Spirit of Jesus

Not Good but God’s

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“For years, I begged God to help me be good. Didn’t you join up because you wanted to be good? I’d worked years trying to be good and I wasn’t good! Oh, I was gooder than I was when I started out, but I still wasn’t good because as good as I was getting, I still wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t sustain it long enough. Sometimes I’d go 7 or 8 minutes without sinning. But it still wasn’t long enough!

And the Lord spoke to me very clearly that day. He said, ‘The issue isn’t being good, the issue is being God’s. Just come to Me and I’ll provide goodness for you. Just come and love Me. Seek Me with all your heart.’

Now I’m not arguing for sin, but I am saying this: my focus these days is not on trying to be good. I am gooder than I’ve been in the past, but it’s not because I’m focused on trying to be good, it’s because I’ve focused on Him and doing His bidding. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for me and my sinning” (John Wimber).

As I’ve heard before (and maybe you have as well), Jesus didn’t become incarnate to make bad people good but to make dead people alive. See, it’s not about behavior modification and better morals. It’s about being made new.

I still think that more than being gooder, I need to focus on being more like Jesus. That can only happen when the Spirit of Jesus inside me starts to manifest outward from me as I live more surrendered and obediently. It’s no good if I behave better when I still have the illusion of control over my life and my destiny. It’s only when I acknowledge that I belong to another that I really begin to transform.

It’s not about being good as much as it is being God’s.

Quotes I Love Part One

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I think this says it all.

“WE CAN SAY THAT the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than the literal.

Very often, I think, this is the way that the Bible is written, and I would point to some of the stories about the birth of Jesus, for instance, as examples; but in the case of the Resurrection, this simply does not apply because there really is no story about the Resurrection in the New Testament. Except in the most fragmentary way, it is not described at all. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! In fact, the very existence of the New Testament itself proclaims it. Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity.

Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points.

Unlike the chief priests and the Pharisees, who tried with soldiers and a great stone to make themselves as secure as they could against the terrible possibility of Christ’s really rising again from the dead, we are considerably more subtle. We tend in our age to say, ‘Of course, it was bound to happen. Nothing could stop it.’ But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this ‘miracle’ of truth that never dies, the ‘miracle’ of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the ‘miracle’ of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to” (Frederick Buechner).

-Originally published in The Alphabet of Grace

A Real Man

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I want to put in a disclaimer at the start of this blog: this is by no means an exhaustive treatment of the subject of manhood. Exhausting, maybe. But not exhaustive.

You don’t really get a true idea of biblical manhood from most of the voices clamoring for your attention these days. Manhood means virility. It means physical strength. It means having the right car and wearing the right suit and living in the right house and making ungodly amounts of money. According to some.

Sometimes, you get manhood spoken of derisively to refer to caveman-type behavior and values and it’s expected that any man will be rude and gross and inconsiderate.

I don’t think so. Here’s what true masculinity is, according to me.

It means holding on to what you believe, no matter what. It means having principles and values and sticking to them, regardless of who else shares them or stands with you. Even if you stand alone, you still don’t compromise your beliefs.

It means that who you are in public is the same as who you are in the dark when no one else is watching. It means you are the same person around friends and around strangers.

In terms of faith, a Christian man is one who seeks single-minded obedience to Jesus, no matter what it costs him in terms of popularity, money, fame, friends, health, and even his own life. Obedience as I heard it described very recently is doing what you know to do because it is the right thing to do and doing it as consistently as possible.

I’d also add that being a true godly man means knowing when to ask for help from others and from God. It’s the bravery to admit weaknesses and faults, the strength to shed tears, the ability to care for the helpless, and the wisdom to know when you should stand and fight and when you should back away. And by fighting, I mean speaking up for those who can’t speak for themselves and standing up for those who no one else wants to help.

A true man is passionately and unashamedly in love with Jesus Christ and doesn’t care who knows it. A true man will be the one who, after he’s gone, people will remember not him but the Spirit of Jesus in him.

There are probably a lot more good characteristics of a godly man that I left out or simply forgot. But these are just a few of the ones that I think make a real man. In this man’s humble opinion.