Social Media Musings Vol 6: Sabbaths, Psalms, and the Kingdom

4/4/18

I have this prayer that I pray each day when I read the Scriptures. I made it up a while back – it helps me to keep the right frame of mind because it is so easy to turn Scripture reading into an intellectual exercise, a goal to get to the end once more, something to achieve. I remember once, about 17 years ago probably, I was reading for hours a day before the babies woke up, and I used to just love it, it was still all so new. But the years go on and reading through became a way to get knowledge that I could wield like a sword. For a long time, God stopped me cold in my tracks and I just couldn’t read the word at all – I was doing violence to it in the way I was reading it – as something to be conquered.

So, I have this prayer now:

Lord, let me never strive to conquer Your Word, as though it was a mountain to be overcome and added to my bragging rights of conquests, but please, conquer me through Your Word.

It changed everything. I get more out of it spiritually than academically now.

4/5/18

Dad and the Sabbath.

It can be hard knowing how to respond to folks who object to commandment keeping (well, only a few commandments are objected to, if we are really honest), and sadly, most folks just get super defensive about those objections when it is unnecessary. I stumbled across a novel solution once during a visit from my wonderful Father in Law, who is in his 80’s – a lifelong faithful Christian man.

The fact that we keep the Sabbath really bothered him. Our Friday night Sabbath meal bothered him. It was different from what he was used to and he protested as we were beginning because it looked “Jewish” and these words popped out of my mouth before I even knew what I was saying (very gently and genuinely);

“Dad, is it a sin to observe the Sabbath?”

He thought about it and said no. I smiled and told him that we should all just enjoy it then. He was surprised when our prayers included Jesus (we changed from Yeshua to Jesus so he would understand who we were talking about, no need to be cryptic and no good fruit to be had by being so) and he recognized the taking of bread and wine from communion at his church.

Next morning, he had forgotten it was the Sabbath. He wanted to get some work done around our new (to us) house that did need some repairs. I swear that man will die on his feet, he is just part of that work until you die generation. You have to literally take him on a vacation to get him to put down his hammer. I love him dearly and respect him. He is a loving father, father-in-law, and grandfather. But he really wanted to work on the Sabbath and it was hard for him to remember that we don’t do that so, we drove him to Yellowstone, and we had a wonderful day there, not working – in a totally non- “in your face” manner. He kept the Sabbath, but in stealth mode. We need to know what battles are and are not winnable, and be clever as serpents yet gentle as doves.

People are where they are and I can tell you without a doubt that if God told Dad to keep more commandments, then he would die endeavoring to obey. Dad just needs to be reminded sometimes that keeping a few more commandments than he does isn’t sinning, nor is it standing in judgment of him. He needs to be reminded in a respectful way, and only when he asks about it. There is no grace in nagging one’s elders, or judging people who are keeping what they know as best they can. It is our commission to seek and save the lost, not to try and convert people who are already converted, because of differences in beliefs over a few commandments. Yes, they are important or I would not be keeping them, but people know what they know and understand what they understand and bullying them and/or getting defensive is not good fruit, nor will it produce good fruit! I have never seen anyone bully another person into a true understanding, but I have seen people manipulated into doing things that they later gave up and decided were worthless beause their eyes were not yet opened to it.

Things are a mess right now – we didn’t create the mess but we do live in the midst of it. Let’s clean up our corner of us and become excellent in our character before we seek to nitpick others – I can actually guarantee that good character puts an end to nitpicking pretty quick as the kindest and most godly people I know, the people who practice zeal in the correct way, those who image Yeshua/Jesus the most accurately – they just don’t do it.

It just takes a few quiet words in a non-sarcastic or defensive tone, “Am I sinning in keeping this commandment, in doing this thing?” Generally, people haven’t actually thought of it in those terms before. It takes the edge off. They need reassurance that we are still faithful to God and our beliefs are practically identical to theirs, and that we aren’t trying to earn God’s love. We don’t have to justify ourselves, and we don’t need to get defensive, we only need to point out that, in fact, the Law is not sin – just as Paul pointed out in Romans.

We also have to remember that there are many people out there surpassing us in commandments that we keep at a low or moderate level and they may well look at us and count us as transgressors for going light on a commandment that they pursue with much zeal. Much of this is about perspective, maturity, growth, and genuine awareness – and awareness comes from God. It’s a gift. Missionaries are aware of the commandments in a unique way, as are those who work on skid row – they have a measure of grace to understand and excel in commandments that, compared to them, I am practically breaking. Much grace is required to live among one another in humility.

4/7/18

How the Sabbath and the Psalms Reveal Us

I am about 2/3 of the way through NT Wright’s The Case for the Psalms and it is a different kind of book for him. It is an apologetic for the use of the Psalms in everyday worship and for the past 12 days, I have taken his challenge and I have to say, it has been wonderful. I have experienced greater intimacy in prayer afterward, and they challenge my character in a way that simply reading them on my way through the Bible, or studying them from a context perspective, just doesn’t accomplish.

On the Sabbath, I read only praise Psalms, so I start out with Psalm 92, which was specifically sung by the Levites in the Temple every Sabbath day, and then I also focus on the “back of the book” Psalms – all the ones near Psalm 150. Sabbath is the one day that I try not to present my personal petitions to God, unless there is an emergency – and that’s just a personal decision on my part, not something I am forcing or endorsing. I will pray for the persecuted church, and for others, but I leave my own needs out of it. Sabbath is about Him and about His Kingdom. Which reminds me of something that Richard J Foster, a Quaker theologian and expert on prayer and discipline, said:

“In his ‘Rule’ Saint Benedict insisted on regularity in prayer because he didn’t want his followers to forget who was in charge. It is an occupational hazard of devout people to confuse their work with God’s work. How easy it is to replace, “this work is really significant” with “I am really significant.” With a profound understanding of this, Benedict would call for prayer at regular intervals throughout the day – right in the middle of apparently urgent and important work. We, too, will find that a commitment to regular prayer will defeat self-importance and the wiles of the devil.” – Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard J Foster p. 72-3

Sabbath is also like this, purging us of our self-importance and the devil’s ways, but only if we resist and refuge to do our own works. Our works are so deceptive, they seem so righteous. Railing and gossiping about, and mocking at sinners publicly! Really? That’s boorish enough on normal days, really just preaching to a self-righteous and critical choir who have forgotten God’s mercy, but when we are to be resting and worshiping? Inexcusable. Lovingly reach for them during the week, but don’t tackle the Kingdom as you would a 9 to 5 secular job in advertising, Hollywood, or the legal profession. Good rule of thumb – if you are treating people like Hollywood treats the people they disagree with – you are not doing Kingdom work, you are simply white-washing the world’s methods by applying them to a different subject matter – a subject matter that should never even touch the world’s methods.

Seeking out the Kingdom way is counter-intuitive and never seems right to our flesh, which is combative by nature. Our flesh wants to win, on its own terms, without any sort of radical inner character change towards being loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle and self-controlled. I have been at this for so many years now and still, my first desire is often to fight for the Kingdom by kindling a flame on the Sabbath day. Those of us who don’t commit the obvious sins on the outside are often still the greatest sinners on the inside – and the inside sins are those which turn us into murderers at some point – and always in the Name of God, right? We find ourselves persecuting Him during those very times we feel the most assured that we are fighting for Him – because our hearts are still desperately deceitful and wicked. But as Yeshua/Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “My Kingdom is not from this world.” Make no mistake, His Kingdom is for this world, just not of it. It cannot be seized violently as can the kingdoms of men, it has to be infiltrated by replacing evil with goodness, cruelty with kindness, hatred with love, factions and dissensions with brotherly unity, self with selflessness. The list goes on.

The Sabbath should be our training ground, it should be the day that our inability to be those good things should appear at their most glaring. It is a day when we should surrender ourselves to God so that we will do better – not next Sabbath, but all next week. We cannot suddenly have good fruit on the Sabbath if it was bad all week – Sabbath is just a tool for revealing who we really are – if we can stand to be peaceful, loving, and patient with others all day, or if it makes out skin crawl. It is a day to carefully consider all our own works and to rededicate ourselves to finding out what is God’s work in God’s way, and what poor substitutes we have been peddling in His name.

Shabbat Shalom.

4/10/18

I had something stunning happen.

About two weeks ago, I prayed something that it had never occurred to me to pray before. I asked God to show me if there was anything about me that was pleasing to Him. I spend a lot of time in prayer, fasting, study, and meditation on my actions focused on becoming more conformed to His image, which, by necessity, can be a negative focus on self. Not morbidly negative, but I believe in evaluating my behavior, thoughts, and feelings as honestly as possible.

So, He had to show me an area in my life – how far I have come and yet how far I have to go. So He showed me in His regular way, not heavy-handed and condemning, but by just gently opening my eyes to the situation. I was very sad that I was still representing Him badly in this way, and as I was repenting for it, I told Him that I knew He wouldn’t show me anything that He wasn’t getting ready to help me clean up because I experientially know that about His character.

At that moment, it was like there was this very intimate meeting of the minds, where He had shown me that He knows and is committed to me and I had shown Him that I know and am committed to Him. Needless to say, it was the meeting of a very insignificant mind with an omnipotent mind, but it was one of the most intimate experiences of my life. And in that moment of me truly “getting” who He is and His purposes and character in revealing sin to us – that was very pleasing to Him. He wants to be known by us. He doesn’t want our picture of Him to be muddied by the worldly models that we use to try and describe Him. When we come through to a core understanding of a part of His nature, that delights Him to no end. We were created to know Him and be known by Him – and it is an ongoing process.

Yes, he is described as a Father in Scripture, but that doesn’t mean He should be tainted by our often twisted ideas about fatherhood. We have to take that idea, that conceptual seed, and be willing to see beyond it and come to an understanding beyond our wildest dreams. Throughout Scripture, God spoke through the writers in order to give us beginning concepts that would help us begin to relate to Him, but should never completely define who we think He is. Yes, He is Father, but He is also unlike our concepts of it. He is beyond our definitions. As I said in my book The Bridge, years ago, He is the reality, and what we have here on earth are mere shadows. Some shadows are less dark than others, but they are still just shadows.

And so, do I please God? Yes, I please Him when I see who He really is, even in one tiny little area. He knows how hard it was for me to come to that understanding, how I battled year after year to seek Him out. Everyone desires to be known and loved for who they are – and God is no exception.

4/11/18

John 14:12 “Amen, amen I tell you, he who puts his trust in Me, the works that I do he will do; and greater than these he will do, because I am going to the Father.”

What could be greater than raising the dead, walking on the water, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, curing lepers?

The one thing that Yeshua/Jesus never did, the most important of His works – taking the Gospel to the nations. We look upon it as nothing, because it doesn’t look like we have been given super special secret powers, but given the choice between raising the dead and curing the sick, and bringing the power of God’s resurrection and New Creation into people’s lives… wow. The first is undeniably more impressive by the standards of the world and I imagine more profitable financially – but we aren’t supposed to look at the world’s standards.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness…”

This Kingdom was made to swallow up the entire world, as per the prophet Daniel. Preaching to the choir about how terrible unbelievers (or just those who disagree with us on doctrine) are isn’t doing a thing to promote the Kingdom or to add to it.

Have we become utterly useless and distracted by a scolding and critical spirit? Are we now hated for His Name sake or is He hated for our name’s sake?

4/12/18

Sometimes the most profitable thing we can do spiritually is to break free, even in a small way, from someone who is controlling. I can track some of my greatest times of growth to right after the setting of boundaries, taking responsibility for my own life and learning to just say no to people.

Controlling people are generally unaware that they actually are controlling. They do what they do for reasons that seem good and beneficial, but they have a tendency to project their needs and desires onto everyone around them. They don’t see themselves as pushy, or critical, or demanding, or as bullies – they generally think of themselves as helpful and sometimes even protective. Truth is that controlling people are generally fearful and not in control of their own lives – but here’s the deal, “control” over our own lives is an illusion. No one can guarantee that a tractor-trailer truck isn’t going to come smashing in through their front door any moment. No one can safeguard against cancer striking a loved one. We cannot prevent drunk drivers from crashing into us, or identity thieves from stealing everything we have. We can’t avoid frivolous lawsuits. We cannot prevent our reputations from being destroyed through gossip. We cannot guarantee that our kids will grow up to be good people and not monsters.

All we have is God and our trust in Him that if those things do happen, that He will walk us through it. And that trust is what allows us to let go of our need for a neurotic level of control so that we can live and serve Him, without overstepping anyone else’s rights or boundaries. Controlling behavior, by definition, is about distrust. It’s destructive, and it hampers the growth of ourselves and those around us. Nothing in life is guaranteed, and that is part of the beauty of it. It requires us to trust in God, and not in our own efforts to control our environment.

4/13/18

One thing I love about the Psalms is how they just eradicate self-righteousness.

So often I hear people bragging about their blessings as though they are rewards and not gifts. But the Psalms readily admit that the wicked are sometimes rich, have a house full of kids, and die in their sleep in their old age, after a healthy life. The Psalmists always question why, as do we all, yet presents no illusionary world where the good always receive good and the wicked receive only evil. In a world like that – there would be no need of endurance and faith.

I think of people in oppressed countries, who are caught in the active war between the New Creation world and the Old – they know persecution, and loss, and suffering – just as Messiah said they would. Here, where even the poor live in relative luxury, we credit our prosperity to something related to our obedience and deservedness. We act as though God pre-emptively caused us to be born in a prosperous, Christian nation because He especially wanted to bless us. But that’s like saying that people deserve to be born smart, athletic, or pretty and woe to those who aren’t. The Kingdom doesn’t operate that way. The least will be the greatest, and so those in this world who are blessed ought to humble ourselves and be grateful.

Today I am married for 27 years, and that is a blessing. Yet, am I greater than a woman whose husband left her for another woman? Am I more favored in God’s eyes than a widow? After all, I was never able to bear a live child, so am I cursed or blessed? Maybe it is more complicated than we want it to be, and perhaps we measure blessings along very convenient lines.

The Psalms set things straight. Those who know and are known to the Lord are blessed eternally, and those who do not know Him are blessed in this life because His creation is good and it can’t help but bless us. After all, the rain falls and the sun shines on the righteous and on the wicked – it can’t help itself but be exactly what it was created to be.

4/14/18

How do we seek His Kingdom on the Sabbath? We refrain not only from work, but our works, our fears, our agendas, and from any compromise with the ways of the world in how we go about Kingdom business. If our behavior on this day is bullying, manipulative, borne more of fear and a need to control than love, full of name-calling and presumptuous judgment against people who do things differently (for reasons we cannot be entirely sure of, despite our desire to assume the worst), then we might as well go and work a 12 hour shift because it would be a better witness than being online indulging in the works of the flesh with all of our anger, dissensions, factions, envy, jealousy, and strife.

If we want people to be more like Yeshua/Jesus, then we need to give them a clear example of how different He was than the people picking fights with Him – on the Sabbath, no less. We need to learn self-control and kindness, and let go our ranting and the controlling of others.

Be painstakingly kind, and only then will people listen intently to you on those occasions when you are forced to rebuke. He or she who rebukes without ever having encouraged is nothing but a clanging cymbal, and there are many people who appear to be believers but who have simply found a new way of “proving” that they are better than everyone else. A big part of being a believer is coming to the understanding that we are actually not better than everyone else, and in fact, our own faults start seeming larger than life. The smallest of our faults begin to seem bigger than the gross sin of others who are in deeper bondage. It should create in us an awe of God and a gratitude for His mercy, so that we can pray for those people who are “not where we are” as I would hope people would pray for us when we are “not where they are.”

Be gentle, joyful in the knowledge of your salvation, and mindful of our Kingdom and Covenant obligation to be peaceable, forgiving, and compassionate.

4/17/18

So many Psalms telling us to be silent before wicked people – probably because it is the last thing on earth we want to do, right?

But think about it – people who are cruel don’t play fair. They make rules for conversation and interactions (both in person and behind the back) that people with good fruit (or who are struggling for good fruit) just can’t live by without compromising the witness of our King. Like spiders, they create intricate traps that can hardly be avoided, or even anticipated.

in the end, it is always the same when conversing with such people – you end up waist deep in the mud he or she drew you into, or you just refused to engage in the first place.

I remember a dream almost 2 1/2 years ago where I was pre-emptively warned of such a trap, and I was shown the mud. It was on a farm so it wasn’t all just mud! I couldn’t set one foot on the place without being ankle deep. I was flat out told to keep away – there would be no victory for me if I set foot there.

It was (and has been) an excruciating situation and journey. I have had to trust God with my reputation – which is easier said than done. So easy on the outside to say, “What do you care what people think of you?” But even Yeshua/Jesus asked, “Who do people say I am?” The Psalms are positively drenched in lamentations about ruined reputations and those who trample a man’s honor without a second thought. We live in an era where not only are people angry, not only has their love grown cold, but social media has provided quite the voracious audience for their rantings and underhanded attacks.

And yet, in those lamentations over damaged honor, the theme always returns to, “I will trust God, who will make all things right.” When people slander another person (especially a brother or sister) wrongly, the slander does land squarely on God, and we have to remember that, so that we don’t do it in return. Depending on the person involved, God may have to handle most of or the entire situation – because there are those within the Body who attack without conscience or remorse, and listeners who love to live vicariously through their cruelty while pretending to be above it all. The only thing we can generally do is to try and manipulate them into feeling bad about it – which is a fool’s errand.

I know it is hard, guys, but stay out of the mud. Stay clean. It wasn’t so long ago that I had someone approach me privately who had believed years worth of lies about me – they came to me apologizing because those years of watching me had proven the charges to be without merit. God does take care of us, but we make that job nigh impossible if we are covered in mud that we willingly descended into. It may not seem like much to have one apology when hundreds, thousands, ten thousands or millions believe the lies – but from the standpoint of the Kingdom, waiting for vindication means that God has less of a mess to clean up.

We have to trust God, and His plans for His Kingdom, more than we love our immediate reputation. Sometimes we have to go through a season of humbling and allow Him to kill our flesh, at the same time that He is preparing a fellow servant for severe discipline. Sometimes, like the Amorites, a person’s iniquity is not complete enough for them to be dealt with. I know how far I had to fall before I was willing to utterly bend the knee and accept the Lordship of God in my life – and that hasn’t been just a one-time thing.

Some brothers and sisters are in such an ugly place that they really have to sink into deep trespasses against their fellow servants before they can be broken and used by God. Sometimes they have what looks like a lot of fruit, but it will never ripen, or if it does, it will be the wrong sort of fruit. That is God’s domain because only He can see the truth of it.

Our job is to be in constant prayer so that we will know when to be silent, and when it serves to Kingdom (and not just our pride) to speak out in our own defense.

4/18/18

Crucifying our Reputation and Grievances

God has really been teaching me deep things about His Kingdom at night and I am so ashamed of how we behave towards one another – grieved at how much damage it does to the Kingdom and the witness of our King. Not only in what we say and think about one another based on this or that doctrine or whatever, but also how mindlessly we retaliate when wronged (or when we feel wronged), only thinking about ourselves and not about what effect it will have on the Kingdom. And everything that adversely affects the Kingdom has a cost in real people’s lives.

What is my life, or my reputation, compared to furthering the Kingdom? Why do any of us feel like we must have justice NOW, or God has failed us? We were told to expect persecution, even (and sometimes especially) from brothers and sisters in the faith. We were warned – it was part of the price tag of our redemption, but we want easy lives PLUS we expect to inherit the world to come, as though there is no more evil in the world, either out there or at work in our own flesh and the flesh of everyone around us.

We are not seeking first the Kingdom if we are more concerned about our immediate comfort than we are about how our actions will impact His Kingdom. His Kingdom is our salvation, but now that we have it, are we unconcerned with those who don’t? Everything we do either grows the Kingdom or caused stumbling blocks. Growing the Kingdom costs us, a lot. But that’s the greater works we were called to do – not raising the dead and working miracles, but becoming what NT Wright calls “Passover people” – people who live and breathe in order to prosper and champion God’s works in the world. We are called to the radical works that defy evil through love and good fruit, not to the worldly works that are simply dressed up with the Bible but use the same tactics as the devil. We cannot bite, devour, and destroy one another and claim it is done in the Name of God and in the service of His Kingdom. As Paul told the Corinthians, isn’t it better to be defrauded by a brother than to bring the shame of it before the entire world? Social media has made every little battle the business of the whole world, to our shame. To God’s shame.

When two believers go at it publicly, it is a shame to the Kingdom. When one believer attacks another, it is a shame to the Kingdom – but the one attacked has a choice to make. Does that person trust God to deal with His own wayward servant or do they retaliate and cause a larger scene? Tell me, if it was your children in the grocery store, which would you choose? Your response would be to tell them to stop, that you would deal with it, and then later, as and when appropriate based on ages, and maturity and such, you would. You wouldn’t let it slide, but parenting is complex. Just try being God…we owe it to Him to wait upon Him and not make our grievances public except in extreme cases, and only then with prayerful caution, in fear and trembling and not as a knee-jerk reaction.

People have been asking me about the books I have been reading lately, and these two have been impacting my prayer life immeasurably, both by Richard J Foster, a Quaker theologian:

Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home

Celebration of Discipline.

Both books contained a lot of what I have always done naturally, but there were some methods of prayer that I was unfamiliar with that are reaping big rewards.



Social Media Musings March 20-27 2018

3/20/18

I am not a fan of memory verses.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big believer in memorizing Scripture, but verses out of context can be worse than nothing at all – because out of context they can seem to mean the exact opposite of what they actually mean.

Let’s look at the oft-quoted “I am the Lord, there is no Savior except me.” It pops up a lot throughout the Tanach/Old Testament and is a favorite among those trying to get people to deny Yeshua/Jesus as Messiah. Because we are a religious society trained to take verses, by themselves, at face value, and because most folks do not read Scripture end to end, over and over again – some people don’t understand what it means and are led away to their own destruction.

There has never been any Savior except God, obviously, but how does He save? Well, usually when there is a verse like that, it is being used as a slap in the face of adulterous Israel or Judah who is paying some foreign nation to come to their aid militarily. God says to them, “Hey! Remember Me? I am your Savior! Not them! They can’t save you!” As they would strip the Temple treasuries to pay for foreign chariots and soldiers – well, we can all see how ridiculous it was, and what lack of faith it represented, Without turning to God, there can be no salvation at all, not through anyone. God was repeatedly having to remind Israel of that fact. They weren’t going to win a battle simply because they were paying off Assyria or Egypt to protect them.

How does He save? Well, by Joseph’s own words, God sent Joseph ahead to Israel to be a savior during the time of famine. During the Exodus, He did great works through Moses and Aaron – He saved the Nation through them and worked miracles through them. During the time of the Judges, he sent Judges to save Israel from their enemies. Throughout Israel and Judah’s history, He saved them through angel armies, through natural events like rainfall, through this and through that. In these last days, He has saved us through His one unique Son.

But, out of context, as a mantra or a memory verse, not taking the whole of Scripture into context or how God chooses to save time and again – it looks like Yeshua cannot be the Savior, only God can. Well, as you can see – that’s not the Scriptural view. We see HOW God CHOOSES to save.

Truly, we have no Savior but God – but though He is the author of our salvation, He sends saviors and, finally, a Savior to do His saving. Never allow anyone to confuse you based on any verse, and especially if you are not extremely well-versed in the Bible from beginning to end. If you have tasted salvation, then you know it is real. As God told me on the night I came come to denying Yeshua, “What will you have to CHOOSE to FORGET in order to deny Me?” This is why we are commanded, over and over again, to remember and recount His deeds. Write down your testimony – read it often! Do not forget your first love, how you came to salvation, how real it is. The changes worked by God through His Spirit because of faith in the Son, and not just by you through willpower. Remember what evils you have been delivered of – and be humble. You didn’t accomplish that by yourself. Do not deny so great a salvation. If you have trouble remembering what you knew so well at first, ask the Spirit for wisdom.

But don’t allow people to come in and take you as one of their trophies. And I am going to say this very plainly – it is through Christianity, because of faith in Yeshua, and not because of Moses, that a world once utterly dominated by paganism and abject cruelty is now a more righteous, just, and compassionate world. Yes, there are still problems – but crimes once commonplace and legal are now unthinkable. Why? Because the Cross changes everything it touches, including the unbelieving world – where even atheists now care for the poor and oppressed. In the first century, no one cared for anyone except their own limited clan. Yeshua changed that – not Moses, and certainly not some sort of godless social evolution. That’s the proof of the New Creation inaugurated at the Cross. When we take the long view of history, the change is evident. All glory to God, through His Son Yeshua.

3/24/18

What was Yeshua/Jesus saying no to when tempted?

I am nearing the end of Watchman Nee’s The Normal Christian Life – haven’t been writing much about it because it is quite complex and I have not been up to the task, but this morning I am making an exception. Honestly, I haven’t agreed with him on everything, and some of it irked me, and then after sitting on it a few days, or more, I started to see where he was right, or at least more right than I gave him credit for. That’s the stuff I am still mulling over and can’t write about yet. But this morning I wanted to write about something I read last night:

“For even with all these experiences, we are still unsafe for him to use until this further thing is effected in us (God’s working out of our salvation at the deepest level of the soul). How many of God’s servants are used by him, as we say in China, to build twelve feet of wall, only, when they have done so, to undo it all themselves by pulling down fifteen feet! We are used in a sense, but at the same time we destroy our own work, and sometimes that of others also, because of there being something undealt with on the Cross.”

I am a firm believer that God only gives us the level of ministry we are mature enough to handle at that time. When I see ministers, and people in general, fall into gross sin (which Scripture, time and again, equates with sex, greed, and slander) or tearing people down instead of building up Messiah/Christ and His body, I know they either reached for more than they could handle, or took more than they should have when tempted.

Years ago, there was a ministry ran by a bunch of people who were way too new to minister. There was a lot of zeal there, but no depth because there just couldn’t be. I was asked multiple times to come on board and God never even gave me a chance to pray about it – one of those “smacked across the head with the holy 2×4 of discipline” moments. It appealed to my ego to be asked, but once I thought about it, I knew I lacked the skills for that type of leadership – and I still do. The offer for this or that has come again and again many times over the years and my answer is always no. I have literally watched ministry, out of season, destroy and drive people crazy – including two of the people who initially asked me to join with them. Ego takes over, people get drunk with the power that naturally comes from being listened to and agreed with and egged on. Having an audience has a way of bringing out the worst of our demons before we are capable of conquering them. Remember when Joshua and the children of Israel went into the Promised Land? God told them He would not drive out all their enemies at once because, if He did, the wild animals would be too numerous for them. He does that with our dysfunction too. Little by little, year by year, He heals and equips us. We must be humble like little children and wait.

Anyway, social media has become religiously toxic for this very reason – people are tempted with an audience that they may not have the ability to cope with, and they do not yet have any good fruit to represent God’s character adequately. They may just have a lot of charisma, which is an outworking of the flesh and very dangerous when left unharnessed and unbroken. The result is that they go the easy route – they rant and rave, they get controlling and insulting, they make mountains out of molehills, they slander and live in a state of offense, or they may just destroy their “competitors” behind the scenes. They lack the proper level of depth in that season of their lives and so they cannot step back and re-evaluate when challenged, they attack character instead of admitting their own faults, and they take disagreements as an affront against God Himself. As Watchman Nee wisely pointed out, they tear down whatever they have built, as well as the building of others.

I was watching an interaction the other day – it involved someone who I have been watching for years who has made a ministry out of publicly disagreeing with people, sometimes honestly and sometimes not, and I couldn’t help but think that this person is wasting what gifts they have (which are considerable) in an attempt to gain a bigger audience. It makes me sad, not only because of their wasted potential but also because they are ruining the perfectly valid work of others in an attempt to be more than they are honestly ready to be. Slow and steady may not win the race with a jackrabbit in real life, but we aren’t called to race with rabbits. We are called to bear the image of God’s character in this world. That takes more than spewing Bible verses, a lot more. Even the enemy can quote Scripture – as we saw in the Temptation in the wilderness.

And that was the point I wanted to come to. Each of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s temptations involved proving himself to be the Messiah NOW, to be the ruler of the kingdoms of the earth NOW, to be acknowledged NOW – to not have to go through any sort of waiting period, and especially not persecution and crucifixion. It is the greatest temptation of ministry, to be big before we are very small – to imagine we are big when it is God who either is or is not big within us. For that matter, it is a terrible temptation to see a “big ministry” as more important than a “small ministry.” I speak of big and small in terms of worldly standards here, and not according to how things look in God’s eyes,

All this is to say – resist the temptation to grab for more than you have been given. Allow God, and not men, to give you what He knows you are ready to handle. Do not desire fame, and especially do not crave influence beyond your ability to represent God’s character to a lost and dying world. When ministers fall, and when they fail and lack the integrity to fall back and admit error, it does such damage to others. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. We should heed the warning against becoming stumbling blocks – and a hateful experience with someone who claims to be God’s representative is the biggest stumbling block of all. Better to be a bit off on your doctrine than to butcher His character for the world to see. We should constantly and genuinely be asking for those refining fires, and then we must submit to them and not presume that the devil was the one turning up the heat.

There are more ways to be great in the kingdom without fame, and without an audience, than there are ways to be great through fame and influence. Yeshua knew that – He was even constantly telling people not to blab about what He had done but to give credit to the Father. Fame followed Him, and killed Him and thank God He had the maturity to handle it. Thank God He had the maturity to deal with the nitpicking of those within the leadership who wanted to tear down His wall, while mistakenly believing that they were building their own.

Tearing you down does not build me up.

Matt 23:12 Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Don’t reach for anything – except greater refinement. When you get that right, you will be handed greater responsibility, and then it won’t so easily destroy you and others.

3/25/18

Expectations of suffering

So much of our bad fruit, the works of the flesh, is rooted in a lack of faith. We really don’t believe in the world to come where everything will be okay, our tears will be wiped away, that everything we have done here will be worth it. We get sidetracked, panicked even, because we are focused on getting what we want, what we feel we deserve, and receiving justice. We long for the upper hand in this life, but we weren’t promised that – serving Messiah often means that, in this world, we have to revel in being on the bottom rung, being wronged, being slandered, etc…

When I see people going wrong, it is because their flesh and souls are kicking against that. Satan tempted Yeshua into having the upper hand “now” – and it is a terrible form of temptation. We resent the friction of this life, and we often feel that we (like the older brother of the prodigal) deserve better for “getting it right.”

Yeshua, our Master, showed us that things don’t work that way. He is our model, our tavnit, our blueprint. Good fruit comes when we stop being offended that we suffer, when we stop figuring that we deserve better. That’s a snare of the enemy – we are so concerned about being treated well that we can’t be used effectively. So concerned with having everything our way that we don’t see His way in the midst of it.

That’s where the works of the flesh originate – envy, jealousy, slander, divisions, arguments, outbursts of anger, gossip, greed, and the like.

We figure that we deserve X… and that makes us worldly – and X isn’t just stuff. X can be control, or a receptive audience. or credibility that we haven’t earned, or whatever.

Thank God that none of us are truly receiving what we deserve.

3/26/18

“If Caesar and the dark powers that stood behind him were to be confronted with the “good news” that there was “another king, Jesus,” the community that was living by that message had to be united. This would of course be a differentiated unity (“God’s wisdom in all its rich variety”; and we may compare the vivid lists of ministries in I Cor 12 and Eph 4). But if it was all differentiation and no unity, Caesar need to take no notice; they were just a few more peculiar eastern cults come to town.” – NT Wright, Paul: A Biography, pg 324

The early church (the first three centuries) accomplished what it did because of unity – unity that they needed to have in a hostile world. They built the first hospitals and orphanages, and the first societies for the relief of the poor. Women soon learned that they were safer under the umbrella of Christianity than living as pagans, and the same can be said of children (especially infants), the poor, ethnic minorities, and slaves. They could accomplish it because they saw themselves as a united front, working for the cause of King Yeshua/Jesus, right under the nose of Rome. Unlike the zealot party in Jerusalem, they did not operate through violent revolution, but instead through the administration of love and good works. They honored those whom Roman society swept to the side, and they served the least of these. Within a few hundred years, Christianity had almost completely supplanted paganism in the Empire – not through syncretism, which history proves didn’t actually happen until closer to the end of the first millennium, but through carrying their crosses in everyday life. Like leaven mixed into three measures of flour, the Kingdom of Heaven was violently clashing with the kingdoms of the earth – through love instead of violence.

In a hostile world, that isn’t a one-person job but a many person job. They needed one another. The problem nowadays is that we are deceived into thinking that we don’t need anyone else, and that we can sit at home pontificating online to strangers (if anyone is even listening) and reading the Scriptures privately instead of doing the weightier matters alongside our brothers and sisters. I know the arguments – we want to be of one mind, but the problem is that we demand a one-mindedness where it is our mind that must be duplicated. No, what must be duplicated is a mind that believes first and foremost in “Christ, and Him crucified” and we have to learn to get over the discomfort of having folks disagree with us on other things.

Frankly, the biggest challenge in the Western church is a lack of real persecution – we have grown lukewarm to the point that we feel it is a sort of zeal to avoid other believers who simply disagree. That isn’t a spiritual zeal, that’s just conveniently avoiding anyone who disagrees with us, we have wrapped our self-centeredness, our desire to feel safe and comfortable, in a deceptive cloak of righteousness. The end result is nothing, zip, zilch, nada – we are getting nothing done. Oh sure, we have our own personal testimonies, but we can’t stand against the Caesars of our day because, instead of a united Body of Messiah, we look like a body caught in a bombing. pieces lying everywhere, separate and powerless.

In Brother Yun’s The Heavenly Man, he talked about when that happened to China. All of a sudden, groups and people who had once risked their lives for one another were splintered and suspicious and contemptuous of one another – not because of Messiah and Him crucified, but over this or that other thing. Make no mistake, everything, absolutely everything, is less important than our mutual belief that the Son of God was crucified, buried, and rose again. This week especially we should be mindful of it.

So we have disagreements on other things. They have to take a back seat. Heck, we can’t even influence people with whom we are unwilling to speak and meet with. Our government, our leadership, our culture is what it is because of us, and not in spite of us. We are too fractured to fight the good fight – and so instead we fight each other, and you know what our master said about a kingdom divided against itself. We cannot stand – we can’t stand each other and so we cannot stand against the enemy.

3/27/18

Accusers or Redeemers?

As per God’s laws, we ought to diligently search out a man’s vindication before we seek to believe the accusation. What kind of people are we? Heartless gossips or redeemed sinners? We ought to ask ourselves, are we more like the satan, accusing others endlessly before the throne (make no mistake, ALL accusations from the mouths of believers end up before the throne), or are we like our Lord, who refused to act even against Sodom before personally investigating the matter?

We are not wise enough to read a headline, and often even a full story, and know whether or not to believe the accusations. We do not have the discernment to know the truth without personal investigation – and how often we prove it!

And if we have sinned by posting an accusation, which is then brought into doubt or disproven, our responsibility as Passover people, who have been redeemed from the slavery of sin – is to apologize and retract. If we do not then do not be fooled, the accuser will have the right to accuse us, and the right to be heard when he does it.

This isn’t a game – we are playing with other people’s lives. We ought to fear God – or at least be grateful that He hates listening to accusations about us and love our neighbors in the same way. We ought to make Him look more like He is – merciful, and less like He is not – quick to accuse and judge.

We can tell more about ourselves from where our minds immediately go when faced with appearances and what we do with those thoughts, than from all our posted Bible verses and spiritual talk.



Social Media Musings Vol 4: Praying for Modern Untouchables Part 2

Continuing on from last week

Day 9 – January 10, 2018

What Kind of Repentance am I Praying for?

I guess this requires a teaching about what repentance is and is not.

Repentance isn’t merely feeling bad and deciding not to do something ever again. True repentance has to be restorative in nature.

In the specific case of what I have been praying for, when I ask that a child molester be brought to repentance and salvation (so that they would stop offending), I am actually praying for that man or woman to not spend their time in a perpetual pity-party guilt trip, or to just wipe their slate clean and walk away happy. Forgiveness and repentance don’t work that way. Yes, there must be remorse – how could there not be considering the horrific and lifelong impact of this specific crime on their small victims? However, there also must be an accompanying yearning for justice. In order to love one’s neighbor, one has to be prepared to see restitution for that neighbor when they have been harmed, and not only that, to come to understand that their victims deserve some form of justice. There needs to be an acknowledgment of the damage, and the need for consequences.

If a murderer came to salvation and had gone unpunished, it would be wrong of them to keep hiding from the law, leaving the loved ones of their victim without the peace of closure and justice.

No, my prayers include justice – which will probably include jail time – if their victims decide to press charges (which is their absolute right). Salvation frees us of eternal condemnation, but not of our temporal consequences or our obligation to do what is right. Molestation hangs over the life of the victim, usually permanently in one form or another, and so the perpetrator cannot develop the attitude that they can just walk away. So they get saved, great! But a salvation that sees no problem in turning aside justice for the oppressed is a sham and self-serving.

Victims tend to live in the fear and dread that their molesters are out there harming other children, and it is very difficult to emerge from that little child mentality that marked the moment of their attack when certain portions of their psyche were stunted. In order to heal and grow, people often need vindication – even though true vindication cannot be had in this world because nothing can return them to who they would have been if the violation had never happened in the first place.

Also, former molesters have to realize that they knowingly committed a crime that would make them a pariah in this world, and so their ongoing lives are going to have to reflect the humility of the Cross. That is their cross to bear. They have to make peace with it – as I have said before, no one on this earth is entitled to restoration on their own terms, but we as Christians are obligated to forgive.Forgiveness and restoration are entirely different animals.

Day 10 
I was furious all night (story linked in the text)
 
I saw the headline and it gave me so much hope – a pastor got in front of his congregation this last weekend and admitted a “sexual incident” with a teen, apologizing. I admit I didn’t notice that the word “incident” was there, at first. I was too excited at the prospect of a man coming forward and repenting.
 
I found out quickly that I was wrong. It was 20 years ago, when he was 22 and she was 17 and they attended the same church.where he was the youth minister. Instead of driving her home, he drove her to a dirt road where he used his influence to convince her to perform oral sex on him. He’s a good-looking man, and at that age, it is easy to mistake something like that for an opportunity to have a man love you forever. I can attest to that personally. Only, after she finished, he begged her never to tell anyone, to take it to her grave, complete with tears.
 
She wasn’t able to keep her shameful secret for long and she told the elders, who asked her to keep quiet and her molester was celebrated at a huge goodbye reception before being sent away for an unnamed mistake. No one gave her the dignity of having sin labeled as sin, she became a non-entity who was part of a “mistake.”
 
So she kept quiet for 20 years – can you blame her now? This is why women don’t come forward. Children don’t come forward because we were trained to believe that adults’ word will be taken over ours.
 
So, she wrote him an email on December 1, confronting him about what he had done. Good for her. He never even had the decency to respond to her.
 
When it became evident after a month, that he would not respond, she posted the story on a blog for abuse survivors. ONLY THEN was he forced to act, and instead of contacting her, he delivered an apology to his congregation this last weekend, who gave him a standing ovation.
 
But he didn’t tell them the whole story – he didn’t bother to tell them that he had failed to give his victim the dignity of an answer to her painful email, and Jules flatly denies that there was any apology to her and her parents. I wonder how the women in the congregation would have responded if he would have said, “The woman emailed me five weeks ago but I just let the email sit there, bygones be bygones, not sure why she is still so hung up on this but she is making a big deal of this by going public, so now you have to know.”
 
He used her, he abandoned her without a word, and then he deprived her of her dignity once more by completely ignoring her – not even an emailed apology. I think he feels badly about what HE has done, but I don’t think he feels badly about what he did to HER, as his pattern of behavior suggests. The idea that he and the church are willing to work with her NOW, five weeks after her initial email, when they categorically ignored her before that, rings hollow. It would appear that they were hoping she would just vent steam and go away.
 
I share this because of a common feature among pedophiles, narcissists, and critical people, is a focus on self. One of the things I have been praying for is that child molesters would develop a love for others, one that outweighs their childish need for gratification at any cost.
 
Yes, he was young – but he isn’t young anymore. He should have grown a deep sense of compassion for her by now, and when her message showed up, revealing how deeply in pain she still is, his heart should have gone out to her. After all, his wife already knew. The church board already knew as well. But again, sometimes our confessions are only to relieve our sense of guilt without really caring a whit about the people we hurt.
 

.

Day 11

When God Saves

The famous John 3:16 just exploded in my head last night. For God so loved the world…

It became clear to me that when God saved me from my sins, He saved the world at the same time – from my sins. My salvation wasn’t just about me, about me getting a personal relationship with God, about me having eternal life, about me, me, me. My salvation was about transforming me into the type of person who no longer thought it was okay to be critical, cruel, hostile, insulting, impatient, and prone to fits of anger anymore. That saved the world from who I was, so the world would no longer be under the constant onslaught of my unsaved self. Not that the world doesn’t suffer sometimes still, as I a not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but my sin footprint is much smaller.

Hence, the commandment to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us, so that God can save them, and us, from their sins as well. That should pretty much motivate us to pray for anyone and everyone. Unless, of course, we like the consequences of their sins.

Shabbat Shalom all.

January 13, 2018

I think of the Sabbath as a sort of hospice for the weak and weary, those who are in need of God’s rest, a taste of the world to come (which is, you know, everyone), and as such we can behave in one of a few ways:

(1) we can choose to act the way we act every day, just without working.

(2) we can act like mental ward patients, stirring up dissension over our agendas, and actually impede the healing of others through treating them badly in the Name of God (or whatever our version of it is).

(3) We can cooperate with, and assist our creator in this process through acts of radical kindness, peacefulness, and gentleness.

Which do we think will be counted as Sabbath-keeping?

Day 13 

Finding the balance between hope for redemption and the need for justice

On Friday I had become certain that I had allowed the Andy Savage incident to steer me off course and distract me. However, I was missing an important piece of the puzzle. Before praying for the repentance and salvation of sexual predators (so they will stop claiming new victims), I was a little ball of pure hatred with fantasies of vengeance. I wanted them to all die in their sins, and never considered the very real victim toll that would result because of that – not a toll in terms of predators being victims, but new children being victimized. Of course, God showed me that price tag was not acceptable to Him and now it is no longer acceptable to me either – I would see them all saved and redeemed before I would consent to the violation of even one more child. I imagine that if you could look at the child, and if you had the power of that choice, you would come to the same conclusion – we cannot sacrifice even one on the altar of wanting retaliation at any price – not if there is another possibility in some cases. So I pray. It is for God and the offenders to determine who will come to life and who will die in their sins.

And so I have been praying, and somewhat softening. I was concerned that I would soften too much, and lose my sense of outrage and my desire for justice (salvation does not erase the effects of sin on the victim nor the earthly consequences earned by the offender). Fortunately, this violation of a 17-year-old youth group student by her youth group minister, 20 years ago, and his narcissistic response to the situation – well, it allayed my fears. If anything, I am far more concerned with actual justice than I ever was. Before this, my mind was set on revenge and not justice, I was angry and was displaying bad, yet understandable, fruit. Justice requires wisdom, discernment, and peace, while I was blinded by fantasies of revenge. Woe to the person falsely accused if they were placed under my care…

But I lacked balance. I didn’t want it. I wanted it easy. Nothing is easy. If we do not pray for our enemies, they will keep sinning against people. Bottom line. The only cure for sin is Yeshua/Jesus and the Cross. The salvation of our enemies is the price we must all be willing to pay in order to put an end to their sinning against ourselves and others – and that goes for any type of sin.

The world is taking care of the revenge bit – the guy lost his publishing contract, and the respect – maybe not of his church, but of the world. I would be shocked if there were not picketers outside of his mega-church this morning. Most Christians worldwide are standing on the side of his victim. Sadly, what he did in Texas was immoral and unbefitting anyone in a pastoral position, but not illegal, although in 17 other states it is illegal for any clergy to have intimate relations, consensual or forced, with any parishioner under their care. I am praying that all 50 states will soon have that law on the books. Perhaps they could call it Jules’ Law. I encourage you strongly to contact your state legislature and apply pressure to get such a law on the books. I will definitely be adding this to my prayers, and actually, I would love to see this become a national law. It is horrifying to think that the Body needs secular guardrails in order to prevent activities that are already outlined as sinful in the world – but it is what it is.

Tomorrow I want to talk about how sin compromises the lives of everyone, on both sides of the equation – and sometimes most especially those close to the sinner.

Day 14

How Sin Compromises Everyone

You’ve heard the platitude/slogan – “Love the sinner/hate the sin” and you all know how I feel about platitudes – if a platitude or slogan is all you have to offer, then best say nothing at all.

I hate this one, not because it isn’t true, because it is, but because we don’t know how to do it – so saying it is practically meaningless. Overwhelmingly, our tendency is to be partial, and not impartial, in justice: we can’t hand the same sentence out to our sons, daughters, mother, father, spouse, friend, etc. as we could to a stranger. This happens because the sins of strangers can be met with a certain level of cold objectivity, whereas our love for certain people tends to lessen the severity of their crimes in our minds. When it comes to family members or, as we have seen lately in the case of Highpoint Church in Memphis, OUR pastor, we are biased, and often to the point of blindness. Instead of loving the sinner and hating the sinner, we adopt a different mantra of unequal weights:

Love the sinner, enable the sin.
Love the sinner, ignore the sin.
Love the sinner, say the sin isn’t really so bad.
Love the sinner, cover up their sin.
Love the sinner, blame the victim.
Love the sinner, wait – is he really even a sinner here?

Whereas those who love the victim have a less complicated mantra:

Hate the sin, hate the sinner.

See Tom. See Tom Sin. Tom needs to burn in hell. Does anyone have a match?

You see what happens? Tom sinned against an undeserving victim, and then the effect of his sin made transgressors out of many. Tom’s sin compromised everyone.

Ever wonder why certain sins in the Bible carried the death penalty? Because they were the kinds of sins that set loose this terrible kind of transgression within the community – they destroyed the unity of God’s people. We can hardly help ourselves but to fall onto one or the other side of any crime where we know the participants. Sin poisons everyone. We want, in our flesh, to condemn or to excuse that which touches us, and not in a reasonable way, but in as extreme a way as the feelings the crime engenders.

This is why crime is so horrible – it taints the lives of everyone. There is never just one victim. Everyone is a victim – the only question is, to what extent?



Social Media Musings Vol 3: Praying for Modern Untouchables

This is crazy, if you had told me a few weeks ago I was doing this I would have growled at you and called you insane, a liar, or worse. I might have spit at you (okay not really, but I would have been grossly offended). But then God shared something with me that I, as a teacher of children, could not ignore. It is almost futile to just sit around hating child molesters while knowing that they aren’t going away, that it is a generational sin, and if I am not part of the solution then I am part of the problem. Most will never be caught. If they were, the prisons aren’t big enough. God isn’t going to just kill them all en masse – even if I wish sometimes that He would. Since the Cross, God has dealt with evil primarily one way – by transforming it through the power of the Cross. The exile from the garden didn’t wipe it out, even the flood just limited it for a while. So, what did He ask me to do that was so unthinkable? That I need to explain step by step. If you would like, you can start out by listening to this interview on the power of radical forgiveness that unexpectedly segued into this unexpected topic – but if you don’t want to spend the time (hour and a half), you can read the daily journal below. And by the way, I am moderating ALL comments now. So if your comment is incendiary or insulting, it won’t see the light of day – and I won’t read very much of it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS8Tu1bEIW4?feature=oembed&w=1080&h=608]

January 1, 2018

This is a risky thing to say because people might not read the whole thing and get offended – but when has that ever stopped me before? This year I am going to spend a lot of time praying for the repentance and salvation of child molesters. Yes, I know, you want them dead and in my heart of hearts, I sympathize. I have prayed for God to kill them all at once, only to retract it, thinking of how many car accidents, plane crashes, whatever – would happen all at once. It’s the old “you have three wishes” scenario where people end up destroying the world based on good intentions.

We all know that God is not going to kill every child molester any more than He is going to strike down every malicious gossip, or any other kind of murderer. So what’s the alternative? Do we want their eternal condemnation so badly that we want them to die in their sins? Do we really understand the consequences of that? Their eventual eternal condemnation means only one thing – more victims. More children molested, bottom line. More child sex slaves. More child porn. That’s the price of their not repenting and coming to salvation.

About 17 years ago, as a new Christian, God challenged me on this and it has taken all this time to even begin to get my head screwed on straight about it. I pray for their repentance and salvation because I love children more than I hate them. I would have every single one on earth saved before I would have even one more child violated.

A lot of times, we don’t understand the justice of God. He is more concerned with eradicating evil than He is in condemning sinners. Evil is only eradicated one way in the post-cross world, and that is through repentance. Repentance leads to salvation. Salvation leads to transformation and reconciliation. And that is a tough pill to swallow – it is why radical forgiveness is so offensive to our flesh. We want people like this to burn forever, right? I am on record as wishing the US Government would have the death penalty for child molestation and rape, just as it is in the Bible, but that’s not our reality.

We have to deal with reality. Reality is: no repentance leads to more victims. Eternal vengeance vs salvation is really going to be measured in a higher victim count.

Will any repent? I don’t know. But if I am not praying for that, and none repent, what will be my culpability in the victim count? I believe that prayers work – and even if only one, only one repents, there will be untold children saved.

So, that’s my big goal for 2018 – to strive to protect children by focusing my prayers on the salvation of their greatest enemies. Truly, if we want child molesters to suffer – I imagine that the suffering they would endure as believers, having to face their sins and hopefully, make restitution and confession, would be pretty terrible.

***

After a long, agonizing, and prayerful day today spent searching my heart, I have decided to fast and pray for 40 days. It won’t be my first time, and I fast relatively often for various amounts of time without ever saying anything about it. But some things I have been reading about in “A Chance to Die” have me thinking a lot about my calling to teach children, and although I have prayed often that God would allow me to impact every child on earth for His Messiah – it occurs to me that I would like to pull back for a while and pray for the spiritual bondage to be broken in the lives of those who victimize them. Some demons can only go out with prayer and fasting, and I imagine that anything that could override a human’s natural protectiveness over children for the sake of a moment’s pleasure has to be something akin to that. I posted about why I have been praying for these people this morning and did a radio interview where I talked about it last week (I will post it in the comments) but I feel a seriousness about this. I plan to ask God for a soul on the first day, two on the second, four on the third, and so on. As things stand now, I am not able to ask for the sake of the molesters, but for the sake of the present and future victims they will continue to harm if they are not delivered. If we, as a people, do not protect our children then our love has grown colder than cold.

I am letting you know this because I am planning on journaling through this process on my wall, day by day. Also, if you all know about it, I won’t succumb to the day 20+ boredom and decide to start eating again. Yes, I know when my weak spot is – when I am no longer hungry but bored to death. Eating is more entertaining than you might imagine – even to someone who fasts quite often and even for extended periods. The only reason I will seriously consider stopping is if I start having TIA’s or strokes again, and I have been okay since December 7, so I ask prayer support on that so I will be able to do it.

I just feel so strongly like I need to do this. I don’t even begin to understand this.

January 2, 2018

Day 1 – The Reluctant Missionary – 128.2 lbs

Although it is hard to believe now – the great missionary to India’s children, Amy Carmichael, did not enjoy wide support back home for her efforts. Can you believe there were actually people who were angry with her? She should have stayed home with the D.O.M (Dear Old Man) who had effectively adopted her to come and live with his family. He would die of a broken heart without her, after all (he did not). She should have stayed closer to home. She should have continued working with the poor back home. She should have…and the should have’s tragically kept people from praying for her efforts.

The call of God rarely sounds sane to those who have not heard the precise instructions. We are quick to judge, and even quicker to condemn and dismiss – but only time will tell what God has and has not instructed.

Sometime between 17 and 19 years ago, as a new Christian, God issued a challenge that provoked me to lash out at Him in anger:

I was listening to a local radio show in a small, southern Idaho town, and the hosts were talking about homosexuals. I remember the one host said that he would like it is God would put “them” all on a boat in the middle of an ocean and then put a hole in it so they would all drown. I was outraged – where was his decency, any sense of mercy? I quickly shot off an email to him and went back to my work in the lab. As I was muttering to myself, I heard God respond in what I call His “loud inside voice.”

“I can’t believe anyone would have that kind of hatred in their heart!” I muttered.

“You mean like your hatred for child molesters?”

The message was in so quickly– my defenses had been down because my offense was up. I heard what I heard clear as a bell, and I was angry about it for a long time. As with every incidence in my life of hearing this particular voice, it has always left me without argument. I also can’t just dismiss it or ignore it, The voice has always been right, painfully right, even if I didn’t understand why. I disagreed with and resented the unspoken message, and I still do, but I knew then it was right as I know it now.

Yes, I hated child molesters, and much of me still does. I am not going to detail my own story here, or the things in my life that have happened since that day in the lab. Some of the story is mine to tell, and other parts belong to others – I cannot tell their story and to tell mine would be counterproductive.

If God was merely pointing out and congratulating my hatred for child molesters with a divine “high five”, I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit offended. But there is always a message within the message – and, in this case, the message was terrible:

“You hate them with such an intensity that you want them all dead and condemned, AT ANY PRICE.”

Right after the Biblical Feast of Sukkot, I began studying the reality of evil and radical forgiveness. Nothing I have ever studied has been more excruciating. I have been shaken to the core – and yet, my mind has also been eased by learning about what forgiveness is and is not.

Two weeks ago, God showed me the reality behind my fantasies of revenge and retaliation – they weren’t going to ever happen. I may be a murderer in my heart and mind, but my hands are not willing, despite my verbal bravado. God also showed me that He has no intention of killing every single child molester on the planet. And we know that the justice system will not be incarcerating them all, and even if they did – they would not remain safely locked up. There are not enough jails in the world to hold them, and the Biblical penalty of death in such cases is not being implemented. That is our reality.

So what power do we have? Prayer.

So, do I simply pray for an ever-growing number of victims? Will that do anything to stop the abuse, to stop there from being more and more victims every single day? No, the victim count will rise and I will simply have more victims to pray for, every day more and more. That isn’t acceptable to me – I don’t want my prayers to simply be a trauma ward after the fact. It seems like admitting defeat, “We can’t stop them all so let’s just pray for their victims.”

We have to remember that, in much of the world, this behavior isn’t even illegal. Do we just write off those kids? Pray for them after the damage is done and irrevocable? That isn’t acceptable to me either. I can no longer justify ONLY praying for the victims.

As I see it now, the only recourse is to pray for those who are victimizing the children in the first place. Worldy methods just don’t work – people just go back and offend and offend again and again. I believe the only hope for the children of the world is for their abusers to come to Yeshua/Jesus, and for that to happen I believe the demonic stranglehold of this unfathomable evil has to be broken in their lives. Yes, I want them to suffer, and I want to sit back and comfortably hate them and abandon them to the devil – but that comes with too great a price tag–more and more victims.

How many more children should be sacrificed on the altar of my revenge, just because the thought of them being forgiven is too terrible for me to bear?

And so today I begin 40 days of fasting and praying for the salvation of the people who, if they do not repent and come to salvation, will victimize more and more and more. I am so conflicted. I want to do this for the sake of future victims. I want to do this for the sake of the children whose molestation would stop now, today even, if salvation comes to their attackers. I want revenge – but more than revenge I want to evil to end.

I suppose that if such a person comes to Messiah, that they will suffer as they contemplate their sins – as I suffer when I contemplate the times I have hurt people. But salvation has always been about this – about someone not getting the punishment they deserve, right? Faith is about trusting that although there will never be true justice in this world, that we will know it in the world to come. And so I am called to this bizarre mission field – but unlike other missionaries, I am reluctant. Today I will ask the Lord for the salvation and deliverance of one child molester – something that up until now has been unthinkable to me. I even do it knowing that this might make me the most hated woman on earth. But what if? What if a father, one who was molested himself, stopped before he even began? What if even one child trafficker had a salvation experience and turned him/herself in. What if someone else refused to kidnap or purchase a child today? What if?

I have seen amazing things come from prayer – I believe that God works miracles through prayer. Yeshua/Jesus told His disciples that they would do greater things than He did while on earth – what could be greater than to save children? Are we willing to pay the price? It is high.

A word of caution on the comments – this is a sensitive and emotional subject, for all of us. I have friends who have been molested, whose children have been molested, some people’s children have committed suicide after molestation, others go on to commit these terrible crimes themselves. No matter what has happened, there are victims on every side, hurting in different, and violently painful ways. I ask that everyone just extend grace to one another. I won’t allow any victim bashing – assume that if someone is lashing out, that they are frustrated and hurting. It will be hard for me to endure because I am hurting too, but if I can endure it, then I ask everyone else to be patient and loving as well. Our personal situation is not the same as everyone else’s – but we tend to only see our own side of it and want everyone else to as well. That’s natural. What I will not allow, and have never allowed on this page, is personal attacks, cheap shots, any demeaning of anyone else on this wall – no naming of names – this has always been a rule here. I don’t even allow my enemies to be slandered here. We can’t fight evil by doing evil.

January 3, 2018

Day 2 – The Man Who Stood in my Grey Zone. –

If you haven’t read the last few posts, you might want to before reading this. The stuff I am writing about right now is going to be disturbing to folks – especially without the context of the posts that have come before.

*************

He wasn’t totally in my gray zone, mind you. A lot of him stood in the zone I reserve for the blackest of the black – at least I presume he did. I really don’t know.

In the early 1990’s, NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association) got outed for holding their monthly meetings in the San Francisco public library, one floor above their children’s section, so the news reports went. No one was happy – not parents, not non-parents, not the well established gay community of the city. My gay friends at work and in the neighborhood (I was working at an Aerospace company in Berkeley, right across the bay) were outraged. Christian/non-Christian – you name it, people had their torches and pitchforks out and frankly, that was good and right. NAMBLA is set on the legalization of pedophilia and is probably the most hated group in the US.

While watching the news one night, brows furrowed and mouth pursed angrily, muttering obscenities (hey, I was NOT saved at that point, okay? Honesty time here), they interviewed a guy that made everyone watching catch their breath in horror.

“I am just grateful that my grandfather loved me enough to allow me to play Doctor with him when I was a little boy.”

The kid looked like he was in his 20’s, my age at the time, or that’s how I remember him. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I don’t know if this young man ever had, or ever did, molest anyone – but he equated the act itself with love. His grandfather had twisted his little boy trust into believing that violation was some form of familial nurturing. I have always imagined that was the only way his mind could deal with the molestation – to turn it into something special instead of acknowledging the horrific nature of it. I wonder if he was even interested in molesting anyone himself, or if he just joined the group as some unconscious attempt to normalize what had happened to him – to make it okay.

Do I believe that God can heal that kind of twisting? I have to. Does that twisting excuse abuse? No. It better explains it but doesn’t justify it, doesn’t make it any less wrong, doesn’t make it an inevitable outcome, and certainly doesn’t give anyone a free pass on consequences.

All day yesterday, praying for people I don’t want to pray for – I spent a lot of time walking because only while walking would my mind quiet down, only then could I just pray. Sometimes I just loudly groaned because praying was hurting me in areas that I hadn’t felt in a long time. My flesh, in this, is hostile towards God. I obey, but with no joy, with no sense of holiness or righteousness. I pray because I have been given that burden. My flesh is screaming, “foul.”

I am not a great prayer warrior, and never have been, so this is difficult on a number of levels. My prayers are not from the heart, each syllable forced from my lips. I make a rather pathetic spectacle as I retreat to the treadmill (I don’t want to wear out my carpets), groaning and protesting from a place deep inside me.

It is what it is, and that is why I don’t ask anyone to join me, or expect anyone to understand, or approve of, what I am doing. I don’t quite approve of it, not yet. I am not asking anyone not to hate, not to want these people dead. I am not telling anyone what to do or judging anyone. All I am doing is sharing this insane thing I know God has asked me to do, for whatever reason. Maybe not one will come to faith – maybe this is about breaking me completely by having me do the unthinkable for 40 days. Reluctant is my new middle name, and I just hope that my grudging prayers count for something. Maybe salvation for someone who is tormented by demonic thoughts but has never offended yet, maybe my prayers are strong enough for that, but it will be many days, I think, before I can do this without feeling like this.

But the children. Each offender (or potential offender) who turns towards God and is delivered – I think I once saw a statistic that the average molester will hurt 100 children. I have trouble, still, wanting to pray for people who have crossed that line, but right now I can, absolutely, focus my prayers on the people who have not yet. I just think of that NAMBLA kid, and it does make it easier. I pray he got help, and I pray he is okay now.

Yes, if we were under Torah they would be killed – the ones who got caught, anyway. But we are in exile. Exile means we do not live under Torah. Exile means no easy answers. For years I have said, “Well, if we only lived by Torah…” but we don’t. So it’s either (1) continue to lament about what should be, (2) become a politician and change the laws, (3) become a vigilante, (4) or pray in the only way I can think of to keep this from happening in the first place. The cycle has to be broken – this is the only path I see available to me. I wish we lived in the fantasy land where the laws were correct on this, but instead, we live in a real world that we need to face and deal with according to the weapons of God and not the weapons of this world.

Jan 4, 2018

Day 3 – Do I Love a God Who Can Forgive and Restore Nazis? – 124.0

Today I have the privilege of telling you about two heroes of mine.

I once listened to a popular radio talk show host, a conservative Jew, whose mother was Catholic and whose father was Jewish and she stated quite frankly that she couldn’t accept Christianity because of the forgiveness factor. She simply couldn’t accept a Jesus who would forgive the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Eva Mozes Kor, on the other hand, was a “Mengele twin” from Auschwitz, who did forgive, and found great freedom – without ever condoning the Holocaust, she forgave. Her video is viral out there on youtube, and I recommend everyone watch it.

Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie were imprisoned for hiding Jews during the Holocaust and then sent to the Herzogenbusch and Ravensbruck concentration camps. It was the dead of winter and frail Betsie was generally sick, yet unfailingly taught from the Bible she had smuggled into the camp. Betsie’s eventual death was tragic and made it all the harder after the war for Corrie to forgive the perpetrators of the Nazi madness. At a speaking engagement years after the war, she was greeting people afterward, when, standing a few people before her, she caught sight of an SS guard that she recognized from the camp. How could she shake his hand, how could she keep from lashing out and scratching his eyes out? She was in a torment – until he came forward in repentance, freely confessing his past sins, and told her he was now a Christian. He asked if she could accept him as a brother in Christ, and the love of God swept through her and allowed her to take his hand – with great joy.

Just want to be clear here that Joseph Mengele died, as far as we know, never repenting. Eva Mendez Kor’s decision to forgive was a personal one, which didn’t involve any sort of reconciliation – it was a true, free gift. One she has been widely criticized and hated for within the Jewish community – BUT, she had the absolute right to do it or not do it. I am posting a few videos and articles about her in the comments – I hope you will watch this incredible woman and hear her story.

Anyway, last night I wrestled all night. I didn’t sleep much, and what dreams I had were scattered and unhappy. I felt very lost and stuck. How can He forgive and restore people who came to their senses after the Holocaust? According to the words of our Messiah in John 6:44, the Father had to actually draw them first. Nazis. I knew one, in my youth. By the time I met him, Jerry was older than I am now. I only learned years later that he had been a Nazi – he seemed like the most normal person on earth, really nice. I don’t know what he did in the war, where he was stationed, any of that. Gosh, he was so normal. A couple of years ago, while I was still homeschooling, we read a book called The Wave – and since then I have never questioned how “nice people” can descend into depravity and violence so quickly. It was remarkable how quickly and easily people’s minds can be warped to the point where right seems wrong, and wrong seems justified. We see it in the aftermath of revolutions all the time.

I want to agree with the Jewish radio talk show host – I really do. I want to believe that there are crimes, ones that fall short of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (slandering/lying about the witness of the Spirit in any way – whether it be to attribute divine miracles to Beelzebub (Matt 12:27) or for a believer to call the inner witness that Yeshua is Messiah a lie (John 15:26, Hebrews 6)) that are just beyond God’s ability to forgive. I want to think that an evil person is evil forever – it makes me feel better about hating them. I want them in that big evil box I keep stored safely away where no one can jostle it.

I want for so much more to be unforgiveable. So much more. The agony of thinking that so many other things are forgivable is just constant. I feel it like a great, heavy, ache in my chest.

Yesterday was not a fruitful day in prayer, though I did pray. I was reading Romans, Amy Carmichael’s biography (we have come to the point where she has rescued a young temple prostitute – praise God!), and a book that a couple of friends just read that would probably start a riot if I admitted it. The guy has a lot of wrong to say, but when he says something right – it is right at a very disturbingly deep level. Ah well, we all have a piece of the puzzle, right?

My prayers – begging God to break the cycle of child sexual abuse. I can still do little more than pray for those who are offenders in their minds but who have not yet harmed a child. When I think of praying for anyone who has actually transgressed in the flesh, and when sometimes I am able to reach beyond myself and do it, I want nothing more than to pound my fists on the floor and throw things. In the night, I want to scream for not understanding. How can He ask this of me? How can I refuse? I used to write internet porn stories on the old boards – a child could have found them, and read them. Maybe I am a molester too because of that. Maybe everyone who has ever left a magazine laying around for their kids or babysitter to find, or took their kids to the store only to have them walk by explicit women’s magazine covers, maybe we are all guilty in one way or another. I don’t know. Where does God draw the line on what it is to violate a child? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.

I know what God has asked me to do. I guess I would rather be Jonah and wait on the hillside, under a green plant, for their destruction. But I know that God, from beginning to end, deals with sin not generally by massive destruction (which doesn’t work in eliminating sin), but through redeeming and transforming sinners – like me.

Jan 5, 2018

Day 4 – God is so totally not interested in my suggestion box comments

I am such an idolater. I constantly judge Him for not being more like me. I resent His independence from my feelings about how I think things should be.

My ideas about justice and what is right and wrong are so incredibly temporal and tied up with my emotions. I want Him to make sense to me. I want Him to agree with me, hate what I hate, be as unforgiving and unbending as I am, and yet love what I love and be as flexible as I can be when it suits me.

So I rail at Him when He asks me to do something that I find offensive, mostly because I can’t find a single Scripture backing me up and I resent that, a lot. I want to at least have a horse in this race, a non-flesh argument on my side – even one. That’s the worst part. Understanding that He is right and yet still not agreeing with Him. It’s just messed up.

As soon as I came to peace with that – my being messed up and needing to be dealt with – I got this burst of energy yesterday. I can pray now. I still disagree with Him, but am at peace with the fact that – well, that it’s my problem and He doesn’t need to hear about it 24/7. I cannot, however, promise that He has heard the last of it.

We really, rarely believe that He is God and we are just the created, the servants, the slaves, the children – whatever. However we put it, we are still unwise, subordinate, fleshy, and totally committed to seeing things from our own point of view. We don’t take the long view because, in some ways, it is unfathomable to us. We cannot imagine a future where just will look like no more tears, no more desire for revenge, no more betrayals, where we won’t care about what was done to us anymore.

Did you know that love and hate in the bible are not emotional words, but instead covenant terms? Emotions are kinda wild, and they lead us astray way too often. But chesed translated instead as Covenant loyalty – that will get us through the long, dark night of our doubts and times when we wonder about the legitimacy of all this. When hatred becomes a lack of preference, a non-Covenant status, the unchosen, and not necessarily the hatred that drives our flesh to murder, gossip, and every other evil work – we are called suddenly to a much higher level of our following of Yeshua/Jesus. It isn’t about what we feel, understand, or agree with – it is what the Master calls us to do in response to what He has done.

So I am done fighting, maybe. Maybe. For now. Asked God for four sexual predators converted and transformed yesterday. I prayed that God would violently break into their consciousness and show them His heart and His truth. I asked that they won’t even be able to enjoy thoughts of violating any child. More than anything, I plead for the cycle to stop, because we will never catch them all, not even most of them. God most effectively deals with evil by changing people. In a world where they can manipulate and hide for a lifetime, and even go to other countries legally to violate, when it is so hard to prove charges – oh God, please. Stop them. Stop them because kids don’t usually tell what happened. Stop them because I can’t. And then, let them be moved to face their consequences and do right by their victims, who deserve to be acknowledged as having been desperately wronged.

No update tomorrow, want to focus on worship and this is not Sabbathy material.

Jan 7, 2018

 

Day 6 – The God who has mercy on whom He will have mercy

First of all, answering a concern. If you have no concerns, then skip ahead. Why am I fasting publicly? Am I looking for attention? Well, honestly, I fast like very often and I have never mentioned it in the past 7 years I have been on facebook. I have fasted 40 days in the past without a peep out of me. I routinely fast from between 3-5 days, again, no one ever knows. I am fasting for my own spiritual growth so why would I say anything? But, like Esther, who fasted publicly and told people about it – sometimes there are situations so serious that we need folks to come alongside us. Unlike Esther, I can’t and won’t command anyone to join me. But I do appreciate the prayer support. As for journalling it – you guys know I journal through everything I am going through. Same old same old. What I am praying for is just too big for me, like it was too big for Esther – I can’t do this without support. This isn’t about me this time, it is about other people. Though God is strong enough, I am not.

Am I going to keep oiling my head and appearing happy – well, yeah – the only pains I have talked about have been my wrestlings with God, and those hurt just as bad whether I am eating or not, and you are all used to me doing it. What fasting does is really make me more pliable, and my defenses against what He wants a lot weaker – and so this is good.

My health: is awesome, actually. Haven’t had one of my warning headaches, but if I do, I will re-evaluate. My option on the table is a vegetable and water fast, but I hate those with the intensity of a thousand red hot suns, so I prefer to just water fast. You need to understand, when God has me fasting, I literally cannot swallow what I put in my mouth. It’s abhorrent to me. I would have to do it willfully. I wouldn’t be able to eat a pizza right now, gross, and you guys know how much I love pizza. Extra cheese, turkey pepperoni, maybe some mushrooms, artichoke hearts, olives – but as long as there is extra cheese, I am not picky. And the crust brushed with butter and rubbed with garlic.

So, back to what I wanted to write about:

Romans 9:18

So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.

Got told last week that what I am doing (praying for the salvation of sexual predators in order to save future victims from being violated) was dangerous and leading people astray. I accept that it is distasteful, and it certainly was to me at first. Hardest thing I have ever prayed for. But we are wrong if we look at God as though He can be manipulated into an injustice. Truly, only God really knows what true justice and injustice looks like, and so He has undoubtedly hardened some offenders – of that I have no doubt. Just as Eichmann and Mengele went to their graves without regret, there are pedophiles out there who are hardened beyond salvation. I don’t ask God for those, although I do wish for their speedy deaths or at least permanent incarceration.

I can’t ask for and receive, anything in prayer that God does not desire – that’s a fact. He isn’t a pagan god who can be manipulated by my using the correct pronunciation of his one true name (like Isis did to Ra), and forced into doing what I want. No, He can only comply with His own nature.

The more I do this, the more hope I have for the cycle to be broken among the young – especially those who have not offended yet. God doesn’t want a single child molested, not even one. He also doesn’t want them to become pedophiles themselves. God hates injustice.

Interesting side effect of all this, it has put all other small slights (and compared to this, they are pretty much all small) into a radically realistic perspective. We really want everything done to us to be a damning offense, right? But the big stuff is coming into perspective as well. Not only am I coming to forgive the evil that was done to me, but also, the evil done to someone else whom I love more than my own life. It is their violation that torments me, not my own. I realize that in praying this, I am praying for them as well – that they will not offend. My love for them alone, will not keep them from doing this to someone else. I am praying not only for their life, but the lives of what children they might have or come in contact with. I hadn’t really thought of it before because I was too consumed with agony. I don’t share their story because it is not mine to tell, and no one should be exposed and violated simply for being a victim. Their story isn’t inspiration or outrage fodder for others – not unless they choose that.

God has mercy on whom he will have mercy, and He will render without hope, those whom he chooses. Or else we wouldn’t be here, right? No one deserves what He did for us, How He redeemed us at the Cross and then began the New Creation in each of us, transforming us – making us into His image-bearers. We don’t deserve any of that – no one does. So we pray for everyone, and He will decide which prayers to honor and which to ignore – but there is no danger in praying, in blessing those who persecute us, just as long as we hold to what is good and reject what is evil (Ro 12:14)

Jan 8, 2018

Day 7 – The Mormon technicality (I have since been informed by different ex-Mormons in my sphere that the view of Mary’s actual impregnation that I was exposed to was regional, but that the rest remains uncontested)

I have lived in predominantly Mormon communities for 11 of my last 23 years. The town I live in now has 120 Mormon churches in it for a town of 56,000. That’s one Mormon church for roughly every 450 people – plus we have a Temple here. The first Mormon town I lived in, for ten of those years, was a small town of 10,000 in southern Idaho and, if anything, it was a lot more Mormon than this one. You were either a Mormon, or a jack-Mormon (unobservant yet loyal). If you were a Christian running for office, it had to be as a Democrat because you would not be allowed to run as a Republican – the church had that tied up. They also had the police force firmly under wraps.

The one thing I learned early on, after coming to Christ, was that molestation of girls by their fathers and stepfathers was epidemic and protected by the church. Why? Because of their belief that Heavenly Father, Elohim, physically came to earth and impregnated his literal daughter, Mary. Their god is in heaven making babies like gangbusters and, as a 12-year-old Mormon girl once told me, so this is not second-hand gossip, “Heavenly Father saw that Mary was the most beautiful girl who had ever lived and couldn’t help himself.” Honestly, I wanted to go home and bathe in bleach after she told me that. I mean, someone actually told that to a 12-year-old girl, or maybe she was a lot younger when she heard it. I really don’t want to think about it.

So, in this we have a conundrum. A god with no self-control who had sex with his own daughter to make Jesus, who would someday become a god by living according to the tenants of Mormonism.

My neighbor came to me, upset about a write up of Mormonism in like Time magazine or something, right before the 2002 Olympics in SLC. “Why don’t they think we are Christians?” I laid out before her that Christians, besides believing that becoming gods ourselves was Lucifer’s sin, don’t believe in a carnal god who impregnated his own daughter. She quickly and nervously jumped in, “Well, no one knows for sure what happened.” But she didn’t deny it.

Although these beliefs are not well known in the larger Mormon empire, they are very common in Utah and Idaho, which are more traditional than the moderate Mormonism elsewhere. And don’t get me going on their views of evil angels and people being reincarnated black.

So, we have a belief that their god is carnal and had sexual relations with his daughter. Although most Mormon men would never consider the ramifications of that, much less ever do such a thing, too many men in these more rural Mormon–dominated communities do – they hold more to the old ways of Mormonism that are more deeply tied to the doctrines of their prophet Joseph Smith than their modern-day politically-minded prophets. I know a lot of women who escaped Mormonism out of such communities, and they tell tales of their own molestation at the hand of fathers and stepfathers while their mothers stood by – not knowing what to do because they won’t get called into heaven if their husbands are displeased with them. I have been told of meetings with a Bishop (or something, can’t remember) where his advice to distraught mothers was, “Get a deadbolt for the inside of her door.” In Mormon homes, “Temple worthy” homes, as long as a man is observing the laws externally, and tithing according to the dictates of the church accountants, he will not be acted against. The Mormon father is, in some ways, a god in his own home and not just a man. As I said, you find this in the more ancient and traditional communities that stretch back to the 1800’s.

So, today, I didn’t know exactly what to pray for – but I wanted to put the plight of these precious girls in your hearts. It is one thing to pray for the salvation of someone who believes that he/she is still just a mere man, but someone who believes that they practically already are, and will, in fact, be a god? I pray that God will rid them of this arrogant notion and convict them of their abominations. I pray for the strength of these girls, as they grow up, that they will not be intimidated by religion and promises of glory, but instead ruled by love and compassion when it comes to dealing with their own daughters and husband. Their minds are being twisted, and it isn’t their fault. My heart is sick with grief for them.

 



To Love Kindness (Micah 6:8) – 2016 Social Media Series

I wrote this back in August 2016 – it’s a many part series when God challenged me about the requirement of loving kindness. It was a lesson that I had to learn because of a very grueling ordeal at the hands of people whom I had mistakenly thought were friends, who I had ministered to, and even spent money helping. It was a deeply personal and humiliating violation of my dignity, but God did use it in my life – although, all told, it took Him 9 whole months to get through to me. I am still in recovery from my November and December strokes and not really able to do new teachings but it has been a good opportunity to transfer some old social media teachings to the blog.

August 16, 2016

Sabbath/Feast Culture Experiment Week #32

A Love of Kindness

I am not there yet, not by a long shot.

Near the end of the Shemoneh Esrei, the “eight plus ten” prayers that were composed by the men of the Great Assembly, headed by Ezra at the time of the building of the Second Temple, there is a section entitled “Peace” where the Spirit has apprehended me for two days in a row by drawing my attention to the following statement:

“…Bless us, our Father, all of us as one, with the light of your countenance, for with the light of your countenance you gave us, HaShem our God, the Torah of life and a love of kindness…” – The Complete Artscroll Siddur

The “love of kindness” stopped me dead in my tracks two days in a row, so here on the third day I want to address it.

Michah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Pro 31:26 She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

Zech 7:8-10 And the word of the Lord came to Zechariah, saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart.”

Ro 2:4 Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

Col 3:12-13 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

I find it a fascinating phenomenon that when we, as Gentiles, came to Torah, we by and large did not do so with the proper attitude of believing that kindness is a virtue – in fact, we seemed to hate all displays of kindness and labelled it instead as enabling, a hatred for the truth, weakness, etc. Yet, the Shemoneh Esrei specifically draws our attention to Micah 6:8 where we are not only to act kind, that isn’t enough and it isn’t always genuine, but to love kindness – to love it. This love we are called to have for kindness is “ahavah” love – the kind of love we first see mentioned as referring to Jacob’s love for Rachel, the kind of love that was willing to labor for 14 years. It is a love tied to faithfulness, meekness, humility and patience, an enduring and delivering love.

What would happen if we dropped everything, all of our impatient posturing, and pursued kindness the way Jacob labored for Rachel?

I am going to leave it there.

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Moving forward from yesterday’s Sabbath/Feast Culture post on what it means to love kindness.

Can you imagine having such a love and reverence for kindness that it created a barrier against cruelty? What if I loved kindness so dearly that it would actually cause me to loathe “snapping” or overreacting when I am frustrated? What if the fruit of self-control is actually tied to each of the other fruit? What if I need kindness in order to control the innate human desire to lash out at times? What if each measure of fruit actually manifests in its own unique area of restraint? Maybe that is why self-control is listed last and love is listed first. A desire to love others is the prerequisite for all, and total self-control would be the ultimate fruit of maturity in each and every one of these virtues.

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To Love Kindness Micah 6:8 Pt 3

In learning to love kindness, we have to be careful about our hatred for unkindness because it can manifest itself as – well… more unkindness!

There is a big difference between hating unkindness and simply being hurt by someone else’s unkindness. We all hate it and get outraged when someone is unkind, because unkindness does damage – sometimes it does really deep damage that takes a long time to heal. How we respond to that damage tells us whether we truly hate unkindness or whether we just hate being hurt. We often hate the unkindness of others and make excuses for our own unkindness – especially retaliation-related unkindness.

I was recently wounded very deeply, twice on the same day from two unexpected sources and I struggled for about a week. At first, of course, I was just in shock – trying to get my bearings. I didn’t want to harm anyone at that point – I was just struggling to understand what had happened and why. As the shock wore off, about a day later, I slipped into a numbness and then into a real struggle – I wasn’t hating unkindness, I was like a wounded animal, longing to hurt someone but not having the heart to do it (having a conscience, however, is still not the same thing as hating unkindness!). A part of me wanted someone to hurt the way I was hurting, because I was howling with pain inside – really, it took every ounce of strength not to lash out. I am grateful that the I spent so much time in shock – actually I am really grateful this didn’t happen a few years ago because it would have been incredibly ugly.

I recognize now that I was being tested – sifted like the flour for the grain offering. I marginally passed not because I hated unkindness so much that it was unthinkable for me to lash out, but simply because the Spirit was communicating to me that this lashing out would be wrong.

I call this phenomenon “Tyler, shut up and trust me because you just don’t get it yet. Trust me, I am protecting you from yourself here.”

It didn’t matter that I was provoked, it didn’t matter the unkindness I was faced with – it didn’t matter. A response to something wrong can still be fatally wrong. We don’t get to exercise our flesh when wronged, and that chaps my hide something fierce, but we just don’t get to do it. If we are innocent of a charge, we have to remain innocent, but how many of us become guilty because of the way that we defend ourselves?

The fruit, the kindness and self-control, that we are called to is radical fruit. It looks wrong and feels wrong to our flesh – my flesh knows that what happened was wrong, and my flesh says, “That gives us carte blanche to go lopping off some heads!”

That’s a problem – people already came through and did damage. Do they also get to influence my behavior? Because that’s what we would have been talking about here – had I responded how I wanted to after the shock wore off, humans would have had more influence over me than the Spirit. When the Spirit curbs my behavior, my most common response it, “But that’s unfair!” Yeah, it’s unfair – everything that happened to my Master was grotesquely unfair, not just slightly unfair. Do I want to be like Him or not?

I tell you that not retaliating hurts more, and not less, than retaliating because not only does the original unkindness hurt like crazy, but the flesh screaming for vengeance night and day can hurt even worse. Flesh demands satisfaction, and being wedged between pain and the desire for vengeance – well, that’s the place where we either decide that we do or do not love kindness.

August 22, 2016

To Love Kindness (Micah 6:8) Part 4

I drank caffeine yesterday afternoon, which gave me a whole lot of time to think about things in the middle of the night. I started thinking – what does it mean to be kind to God?

There is the easy answer of simply submitting out wills to His individual plan for our lives, but what about making His job easier?

I started frowning, thinking of the different times when I created a stumbling block for this or that person – especially when I was new to the faith and then new to Torah. The guilt trips laid on me as a new believer, “If your loved ones died tonight, would they go to hell?” and the embarrassment I felt over being understandably ignorant, both in the beginning of my faith walk and again when I had my eyes opened to His Torah – they really twisted my perceptions of “my obligations” and I hit the ground running – well actually chasing people away. Not only wasn’t it kind to encourage and manipulate me into thinking I had to be an evangelist before I even knew what I myself believed, but I myself wasn’t being kind. I was in the “in crowd” now – going to Heaven as part of the remnant while Jews and non-believers were going to hell. (don’t get me started about the world to come… I know, I know)

Looking back, I made His job a lot harder for Him wherever I intervened.

The former Gentiles in Rome did the same thing for both God and Paul. They weren’t keeping to the same standards of kosher as the Jews of Rome with whom they were worshiping – it was, well, scandalizing the congregation, and destroying the witness of Yeshua and making the job Paul wanted to do there much more difficult. It’s a complex story (I wrote about it in King, Kingdom, Citizen) but in the end it came down to the former Gentiles needlessly creating a stumbling block for their brothers and sisters in their synagogues who did not yet know Messiah and sadly, might not ever want to because of the unkind behavior of the newcomers.

In Galatia, we had the flip side of the coin. Despite the Holy Spirit over-ruling the 18 edicts of Shammai at the house of Cornelius the Centurion by falling upon the entire family when they had not formally converted to Judaism, the Jews who did believe that Yeshua is Messiah refused to share table fellowship with them – simply because they had not formally converted through adult circumcision (I wrote about this in KKC as well, at length). Another stumbling block of unkindness.

I am certain that in both situations, the unkind meant well – heck, I meant well when I was young and ignorant, too. But meaning well is not the same as kindness – sometimes meaning well is just wanting to do good but refusing to take the time to find out what “good” actually means. Actually doing good means showing kindness to God and others, doing good in our own eyes usually means we are pursuing our agenda at all costs – agendas being whatever it is that we convince ourselves is good.

But if we pursue a love of kindness, maybe those agendas will fall away one by one – after all, even if our agenda is good, such things are only good for certain people in season, and out of season they are inappropriate and can even be detrimental. Until we can see that people are in different seasons of maturity and in need of different treatment accordingly, we don’t stand a ghost of a chance to know how to be kind and helpful towards God – we’ll just keep doing what we think is best, and when we do that, the words will come back void, because they are only His words when they are in season. The Word of God can’t be reduced to some kind of magic spell – where we speak the phrases in English (or even in Hebrew), however we want wherever and whenever we want, expecting them to do our will. We have to be kind, and true kindness requires patient discernment – something I rarely ever actually see.

August 23, 2016

To Love Kindness (Micah 6:8) Part 5

Been an insane week, well, insane two weeks really. Ever wake up in the middle of the night knowing something has changed but you have no idea what it is? Like something just snapped, and a season has changed? Felt it last night. Has me a bit worried because I am being forced to learn about kindness lol and worried about how I will be required to use it.

Saw a meme once, and at one point I would have agreed with it but it is one of those memes that means entirely different things to different people, it’s what I call a “behavior justification meme.”

It said something like, “Love means telling the truth, even when that truth hurts.”

Such memes are simply a carte blanche to be unkind, sort of a “get out of the guilt-jail free card.” As long as one believes they are telling the truth, they can just say they were “speaking the truth in love” when their conscience comes knocking at the door.

Of course, that meme was nonsense because we always think we know the truth, right? But how much “truth” boils down to plain old ignorant guesses and assumptions and even projection? How much truth is actually just opinions itching to be spoken?… or flesh screaming to be unleashed on the world?

It is often the height of self-deception and definitely the fruit of pride to convince oneself that personal opinion is not only truth, but also one’s obligation and loving duty to inflict on others.

Sitting here this moment thinking back and cringing, how many false “truths” do we remember feeling an uncontrollable urge to force on others as though they couldn’t live without them? How many of those do we regret now, with all our being? Are we somehow immune to our judgment being wrong now? How many people have we led astray with what we genuinely thought was true, and how many people have we wounded with opinions that served no purpose but to blow off steam?

It is incredibly unkind to tell the “truth” if all it does is make us feel better somehow – if it serves as a steam vent for frustration, ego, misplaced guilt, or sometimes genuinely well-deserved guilt. Why are we telling this “truth” and what purpose does it serve? Is this the right place, and the right time and am I the right person to tell it? Why do I want to tell this “truth” right now? Does this person even have the ability to receive what I am saying at this moment or am I going to create a stumbling block so that they will never receive it?

Telling people what we truly *think* is not the same thing as telling the truth, but it takes a sizable measure of humility to even consider that as true.

Kindness really does matter, and we owe it to others to learn how to be kind – in fact, it is better to err on the side of too much good fruit than not enough. I don’t think that we should simply write off having hurt people under the excuse of having told the truth – truth is, if we were truly mature in the fruit of kindness and the level of self-control that goes along with it, I bet we could, most of the time, tell the truth with a minimum of pain. Right now, it seems like we don’t think about the amount of pain we are causing, or questioning if we are causing enough pain in telling the “truth” that our truth-telling in fact has become sin.

August 24, 2016 

Part 6 – “What happens, in truth, when we return unkindness for unkindness? I mean really, what is the result?There is only one result – the person who was initially unkind to us hears our unkindness and feels justified, making it harder for them to repent.
In addition, their buddies standing by do not question their unkindness, figuring you are just a jerk who had it coming.Returning kindness for cruelty is the only hope that unkind people have of questioning their own actions because, as Robert Heinlein once wrote: “Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes.””

August 25, 2016

Part 7 – Showing kindness to our Spouse and kids
There are three types of people in this world when it comes to showing kindness:

The people who are only kind to their own loved ones, the people who are kind to everyone except their family, and the people who are somewhere in between.

I have no use for people in the first two groups – I am definitely one of the people who struggles in between.I struggle in between because I am rather too easily irritated and irritation tends to flow out of me as unkindness. Fear, also, shows itself through unkindness. Frustration. Anger – beneath my unkindness lurks quite a few emotions. I am at the point where I have mostly managed to contain it with outsiders over the past few years, and have been reigning it in with my family as well – but they still endure too much of it.
Strange, isn’t it? The people who need our love and kindness the most, because it means more to them than to anyone else in the world, are so often the recipients of unkindness.
We have to come to the point where we love kindness so much that our own unkindness brings us to tears, our unkindness needs to hurt us more than it hurts the people we unleash it on.
August 27, 2016

To Love Kindness (Micah 6:8) Part 8

Guarding the Peace of Others, and especially on the Sabbath

The Sabbath is a day to weigh every word and every action. It occurs to me that Friday should naturally be not only be a day of preparation but a day of repentance. Have we wronged anyone, have we crushed their dignity, have we done anything that might cause them to carry a lack of shalom into the Sabbath and into their own homes?

It seems to me as though we are too quick to damage others and far too slow to try and restore them. We steal peace but do not think to give it back. We feel a bit guilty maybe, but not enough to think about easing the burden we placed on another.

Our words are never spoken in a vacuum, despite the fact that we would love to believe that they are. We will be judged by every hasty word, every careless accusation, every insult, and every unjust judgment.

It is common in this culture to rashly speak our mind, and even more common to give no thought to it afterwards, thinking that our words produce no lasting effects – like ripples on a pond that go far but quickly dissipate, leaving no discernible difference in the pond.

But people are not ponds – they have lives, and struggles, fears and heartaches that they do not share with the world. No matter how well we may think we know someone, we never know how close to suicide someone might be, how little dignity they have remaining, how close they are to being literally humiliated to death. We just don’t know.

And so if we are going to engage with people whom we do not intimately know, we must always make allowances for the fact that we might have in front of us someone who just can’t take it anymore, someone who needs their dignity guarded and not degraded. No matter how it looks on the outside, many people who look like they have it together on the outside are dying from grief.

Yeshua knew every person’s heart – we don’t. He could speak what was on His mind to speak and have it always be appropriate – we can’t. Too many people blaspheme the Spirit by crediting the Spirit with inspiring their every word – and then come up with noble sounding names for their cruelty. I have heard more than one club-wielding person call themselves a “scalpel in the Lord’s hand.” Blasphemy – we dare not credit the Spirit as responsible for the actions of the flesh. We dare not accuse the Spirit of our callous words in order to endorse our own behavior.

Until we learn to guard the dignity of others, and not simply of those we are fond of – preferentially protecting those we love while running roughshod over those whom we don’t love, or love less – we are not the types of people who can be trustworthy ambassadors of the Name of our King. The more I read biographies of the great men and women of the faith, the more I see people who were not careless with their words, or quick to attribute their prejudices and harsh moments to the leading of the Spirit. Even a plot to murder Hitler was agonized over by Dietrich Bonhoeffer before he agreed to be a part of it – he was that cautious even with a monster.

How many of us would even think twice, so assured are we of the rightness of our impulses? How many of us think twice about hurting those around us who are not monsters at all or even dangerous – but simply irritating?

I guess what I mean to say is that people are drowning, and we have a choice to throw them a life-preserver, or a weigh them down with something heavy enough to drown them. We ought to think carefully about every word – and not just about the words we speak to those whom we admire, love, or feel protective of.

Extend dignity – love kindness. No more excuses.

August 28, 2016

To Love Kindness (Micah 6:8) Part 9

Kindly equipping others in season vs Unkindly vomiting information

There is a certain behavior that is common in social media religious circles that I absolutely detest – and that is when people who are not teachers will drop into a thread and make a comment that is either controversial, or way above the heads of many people – and then they just walk away, having no decency to stay and clean up the mess they just made in the lives of others.

(You might ask, “Why are you saying the people who do this aren’t teachers?” and I would respond, “Just because someone is spouting information doesn’t make them a teacher, but yes, some people who “teach” are not mature and some do this sort of thing – although most genuine teachers walking in maturity would see this type of behavior as not only futile, but as completely undermining the learning process)

Being a teacher requires kindness, a whole lot of it. I teach kids and beginners – which means that I don’t teach at my own level of knowledge. I don’t drop big complicated bombs on people and leave them desperately searching for a handhold. I don’t put things in front of people without first laying a foundation or without being there to answer questions if someone missed a step.

Teaching has to be about love, or it’s just a way of showing off. Giving someone something they don’t have, when they are ready for it and in a way that they can easily grasp, that’s kindness. Forcing on them something they are not ready for, in a way that makes them feel stupid – isn’t teaching.

There are people out there who are extraordinarily puffed up with this or that understanding – and they seem to believe that merely mentioning something is tantamount to planting a seed. Nothing could be further from the truth – it is incredibly unkind to drop a knowledge bomb in the midst of a conversation. It isn’t teaching, and it isn’t preaching – it’s generally just an extension of ego.

“(Insert controversy here). You don’t understand now, but you will – just pray about it.”

PLEASE! ^^That right there is not how we should treat people. There is no point to it other than to elevate oneself or lord one’s own level of esoteric knowledge over others or your supposed superiority in relationship with God that you have “deeper understandings.” It’s a pet peeve of mine. It’s also incredibly transparent – and sadly, almost irresistible to those who play the knowledge game. For me, knowledge isn’t a game, it is a tool that helps me not to misinterpret Scripture. Knowledge hems in my imagination and keeps it from masquerading as the Holy Spirit! But knowledge is nothing if there is no mature character beneath it as a foundation – when I go to prayer, it is not knowledge that I am lamenting not having enough of (because that can be remedied through study) but because I am still incredibly flawed.

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. (Mt 23:12) – ESV

Self-exaltation is, by nature, never kind to others. We have to diminish others in order to do it, we have to be showing off.

The proper way of introducing information to people is through sustained relationship. If one is truly a teacher, they understand it intrinsically – we know how vital it is to know where our students are at, and to give them what they need, and not what we know. Imagine how little respect we would have for a person to barge into a Kindergarten classroom and start spouting multiplication tables, and then just walk away, leaving a classroom full of confused youngsters whose education has now been undermined by being given food out of season by someone who obviously had no love or respect for them, and their level of understanding.

We don’t give them what we know, we have an obligation to give them what they need and what they are actually ready for – otherwise, we aren’t teachers at all, we’re just people who unkindly vomit information to show how “awesome” we supposedly are.

August 30, 2016

To Love Kindness (Micah 6:8) Part 10

We are often… whatever we go to the trouble of saying we aren’t.

Kind people rarely brand their own actions as loving, but unkind people seem to announce it in front of themselves like a trumpet. It’s a sort of a disclaimer before or after doing something horrifically cruel. “You aren’t about to see what you think you see!”

“I am not usually a critical person, but in love I really must tell you that… ” (oh great, they just told me they aren’t critical, which means – oh yes they are)

“You are a son of the devil, and it took me a lot of love to say that to your face” ( – well, I mean, on facebook where I don’t actually have to look in your face or anything…)

“I hope that you aren’t going to overreact but…” (invariably followed by something offensive that they don’t want to have to deal with the consequences of saying, so not only were they jerks, but they put you on a pre-emptive guilt trip for any response that falls short of kissing their feet in gratitude).

We definitely, subconsciously at least, know when we are doing evil through an unkindness, IF we preface it with a disclaimer. Years ago, I asked God to judge me during this life while I still had time to change and the time He slammed me to the mat the hardest was when He showed me all the times I lied – not to others but to myself:

“I was just speaking the truth in love..”

“Of course they are offended, the truth always offends the rebellious and sinful…”

“I am not racist, I have a darned good reason to hate…”

After that day it became:

“I was fooling only myself, I couldn’t bear to hear the Spirit poking at my conscience as I was saying that… so I told myself I was speaking the truth in love so I wouldn’t have to hear the truth about my unkindness.”

“Of course they are offended, I acted like a jerk and worse – I did it in the Name of God. It made it a whole lot easier when I blamed their reaction on them instead of on my behavior.”

“I am a racist, and I have no reason to hate.”

We can learn a lot about ourselves by learning to listen to our disclaimers….

Sept 1, 2016

A Love of Kindness (Micah 6:8) Part 11

Rebuke without Relationship Part 1 (or conversely, a relationship based solely upon rebuke)

We are called to love one another. We are called to peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control – but those tend to go out the window when we see something that we disapprove of.

There are times, of course, when someone will get publicly in our face and start something up – it happens. It happened to Yeshua (Jesus) quite a lot; He didn’t pick fights with the chief priests, scribes, Pharisees, Herodians and Sadducees (some of which were the chief priests) – they came gunning for him. Not all of them did, but some did. When they attacked – well, He didn’t start the fight but He sure finished it. He rebuked because they came at Him first, repeatedly throughout the Scriptures, as part of the honor/shame culture of the day. I teach honor/shame culture but Yeshua was very clear in His sermon on the mount that the system of gaining honor at the expense of others in this manner was not acceptable as part of the Jewish lifestyle. We are to give and preserve honor preferentially as opposed to publicly taking honor and degrading others.

Sadly, there are many people out there who wield unkindness as a substitute for righteousness – really as self-righteousness.

I once met a couple who were just frankly bonkers. He was a wannabe cult leader with no charisma (I thank God for that) but his wife was completely in his thrall. She once told me that his spiritual gift was “bringing correctness to the body.” He did this through correcting everyone, on everything, in a very controlling manner. Had facebook existed, he would have been the type of person to never engage unless he was scrolling through his newsfeed and saw some behavior to disapprove of and correct.

Apart from being dreadfully boorish, this doesn’t work except on people who have been weakened and beaten down by abuse and know no other kind of relationship. The majority of people are repulsed by such behavior, and actually come to associate the correction with the bad behavior.

“You shouldn’t be dressing like that unless you want to look like a whore!” becomes, “This self-righteous jerk has a problem with the way I dress, therefore he only disapproves because he is a self-righteous jerk, therefore I am justified in dressing this way because it is HIS (or her) problem!”

A comment like that is usually given outside of a relationship, I would hope, but when a comment like that is given inside a relationship, there are big problems in the relationship! (You think?)

That was just an example of the sort of thing that goes on on social media everyday among believers, and sometimes perpetrated by believers against non-believers (which we are NEVER supposed to do). That’s an “in your face” type rebuke, but there are more subtle and manipulative sorts of unkindnesses as well – guilt trips, control through promises of approval IF.., only showing up in conversations when you can take the moral high ground, etc.

It comes down to this, and parents, this goes for us doubly – if the only time we open our mouths in a relationship is to correct, rebuke, embarrass, discipline, manipulate, scold, lecture, etc., then we need to keep our mouths shut. And hey, I know it is hard – but relationships are built on the same elements that we see listed as the fruit of the Spirit. If a person does not have a portion of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control from us and with us – then we are not in the position relationally to come along and offer correction.

I think we need to ask ourselves a hard question – “why am I seeking to rebuke here, now and in this way?” How about, “Do I feel an uncontrollable compulsion to do this?” <— a lot of times the answer to that is yes and we were taught that uncontrollable compulsions come from the Spirit.

But there’s a problem because self-control is a fruit of the Spirit. We have free-will, and not only that but we start out with very strong-will, an uncontrollable will. That uncontrollable impulse is our flesh, not the Spirit. We like to say it is the Spirit, especially when we have left a trail of wounded in our wake. Our flesh desires enmity, strife, resentment, fear, impatience, cruelty, sin, frivolousness and most of all, a free reign to do as it wills and something else to blame it all on.

Relationship, real relationship, teaches us restraint with a small group of beloved people. Hopefully it is a healthy relationship and hopefully there is indeed a measure of restraint and kindness. That should lead to us seeing others as extensions of that. If you would scream if someone treated your spouse the way you are treating someone, then you are a hypocrite to treat anyone in that manner. The same goes for your child, your relatives and your friends. We have to be equitable – kindness cannot simply be reserved for the people we like the most or divvied up according to our hierarchy of fondness.

Sept 3, 2016

A Love of Kindness (Micah 6:8) Part 12

Speaking the Truth in Love?

I think this is the last entry in the series – it occurred to me last night that any modern conversation about kindness, and by extension unkindness, has to end with this oft heard expression. It comes from Scripture, Ephesians 4:15-16 – but the context is almost always ignored. In fact, the verse has been used as a justification for ignoring the context of this verse.

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love”

So what is the context? What does speaking the truth in love require?

Eph 4:1b-3 “…walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…”

The prerequisites for speaking the truth in love are:

(1) humility – I can assure you that if your first action upon being rebuffed was to insult the person or go on social media decrying their not accepting the truth you spoke, your words did not qualify as humble.

(2) gentleness – gentleness requires speaking the words in such a way that they CAN be accepted in the first place, which requires knowing a person and approaching them with wisdom. Everyone has different ways of needing to be approached – and that takes relationship. Paul was talking to a congregation who had relationship with one another, they were intimates in a hostile world.

(3) patience – the truth is not enough. Does it matter what I think you need to know if you are not able to understand it or receive it yet? And the converse is also true – does it matter what you think I need to hear if the timing is bad right now? More stumbling blocks are placed through impatient vomiting of opinions than possibly through anything else.

(4) bearing with one another in love – as I explain in my new book, love isn’t what we feel on the inside for a person, love in the ancient world was expressed in terms of loyalty – something we moderns know very little about. Do we seek to guard the dignity of each other, or are we interested in saying whatever is on our mind whenever it occurs to us, and wherever we want to say it? Notice that the people who respected and loved Yeshua always confronted him in private, and those who hated him confronted Him in front of an audience.

(5) eager to maintain the unity – our individualistic society sees no virtue in unity at the expense of having everything our own way, having everything “right” according to our current standards and level of knowledge. In fact, we are quick to disparage unity as compromise and weakness. During the days of Yeshua, the High Priesthood was corrupt – and yet, unlike the Qumran sectarians, Yeshua was still in Jerusalem at every Feast. Circumstances were not optimal, far from it, and yet He who knew perfection better than anyone, was in the synagogues every Sabbath, at the Temple every Feast in unity with everyone else.

(6) the bond of peace – we have to cherish peace, like kindness, we have to love it and hate that which is contrary to it. Robert E Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” It is true, but sadly, the internet social media and our egos have removed the terrible nature of war – as well as our conscience over fighting. It is thrilling to battle an enemy whose face we are not required to look into, while the bodies of our friends are not decimated to our left and right. In truth we enjoy social media war because it is a war of cowards, with none of the immediate horrors because we cannot see the true effect of the carnage we deliver into the lives of others – after all, they are no more real to us than video game characters. Social media warfare is much like drone warfare – we kill and destroy people we do not know and can not see, and over what? Doctrines that we may not even still believe tomorrow?

In truth, the “truths” I all too often see spoken “in love” do not qualify as either truth, or love, and they certainly are not serving the purpose of equipping one another and helping one another to grow up. On the contrary…

… instead of building up the Body of Messiah we are often, instead, tearing it down one soul at a time… while using Scripture to excuse our lack of mature fruit.