So We Do Not Lose Heart

“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (NRSV)

Faith looks to believe in a promise that cannot be seen; a promise that will deliver infinitely and abundantly more than we could ever hope or dream for.

There are two characteristics of faith, here above, that are diametrically opposed: 1) the pure absurdity of faith in the eyes of the worldly, and 2) the sheer wonder of it, in what it produces as an investment regarding eternal riches, both here and away.

Faith must believe in the unseen. Faith must also believe in its inherent eternal worthiness in trusting God.

These things are important to the spiritually faithful. The reason being, their hope persists in resting upon faith, for faith is their only hope. And when faith is our only hope, we are hoping in the right direction, with all our resources, and we are focused purely on our obedience before God.

And the secret to this faith is not losing heart.

Living by faith is a knowledge against the prevailing power of reliance on the world. It goes the opposite way to depending on the world. It lives according to an invisible promise; the more invisible, the more biblical, the better.

Faith believes when the world would mock.

Faith believes the Spirit of God is the only Supreme Authority. It sees all other authorities under the direction of God. It therefore rests knowing that all things are in control, despite worldly evidence to the contrary.

In the exploration of such faith we determine the strength of hope even in the midst of suffering; indeed, our problems are the very cause of what goes to God as glory. And this is no big deal—apart from the awe we experience in being won to such a miracle of existence in God. We see the significance of our problems in revealing God’s glory through our mortal beings. We may even be inspired by our problems. The world may see that as absurd, but it is a charismatic type of absurdity; alluring in its manifestation.

Having become committed to such a faithful Deity as to be won most sure assuredly and certainly to the promise of all promises, beyond any shred of doubt, we do not lose heart.

That is the characterisation of our faith: that despite the ‘evidence’ of absurdity (in the world’s eyes) we can and do cling to the Good Hope; a hope that is most certainly coming; a hope that came in the Incarnation.

We believe upon Christ, and, in obeying God, we take on the death of Jesus in order that others are won to momentary and eternal life. We can, and do, willingly sacrifice our wills so God would achieve his will in the lives of our contemporaries. All this is a very great pleasure; to know such a love as to want to love for the sake of love.

***

Our faith in Christ is so persuasive, so beautifully commanding, that we find it a joy to obey. Such obedience of faith—where, we do not lose heart—is powering us to glory, both here in this life and also in eternity. This is the abundant life we are living. And who would not want it, knowing what it achieves?

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Gathering Strength From Distress

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.”

— Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

Skating a fine line between wilting in the midst of our problems and stoically pushing on regardless, there is a better way. Gathering strength from our distresses is, initially, not so easy, but it is the mature and safest way of handling our problems.

This is not so much the Middle Road, but a new road.

We need two things in order to take this new road: the 1) awareness of a better alternative—to respond in faith—and commitment to 2) action.

Where we become aware of the effect our problems have over us, and we can measure our response toward calmness, despite how panicked or annoyed we feel, we have the right impetus for action or inaction, as each case may be.

Then all that’s required is a resolute courage to act in accord with the situation’s need.

Like anything as far as faith is concerned, we only get opportunities and results when the rubber hits the road. Our faith cannot grow in the presence of ease. And if it’s the only good news to come out of an unfortunate event, having our faith grow is a real prize we can cherish in our walk, later, with God.

What to Hang on to and What to Let Go

All throughout life we have choices regarding where our focus will be placed.

When we have no choice at least we have the choice about how we will take that lack of choice. Seen this way, we always have choice. Even when we are cornered, we choose our response. Even if the things that have occurred to us are irreversible, as they often are, we have the right of veto regarding our attitudes. We decide; no one else does.

This is no little amount of influence.

The fact that we, by our thoughts and attitudes, have the ability of foresight to seek knowledge of the good in the things that happen to us, we have a grasp on an important personal power.

Gaining strength from distress, therefore, is a beautiful agency of holding on to things by wisdom’s counsel, whilst letting go of the things we cannot retain. It’s even better if we can do this resolutely, without any hankering regret.

***

Faith to respond well or react poorly is about choice—what we choose to do; how we’ll behave. Even when there are no options presenting, we still have a choice—to respond well in faith, or grumble and wilt. In responding well we gather strength from our distress. It’s about just doing it.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Trusting God When Troubled of Spirit

“But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love,

will enter your house,

I will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you.”

— Psalm 5:7 (NRSV)

The troubled nature of our spirits in torment, having found ourselves venturing on a lonely, painful road, is the state, ironically, inviting us to journey once again with the Lord our God.

Not that such a journey should ever, by God’s will, be interrupted.

Pain, this way, is a good thing—it leads us to God.

But it is by our broken, fallen state such spiritual interruptions take us into these reaches of spiritual nonchalance, whereby we struggle to exist. Our identities in God have been compromised so much in these places we barely recognise ourselves as people of God.

We have entered spiritual fatigue, and so sudden is our realisation.

And so there is the invitation: it is written by the Letter of pain; the Epistle of loneliness; the Covenant of emotional distance; a Note from our God to venture in, and drink from the well of healing—by God’s Presence.

Entering God’s Presence

“But I... will enter your house,” says the psalmist.

This is the psalmist in each of us, who, having received that divine invitation, takes the invitation and responds in trust.

We talk about such trust in common ways, but we uncommonly enter into God’s court in trust when we need to. This is why we have entered God’s Presence, now, in such a plight. Our human nature tends to leave it too late.

But God is faithful. We are helped whenever we trust. God limits none of his divine agency in coming to us, to heal our understanding, to bring us to a better mood, and to soothe the aches of our souls.

Entering God’s Presence is simply about separating ourselves from distractions, finding a quiet moment/a quiet day, and going inward to the resolute silence is sitting with God and allowing the healing nature of God to wash over us. The more we practice, the better we feel.

Such a thing as entering God’s Presence is all we need do to credit our trust to the extent that we are blessed by that peace the transcends our understanding. God does the rest, through the pure agency of our surrendered trust.

***

The pain of spiritual discomfort—loneliness, grief, contention, depression, anxiousness, etc—is the blessed invitation to rejoin the Presence of God.

Entering the Lord’s house in taking up such an invitation—to spend time with God—is a grand commitment of trust. Trusting God when our spirits are troubled is the best thing we could ever do. Blessing is soon ours toward healing strength to endure our days.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Why Faith’s for Everyone

“I do not have faith; I just don’t ‘believe’.”

Wrong, everyone has faith. Everyone expresses faith. We cannot live life without faith. Let me go ahead and demonstrate the necessity of faith.

It’s like the nurse who has just finished her shift, and as she walks to the train station, she notices ahead a bunch of construction workers working on the path. It looks like she will not get past. Both to the right and left seem impassable. She continues walking, thinking, “They will make a way for me; I will be okay.” She keeps walking. And the workers do make way. But she couldn’t predict how until she approached close. She had to get close to see and that took faith.

Because we all meet uncertainty in life, and because we can’t escape such ambiguity, we are all required to have or show faith—even the so-called atheist.

The Commonality of Faith

We can know that faith is a commonality because life requires us to show faith; if we are to venture forward and be anything like happy, we will have difficulties to contend with, and faith is our only way through.

The necessity for faith, an opportunity for everyone, despite religious or spiritual allegiance, meets with the presence of the struggling life we can all identify with.

Even for the millionaire, the business owner who is their own boss, the elite sportsperson, and the rockstar, life is nothing like all beer and skittles.

Every single person alive, in living well, must express faith.

It merely helps if we have a construct for our faith, in order that we believe in things that give us the appropriate level of hope—a hope based in truth (that’s not based in denial of truth, or lies). It’s a very practical thing this construct for faith, for no human being can thrive at life without hope. Hope is a necessity for living successfully.

Choosing Faith Can Only Be an Advantage

Because we have to live according to faith if we wish to succeed, we might as well choose a faith that will serve us as much as we serve it. Indeed, the Christian faith serves us much more than we could ever serve it.

When we consider that the Christian faith is borne upon the perfection of God’s love—a no-lose situation for believers—we find, suddenly, there is a faith construct that just improves our lives.

There would be no mature Christians, dead or alive, who would attempt to convince people against the Gospel. They were won to it and they died won to it.

***

Life requires us to have faith, because it is such an uncertain existence.

Faith is for everyone, because everyone needs faith in order to survive and thrive in life. Because the Christian faith centres on unparalleled gain, with God making all the sacrifices, we have a construct for faith that not only works; it reaches into our lives and saves us every day by the very measure of our applied faith.

***

Life insists we live by faith in order to succeed. In living this faith that works—the only one—we choose Christ, knowing Christ has already chosen us.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Identified As Worthy, Approved By God

“Many proclaim themselves loyal,

but who can find one worthy of trust.”

— Proverbs 20:6 (NRSV)

“Why am I such a failure?” “What is wrong with me that my parent(s) left me?” “How could my parent(s) expect so much of me and make me feel bad for not achieving what they wanted me to achieve?” “Why am I the black sheep?” “What must I do to be loved like my sibling?” “How do I create closeness in my relationship with my parent(s) when they are always distant to me?” “Why don’t they give me eye contact?”

These, and many more questions, haunt adult children scattered all over the earth.

Parents—as a genotype—proclaim themselves loyal, but all fail. All humans will fail us. But God never will. Even where our parents were marvellous, some things in childhood still did not sit well, and are rooted in our sense of lack, today.

Whenever we enter a process of psychological therapy we can always expect our childhoods to be explored and to be revealed as the source of our pain. It’s a humbling reality for parents and children alike.

Until we can wrestle with the fact that our parents were highly fallible—some to the extreme—we cannot venture forward to receive our necessary healing.

Growing an Identity of Impenetrable Worthiness

The best of identities of personality flourish with an instinctive worthiness.

But none of us, of ourselves, are worthy—not truthfully. But, of course, this is the best news; we have a Saviour who came to be perfection for us in order that he would die for our imperfections.

Still we cannot escape the issues surrounding our felt sense of unworthiness.

Sometimes, no matter how much we know God loves us, we still struggle to accept this so-called unconditional love. We attempt to receive it, but our focus is consistently interrupted.

Of course, God understands. We have a Lord who understands, and accounts for, our fallibility better than we know.

Still we must come back to the fact that the only worthwhile approval is not of human making at all. Only in practicing the concept of our worthiness in God can we truly become the people of God the Lord has destined us to become.

***

The root of unworthiness comes from hurts unreconciled from childhood. And yes, we all have them. We need God to heal us of those hurts. In God we have a path to worthiness, through Jesus’ love—the spread of his bloodied arms spanning the cross. It’s an impenetrable worthiness.

Impenetrable worthiness—true, lasting healing toward wholeness, in the Son’s name—is only available in God.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Ezekiel 34 – The Only True Shepherd

“For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.”

— Ezekiel 34:11 (NRSV)

Having opened the chapter with a scathing attack on Israel’s false shepherds, those who have led the flock astray, Ezekiel prophesies about the True Shepherd.

Oh, how it is that we are pursued by the love of God from that day, and beforehand, until this one, and in all chronological directions, eternally.

God, the True Shepherd, seeks out his sheep. And we may proudly declare we are not sheep; that we are more worthy than sheep. But in truth, we are more sheeplike, and God more our Divine Shepherd, than we could ever vindicate in the reality of our thoughts.

The nature of God’s shepherding work is comprehensive as it is perfect.

The Character of the Shepherd

Sheep are easily scattered, and so it is for the Shepherd to draw back all his sheep into the flock.

While it is our character to scatter away from the Lord, to leave Divine Presence, it is just the same character of the Shepherd to draw us back, close to him. This occurs via the circumstances of our lives. We may wonder about loss, hardship, pain, and every sense of cursing—these are designed, if nothing else, as a barb to cause us to return. Danger is the prod back to God.

God is drawing us away from danger from wolves as we return to the flock—the church. We are given our own lands, the church, having been drawn. The moral safety of church is the Divine destination—despite many attacks from the wolves both from within and from without the church.

In church we are fed in good pasture; the mountain heights of Israel. God’s preaching from the pulpit, caring fellowship-of-the-flock within small groups, ministry within the needs of love by the Shepherd’s crook; by all these and more we are fed, nourished, and cared for as we care in the name of the Lord.

The True Shepherd makes his sheep lie down and rest, having grazed the pasture.

Our Divine Shepherd seeks the lost, brings back the strays, binds up the injured, strengthens the weak, but also condemns the fat and the strong, which are fed Divine justice!

The True Shepherd covenants a bridle of promises that protect the flock in every way from danger. It is a covenant of peace, beyond threat of wild animals that would otherwise freely devour parts of the flock. The True Shepherd is a Divine Protector.

The True Shepherd discerns between the fat sheep and the lean sheep; he sorts out the true sheep from the sheep dressed up from a wolves’ origin.

***

God has promised to save his flock, the true sheep of his pasture, from the wolves of a dangerous life. We shall no longer be ravaged as God judges the wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing; the False Shepherds of Israel.

The Shepherd of Israel is seeking us, today, eternally, drawing us back into his Divine sheep fold. The True Shepherd of Israel is our Gatherer, our Protector, our Provider, our Rest, our Healer, our Very Present Help in time of need, and our Saviour.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Power from the Ground Up

It’s not from the halcyon heights we derive the spirit to annul defeat. No, from there we complacently take in the sweeping views. The power in resolve is found when the chips are down.

***

Sinking to the depths,

Is not the end game,

Belief from faith we collect,

That’s the way to take aim.

Stirring within our spirit,

Is the power beyond words,

A power to enfold merit,

Same that empowers birds.

Climbing from the canvas,

The courage to rise up,

Fears forming are foundless,

Overflows the underdog’s cup.

***

What happens when things draw to a grinding end?

Most people, in most circumstances, will give-in to the pressure and simply fold. Some, however, don’t feel they have a choice but to fight. Wisdom conveys itself and they hear it!

The former look upon the obvious, highly visible signs and believe what they see. The latter don’t believe it can end this way. Even in a flurry of confusion, punch-drunk from the volley of setbacks, they find the poise, somehow, to believe in an invisible vision.

Believing in Myriad Possibilities

The only real difference between those that give up and those who refuse to lie down is the vision they see. Both see no hope, but those who cannot give up insist there must be a way through.

Realistically, there’s always more than one way through.

Not only are there myriad possibilities—limited only by our imagination, ingenuity, and overall pluck—there are other variables to tap into. Like, the faith to believe unstintingly in a selected path once it is envisioned. Or, the resilience to see it all the way through.

***

Power from the ground up is a simple principle enshrined in truth and God’s Wisdom. It’s not just that God wants to see the battler rise—to conquer their demons; it’s also what the world wants to see.

Such guts inspire everyone.

Power from the ground up is the inspiration of the true story brought to motion picture glory; the championship point from against all odds; and, the victorious battle for remission when opposed to cancer’s scourge. Even more so inspiring is the impossible dream, backed in action, disregarding the eventual result.

It has a million forms; each one inspires us to believe... we, too, can do it.

If you may find yourself reeling from a devastating blow, recoiling in disbelief and strangled for hope, know now that power indwells from the ground up. Unbelievably, you may never be better positioned. Believe in the invisible; hope in the unheard of; love despite it all. Life is now.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Not Without Pain, But Without Stain

“God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.”

— C.S. Lewis (1898–1963)

Armed with salvation in Jesus’ name, we are graced with the divine wherewithal to endure all tribulations, not without pain, but without stain. The end for the believer is glorification, with Jesus, in God, in Heaven.

There’s much more in this Life... much, much, much, much, much, much, much more.

There is no way we can exaggerate such an idea as glorification in the heavens. This idea even transcends our somewhat pathetic concept of the post-death reality. Heaven is much more than that. Not discounting Heaven, heaven starts here, for instance. We are glorified in our responding well, here, in this instant, always, in our mortal being.

Saved without stain, given the gloriously majestic yet horrendous Sacrifice, our God hanging on the cross so our sin would depart, and the curse of condemnatory judgment, we are positioned on the winning team, no matter what we are called to endure.

That idea—the wonder of salvation in the midst of a broken life—is cause for relief, that God considered us enough to save us in the foreseeing of calamities hardly conscionable.

God rescued us before we even knew we needed it.

The Wisdom of the Rescuer

This truth calls us to an adroit hearkening akin to being humbled like never, ever before.

There is no truth greater than this; two comparatively stark and never-more-opposed realities—our eternal distance from God and the eternal reaching in of the Lord to save us through Jesus Christ.

As this Triune God communed and convened before even creation began, we were considered Beloved—the praise of God—even though the Fall was imminent and known.

We fail God, we betray, and we even hate ourselves—all the while accusing everyone else (and God!) that the fault is not ours. The fault is ours! Yet God, in divine reckoning, held it not against us—but threw Divinity into the breach because it was the only way to save what meant most to God: the saving of his precious Creation.

The wisdom of the Rescuer cannot be comprehended, just marvelled at.

***

There is much pain in this life, but, in facing it without stain, having been saved, we have the only tools at our disposal for enduring. The Gospel and our salvation are the only weapons worthy of fighting with in this life.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

Finding Something True to Live For

“If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we would want for nothing.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

The meaning of life is to find meaning in life: some overriding purpose that gives us drive, tenacity for living, and a passion for simply breathing. And breathing is inherently part of our purpose, simple as that might seem. What a privilege to some it is to simply breathe!

There is a great amount of truth in the above quote, but only if we strip all the pain and suffering we endure away in order to find the precious ore beneath the tailings of life. In the refining of this ore we come face-to-face with the wonder of existing, if incredibly on the cusp of time itself.

Think about the present moment. It is but a continual instant, fleeting in nature, but never more significant as we find God Almighty pressing in, within infinite measures, in every way, every day.

The present moment is a phenomenon so resplendently simple, yet wondrously difficult to comprehend. We try and catch it, enjoy it, make the most of it, and still we fail. We are asking too much of existence. We can’t grasp it. It’s too dynamic.

All the wonder in the entire universe is wrapped up in the day—in the present moment—as it is displayed—the glory of God—eternally.

Finding something to live for in the context of what we are discussing isn’t hard, if we have a will to live; to believe beyond sight that there is hope enough to swallow us whole in the divinity of virtue—love, joy and peace.

What is life if we have not found something to live for? The best news: that answer lies ahead of us; joy, triumph, meaning.

And if we are bemused about the purpose of life, and for the life of us cannot find it, we should break life down to look at the simplest of portions: the proverbial sunset, the never-ending motion of time, the sprouting of seed sown in the ground, and even the power in a natural disaster.

There is purpose in life when we consider we are alive, and though it sounds simple, we exist for a reason, and our job is to find out that reason, and not give up in the seeking and searching out process.

***

The meaning of life is to find meaning in life: some overriding purpose that gives us drive, tenacity for living, and a passion for simply breathing.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.