His Mercy

The weekly Bible study I attend is nearing the end of Matthew, and as we're closing in on the betrayal, arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus, I am reminded once again how little we human beings deserve salvation. If one disciple responded to Jesus' arrest with violence, if all the disciples fled the garden at his arrest, if Peter denied Christ not once but three times, how can the basis of our salvation be our behavior?

Source

Paul's letter to Titus reveals his understanding of the human condition. We want to control our lives and judge others, we want to puff up in pride, and we want all glory, laud, and honor for ourselves.

We want credit.

Christ didn't go to the cross because we are worthy of His sacrifice. He went because He loves us with a perfect love. When we experience that love and accept its truth by acknowledging Christ as our Savior, we are simultaneously aware of how undeserving we are and how abundantly blessed we are.

Our salvation isn't about us; it's about God's perfect love seen through Jesus Christ.

Of course, when we come to faith in Christ, we must let that abundant love flow into our words and deeds: faith without works is dead. But righteous works are the product of salvation, not the labor that earned it...and therefore, we should not boast.

Instead, let our lives humbly testify to His mercy and love.

Thanks be to God.


Reflection:
Recall a time in your life when you felt utterly aware of God's mercy for you. Reflect on that feeling of both being unworthy and simultaneously a beloved child of God. How can you tap into that gratitude for salvation and share it with others who are hurting or hungry in spirit, mind, and body? If you haven't felt God's mercy in this way, if you feel unworthy or unforgiveable, pray for understanding and talk to a pastor or Christian friend. No one is beyond God's mercy. No one.

Building Up and Giving Grace to Those Who Hear

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. Ephesians 4:29


Last week, I read an article from 2014 reporting research showing that strong, successful marriages have one thing in common: both spouses speak kindly and respectfully to each other...even when they disagree. In unhappy marriages or marriages that ended in divorce, one or both spouses speak unkindly, and their bodies show stress when talking with their spouse even when they seem to be calm on the outside. Their heart rate and blood flow are elevated and their sweat glands activate in preparation for a "fight or flight" response. This sort of conditioned response to another person--especially one you've vowed to honor and cherish--is extraordinarily unhealthy.

Scripture tells us repeatedly to use our words carefully and kindly. The book of Proverbs offers up numerous nuggets such as these three:

• "A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." (15:1)
• "Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body." (16:24).
• "Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits." (18:21).

With scientific evidence now proving Proverbs' assertion that our bodily health is damaged by unkindness in marriage (and most likely in all our close relationships), we have even more incentive to watch our words. Relating unkindly to a spouse or parent or child or roommate or coworker adds to your stress, which weakens your immune system, jeopardizes mental health, and can even shorten your life.

Given this, what possible advantage do we gain through unkindness?

Yet every single person speaks unkindly at some time. James 3:8 gives us a rather humbling condemnation of the tongue: "...no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison." Convicted. How many times have I resorted to aggressive or passive-aggressive comments? How many times have I expressed dissatisfaction or disapproval of a family member who isn't behaving the way I think he or she should? How many times have I had to apologize for words spoken thoughtlessly or hurtfully?

Ugh. Too often.

Matthew tells us that after the Pharisees criticized Jesus for allowing his disciples to eat without washing their hands, Jesus "called the people to him and said to them, 'Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person'" (15:10-11).

What applies to spoken words also applies to written words. That's one reason I haven't posted much lately. I've felt far too much frustration and anger, and have been tempted to vent publicly. I've started a number of posts, only to delete them when I realized how negative, how potentially hurtful or insulting they were. There's enough poisonous negativity on the internet these days, and Christ calls His followers to behave better than that. In Luke 6:45, Jesus says, "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks."

What does your heart produce abundantly: good or evil?  My own heart has been slipping lately toward evil.

Last Sunday's sermon at my church was delivered by a wise layperson in our congregation, and his words were abundantly good. Kirby recalled that wonderful feeling of starting a new job...the excitement and enthusiasm and commitment to learning how to do our best work. Over time, the newness and enthusiasm wear off, and we can get burned out, tired, distracted, and negative. Our faith life, Kirby said, is like that job. When we burn out and let petty stuff distract us, we turn away from God.

God doesn't leave us...we shut Him out.

As Kirby spoke, I saw the to-do lists, the worries, and the frustrations of the past year or so pop into my mind's eye, scrolling like junk code on a computer screen. I realized how acutely those stressors have been distracting me from God. Kirby pointed out that we need to be born again in the spirit not just once, but over and over, and I remembered that repentance isn't a one-time act...nobody is that perfect.

By intentionally recommitting to God when we are tired and negative, we can push out the evil of self-pity or hatefulness or anger, and let the Holy Spirit fill us again with enthusiasm and joy.

Kirby's message fell on fertile ground.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians that our words should build others up, and as a writer, I have needed to remind myself of this. I am drained and diminished when I use words to tear others down, to express anger or frustration. When my words are kind, spirit-filled, loving, patient, full of grace and mercy...that's when I build up others and also when my own spirit lifts and feels healthy and harmonious.

Aware of what my exhaustion and distraction have done, I humbly commit (once again) to sharing words of grace with you here.

With God's help, may it be so.

Are you tired today? Have you been filling up with negativity and worry and anger and frustration? Have you slipped into self-service instead of God's service? How can you reconnect with God, grow in your relationship with Jesus, open yourself to the Holy Spirit?

We Can't Save Anybody

A woman once said she knew she had saved at least two people by bringing them to Christ, but she wasn't sure that was enough to get her into heaven.

God keeps score? Is that what Easter tells us? Or is that what the world tells us?

The world tells us we have to achieve, we have to make the grade, we have to be somebody. We need a stellar curriculum vitae, we need to score more points than the other guy, we have to perform at the top of our game, fulfill our potential, summit the mountain...or we're nobody. If we live in the wrong neighborhood, have the wrong job, drive the wrong car, go to the wrong college, have the wrong major, wear the wrong clothes...we're nobody.

My earthly father once told me, "No one remembers who finishes second."

My heavenly father tells me, "My Son died for you."

The world told this woman she had to save a certain number of people--an unspecified quota--or she would burn in hell. Perhaps you've encountered this attitude of earned salvation yourself. Perhaps you are gay, or you got divorced, or you have a tattoo, or you don't belong to the right church, and someone made you feel ashamed and inadequate. A twelve-year-old girl once told my son he would go to hell because he wasn't in church every Sunday. My college roommate was told she would go to hell by her Pentecostal boyfriend because she was Catholic.

These judgments are based on what the world tells us, they incite fear and shame rather than trust or faith, and they work against God's glory.

God is the judge, and His mercy is boundless. Thanks be to God!

Easter teaches us that it's not our job to save anybody. That's God's job, and He already did it. When we start thinking we have to do something spectacular to earn our salvation or that salvation hinges on a particular prayer or practice or accomplishment we must perform...that's when we forget what Easter means.

God Self-Limited, in the form of Jesus, came to an earth so broken and sinful that it could never get itself out of the pit. But God loved us anyway. That love, that blood shed on the cross...it's done and cannot be undone. When we truly understand the depth and breadth of God's love for us, in our bones and hearts and heads, our only sensible reaction is gratitude and humility. We know we don't deserve to be loved so much. We will never deserve it. We can never earn it. And we can never expect others to earn it or deserve it, either.

God created us so He could love us and so we could love Him, each other, and ourselves.

That's the point: Love.

We aren't here to save other people. We are here to love everyone, to pour God's abundant love into the world and onto the hungry, the sad, the angry, the naked, the sick and hurt so that His love can feed, encourage, soothe, clothe, heal. And as people are fed, encouraged, soothed, clothed, and healed, they see God at work, the Spirit moves in their hearts, and they learn what Easter means for them.

We just have to be conduits for God's love. And as God is our witness, that is so very hard. It takes a lot of work to love some people, a lot of grace and mercy and forgiveness, and sometimes, we just don't have it in us. People will be so unlovable. You will be so unlovable. I will be so unlovable. We will always finish second to Jesus.

And that's just fine. We are, after all, Christ-followers. The best we can do is obey his new commandment, to love one another. By that, we glorify Him. By that, others will be drawn to Him.

We can't save anyone. We can only love them. The rest is up to God.

How have you encountered humans judging you in God's name? Did it lead you to God or separate you from Him? What led you to God? How were you brought to know your salvation? Who loved you all the way to faith?  How can you love others to faith? 

If you have doubts or shaky faith, know that we all do at times. Talk to your pastor or any pastor or Christian friend. If you meet with judgment, find someone else to be that conduit of love for you. 

He Lives!

Lent is now over (feel free to eat chocolate again), and today begins the Easter season...50 days to celebrate that He lives. Note the present tense. He lives. When people challenged Alfred H. Ackley on this point, he wrote a hymn as his answer. In case you're not familiar with "He Lives," the refrain goes like this:

He lives, He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!

He walks with me and talks with me along life's narrow way.

He lives, He lives, salvation to impart!

You ask me how I know He lives?

He lives within my heart!

How will you celebrate this living Savior over the next 50 days? Will you let Him live in your heart, lead you through the stormy blast, see His hand of mercy, and hear His voice of cheer?

I hope you and I will both open our hearts to celebrate Easter for the whole season, and not pack it away with the Easter baskets and plastic eggs.

Happy Easter.

Lent

The story of Easter is complicated and weird. Just try explaining it to someone who knows nothing about Jesus or God. Your story might sound something like this:

Well, Jesus, who was God made flesh, rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, all humble, while people sang hosannas and waved palm branches because they thought he had come to over-throw their Roman oppressors, and then a few days later, he ticked off the Jewish leaders, so they had him arrested and tried by the Roman leader Pontius Pilate. The same crowd that had welcomed Jesus with hosannas a few days earlier now shouted to Pilate to crucify him. Crowds are fickle things, aren't they? Then, Jesus died in the most humiliating way the Romans had devised to save us all from our sins, and after he was buried in a borrowed tomb, he was resurrected and visited his followers a number of times before finally going back to heaven, until he comes again in the final days.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Really?

Even people raised in the faith who celebrated Easter every year with rousing choruses of "Up From the Grave He Arose," struggle to make sense of this reckless, boundless act of love. The idea that God died for us, to cleanse us of our sins, makes sense when put into the context of the whole of the Bible, but how many Christians spend the time studying the full story to see the full scope of God's work that culminates in Jesus? That's a lifetime study, and no blog post can explain all that. I'm not even going to try.

What I do know, in the depths of my heart, is that Jesus was born for every one of us. He died for every one of us. And he had a message for us that gets repeated through John's gospel account of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and its aftermath.

1. At the Last Supper with his disciples, Jesus said: "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." John 13:34-35

2. While hanging from the cross, "[W]hen Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, 'Woman, here is your son.' Then he said to the disciple, 'Here is your mother.' And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home." John 19:26-27

3. After his death, when he meets his disciples on a beach, he tells Peter three times: "Feed my lambs."

Love each other. Take care of each other. Sacrifice for each other as he sacrificed for all of us. That's the message Jesus wanted to make sure his disciples heard. God so loved the world that he poured love out onto the cross for us. When we accept that unimaginable, complete, and total love, we must pass it on. We can't dam up that kind of love in our hearts...it overflows abundantly.

I wish this were the message of Lent.

Too often, Lent is about giving up chocolate or coffee or Facebook, as if something we can do will save us. Until recently in history, Lent coincided with a time of shortage and conservation of food, a time of hunkering down, doling out wrinkled apples from the cellar, an annual and necessary reduction of consumption while people awaited the early crops. It wasn't so much of a choice back in the day as it is now.

If you find those sorts of sacrifices helpful to prepare you for Easter, certainly don't let me deter you. We all get to the cross differently. But please don't stop with giving some luxury up.

To prepare us to celebrate that free and unearned gift at Easter, we should add something to the world that's starved for salvation. Let's feed the lambs, help our neighbors, love one another in ways that shout to the world that we follow The Lamb of God. During Lent, Jesus' example and words invite us to engage more deeply with his new commandment, to add to the love in the world, to move the world one step closer to kingdom life.

Is there a better season to recommit to sacrificial love all the days of our lives than Lent?

How are you feeding his lambs? Do you need to be more intentional in seeking out and caring for the hungry and those in need of love? Are you listening to the needs of others and responding in love? Pray during this season particularly for a heart like Jesus' heart, one that acts in love and shares the joy of salvation.

Different Practices

As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. Romans 14:1-23

Have you ever experienced someone telling you that you're not doing Christianity right? Perhaps someone has told you that you read the Bible using the wrong translation or a wrong method of interpretation, or you worship wrongly because your church doesn't celebrate communion every week or because your church does celebrate communion every week. Perhaps you don't attend worship service often enough to meet someone's random attendance requirement or you do attend worship but not Sunday School. For shame! Perhaps it's because you drink wine or beer or liquor, or you utter the occasional (or not so occasional) cuss word.

Who, in fact, decides what is right and what is wrong in religious practice?

When it comes to religious practice, I think it's important to figure out what is helpful for us and what is not. If we were raised in a church that strictly forbade tattoos, for instance, we might look upon ink as a defacement of God's creation...or we might rebel against what we're taught, seeing it as just another form of self-expression. Does God really care about a little (or a lot of) ink when people are starving and enslaved and murdered?

I honestly have no idea how God feels about tattoos, nor do I care because I will never, ever have one myself. Needles! Ewww!! But certainly tattoos, as with any form of self-expression, can signal all sorts of things...good and bad. Concentration camp victims were tattooed with numbers on their arms; we can (I believe) safely assume that this was a bad thing done to them, not something that will damn them to hell. We had a baby sitter who had a Bible verse tattooed on her foot...in Greek, no less, which made it a talking point for her to share God's word. I doubt that sort of evangelism will keep her out of heaven. People with swastikas, satanic symbols, and hateful speech tattooed on them likely won't miss out on eternal glory just because they got tattoos, and if they repent of hate and turn to God in love, I think God's grace and mercy are powerful enough to wash clean the stain of sin.

My point: Religious practice is on the outside. God looks inside. If we want to be in right relationship with God, we should figure out those religious practices that keep our hearts focused on Him. These might differ from person to person, and we need to follow Paul's advice and not judge others for doing what it takes to strengthen their faith.

For me, one thing that keeps me growing in faith is regular Bible study in Christian community. I've been attending a weekly class for six years now, and it's transformed my thinking in so many ways, helped me to understand things I didn't understand before, and discover new things in scripture that I never knew or thought I knew but got totally wrong.

Years ago, I listened to a relative vent about Bibles. "People whose Bibles look new aren't good Christians," he said. "Real Christians mark up their Bibles. The more tattered the Bible, the stronger the faith!"

Hmm. Having grown up in the Methodist church, I was taught from a very early age that never, ever, under any circumstances should I mark in or write in my Bible. I should treat it with respect, never put other books or papers on top of it, and never, ever put it on the floor. All these things showed disrespect to God and His Word.

As a result, my main Bible, read and studied so intensively over the past six years, still looks relatively new. It's an Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha in the New Revised Standard Version translation with a soft, oxblood-red leather cover that's soft as butter and smells like a library. My mother gave it to me and had my name put on the front lower right corner in gold. I have other Bibles, but this is the one I use the most. It has the highest quality binding of all my Bibles and lays flat open whether I'm reading Genesis or Revelation.

The gold on the page edges retains its shimmer despite frequent thumbing, and the pages are crisp and clean, definitely unmarked. Okay, yes, there's some wear of that gold edging on the bottom corner where it's rubbed in my book bag, and the fine leather binding has worn a bit on the corners as well. The two ribbon book marks have picked up a bit of oil from sliding between my fingers. But by my Bible-defacing relative's standards, it's hardly been cracked open. By his standards, I'm not a Real Christian.

Who is right?

Does it matter?

Not according to Paul. Let not the one who marks up Scripture pass judgment on the one who does not, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who does not abstain. We are all weak in faith in some way or another. Whatever we do to bolster our faith, when we do it for love of God or our neighbor, He will be well pleased.

You are invited to share a time when your religious practice was criticized. How did you defend your practice? Did the criticism help you or hurt you or just make you realize we're all different? Do you judge others for their tattoos or type of worship or biblical interpretation? Are there times when that judgment is just?

Another New Year

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature:
old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV

We crave newness. Unspoiled freshness. New car smell. Peeling the protective plastic off an electronic device. Puppy breath. Baby powder.

Newness feels...hopeful, promising, alive with possibility.

Newness hasn't made mistakes.

Yet.

Newness hasn't been soiled by carelessness or ignorance or cruelty.

Yet.

Newness feels perfect.

I'm the queen of new year's resolutions. I've resolved for years...and failed to follow through a lot of the time. The weight doesn't come off. I still lose patience too easily and too often. My house doesn't stay tidy and organized. It doesn't even start being tidy and organized.

These failures have lead me to rig my resolutions so I wouldn't fail by resolving to do things I already do. Yay, I learned  and created some things last year! Go, me! I won!

The newness we gain in Christ, however, is different. What does this mean..."if a man be in Christ"? Well, it means giving your life to Him, surrendering your sin to Him, opening your heart to be filled with His love and to let His love flow through our hearts and hands and into the world, where it will make other old, broken, hurting hearts new, whole, and healthy.

We don't make anything new. We are conduits of Christ's healing love and grace and mercy in a broken and soiled world.

The purpose of newness in Christ isn't a smaller waist or cleaner home. The purpose of newness in Christ is relationship with Him, seeing the world in His eyes, and relating to that world in a new way.

In Christ, we can do all things that are good and righteous.

How will you see the world through Christ's eyes? How will you be a path for His love to flow into the world? How will your new year's resolutions reflect your gratitude for His salvation, given to you unearned and unmerited, freely and abundantly?