marvelous light!! When I came out of the world I became a new creature in Christ. Old things have passed away and ALL things have become new to me!
I was ‘trans’ formed by the renewing of my mind (Romans 12:2) NOT ‘trans’ formed by mutilating certain body parts. Trans is a Christian word. We are transformed through the mighty name of Jesus Christ.
The Holy Ghost will lead you into ALL truth! didn’t become gay overnight and I’m thankful that I serve a God who has given me space to make powerful changes in my life.
I am learning what it means to be a man….a Christian man…..because I used to feel like a woman.
“How can we forgive those who do not want to be forgiven? Our deepest desire is that the forgiveness we offer will be received. This mutuality between giving and receiving is what creates peace and harmony. But if our condition for giving forgiveness is that it will be received, we seldom will forgive! Forgiving the other is first and foremost an inner movement. It is an act that removes anger, bitterness, and the desire for revenge from our hearts and helps us to reclaim our human dignity. We cannot force those we want to forgive into accepting our forgiveness. They might not be able or willing do so. They may not even know or feel that they have wounded us.
The only people we can really change are ourselves. Forgiving others is first and foremost healing our own hearts” (Henri Nouwen).
Sometimes, the hardest person to forgive is yourself. It can be much harder to forgive yourself or to receive forgiveness than to give it. But at the end of the day, we are all broken and hopeless without Jesus. We all bring nothing to the table in and of ourselves but our own sin, but when we are in Jesus, we bring Jesus, and that is enough.
“A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert – himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).
These days, the problem is always with THEM. It’s always someone else’s fault. In politics, the blame has gone to either Trump or Harris supporters, depending on which side of the aisle you sit. It has become very fashionable (and very easy) to point the finger from a high and lofty position with which to judge others.
Even in this, I have to point the finger at myself as well. I can’t tell you how many times I read a passage in my Bible and thought how this or that person needed to hear it. They’re the ones who need straightening out.
But then God gently reminds me that this word I’m reading is not for anyone else but me. The reason for my time in God’s Word isn’t so I can use it to point out other peoples’ flaws. If there’s any finger pointing, it’s me pointing back at me.
In this culture, it’s also popular to redefine truth and Christianity to fit into societal norms rather than transforming society by biblical truth. So many people and churches and even denominations have watered down the gospel to the point that it’s only a kind of feel good self-help doctrine where no one’s really lost and sin doesn’t really exist and everyone’s going to heaven and it really doesn’t matter how you live.
But the problem is that there’s no hope in that kind of gospel. There’s no deliverance or transformation or future. Jesus talked about the blind leading the blind, and that fits a lot of current theology. But Jesus came to set us free and not just make us better human beings but brand new creations. He came to die for us while we were yet sinners that we might truly become the sons and daughters of God.
The Bible talks about working out your salvation in trembling and fear. Maybe that looks like preaching the gospel to yourself and each other every single day. Maybe it looks like not trusting in your own understanding but in all your ways leaning on God’s revealed truth and on God Himself. Maybe it looks like not accepting everything that comes from a pulpit or position of authority but exercising discernment by checking everything against the Word of God to see that it matches.
““Choosing to be unoffendable, or relinquishing my right to anger, does not mean accepting injustice. It means actively seeking justice, and loving mercy, while walking humbly with God. And that means remembering I’m not Him. What a relief” (Brant Hansen, Unoffendable).
This book is one of those that comes along and does a seismic shift on your thinking. I’ve always grown up believing that we’re supposed to be righteously angry about injustice and wrongs and sin, but this book is showing me that you can be actively against all those things without giving in to anger.
Based on what I understand, the Bible never calls for us to be angry. It does say that in your anger not to sin. It also says that anger does not produce the righteousness of God. I think when it says to be angry but don’t sin, it’s making allowances for the natural human tendency to anger. It also says not to stay there.
The only one allowed to be truly angry is God — and of course, Jesus — because God can have pure anger rooted in a holiness and righteousness that we don’t have. We can choose not to give in to anger without also giving in to all the wrongs and oppression in the world. We can fight those things out of love rather than anger.
I don’t want to give too much of the book away. It’s worth reading and says all the things I just said but way better than I just said them. Plus, if you get the audio version you get the book read by the author, which is almost always a bonus (and it is in this case).
A lot of our anger comes from the misguided view of calling out the sin in others while ignoring our own sin. We can easily become Pharisee-ical in seeing evil and wrong as being “out there” and “in them” rather than acknowledging my own sinful depravity and capacity for evil apart from the grace of God.
I’m a little over halfway there, so those are my takeaways thus far. My assignment for you is to find the actual book or the audio book and to devour it in short order. It’s an easy read (or an easy listen if you prefer). I’m even going through all the trouble of providing a link to the book on amazon.com. You’re welcome.
As Christians we need to be sensitive to the needs of sinners.
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