Category Archives: In the Word

Holy Spirit, who are You?

In my quest to go deeper, to know the heart of God more, it was inevitable that I would find my way here. Because after almost 24 years of relationship, I still find the Holy Spirit to be a mystery. I’ve been taught much, heard much, and have even sensed His presence many times, and I still feel as though I need to stick out my hand, introduce myself and ask Him that question.

Just who are You, really?

I am filled with the urge to search, and I know of only one place to search for God; only one place that I know for sure He will be found.  And I remember that “In the beginning“, the Spirit of God was there, so that is where I turn. And I find the first glimpse of the Holy Spirit.

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” {Genesis 1:2}

Hovering. Rachaph is the Hebrew word. It means to brood, like a mother bird broods over her young.

It also means “to cherish”.

The exact same word is used in Deuteronomy 32:11, describing God’s care for Israel ~

“like an eagle that stirs up its nest
    and hovers over its young,
that spreads its wings to catch them
    and carries them on its pinions.”

He cherishes.

And I am reminded ~

“And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.” {Romans 5:5}

I sat back and closed my bible, closed my notebook and put down my pen. And then I chose to believe what I had found.

The Holy Spirit of God is not just a vaporous mystery. He’s not just power and strength, worker of signs and wonders, and Giver of gifts.

Suddenly the fact that I am indwelt by the Holy Spirit looks different to me.

“In the beginning…”  became “Here is the first thing I want to tell you about Myself. You are cherished by Me.”

Holy Spirit of God…

It’s so nice to meet You.

how to not end abortion

Fair Warning:  This is not the kind of post I typically write. It is not a personal attack on anyone, it is a plea to the Church. I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I claim absolutely no affiliation or allegiance to a political party. My allegiance is to Christ and His Kingdom. This post may make people mad at me. While that is not my intention, I’m ok with it. 

On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court made abortion legal in this country. Since that time, there have been 8 different Presidents in office, 5 Republicans and 3 Democrats. In every election, abortion has been one of the major hot buttons and for some people, the biggest issue that decides their vote. When President Obama was reelected this month, I read statements similar to this one:  “Well, that’s four more years of unborn babies being killed”. Obviously they believe the President can make abortion illegal. He can’t. Only the Supreme Court can do that, and they can only do it if they have a case come before them to deliberate that would end up overturning Roe vs. Wade.

But none of that is really my point, I just needed something to open this post.

Because abortion is a spiritual issue, which brings it into the front yard of not the White House, but the Church. (And we can substitute Abortion with any other moral issue that permeated the airwaves and social media during this election.) What has the Church done to stop abortion? Not to make it illegal, but to STOP it? (Because surely we are not naive enough to think that if it’s illegal, people won’t do it. We’re Christians, not idiots. Right?)

First, we need to recognize that the United States is not our Kingdom. For some, that could be a long process with God. We are the Church. We cannot cast our allegiance to something as fragile and fickle as an earthly nation. We’ve all heard it, read it, and been taught that this world is not our home, but I think we would have a hard time convincing the world of that, given the way we act, especially in an election year. But just to cover the bases, I will say it again. We are not from here. We are aliens here. Strangers. Passing through. Heading home. We need to be less invested in earthly matters and processes, and fully invested in the work of the Kingdom. And I promise you, the work of the Kingdom is not shaking your fist at the government. It really isn’t.

Time is shorter than we think.

It is time to stop fighting darkness with more darkness. We cannot continue letting fear and anxiety and our political allegiances govern our conduct, or our words. We cannot continue to hate the President and blame this nation’s woes on a political party, all in the name of God. We cannot continue to make God a “cause”. He doesn’t need us to defend Him. (Read the 38th chapter of Job.) He is God. We are His Church. We alone have the Gospel that is so desperately needed by a lost world. He didn’t tell us to defend Him, He told us to imitate Him. By living lives of love, not hatred, no matter how justified we want to make it appear. He also told us to reproduce ourselves. Make disciples. Spread the Good News, which offers hope to the hopeless.

We are in a spiritual war, and what is at stake is not our taxes or the unemployment rate or health insurance. It is the eternal destiny of every person we come into contact with either directly or indirectly. That includes our President, whether he’s pro-choice, liberal, Islam, or plays golf when he shouldn’t. God cares about where he spends eternity. Do we?

If I was not a believer, I don’t know that anything I have seen or heard from many Christians this past year would make me want to be one.

Abortion is not a political issue, or a women’s rights issue. It is a spiritual issue. Only the Church is equipped for such a battle. If we live in a nation that is so turned against God and His ways, a nation that is killing its unborn and falling further and further into moral decay, then it begs the question “what has the Church been doing?”. Because all of this is taking place on our watch.

Women are killing their babies because they are lost, deceived and desperate, not because of who is President.

Abortion should break our hearts and make us angry. It should elicit from us a desire to see justice. I believe it has done all of that, but our response has been to look to the broken systems of man to fix what amounts to spiritual terrorism against the image bearers of God. Again, we, the Church, are the only ones equipped to fight a spiritual battle.

What if we did the research and decided to be missionaries to those women who are most at risk, taking the love of Christ, and His gospel to them? What if that demographic became the Church’s mission field in this country? What if we reached them before they become pregnant? Or after. Or even after they’ve aborted?

Maybe if we will do what we were commissioned to do, less women will get abortions, regardless of how legal it is.

Because Christ changes things by changing hearts, not laws.

Go. Make disciples. Pray. Be humble. Believe. Show mercy. Love. Fight the real enemy.

Or…we could just keep doing what we’re doing.

That’s one way to not end abortion.

[Please know that I dearly love the Church, and firmly believe that she has the power to bring change. But not when she has her eyes fixed on earthly kingdoms, wielding carnal weapons of picket signs, petitions and name calling. It is when her eyes become fixed on Jesus, and she realizes that heaven and hell are real, and that what is at stake is not her comfort, but the eternal destinies of everyone around her. We must learn to put down our sticks and stones and pick up the weapons we have been given by God, weapons that are mighty for bringing down strongholds…love, humility, truth (spoken in love, not arrogance), prayer, faith, the Gospel…all mighty weapons that bring destruction to the darkness that is the root of abortion and every other evil.]

Hebrews 11:13-14; Ephesians 5:1-3; Matthew 28:19; 2Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 6:11-13; 2Corinthians 10:4

she did what she could

I cannot leave the gospel. My fingers flip pages and my eyes scan words and stories and always I am drawn back. I am searching for the heart of the One I love and He keeps bringing me back to the beginning. This is my journey. My story. Good news hammering against the rocks.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus, and the hammer came down, making my breath catch.

“While He was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on His head.

Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.  She did what she could.“ (Mark 14:3-8)

She did what she could. And against the harshness of men, He rose up protective.

This is for you. For me. For all the ones who do what they can. For the ones who hear the harshness of

not enough

too much

you should have

you shouldn’t have

The ones who long to bring what they have and just pour it out over Him because we can do nothing else.

For those of us who will never feed five thousand, but spend the last five minutes of our weary day feeding on Him.

For those who will never lead thousands into the Kingdom, but will live face to the ground praying for the one.

For all the ones who will never do great and mighty things, but who choose to put one foot in front of the other to follow Him in a harsh world.

Broken hearts broken open, poured out

Broken prayers flowing like perfume

Fleeting, weary moments given to Him

Songs we refuse to let fear silence

He will protect it all. He will honor every bit of it.

This is the Heart I found today.

measuring grace

Measuring-TapeI didn’t measure up again today. Yesterday I fell really, really short. In fact, the measuring tape hasn’t delivered good news for me in quite a long time, and today I just woke up feelin’ it, very aware of the heaviness of it.

I think God knew.

He’s been whispering “grace” to me for weeks, in various forms. Doing battle for me behind my back. This morning He thrust the sword into my own hand.

“You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?” (Galatians 3:1-5, emphasis mine)

Faith in grace. That’s where it began. It didn’t begin with me measuring up, nor will it end that way. It is by faith, from first to last.

“For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” (Romans 1:17)

Why is grace so hard for us? Why do we chase our tails trying to be good enough when we were never good enough to begin with and that’s why this whole thing started? That’s why “it is finished” was ever spoken in the first place.

I pondered all of it this morning, as I let God remove the heaviness like we remove a winter coat. I retraced back to grace and all is well because I can’t earn what is free. And it seemed good. Seemed done. But it wasn’t.

Because sometimes we drink down His grace and something in us still says “more”. Because sometimes bewitching looks different than we expect, especially when it looks like I’m not trying to measure up to God at all. I’m trying to measure up to you.

To the ones who do it all and do it well. Those of you who have self-control in spades and never struggle with sin. You, with your perfect life, perfect happiness, perfect job, perfect hair, perfect spouse, perfect everything.

You, the one who doesn’t exist, except in my wildly rampant imagination on days when the feeling of failure is exceptionally present. The days when my usual pep talk to self turns downright abusive. The days when I want to slap you, you non-existent perfect person, but instead I spend the day crying and binge eating.

And to this God still whispers grace, it is finished. On my worst bewitched days, He leads me right back to the cross, where all measuring ends, and grace begins.

Everything begins and ends at the cross. And there’s just no measuring grace.

look

I think it started in the garden. This trickery of the devil that convinces us to “look” here and then over there. I think it started there because I think he knew a thing or two; things he didn’t want us knowing.

The first daughter looked, and what she saw she believed. And what she believed she acted on. And it brought her down, and us with her. And no, she wasn’t alone. The first son was there, nodding and agreeing and taking and falling.

She looked and when she did, she believed she should and could be like God.   (Genesis 3:1-6)

This “look” thing he does? It’s designed to hit us in our vitals. Our value. Our identity. Because we look, and we feel cheated. We look and suddenly all that we have, all that we’ve been given pales in the light of what we don’t have.

Looks, money, position, peace, love, talent, home, confidence, knowledge, friends, admiration…really, must I go on? There is always more of something that we don’t have.

We see others through eyes of comparison. For some, it stirs their competitive nature and off they go to do more, be more, have more, know more. For others, it has the opposite effect. Stay home, give up, don’t even try, resign, shrink back.

The devil doesn’t care which one we choose. He knows either one will accomplish what he wants.

But he’s walking a fine line and he knows that too.

Because God also directs our gaze and permissions us to compare.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”(Matthew 6:26  emphasis mine)

writingindirtWhat if this could be written on our hearts? What if it could erase what is written there now? What if we saw, believed, and acted on the truth in heaven rather than the lie in the garden?

I heard someone say once that if you attach a price to something, people give it more value than if you give it away for free. It there is any truth in that, then what if we lived according to what we know?

That we all cost the same.

 

You, me. The one with much and the one with little. We all cost the life of Jesus, and we all received the same amount of grace. We are all loved by our Father and we all have purpose. We are, each and every one of us, seen by Him, known by Him and cherished by Him.

There is nothing we lack. Nothing we missed out on. Nothing is being withheld from us. We will know that when we stop looking around, and choose instead to just look up.

i drank from a garden hose and it doesn’t matter

“One generation will commend Your works to another…”

I am part of the generation who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. Free love that was never really free. An anti-war generation that rallied for peace while fighting an internal war by escaping down psychedelic rabbit holes.

There is so much that my generation can pass on, and we certainly do try, don’t we? We love talking about how simple life was back then. How different, how much better things were. But this morning I was struck by Psalm 145:4, and I realized that we spend far too much time commending memories that are evidently being remembered through rose colored glasses. Because frankly, many of us who grew up in that era were just messed up.

So here’s the deal. I don’t care if you know that I drank freely from the water hose, and played outside until the streetlights came on. It won’t help you to know that we slept in painted cribs, rode around without seat belts or airbags, or that kids failed entire grades in school because they deserved to fail. I don’t care if you ever know what life was like “back in my day”.

Here is what I want you to know…

God…relentlessly pursued my heart down every rabbit hole, every dark corridor, through every bad choice. He never gave up. He chased me until I was finally broken enough to stop running. Because I am not just a face in the crowd to Him. I am not just an unseen part of  “so loved the world”. And neither are you. You are not only loved, you are wanted by the Father who created you. He is the relentless pursuer of your running heart.

God…healed me on the inside. In the unseen places where I was incurably broken, He healed me. I was convinced I had little or no worth. He healed me. I was hurt and I was angry. He healed me. I had been used and discarded. He healed me. Because that’s who He is. Healer. He desires to heal the deep places in you, to convince your heart that you are worth much. Are you going here and there and everywhere trying to find what can put you back together? Are you convinced that nothing will be able to fix what is broken? I commend to you…God. You are not so broken that He cannot make you whole. It’s not too late, you haven’t gone too far, and there is no such thing as too damaged. For man, yes, but not for God. Not for your Healer.

God…gave me purpose. After years of wandering, looking for something I couldn’t define, I was left convinced that there was very little real purpose to my life. I would live and die and neither would have any impact on the earth. But as all of that began to fall away under the love of Jesus, it revealed the truth. I was created on purpose, with purpose, by my Father. My life matters, and so does yours. In knitting you together in your mother’s womb, He wove in the uniqueness that is you, the gift of you. You have giftings, talents that you may or may not be aware exist, but they are there on purpose. And the work of God, the advancement of His Kingdom, the release of captives, the healing of broken people, all of it needs you and your gifting. He has people for you to meet, places for you to go, things for you to do. You, and your life matter. You are you on purpose, with purpose.

God…gave me rest. Removing the shame and guilt that kept me running, He taught me what stillness looks like inside and out. He gave me rest from trying to earn love and worth, from Him or anyone else. Earning is a wearying business is it not? Two steps forward, nine steps back now start all over and there’s no such thing as a truly clean slate. We may have that “so what?” look on the outside, but we’re black and blue on the inside, damage done by our own fists of self-loathing and there aren’t enough Hail Marys to be said. But there is God, and His invitation is not “try harder”, but “come to Me and I will give you rest”. Rest from earning what cannot be earned, but is freely given by Him. He invites us to let our bruises heal, unclench our fists, stop doing penance for what only His blood can take away. And speaking of blood that doesn’t just wipe the slate clean, it destroys the slate all together…speaking of that blood…

God…saved me. I could comprehend that God is good, even loving. But the heart-shocking truth is that He is so good and so loving He sent the innocent to pay for my guilt, giving His Son over to death so that death could be conquered for me. So that the slate that held my record of sins would be forever destroyed, my filthy clothes would be forever removed, so that my forever would be forever changed. God pursued me straight to Golgotha, and there I discovered just how much I was worth to my Father. You are worth no less.

To the generation coming behind me, I commend to you the works of God. Powerful, majestic, fearsome. Kind, loving, merciful. Faithful and unfailing. Pursuer of hearts, Healer of broken, rest for weary. Savior.

I drank from a garden hose.

                        He loves you so much He died.

                Which is worth commending?

the right question

“What do people want?”

It’s a strategy question. Churches, ministries, businesses and lives have been designed around that one question. And that question hides a lot of questions we don’t ask.

What will make us popular? What will make us look good? What will make us bigger? What will make people like us? What will make us the most successful? What will make people approve of us?

People pleasing is rarely about other people, it’s about our obsession with us. We need to change our obsession, so that we change our question.

“What does God want?”

With that question alone burning in our hearts, we can change the world.

The gospel would be preached. Disciples would be made. We would freely give what we have been given – money and time, grace and love. Prayer would be our first strategy. Obedience would be our second.

Whether or not an altar call would offend people would be dead last.

We would rely on God and expect little from people – not the other way around. We would bend to help the fallen rather than bending over backwards to please the upright.

We would rather be pierced by truth than tickled by a lie. And we would want the same for others. The fickleness of the hearts of men would take a backseat to the unchanging heart of God. His strategy would become ours. We would decrease and He would increase. We would put others before ourselves, for the right reason.

Because we asked the right question.

“Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Galatians 1:10