Tag Archives: Christianity

confessions of a rebellious soul

This is a repost of a previously published blog post. I’ve dusted it off, added and deleted and tweaked, and now I’m reposting. Because I’m still going through this thing, and I needed to feel the weight of that. I also needed to encourage myself with the fact that I’m still in the fight. That I still want, and believe, that I can walk free from bondage. 

________________________________________________

True confession:  I’ve always hated the word ‘obey’. In all of its forms. In any kind of sentence.  Obey seemed oppressive. Controlling. Demeaning. Surely there was a softer way to put it. A gentler call to do what God wanted.

Surely it isn’t rebellion that feeds these thoughts. Surely. 

The change began a few years ago. That’s when I stopped arm wrestling my bondage to food and admitted that it was stronger than me. Much stronger. Overwhelmingly stronger. And I wept and wept because dammit I was tired. Tired of needing to be free of yet another thing and wondering when the last shackle will fall from my soul and thinking this one will be with me to the end.

Then I read  this book. Really, you should read it.

Turns out, it was step one. I had to stop pretending that I didn’t have an idol. Seriously, how can you be this overweight, this miserable, this unhealthy and think idolatry isn’t your deal?  I say you but don’t be offended. We all know I’m pointing at me. I just like saying you more than I like saying I. I think a lot of us are like that. I think it’s a thing we do. But I digress.

Another confession: I have an idol. Actually, my idol has me. Ha Ha. Get it? Yeah, I know, but if I don’t laugh I’m gonna cry and no one wants to see that. Trust me.

I saw the idol. Admitted what it was. Wished I could just wrestle it to the ground and then kill it. But that’s never going to happen. I don’t know about your idol, but I didn’t pick a weak one. No sir. This thing is the Incredible Hulk of idols.

Anyway. Then, I read about Abraham.

{Did you really think I would tell you a story that didn’t include some reference to the Old Testament? You’re new here, I can tell. It’s ok.}

“The Lord said to Abram:  Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” {Genesis 12:1-3}

Blessing flows through obedience. From one generation to another it flows through people who obey God. 

Next confession:  While I avoided the word obey, I’ve always known that obedience was a good thing. Something a Christian is supposed to do. And I did. I obeyed the easy parts. But if you’ve been following Jesus for more than an hour, you know there are hard things and mostly I just turned my head from those and pretended to be busy doing something else. Can I get a witness? It’s ok. Don’t raise your hand. This is about me and as much as I want company right now, I think you’d just distract me. Sooth something in me that shouldn’t be soothed. Excuse something I can’t keep excusing. But thanks for offering.

We’ll just move on to the next step in a process that has actually been harder than it sounds. And not nearly as glamorous.

“For just as through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” {Romans 5:19}

Adam so disobeyed and I so disobeyed, but God so loved the world and Jesus so obeyed His Father and now I am saved. Because of obedience that comes from love.

Love and obedience are holding hands and they can’t be separated and salvation flowed through obedience. From a cross made bloody by a Son who loved  and obeyed His Father, it flowed to me.

Confession number (what number are we on?): I’ve had a number of bondages, but none of them were my fault.  That’s not the confession. The confession is that I believed that lie because it was so much easier than the truth.

Every bondage I’ve had came through disobedience. Not through generational blood lines. Not through curses or entrapment or some kind of disorder. I wasn’t born that way. It is true that food addiction, and addiction in general, runs wild and free in my family line, but that fact does not remove my ability to choose differently. I became addicted to things because I didn’t say no to them. I had a stronghold of anger in me because I disobeyed the scriptures on forgiveness and dying to self. I let the sun go down on my anger for years. Seriously. Years. 

I believe it is not generational sins that caused my bondage to food, it is the fact that I have gone to something other than God to find comfort and solace.

Disobedience brings bondage. And the truth will set us free.

“I will always obey Your instruction, forever and ever.   I will walk freely in an open place because I seek Your precepts.” {Psalm 119:44-45}

Freedom flows through obedience and that’s the truth.

And finally, we come to this…

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil.” {Matthew 4:1}

You know the story. We all know that Jesus overcame temptation by speaking the word of God to Satan. Except He didn’t.

Let’s be honest. It’s just us here, so why not? It is not a lack of knowledge of the Word of God that keeps us circling the drain of defeat. It’s our lack of actually doing what that Word says. Disobedience, not ignorance, is our issue, wouldn’t you say, just between you and me?

Jesus overcame temptation and defeated Satan not just through speaking the Word of God, but by obeying it. By refusing to make bread when He was –no food for 40 days– hungry.

(I would have made the bread. I would have made bread out of every rock I could find. I would have surrounded myself with rock biscuits.)

Power and victory flow through obedience.

And that’s where He got me. Because apparently, dying from a bondage to food wasn’t enough motivation. But if you tell me that obedience is warfare that will break the back of the enemy, I’m in. Well, I’m interested in being in. I’ve long ago learned that I tend to over commit.

Confession # whatever: Here I go again. Choosing steps of obedience. I will fall and flail about while doing it, because I know me and I know this thing that is gripping me. I will not beat my idol. The only way to be free is to walk away. To obediently walk away from self-soothing and self comfort. From feeding my emotions. From trying to escape by way of the fork in my hand. (I have no idea what I’m even trying to escape, but if you know my story at all, you know that escape was my very first addiction, and that horse is very much still in the race.) I know from experience that it is harder than it sounds on paper. But I also know Jesus, and that alone gives me the advantage.

So if you think of it, pray for me. However God leads you, pray.

When the Process is Painful

Because it isn’t if the process is painful. It will always be when, and that should change how we pray.

When we pray make me holy. Make my spouse holy. Make my children holy – then we must be willing to go through the pain of how God puts holy into us. But the hard part isn’t our pain, it’s watching those we love go through the painful process of God answering our prayers for His will be done in our family as it is in heaven.

Because for God’s will to be done, ours can’t be, and a human will in the process of dying is hard to watch.

Asking God to bring a prodigal to their senses.

Praying that those we love would walk free from fear and anxiety.

Asking God for more of His presence.

We know it isn’t a magic wand that brings the answers to our prayers. It is a powerful God and a good Father, who is committed to the process of forming Christ in us.

Which means unholy things get confronted.

Prodigals land at the end of themselves and the end of self is a painful place.

Fear and anxiety aren’t vanquished, they are faced, because trust is a choice we make in the face of something that feels more familiar.

The things we surround ourselves with must be removed, by us, to make room for more of His presence.

Wounds get opened so they can be cleansed so that the healing we prayed for can come.

Can deliverance and freedom come instantly by the hand of God? Absolutely.

But staying free is a process that involves our will and that process can be hard, because our flesh has to die in order for us to stay free, and man, that hurts.

I said all that to say this –

We pray for the outcome. God chooses the process. We cannot control it, and it will do no good to pray for God to skip the painful parts.

He loves us too much to say yes to that.

One last thing…

Not all answers to prayer are painful. God is so good, so gracious, and so merciful it’s ridiculous. But when we ask Him to do a work in us, or in the people we love, that makes us more like Jesus, you can bet something will have to die with the answer to that prayer.

A painful process is an indicator that God is doing something good. Keep praying!

Becoming Less

“So they came to John and told him, “Rabbi, the one you testified about, and who was with you across the Jordan, is baptizing—and everyone is going to Him.” (John 3:26)

“…He must increase, but I must decrease.” (John 3:30)

And the question is, are we willing to learn this most fundamental truth?

Can I handle decrease, even if everyone around me is increasing?

Can I step back instead of stepping up? Can I fade, or does that thought threaten something in me, some kind of need for affirmation? Can my sense of worth handle becoming less significant so that Jesus becomes the all in all He is meant to be?

Can I resist becoming offended when people go to Jesus instead of coming to me?

In my marriage. As a parent. In friendship. In my work. In ministry. As the Church.

Am I willing to become unseen, even after fighting my whole life to be seen? Oh my. That one hits me right in the social media plexus.

This topic could be fluffed up with a lot of words, but let’s not do that today. Today, let’s concentrate on one question –

What would it look like to decrease?

Because Jesus must increase.

It can be painful, or painless, depending on how much we are prepared to become less so that He becomes more.

Who Is With You?

“But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I will be with you.”

{Exodus 3:11-12}

Moses, a Hebrew raised as an Egyptian who was on the run for killing an Egyptian, meets God for the first time in a bush that was on fire. With no small talk and very little in the way of introduction, Moses is given his calling. Go back to Pharaoh, who happens to want you dead, and command him to release the people of God out of slavery. Wow. 

Naturally, Moses’ first question was “who am I to do such a thing?”. God’s answer to Moses’ insecurity? I will be with you.

In other words, who you are is less important than who will be with you.

The truth about most of us is that we would prefer to do what we feel capable of doing. We want to find what we’re good at and just stick with that, without wandering into places that wake up our insecurities. 

The truth about God is that He rarely calls us to do what we’re most comfortable doing but rather, He calls us to do what will require us to rely on Him. 

I am with you is not just a nice thing for God to say, it is His assurance that He’ll have our back. He will be there with all of His power, all of His authority, all of His wisdom, all of His strength – with all of Him. He’s not saying I’ll be there, watching it all unfold. He’s saying I’ll be with you in this thing. We will be together.

And He didn’t just say it to Moses. He repeats it over and over in His Word, and, it’s one of the last things Jesus said to His disciples.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” {Matthew 28:19-20}

What if Moses had said no? I fully believe that God still would have brought His people out of Egypt, because He is sovereign, and His plans cannot be thwarted. However, Moses would have missed out on what turned out to be the greatest relationship any man has ever had with God.

Father, I trust You. I pray that I will not seek out only what I am confident I can do in my own ability, but that I would be willing to go wherever You send me, do whatever You ask of me, knowing that You will be with me. I don’t want to miss a thing, Lord, not one thing that You want to give me, do with me or through me, speak to me, or work into me.

Internet Theology

“I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish My covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.”

{Genesis 6:17-18}

 I recently saw a meme that said something along these lines:

God never told Noah not to invite other people onto the Ark.

On the surface, that sounds good. Very inclusionary. Unfortunately, it lacks theological soundness. First of all, it casts blame on Noah that doesn’t belong to him. Second, just because God did not specifically say something, does not mean He did not specifically imply it. He made it clear that He was going to destroy every living thing on the earth, but, He was making a covenant with a specific family – Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives. The implication is that Noah and his family were not given permission to invite any other people into a covenant God was choosing to make.

The suggestion of the meme is that it was not God’s intention to exclude people from the ark, but that it was Noah who chose to exclude. That goes down easy in a culture that is rallying around the word “inclusion” right now, and often the snowballed effect of that easy thought process is “God would never send anyone to hell”. The everyone goes to heaven and all roads lead to God theology, which bears no resemblance to the scriptures, is shaped by culture, not truth.

This is the danger of letting the internet determine what we believe about God. We end up with a god created in someone else’s image, and we don’t know the God in whose image we have been made.

Social media is full of things that sound good and it’s tempting to adopt them as truth. Beware! In the Word of God we have been given what is true, not just what sounds true. This is where our theology is built. The Bible is our plumbline against which every other thing must align itself.

Father, help us to let our theology be shaped by Your Word and not by our culture. Teach us and help us to steward well the truth You have given us. 

Living His Truth: Persecuted (the promise of God)

We will be hated.

We will be insulted.

People will lie about us.

We will be driven out of places.

We will suffer for Jesus.

Welcome to the gritty side of the gospel. The side we don’t talk about much.

You will be hated by everyone because of Me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. – Matthew 10:22

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.- 2 Timothy 3:12–13

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated Me first. – John 15:18

There’s more, but I think those will suffice for this point to be made:

Persecution is a promise from God.

That promise is full of unspoken truths, and one of those is that we do not have the right to NOT be persecuted. Our country’s Constitution makes every attempt to ensure that we have the freedom to practice our faith openly and without fear. But the Constitution is not a God-breathed document. Only scripture can claim His breath, and scripture makes us a promise that we will suffer persecution on various levels.

The culture likes to tell us that faith is a private choice, to be kept between us and our God, and we shouldn’t push our beliefs on anyone. At the same time, culture also wants total affirmation and agreement of their life choices, complete with parades and twisty pronouns.

Truth: While our faith is based on an individual relationship with God, it was never intended to be private.

Private faith has no reason to be persecuted, nor any need to stand firm. A light hidden poses no threat to darkness.

Those who boldly preach the Word of God, even the gritty parts, who refuse to condone or comfort sin, especially among believers, and who will not go along to get along. All who proclaim that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to the forgiveness of our sins and the inheritance of eternal life in heaven. Any who will boldly speak the truth when they’ve been told to stay quiet, who will worship God with their whole lives no matter who is watching.

These are the ones who will inherit this promise of God.

Lord, make us ready. By the power of Your Spirit give us boldness to live our faith out loud, to live Your truth and no other, to speak truth no matter the cost. To rejoice at being found worthy of suffering for the Name of Jesus.

“They called the apostles in and had them flogged. Then they ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go.

The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.” – Acts 5:40-41 

And if we know our bible history at all, we know this: persecution builds the Church. Keeps us from stagnating. Forces us to make a decision instead of riding an imaginary fence. Scatters us, and the gospel we carry within us, into the harvest fields.

We all want the promises of God when the promises of God feel good to us. Let’s not run from the promise that is good for us.

Selah.

Living His Truth: Unoffended

Skandalizō is the Greek word for offend, and it has a number of meanings.

  • to entice to sin (Matthew 5:29; 1Corinthians 8:13)
  • to cause a person to begin to distrust and desert one whom he ought to trust and obey; to cause to fall away; to stumble (John 6:61; Matthew 26:33)
  • to be offended in one, i.e. to see in another what I disapprove of and what hinders me from acknowledging his authority (Matthew 11:6; Mark 6:3)
  • to cause one to judge unfavorably or unjustly of another (Matthew 17:27)
  • to cause one displeasure at a thing (Matthew 15:12)

I think it’s safe to say that the opportunities for us to become offended at others or at God are many. I can count, using both hands at least, the people I have known throughout my walk with Jesus who have become offended, using most if not all of the definitions above.

Watching people stumble, enter a life of sin, or walk away altogether, is hard, especially since it is avoidable. Our offenses spring from our flesh and we have been given the Holy Spirit, who does not get offended.

Offended is our choice, not something that happens to us, or something we do that we just couldn’t help.

Mary and Martha could have chosen to be offended when Jesus did not come to heal Lazarus. They may have been hurt, but they did not become offended. (John 11)

In Matthew 11, John the Baptist is in prison, and asks what is now a very well known question:

“Are You the One who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

The same man who said “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” (John 1:29) is now saying “are You the one?” Jesus’ answer seems puzzling.

 “Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

I believe John the Baptist knew who Jesus was, but doubts crept in when Jesus didn’t do what John thought He would do. Like many others, perhaps he thought Jesus was there to start a revolution and overthrow Rome. Instead, He was going to “the least of these”.

It seems to me that Jesus’ pronouncement of blessing on anyone who doesn’t stumble because of Him, was also a warning to John. It’s Me, John. I am still the One. Don’t get offended because I am not doing what you expected of Me.

I think we need to hear the same warning because so many of us are waiting for Jesus to “restore to us the kingdom” by overthrowing a government and leading a great political revolution. Or perhaps we’re waiting for Him to give us what we want. To make our lives comfortable, fulfill our dreams, and help us succeed in all of our plans.

Instead, Jesus is still going to the least of us. Healing, bringing us back to life, and telling us the good news that we can be saved from our wretchedness. He is sanctifying us, often by fire, to rid us of our impurities, our selfishness, and our idolatry. Turning our ways into His way. And sometimes, as in the case of Mary and Martha, it can look like He’s not doing anything at all, when in fact He is about to show us the glory of God!

It’s Me, Church. I am still the One. Don’t get offended because I am not doing what you expected of Me.

We may get our feelings hurt. We might get angry at God and for sure one another. But when we choose to be offended we have chosen something far more serious, and dangerous, which is why I think Satan’s goal isn’t hurt feelings in the people of God. It is to encourage us to be offended. And the deeper the offense, the better.

The truth is, Jesus is still the One, His Word is still true, and His ways are still higher than our ways. He is still the head, and we are the body.

We cannot be offended at the body, without being offended at the head. I’ve known people who have said “I love Jesus, I just can’t stand Christians.” Or, “I love Jesus, but I don’t want anything to do with the Church.” The truth is, Jesus will never separate Himself from His Church. We do that, and it is always based on an offense.

We are His Church and the command still stands to walk in love toward one another, to forgive one another, and to consider others above ourselves. To pray together, walk together, serve together, and worship God together.

Bottom line: The whole world is offended these days, and the enticement to join them in it is strong. But we are not the world, we are the Church.

We can choose to live unoffended.