Month: March 2020

The plans I have for you

Humans are programmed to be planners. We can look twenty years into the future and act as if it were tomorrow. Even four-year olds can tell you what they “want to be” when they grow up: I wanted to be an astronaut/scientist. I remember when my nephew was younger he would look for and book airline tickets more than a year in advance, he would put the reservation on the fridge and talk about it almost daily: sitting at the dinner table and giving intricate details of what he would do and where he would go once on vacation. It’s safe to say that none of us ever plan for ill; none of us would normally spend our time fantasizing about how we are going to be miserable next week or next month or next year. As a general rule, humans plan and envision the future better than the present. It’s within our nature; God made us this way. 

In Genesis 1:26 we read “And God said let Us make man in Our image and likeness…”. Now, that doesn’t mean we look like God for God is Spirit but it does mean that we are like God. God made man “a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5) “and has crowned him with glory and honor”. The glory and honor is the fact that we are similar to Him: free will, full of passions and ambitions, imagination and reason, emotions and logic. So if we are made in God’s image, on the inside, and we as humans are planners by nature, how much more so does that make God a Planner? Therefore, when God says He has plans for us (Jeremiah 29:11), we should get excited for the future is bright! 

In Matthew 7, Jesus tells the people, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”. Jesus is telling us that we are God’s children! As Born-again, Spirit-filled, Bible-believing Christians, we need to begin living out this wonderful Truth: we are His children and He wants to give and do great things for us, but most importantly, He wants to do great things through us! Scripture teaches us that we ask and don’t receive because of our motives. God wants us to lay down our human dreams, desires and plans and ask Him for His plan for us! There’s no secret formula to it, no hidden agenda, no decoder ring needed. Simply “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on Earth as in Heaven”. How you may ask? Through the yielded vessels of transformed Christian lives that have finally understood their purpose in life is not just minding their business but the Father’s business!

In my Father’s eyes

The world today is a hot mess! There are more broken homes, broken dreams, lives, spirits, minds and hearts you can ever imagine. Within one generation we went from “Father knows best” to “Married with children” and ended up at “Modern Family”. Fathers have gone from being the firm and loving answer-man seated at the head of the table with mom, by his side, agreeing with every word that came out of his mouth to being seated on the la-z-boy with a drink in one hand and the remote in the other to actually being furniture himself: father’s opinions no longer matter; they are constantly the subject of ridicule and pity in every genre of shows available on TV these day. All in all, a hindrance to the enjoyment of the children and a wet blanket on the vivaciousness of the mother. Simply put: a sperm donor you happen to know on a personal level.

You see, the trouble with what I’ve said is that not only did it happen, men let it happen! We were more than ready, willing and able to let moms and the government pick up the slack where we felt we needed some well-deserved rest. We slowly and surely faded into the background until we simply became noise. Meanwhile, children of all ages experiment with drugs, alcohol, sex at younger and younger ages. Suicide, teen pregnancies, abortions, violence, and relational conflicts all stem from the lack of the father in the home for whatever reason or his tacit abdication: many fathers are there physically, just not present mentally.

Oh, but we were meant for so much more! God had something totally different in mind when He created Adam. As the first human, as a man, and as the first man, Adam would be the prototype of everything God envisioned men to be: accountable to God and responsible for the wellbeing of others around him. But when Adam, having let the devil deceive his wife and not refusing to partake of the forbidden fruit himself, opened the door for Satan, he abdicated his dominion over the Earth to the devil, and it’s been a struggle ever since.

As Born-again, Spirit-filled, Bible-believing Christians, this doesn’t have to be our lot as well. Jesus nailed that curse to the Cross on Calvary. We are no longer bound by it and we can and need to refuse to live under it. As Men of God, we need to shine brightly to our families around us, especially our children and show them that there is another, a better answer to the nihilism the world has to offer. As godly men, we need to teach, model and show our children their true worth as they look into our eyes they need to see their reflection in their Father’s eyes.

What about the Veil?

This world is full of broken things. Broken lives, broken hopes, broken dreams, marriages, childhoods, broken spirits and broken homes. Over the years I’ve had the honor and the privilege to work with some of these broken things; I’ve listened to their stories, which they somehow tell me freely and without hesitation. I’ve watched them cry at the prospects of living in a shelter, on the street, on their own, or worse: an irresponsible adult! I do my very best to, somehow, sprinkle some Jesus in there but I do it, unfortunately, from a position where I cannot reinforce it in their daily lives: I don’t go home with them; they are not my children.

Thankfully, they are Someone’s children and He loves them with an unimaginable Love! You see, so many times, these “misfit toys” believe, from very early on, that love, like respect, is earned. Dad walked out on us so if I could earn his love, he’ll come back; mom ran away and if I could only have found a way to make her love me, she would’ve stayed. This transactional love is not what our Father imagined when He placed Adam in the Garden. He envisioned an intimate, transparent, reckless love with no blemish or shadows hanging overhead: no quid pro quo’s, no tit for tat: He created us for a relationship with Him and that that relationship would serve as a model for the relationships we have with each other. The Triune God is Perfect Love because there is God the Father who is the Lover, Jesus the Son, who is the Loved and the Holy Spirit which is the how He loves. God was not lonely or bored when He created mankind; He wasn’t involved in a domestic dispute and therefore needed an out: God, in His unimaginable loving Kindness, created us in His own image so that He could, we could experience that immensely deep communion with Him as well.

Our role, as Born-Again, Spirit-filled, Bible-believing Christians is to tell the world, this broken Island of Misfit Toys, the Truth. The Truth is this: God doesn’t need them; God doesn’t need anybody! God doesn’t need them, doesn’t need me, doesn’t need Christians: God has no need for any of us! We are the ones in need! We are the ones that need to tell people the Truth and that is: God doesn’t need them, God wants them! The scandal of Grace is exactly that, that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us! There’s nothing to be earned: no parent to win over, no spouse to win back, to hill to climb, to valley to walk through: God wants a relationship. He is Eternally ready, Fully willing, and Perfectly able to love them completely!

He doesn’t need me, He wants me

 

This world is full of broken things. Broken lives, broken hopes, broken dreams, marriages, childhoods, broken spirits and broken homes. Over the years I’ve had the honor and the privilege to work with some of these broken things; I’ve listened to their stories, which they somehow tell me freely and without hesitation. I’ve watched them cry at the prospects of living in a shelter, on the street, on their own, or worse: an irresponsible adult! I do my very best to, somehow, sprinkle some Jesus in there but I do it, unfortunately, from a position where I cannot reinforce it in their daily lives: I don’t go home with them; they are not my children.

Thankfully, they are Someone’s children and He loves them with an unimaginable Love! You see, so many times, these “misfit toys” believe, from very early on, that love, like respect, is earned. Dad walked out on us so if I could earn his love, he’ll come back; mom ran away and if I could only have found a way to make her love me, she would’ve stayed. This transactional love is not what our Father imagined when He placed Adam in the Garden. He envisioned an intimate, transparent, reckless love with no blemish or shadows hanging overhead: no quid pro quo’s, no tit for tat: He created us for a relationship with Him and that that relationship would serve as a model for the relationships we have with each other. The Triune God is Perfect Love because there is God the Father who is the Lover, Jesus the Son, who is the Loved and the Holy Spirit which is the how He loves. God was not lonely or bored when He created mankind; He wasn’t involved in a domestic dispute and therefore needed an out: God, in His unimaginable loving Kindness, created us in His own image so that He could, we could experience that immensely deep communion with Him as well.

Our role, as Born-Again, Spirit-filled, Bible-believing Christians is to tell the world, this broken Island of Misfit Toys, the Truth. The Truth is this: God doesn’t need them; God doesn’t need anybody! God doesn’t need them, doesn’t need me, doesn’t need Christians: God has no need for any of us! We are the ones in need! We are the ones that need to tell people the Truth and that is: God doesn’t need them, God wants them! The scandal of Grace is exactly that, that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us! There’s nothing to be earned: no parent to win over, no spouse to win back, to hill to climb, to valley to walk through: God wants a relationship. He is Eternally ready, Fully willing, and Perfectly able to love them completely!

When the healing doesn’t come…

You’ve done all you could: you’ve prayed, you’ve fasted, went to all the right doctors, asked the opinion of every expert and they all tell you the same thing: ”we don’t know what is wrong with you”; or, they do know what the issue is but they have no cure, no solution, vaccine, ointment, pill, treatment, lifestyle and, above all, no amount of money can buy you, earn you, or get your hands on your healing. You’ve gone to the pastor, the men’s group, Friday night service, Saturday morning prayer breakfast: you’ve done it all, and no amount of intercessory prayer has broken down this wall, this barrier, this obstacle for you. God has simply, at best, said either “not now” or,  at worse, “no”; when all you wanted to hear was a resounding “YES”.

You think back to all the times you quoted Job to yourself and to others. Unfortunately, as the song lyrics can attest to: “it’s easy to sing when there’s nothing that brings me down, but what will I say when I’m held to the flames like I am right now”? You remember your conviction-full “amen”’s when the pastor would say “either He is God of all or He isn’t God at all”. It seems like someone has come to collect on all of your affirmations of faith; a trial by fire to see if you would “curse Him to [His] face” as the Devil said Job would do. 

What do you do when the healing doesn’t come, when the night is too long, when the pain is too great? The psalmist remarked that he would have “fainted had I not believed that I would see the Goodness of the Lord in the land of the living”. The Land of the Living is both here and the Kingdom! How else could Job affirm that “though He slay me yet will I trust Him!”. What was there to trust in Him for? The answer: more than you could ever imagine! 

For born-again, Spirit-filled, Bible-believing Christians, living is the hard sell; dying is gain! In these difficult times, where the world, the flesh and the mind are thinking and talking about anything and everything but God, do as David did and encourage yourself “in the Lord”!  Life for Christians is a win-win proposition: God assures us that, if we put our trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins and follow Him and live circumspectly to His precepts in this life, He will watch over us and guide through the hills and valleys for the furtherance of His Kingdom and, when He’s good and ready, bring us Home to Glory and that alone is worth the trouble!