Friday, July 29, 2016

Gap Standers, Discouragement, Disillusionment and Despair

“For we don’t want you to be unaware, brothers, of our affliction that took place in Asia: we were completely overwhelmed — beyond our strength — so that we even despaired of life.”
— 2 Corinthians 1:8 (HCSB)
In the antiquity of Ezekiel 22:30 it seems you’re called to stand in the gap; to bring to a person, or a people, perhaps a family or a church, and certainly a situation, to a definitive hope.
You’re an advocate.  Prepared, as called of God, to do what only you’re positioned to do.  You’re prepared, as called, to do what you feel led by God’s Spirit to do.  And it’s going to cost you.  And you know it.  It’s just you don’t know how or when or, frustratingly, why.
Advocates are always caught on the blindside.  The enemy waits until we’re least ready, yet already equipped for discouragement, ripe for disillusionment, primed for despair.
You’ve experienced the victory, and you’ve been softened by the feel-good sense of cushy pride; what you accomplished.  It was a massive conquest.  It took so much ingenuity and innovation, guts, temerity, and resources that could only be supernaturally sponsored.  God showed up!  But then, when you’ve been alone yet a little while, BAM!
Struck by a circumstance that I’m sure is orchestrated by God, we’re plunged into an abyss of desolating anguish — even despairing of life itself.  (Isn’t it heartening that even the apostle Paul was goaded many times to give up.)
It will happen.  It has happened, and it will happen again.  It’s the common destiny for those who stand in the gap.  And it’s for this reason: we need it, for we would become conceited otherwise; made a god by our own resources, blasphemously, for it’s always done in the name of the Lord.
When the winds of discouragement, disillusionment, and despair blow hauntingly through seasons of our lives we’re backwashed by how alone we feel.  We do feel betrayed of the faithfulness of the Lord.  It seems to have failed.  But God never fails.
God is in those winds that whistle with eerie silence that only we can hear.  He is there, even if it feels He’s not.  God has brought to us these winds for a reason.  We’ve been an advocate, and we’ve succeeded at that.  But that’s not all there is.  God wants more for us than that.  God wants us to know we need Him, because we do.  It’s for this reason: on a place like earth, and in living this life, we will face injustice because we’re made in God’s image, because to be made in the image of God is to think and anticipate and expect to be a god.
Yet, though we’re made in God’s image, we’ll never have claim-at-truth on being a god.  So, it is good for us that injustice occurs to us.  It reminds us we’re not God.
Now, stand in the gap, in the knowledge you’ll be struck down, and take it the best you can, knowing you’re allowed to lament through your recovery, and be patient; God’s taking you to a higher order of spiritual consciousness.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Eugene Peterson, Pastoral Work and Eschatology

“Pastoral work devoid of eschatology declines into a court chaplaincy — sprinkling holy water on consumerist complacency and religious gratification.”
— Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant
Eschatology for the uninitiated is about the end; ultimately death, judgment, destiny of soul and humankind.  But there’s a nuance of eschatology in pastoral work that Peterson identifies as crucial in the journey beyond the grips of ‘religion’ that stifles all spiritual progress.  We have to get beyond legalism, but we also need to get beyond a comfortable never-comes-the-end spirituality.
As Jonah advanced into Nineveh he was steeled in his approach: the people were shortly to be overthrown if they didn’t repent.  And his rebuke was heard even by Nineveh’s king.  He repented.  As did the whole city.  That didn’t make Jonah happy, but that’s a story for another day.
It should make every pastor’s day when he or she witnesses the repentance of a person with which they have some influence.  The Holy Spirit has convicted the person, sometimes with the pastor’s help, sometimes without.  Any change amid repentance is a miracle of God’s willing and working grace.
The people of Nineveh had forty days to mend their ways.  Purpose at the forefront.  The end in sight.  Suddenly there’s an imperative.  A cosmic size nine boot.  Immediately there’s attention given to the enormity of the work at hand.  It’s the pastor’s dream that people around them are caught in the full beam of God’s headlights — stunned from frozenness into action.
Many pastors abandon their calling because they find themselves ineffective in changing people’s lives, when that’s the Holy Spirit’s job alone.  They get burned out doing anything in their power to give the Holy Spirit a leg up.  They finish frustrated, because they still took on too much.  That’s why pastoral work can seem to be a mystery.  It’s not our effort that brings results, but we must certainly do all we can to biblically position a person’s thinking.
Peterson suggests that “Without eschatology the [fishing] line goes slack and there is nothing pulling us to the heights, to holiness, to the prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus.” (p. 144, Under the Unpredictable Plant)
Pastoral work must have some urgency about it.  The Christian journey is impelled better by no other force that by thought of the imminent end.
***
The end will come eventually; of our careers, our lives, of life.  We have now the choice.  To do God’s will, His urgent will for now, not for tomorrow.
Spiritual progress is about being uncomfortable without feeling forced; relying on God without becoming bound by rules.  That’s a balance the pastor is trying to facilitate in lives within their influence.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

A Content Refugee in a Willing Exile

The words of Psalm 137 are deplorably salient.
But the reality for the exiles sitting on the banks of the rivers in Babylon was ever more sorrowful than we can imagine.  Unless you’ve been exiled.  And there are plenty of veritable exiles.  By virtue of being forced into a life-tending and heart-rending situation, we experience exile.  We’re taken captive to a place, a situation, a time we’d never ever choose for ourselves.  Such a place, situation, and time is commonly called grief.
Grief is a time of exile.  What we never asked for, and never would — the loss, which is, in reality, a plethora of tangible and intangible losses — we find is such an irrepressible and irreversible lament.  We sit at the banks of that foreign place and weep.
What seems ever too real,
a sorrow all too sorrowful,
also seems all too surreal;
too unreal to feel,
yet feeling such reality is ever too hard.
Then, after a while,
what was ever too surreal,
feelings wrestled with in reality,
becomes a reality real enough to feel;
a new, acceptable reality emerges,
and hope returns.
Being exiled is designed to teach us to depend on nothing, to covet nothing, and to fear nothing, so that in fearing nothing, coveting nothing, and depending on nothing is to fear and covet only God, and to depend on Him alone.
Grief is an exile of the soul, where, for a time,
the soul is exiled from hope, joy, and peace.
When the soul is returned from exile,
or learns to live accepting its lot,
the gift of contentment is found.
The gift of contentment in exile
shows the exiled the Presence of God
transcends the exile.
God’s always present,
and the exiled learn
that’s all that matters.
Contentment is a state of soul
that hopes, and enjoys peace with life,
simply in knowing God’s Presence is enough.
One definition of maturity:
to able to sit still and be at peace in exile.
Arriving at such a peace is a lesson of strength in life,
always afforded out of surrender in our weakness.
The exile that grief is teaches us patience when life hurries at us, peace within torment, and perseverance through the perennial winter season.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Isaiah 51 – The WORD of SALVATION that Saves and Heals

“I, I am he that comforts you;
why then are you afraid of a mere mortal who must die,
a human being who fades like grass?”
— Isaiah 51:12 (NRSV)
This chapter of Isaiah is a stark Word from God revealing the revelation of His challenging Word to the faithful with the audacity to obey it.  Thrice there is the imperative “Listen to me(!)” and, as the words “Look” and “Rouse yourself” and “Awake, awake” punctuate the chapter, there is a concluding Word for all God’s faithful to “See” what He, the Lord, is doing — He is taking the cup of wrath away; a cup that has made the genuine believer stagger through periods of life punch-drunk from persecution.
God wants us to know that to follow Him is to follow His way, to see Him in the midst of life, to experience joy and gladness, to fear no mere mortal, and to fear only Yahweh alone.  When that life is lived we find strength (v. 9), comfort (v. 12), and a place, because we’re so God-conscious as to not fail in the seeing.
Prelude of the Eternal God (verses 1 - 6)
Ancestry suggests we were begotten, and of course that suggests that God must have begotten the first human beings.  We came from somewhere, and, because humanity will outlast even heaven and earth, the Lord has created us for a purpose beyond heaven and earth.
The eternal God is a salvation God, and God’s salvation is an eternal gift and possession, in a creation where beings are all that matter.  The environment is a means, whereas beings are the end.
God’s people will show they are His by listening to Him.  Those who listen to Him also look to Him.
Fear Nobody, for Your Salvation is Set (verses 7 – 11)
The theme of joy and gladness mentioned first in verse 3 continues in verse 11.  God’s people experience joy and gladness, for they abide to His teachings that are fixed to their hearts (v. 7).  The core of God’s teaching to this end is the assurance of God’s Presence that subsumes all inappropriate fear.
The Lord is the Vindicator and Avenger, besides, all wicked deeds amount to is a case for the prosecution; the witness of history as it’s brought to bear at the Great Judgment.
Nobody can do anything inappropriate to us without the Lord seeing it in all its unfettered glory.  Nobody gets away with anything, and we who are saved will endure eternally, and nothing can change that fact.  So, our fear of enemy means we’ve forgotten God; the moment we remember Him is the moment of inexplicable joy and gladness.
This Good News is GRACE! (verses 12 – 16)
“You are my people!” says the Lord, and He who created and formed us, who is reaching down to scoop us up and redeem us through Christ’s cross, and who is restoring us through the resurrection, is also the God who has made a way to save us.
That salvation is grace.  “You are my people,” means God would do anything to protect us and to provide for our way.  He who has hidden us from our foes by the shadow of His hand (v. 16) will not fail in protecting us for eternity’s future.  Indeed, He who hides us in the shadow of His hand doesn’t hesitate in revealing us as blameless in Christ before the Father.
Is there any fury like the Lord’s fury?  And we rest assured that that fury is set against those who set themselves against us in our obedience.
The Purpose of the ‘Cup of Wrath’ (verses 17 – 23)
This a Word that sorts the truly faithful from the fair-weather-only ‘disciple’ who fails to see the love in the cup of God’s wrath.  Jesus, Himself God of God, experienced the cup of God’s wrath, so how on earth do we think we’re saved from it?
We all have an obedience problem, and the purpose of disobedience is that, in experiencing the cup of God’s wrath, we might turn, repent, and go and sin no more.
The beauty of repentance is the mercy God bequeaths to us because of our godly sorrow.  He pleads our case! (see verse 22) Christ actually did this in the perfect sense; He did it and He continues to do it.
Another beautiful fact: the cup of God’s wrath makes us spiritually thirsty once more.  It sharpens our palate for God’s Word in our context, and a genuine fear of the Lord impels us forward in faithfulness and obedience.
Put another way, drinking the wine that is Christ’s blood doesn’t inebriate, but it heals the mind, making us more readily able to see the will of the Lord, and giving to us more of the capacity to do His will.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Isaiah 52 – The LORD’S Presence for His People

People of God, you are each, every first and last one, special to Him who created you, who has redeemed and raised you through His crucified and risen Son, and who restores you daily through His Presence, and who protects You perfectly by His Spirit.
God’s Presence is for His people.
In Isaiah 52, Yahweh is sanctifying His chosen nation, Israel.  Nothing Israel could do could ultimately separate it from their Lord.  Each of us, since Jesus, can be likened to His nation, just like each of us is integrally part of His Israel, the Church.
Yahweh is rich in His Covenant Presence, assuring His people that they are His, and He is theirs, unequivocally.  As such, this section is an oracle for what is invisibly seen in this living age, for those of us who search spiritually, as much as it’s an oracle for what is coming — when we’re all resurrected from this corrupt world.
The Freedom in THIS Redemption
God’s redemption costs us nothing.  It is free in Christ.  What is priceless in value could never be bought.  Such is the love of the Lord that He would never accept payment for what is undeniably and unfathomably ours.
Freedom From What Was, To Step Into What Is
We, the people of God, are granted to arise and shake off what we’ve worn; the dust of our pasts that have held us back whilst we were captive to the enemy.  Now that we look to God for visions and revelations for how to live our lives, He redeems us constantly in our moments.  And if any despise us, they despise Him, and oh what a foolish thing that is to do!  We’re warned here, too, that it’s contemptible to look to ‘Egypt’ for help.  We must stay out of the world as far as we possibly can, bearing within our consciousness, daily, the contempt we have for the Lord when we go the world’s way, which is more an ever-present danger now than ever.
Bringers of Good News!
Oh the honour to make public the glory of the Lord!
Freed, we go out, in the joy of God’s Presence, transformed from within, new vessels, acquitted by grace in such a way as to have cognisance for what was, but to know it as no impediment, but as a glory unto Him for what He alone has done; in accord for stepping into what is, we go!
God, Our Every Protection
We go in the knowledge inwardly known, in our soulish core, that we are His.  And with that knowledge retrofitted exactly as if custom made to our identities, we go, knowing He is before us, and our rear guard.
The enemy casts all sorts of aspersions toward us; that God can abandon His children.  But God never can, because God cannot sin against His own covenant.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

A Holy Uprising

For many years Israel has been without the true God, without a teaching priest, and without instruction, but when they turned to the Lord God of Israel in their distress and sought Him, He was found by them.  In those times there was no peace for those who went about their daily activities because the residents of the lands had many conflicts.  Nation was crushed by nation and city by city, for God troubled them with every possible distress.
 2 Chronicles 15:3-6 (HCSB)
I’ve given myself twenty minutes to respond to the excellent article by Tony Evans, America’s Current Violence Can Be Traced to Christians’ Failures on Washington Post.
In his article, Dr Evans cites the abovementioned 2 Chronicles passage as a prophetic exclamation for our time.  I think he’s right on so many levels.  But what is correct is correspondingly perplexing.  In our globalised, light-speed-paced social media world what chance do we have in uniting the church that seems as splintered from within as it’s ever been?
As a ‘Church’ we are bombarded from within on many issues in this tremulous day; gay marriage is one very visible illustration.  The present gun debate is also dividing the church in America.  As a ‘Church’ we’ve become known as a people with a lot to say but with the inability to do; this in a day when ever more we crave leadership — at a global level, because of the way our society now works — that can lead, and evoke, and censure — in order to bring unity, by reasonable force of veto, where necessary, from within.
We need leaders, and many of them, with a Kingdom vision who are genuinely able to harness armies of disciples, to fight a war of love, against the prevailing war of hate swallowing whole cultures by the minute.
I love what Evans has written, and cannot fault a single idea or word.  It’s our fault.  The ‘Church’ has dropped the ball.  We’ve gotten into bed with the consumer culture.  We’ve gone hardball in situations needing a reformation of wisdom; a prophetically-considered, Kingdom-considered voice.  We’ve come to be innocuous and invisible in the landscape of life.  The ‘Church’ no longer imprints the footprint it has in the past.
And yet, it’s not for the first time.  The beauty of God’s Word is that it reminds us that there’s nothing new under the sun; we’ve been here before, several times.  The Bible tells us what we need to do.  The ‘how’ is the bigger issue.
The answer is simple.  We do need to turn back to God, and in repenting, for the seeking of His face, we will need to do that with an innovation that suits our age, and do it on an unprecedented scale, for the globalised economy works against the work that must be done.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Resurrection From the Belly of a Fish

“Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish.  All ‘word of God’ vocations are thus formed.  There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.”
 Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness
The ‘passage through some such interior’ is brutally poignant.  There is a colossal paradox in every fully-fledged loving spirituality of the Lord.  That paradox is this fact: we never simply arrive resurrected.  We’re resurrected from something abysmal to something contrastively better.  Such is God’s love that it takes us into the bowels before we’re able to rise from the brink in His exaltation; His alone.
Resurrection is the plot twist in every motion picture’s climax.  Out of the jaws of defeat comes victory, and the more unexpected that victory is, the better the narrative.
Your life and mine — everybody’s — is such a narrative of loss and recovery, of losing then winning, of rags that dissolved for comparative riches; if we’re diligent and faithful.
None of us can reap the riches of gain without first experiencing the groaning chasm of loss.  We cannot bypass the bane to experience the bliss.  We must go into the darkness given to us as a gift, intrepidly and willingly, and traverse that valley, in that rarefied air, without becoming intoxicated for a lack of oxygen.  We learn to make do with the air we have.  And in this cavernous experience is the journey of interior.  It’s supposed to be incredibly tough, nigh on impossible to endure.
From scandalous trial, to scourging and defamation, to the bloody and tormented cross, to burial, to descending to hell alone, to being raised, to ascending to be with the Father; that was the life of Jesus.  If we’re to live to follow Him, we’ll be blessed to be called into that manifestation of life.
Jesus went into His interior, experienced being void, ultimately to be resurrected.
Jonah went into the belly of the fish for going to Tarshish, and was then spat out onto dry land for redirection to Nineveh.
Jesus asks us to enter our interior, promising ever to resurrect us from it at the right time.
We cannot hope to be resurrected until and unless we bear and suffer our cross.
Grace cost the Father His Son.  Resurrection requires a cross.
Resurrection is evidence of a cross endured.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Friday, July 8, 2016

Justice Is Truth In Action

For World Day of International Justice – July 17
“It is reasonable that everyone who asks for justice should do justice.”
— Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
CHARLINE MUSANIWABO had a pretty ordinary life, a beloved member of a loving family, until the Rwandan genocide of 1994.  She was eighteen and overnight her life plunged into an abyss.  Both her parents, and five of her eight siblings, were killed.  She fled with the remaining three, but was raped and forced to marry the Hutu rapist who had violated her, conceiving four children to him, suffering constant abuse to him over fifteen torturous years.  With the help of a brave woman neighbour, she finally fled him in 2011.  A longer version of her story can be read here.
Charline’s story echoes the fact that some injustices have been faced by relatively few.  But her story also prompts us that injustice faces us all, not only in the wider world, but as much as anything, for many, within the sanctity of home.  No greater oxymoron: violence done clandestinely within what should be the confines of the safest sanctuary.
Just how many women exemplify Charline’s story?  How many even in ‘civilised’ countries with best practice legal systems?  How many Charlines have we known?  And what elements of her story resonate with our own stories?
The atrocities done to Charline are both rare yet contemptibly unremarkable; abhorrent, yet scarily real in the experience of many; too many, when even one case is unacceptable.  Scarier still is the fact that we all have the perpetrator and victim in us.
Indeed, countless normal, indeed even gifted, people have instigated injustices.  For instance, the biggest ecological disasters in the history of the world.  In a former profession as a risk manager, I’d see the list of reported world incidents on a monthly basis, and it amazed me how the world coped with these gargantuan fires, dangerous chemical spills that would fill swimming pools, explosions that levelled entire towns, and toxic gas releases that could kill whole cities.  Some of the worst disasters killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
In 1976, Bhopal in India was the site of the Union Carbide methyl isocyanate gas release that affected a half million people — and depending on who you read, somewhere between two thousand and sixteen thousand died!  Innocent people who lived lives ignorant of the imminence of devastation.  But the nuclear incidents are most disturbing.  The Chernobyl reactor meltdown in 1986 is still a colossal problem thirty years hence, let alone within the tens of thousands of lives it wrought destruction, initially and subsequently.  Then there’s the more recent Fukushima power plant disaster (2011), caused in some part by nature, but with the latent amoral precondition: a sequence to catastrophe at the mere presence of a nuclear power source.  Where is the justice for the people killed or maimed by such events; or, those who lost dear ones?  What technology should even be contemplated for use when a disaster from the use of that technology can wreak a several-thousand-year fallout?  Of course, hindsight is a marvellous paradigm.  If only the early governmental leaders had known what was ahead.  Most concerning, though, there are many who would rise to power, and who have indeed risen to power, and who have deliberately abused God’s creation, procreating their egotism; a personal melting pot for national calamity.  Yet we all have such capacity for wrongness.
We only truly understand justice
when we understand our limits
in procuring and executing justice.
***
Justice, the mystery.
***
Justice is God’s.
It is utterly inscrutable.
We can see it, even touch it, but we cannot control it.
Justice intends that we, the frustrated, come to the end of ourselves.
Then, to God we inevitably fall… and rest.
Then we’re measured; useful, finally, for both God and justice.
We all know that God’s earth needs her justice.  We’ve all seen misguided people greedily step onto that idolatrous soapbox for their fifteen minutes of fame.  We’ve lamented those who are trying to get ahead by ill-gotten gain.  The ingredients of that person are latent within us, too.  Justice warns us.  We who have ears should listen.
Humanity shares something of a dichotomy with justice.  We sense the need to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly, but we struggle to practice it with consistency of purpose and end.  We may be healed of our misunderstanding, day by day, when we recognise our need of God’s sanctifying grace, but we’re subject to this putrefying human condition; the irrefutable condition of our torment.  Our bodies waste away, and we don’t like it.  Our thinking is fraught with dimness.  We don’t like that, either.  And our wavering hearts are feeble, and such a thing is execrable.
Injustice occurs on so many levels and in myriads of contexts: personally, interpersonally, maritally, occupationally, communally, internationally, and globally.  If we would let it, it would subsume us.  The presence of injustice in the world is always an enigmatic paroxysm to us.  Injustice bursts in our lives, shocks us, and takes us on a much unanticipated course.  But we’re reminded, that in the midst of it all is a sovereign God, and His purposes will be made known.  This doesn’t excuse God or the injustices, but it does help us to keep stepping by faith in the interim.  The interim are the days of our lives.  And if the worst can be experienced by anybody, the worst can make its home in us, also.  Oh, what an unbearable thought!
It’s the maker and breaker of life: justice.  It makes life all of what life is.  But when justice capsizes, lives are broken and hope is fallen like a mighty oak.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) said that “justice is truth in action.”  I have often said that love is truth in action.  And that’s where love and justice and truth all coalesce — in action.  That action begins with each of us; what we allow and disallow; how we respond to the issues that confront us; how we advocate according to God’s will, and the discernment thereof.  And experience teaches us, it’s not our passion as much as our wisdom — our prudent diligence; our diligent prudence — that blesses the situations of our advocacy.  To add value, and not make situations worse.
Justice is a visible thing.  It’s a thing of truth and love; the way things should be.  The way we expect goodness to flow.  Where there are only winners and there are no losers.  If that isn’t a panacea.
World Day for International Justice is a time to mourn with those who mourn, and rejoice with those who rejoice.  It’s a day when we thank God for the advocates of past, present, and future, and not least for His resonating grace.  It’s a day when we implore Him: “Come, Lord, come today; to this dying world!  Revive and restore justice to unjust situations, everywhere.”
It’s a day when we pray for Him to convict us in the commitments and recommitments we need to make.
It’s a day for planning each day forward, so each day is marked by a faith that walks by truth in action.
From this moment onward, evermore, into the chasm of eternity, when that time comes.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Cataclysmic Tragedy… Then God’s Silence

Lord, I call to You;
my rock, do not be deaf to me.  
If You remain silent to me,
I will be like those going down to the Pit.
— Psalm 28:1 (HCSB)
Some will have read the words of the title and be instantly thrown back into déjà vu.  Others may read the opening words of the Davidic psalm and know that feeling hostile to our faith.  It seems absurd that God would call a servant to a place, and there leave him or her alone; completely abandoned!
Silence.  A vacuum where His Presence used to be.  Voided of our experience.  Gone.
And at such a time as this; on the back of a cataclysm, where vanquished is a life we truly enjoyed.  As much are the pangs of calamity as the suddenness of its timing.
Abruptly, when a cataclysm has taken place, we’re in a life transition we never asked for, and never would.  And so, to add to our woes, God up and leaves.
What purpose is in His sovereign will when He allows what will cause us a series of conniptions, and then departs?
When we’re in God’s silence it doesn’t help much to be continually reminded by others of the Footprints in the Sand poem.  It seems so clichéd.  But it is an answer to our prayers when God’s Spirit places it in the most arcane place where we would otherwise not have seen it!  Through a series of impossibilities, God begins speaking again!  And this is how God eventually does show up; in the most accusatory manner, in order to show us our lack of faith, whilst at the same time telling us, “Well done good and faithful servant,” for continuing to look for Him despite our worn down demeanour.
God does show up.  And we always feel relieved, knowing that, though our lack of faith gave Him up, He did not give us up.
Our temptation when God is silent is to doubt Him and backslide in our faith, but our response should be to step up our prayer life and listen even more intently.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Monday, July 4, 2016

A Necessary Spiritual Collision

These are the words of the Lord to a furious and despondent Cain:
If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.
— Genesis 4:7 (HCSB)
Every day of our Christian journey is the same in the midst of a kaleidoscope of days.  Each day has its own problems, but the underpinning of the problems is always the same.  We are part of the problems central to our lives.  To live well at accord with God we must first overcome ourselves — our fury and despondency.
Sin crouches in a pose ever present, always only one movement away.  It embodies our environment, and it fills our surrounds, devouring us on the occasion of despondency, feeding on our hope as we give into a passively aggressive fury.  Sin wants to finish us, and very often it succeeds.
But there’s a necessary spiritual collision that will save us in the moment.  God speaks; we listen.  It’s as simple as that.  God speaks in the dulcet tones of our lives, and our task is to be perceptive enough to intuit what He’s saying.  This is the only way we’re able to rule over sin, which is the Lord’s will for the way we ought to live our lives.
This spiritual collision is the nature of His revelation as we receive it.  It collides with our understanding in the form of a meteor — an everyday rebuke meeting our humility to accept this Word for Life.  As His understanding crashes into our consciousness, we take on board what He’s saying, the collision makes for our contrition, and a holy collusion begins to occur.
***
Again, a necessary spiritual collision — us with our Lord — confers us to our contrition, where holy collusion occurs, and we join His work.
As the Lord’s revelation collides as a meteor with our sense for understanding, He speaks and we listen, and, in that, we live and grow and have our being.
The Christian life is about this modus operandi: of listening as He speaks.  It’s not all about developing Christian virtue.  Christian virtue, on its own, isn’t enough.  It doesn’t cater for the inherency of our sinner’s state.  Primary to our being is listening and doing in our going.
As the Lord’s revelation collides with our understanding, He speaks, we listen, and we then do as we’re shown.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

Saturday, July 2, 2016

How Relationship With SIN Helps Relationship With GOD

Whenever I think of my Christian faith I think of paradox.
Whenever I’m weak I’m able to draw on God’s strength.  If I’m humble I can expect to be exalted at the right time, but if I’m exalting myself, I can expect to be humbled.  And so on.
There is the upside down reality of a faith employed in obedience: suffer well what pain a good and sovereign God could disallow or remove from our lives, and we learn a secret that anyone could learn about life, but a secret nobody can learn without experiencing it.
Sin is a blessing.  Oh I know it’s a curse in many ways, but it’s also a blessing.  Sin forces us into the heartland of God, if only we’ll acknowledge the truth: none of us should be happy that we’re sinners prone to sins against God, others and ourselves.
Sin is a double blessing when we relate with it.  God has a double portion of His grace available to use when we stare our sin in its face, bringing it into the community of truth by His glorious light, purging us of our darkness.  There sin, in the company of the Spirit, lies exposed, where grace annuls shame, and provides anointing for healing.
There’s the double portion of blessing: 1) bring the sin into the community of light, and not one iota of shame is experienced.  It is what it is.  Acknowledgement makes for acceptance.  Our sin is no surprise to God.  God is simply pleased we’ve chosen to be real about the truth; 2) In acceptance of the sinner in us, there is healing to overcome the sin.
First, there’s no shame experienced.  Second, the Spirit’s power is known in the healing.
All this is possible because we’ve chosen to relate with our sin; to be honest about it.
Honesty reveals courage, revealing faith that believes obedience to the truth will be blessed.  And it is.
Our relationship with sin helps with our relationship with God, because God loves truth so much, He blesses our honesty by a double portion.  So, our relationship with sin, in the light of truth, means we’re in relationship with God, where the truth will set us free.
Another way of putting it is:
Honesty about sin is blessed doubly, because God loves truth so much He:
1) frees us of shame, and 2) heals us.
Bringing sin into the light, brings us into relationship with grace, bringing us freedom from shame, which brings us healing, to the glory of God.
Don’t be ashamed of your sin.  Be honest about it before God.  Let God do the work in you by His grace.  And watch what miracles He procures in you by your obedience.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.