Friday, July 31, 2015


The Garden

At different times in my life, I have a recurring dream about a garden.  The garden plot is approximately twenty-five square feet.  There on the ground kneels a woman clad in gardening clothes, straw hat, and gloves.  Her back is to me.  She is carefully tending her little garden, working diligently and paying no attention to anything other than the garden.

Sometimes, she weeds.  Sometimes she's thinning and loosening the soil around the plants.  At other times, she plants or harvests, whichever is necessary.  A watering can filled to capacity stands faithfully by her side.  Regardless, of the task, she is extremely focused on her work.

The garden itself consists of straight, neat rows.  On the back rows are tall, mature plants ready to surrender their fruits and veggies.  The middle rows contain plants whose produce is maturing.  The front rows contain patches of plants just sprouting and places where seeds need to be sown.

The sun is always shining, and a gentle breeze is always blowing.  Birds are twittering, and a brook bubbles nearby.  Everything essential for the care and nurture of the garden is readily available.

I believe this garden represents our own individual relationship with God.  Relationship with anyone is grown; it doesn't just happen.  Growing things need constant care, else they wither and die.  So it is with our relationship with God.  It too needs tending.

Ultimately, it is our responsibility alone to cultivate this relationship with God.  Our family cannot do it for us.  Our friends cannot do it for us.  The Lord won't force it on us.  Our gifts cannot make it happen, and our deeds cannot buy it for us.  We must choose to have relationship with Him and to do the work of the gardener.  God is responsible for making things grow and for providing every necessary element to make that growth possible.

Initially, He created and provided a place for the garden.  He chose and invited us to be a part of His family.  He gave us a little spot reserved just for us, for our garden. 

Furthermore, He gave His "Son" to shine down upon us and the garden while the gentle breezes of His Spirit blow upon us and refresh us while we work.  Jesus is our way into the family.  He is our only door.  His precious blood and His faithful love reconciled us to God and ushered us into the family.  By His Spirit, we receive comfort as we journey through this life. 

On top of all of this, God's angels "twitter" holy songs of protection and deliverance and guidance about us continually both day and night while the divine water of life flows freely from a brook that never runs dry.  Everything we need for life and love and godliness has been provided, absolutely everything!  We tend the garden; God makes it grow.  Ultimately, all of us will one day stand before God and answer for our life or lack of it.

How do we tend this garden?  How do we cultivate relationship with God?
  • Set aside time for the gardenA faithful gardener tends his garden almost daily.  If we don't schedule the time, it just will not happen.  Relationships take commitment; commitment requires time and energy.  If this time isn't already a habit, then begin small. Set aside some time, and show up.  "If you build it, He will come."  Before long, that short time will grow into more and more and eventually into a constant walking throughout the day in the presence of God.
  • Prepare the soilPreparing our spiritual garden begins in worship and thanksgiving and then moves to repentance and cleansing if needed.  We must remember who God is and who we are and are not.  We must allow His Spirit to show us the boulders in our lives, the places where we have become hardened by sin, and then remove them making the soil of our hearts ready for His planting.  We must allow Him to sift through our lives and then repent and be cleansed of all that is hindering the planting of His divine work in us.
  • Plant the seedHis word is the seed which needs to be planted in our hearts.  His written word helps us to know Jesus, the living Word of God.  He is our example.  He is our divine design, our model.  His are the steps we are to follow.  He is the way.  We have to know the word before we can be like the Word.  The more word we sow in our lives, the more we will be conformed to the fullness of Christ.
  • Wait for the plant to grow, and care for it.  God makes the seed grow, and we have to be patient and wait on His timing.  If we continually dig up the plant to see if it is growing, we will kill it.  We must believe that the plant will grow and then let God do the growing.  Meanwhile, we must do the work of the gardener.  We must weed and water and fertilize and protect our spiritual garden.  This is most often done through prayer and relationships with our close friends within our family in Christ.  Through prayer and relationship, we discern what is good and what is not, and then we weed.  Through prayer and relationship, we nourish and protect our garden until the plants have produced what they were called to produce. 
  • Harvest the produceGod does not give us fruit; He gives us life and gifts and power and purpose.  Fruit, however, must be grown.  What will this fruit be?  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  What will this fruit enable us to do?  Live by the Spirit just like Jesus did.  We will know the Father's will and be able to do it.  We will become more and more like Jesus and do deeds in keeping with the gospel.  We will be able to love as He loved, to walk as He walked, to see as He sees, to talk as He talked.  In this we will honor God and bring glory to His name.  In this we fulfill our destiny - to be "little Christs" - Christians.
God stands ready and waiting to do His part; however, He needs our cooperation.  He has provided every necessary element to make the garden grow, especially grace - GREAT GRACE for the growing.  We must do the work of the gardener - be committed, worship, be thankful, repent, be cleansed, study, pray, have relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and do good deeds in keeping with the gospel.

My dream doesn't end here focused on this one little patch of garden.  At the end of the dream, the scene changes perspective.  No longer do I view one gardener at work in her garden; now I am on a hill overlooking a vast valley, a valley consumed by "tiny gardens."
Each individual garden produces a certain type of fruit or vegetable or nut.  Together, every food imaginable is represented.  It is complete.  Nothing has been left out.

So it is with God's garden.  Our individual gardens together make up His garden, His kingdom.  One day, soon I hope, my garden will complement yours, yours will complement mine, and ours will complement theirs so that the completeness of God, the fullness of Christ, will be made known throughout the entire world.  Wow!  That would be a tremendous harvest!!

Friday, July 24, 2015

To Be Like Him

Almost fifty years ago, someone planted a seed in my heart - Charles Sheldon's classic, In His Steps.  In this novel, a minister and five of the most influential people in his church and in the town are "forced" to consider what being a Christian really means and what the consequences of truly following Jesus really are. 

These brave souls promise that for one year they would conduct their business and daily life only after asking, "What would Jesus do?".  After asking this question, they promise to wait to act until getting some impression from God.  Upon receiving the impression, they further promise to follow the impression as exactly as they can regardless of the consequences.  That year literally transforms their lives, their church, their community, and many of the communities connected to theirs.

I've never quite been able to "forget" one passage from the book.
 
Is it possible for this church to sing with exact truth, "Jesus, I my cross have taken, All to leave and follow Thee"?  If we can sing that truly, then we may claim discipleship.  But if our definition of being a Christian is simply to enjoy the privileges of worship, be generous at no expense to ourselves, have a good and easy time surrounded by pleasant friends and by comfortable things, live respectably and at the same time avoid the world's great stress of sin and trouble because it is too much pain to bear it - if this is our definition of Christianity, surely we are a long way from following the steps of Him who trod the way with groans and tears and sobs of anguish for a lost humanity; who sweat, as it were, great drops of blood; who cried out on the upreared cross, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" (185)
 
 
What following Jesus means is a question which will eventually confront every Christian.  We cannot sidestep this issue, nor would I dare to tell anyone how to do it.  However, deal with it we must or "else stand condemned" (15).  It is and was the heart of Jesus's message.  Whenever He invited someone to be with Him, the invitation entailed following Him.  So it is today.  If we would be with Him, we too must follow Him.
 
The older I get, the easier the big things are to do most of the time.  Where I often stumble is in the little things, in my daily routine and relationships.  It's so easy to consider what Jesus would do when praying for someone or speaking words of encouragement or providing for a need or being patient with someone else's unruly child, but it is so hard to remember what Jesus would do when I have a pouting child of my own or a frustrated husband or neverending chores or a pounding headache.
 
Micah 6: 8 says, "He has shown you, O man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you - to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."  The acting justly and loving mercy are not directed toward God here.  God needs not our mercy nor our justice.  He is mercy; He is justice.  Whom we should treat justly and mercifully is everyone else in our lives - our family, our boss, our co-workers, our neighbors, our friends and acquaintances, our customers, those who serve us, strangers - in other words, EVERYONE WE MEET.  Everyone is our neighbor.
 
It is hard to treat someone justly and to extend mercy and to love someone from a distance else the one loved knows not that he is loved.  Loving like Jesus loved takes involvement.  It takes work.  It takes asking what Jesus would do for this person.  It takes remembering that Jesus said to love God with everything we have and are and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  It takes being mindful of those around us and of those who materialize in our thoughts.  It's not an impossible task.  God can give us the heart and the resources to do it.  In fact, He wants to give us His heart of love and His resources.
 
Have you seen the news lately?  The world's gone crazy.  The way people treat each other is horrific.  Where in paper is the "good" news?
 
I John 4: 12-17 says that if we love each other, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us, that when love is made complete among us, we can have confidence because "in this world we are like Him."  O, to be like Him - to love as He loved, to think as He thought, to see as He saw, to walk as He walked, to be daily conformed to His image, to see others as He sees them, to know God as He did. 
 
To this we were called.  This is our destiny - "because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in His steps."  (1 Peter 2:21)  
 
Jesus still stands today saying, "Come, follow me."  He still desires relationship with us and that we walk faithfully beside Him, filled with the Holy Spirit and obedient to His plans for our lives.
 
My heart was not the only heart impacted by this seed.  Garrett W. Sheldon, great-grandson of Charles Sheldon, also wrote a novel entitled What Would Jesus Do?  It is a contemporary retelling of his great-grandfather's classic.  After this novel's release, people all over the world began to wear WWJD bracelets.  It was the first of many, many bracelets that people began to wear.  I haven't seen too many WWJD bracelets lately.   
 
So, I share with you now this same seed, a seed planted in my heart almost fifty years ago, and challenge myself and all who will hear to seek to walk in His steps, to ask what Jesus would do amidst the circumstances of our lives, to seek God's will and ways.  May God grant us great grace to walk in the manner of Christ.  "Jesus is a great divider of life.  One must walk parallel with Him or directly across His way" (89).
  

Sunday, July 5, 2015



Adam and Eve's rebellion turned us into rebels.  Jesus' obedience turns us into worshippers.

Today, recovery meetings are everywhere.  They seem to be the new trend, the "next big wave."  Many people over the last twenty years have asked me, "Why are you involved in recovery meetings? You're not in recovery.  Don't you get bored going to those meetings?  Don't you already know the things that are taught there?  They teach the same things over and over and over again.  Couldn't you make better use of your time?"

Recovery is no new trend.  It is not the next big wave.  It is and always has been God's beautiful, mysterious mission.  Everything since Adam's fall has been about God recovering what He lost - US.  The very heart of Jesus' mission was to find - US, to make a way to bring us back to God.

God created us in His image because only a creature like Himself could appreciate and celebrate the excellencies of God.  We were made to worship, to be worshippers.   However, we lost that ability because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve.  Jesus ultimately came to restore us to the place of worship we knew when we were first created.  He came to make worshippers out of rebels.

What is at the heart of true worship?  What are the essentials that need to be present in our songs, praise, and prayers?

  • boundless confidence - We cannot worship someone we cannot trust.  We cannot trust someone we do not know.  Before we can worship, we must have relationship with God.  We have to spend time with Him.  We have to get to know Him.  When we get to know Him, we will respect Him and see Him for what He is.  He is both the Lion and the Lamb, the beginning and end of all things, our Maker and our Redeemer.  He is no little "g" god.  He is really, really big and powerful and can do ANYTHING.  We can trust Him with - EVERYTHING.

  • reverence - When we realize how big, how great He really is, we will fear Him.  Unfortunately, we seem to have lost a little of that holy fear of the Lord, that awe that makes one shut up and lie face down before His holiness.  He is not just a Pez god that we pop the head and out comes a treat.  He is the God who created the entire universe and keeps it functioning.  He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all things.  He deserves our respect and our reverence.  This  also applies to Jesus and Holy Spirit.  They are one in the same, the holy Trinity.  They are our King, our Lord, our Guide.

  • admiration - Tozer defines admiration as appreciation of the excellency of God which grows and grows until it fills our heart with wonder and delight.  As we get to know Him more and more each day, we will discover His excellencies - grace, mercy, love, compassion, justice, holiness, beauty, power, omniscience, kindness, etc.  These components of His nature are like a great river that never runs dry.  They are forever.

  • fascination - As we get to know Him, we will be captivated by who He is and by all that He does.  We'll feel excitement and wonder as we ponder His greatness.  We will be entranced and astonished at the inconceivable elevation, magnitude, and splendor of Almighty God.

  • adoration - As we love Him and honor Him with all the power within us, our souls will be quickened with fear, wonder, and awe.  You may at times experience the holy, heavy silence of God.  The more we experience Him, the more our hearts will yearn to be with Him.  You may at times experience homesickness or even a holy loneliness that thirsts to be with Him.

  • repentence -  As we grow to see Him more clearly, we see ourselves more clearly.    What we see stirs within us our great need for Him and for forgiveness and cleansing and healing.  We see our brokenness and grow even more astonished that He would desire us.  During worship, we can lay out our needs before Him in honesty and confidence knowing that He truly cares and desires our wholeness. 

When I began this series, I mentioned that worship is divided into two actions.  First, we feel something in our hearts, and then we express in some appropriate manner what we are feeling.  Confidence, reverence, admiration, fascination, adoration, repentance - These are some of the things we feel along with great love.  The more we love Him and think upon Him, the more we will desire to love Him.  That love can be expressed in any number of ways - bowing, kneeling, weeping, being silent, raising hands, dancing, shouting, being generous, observing communion, laughing, etc.  I encourage you to follow your heart.  Listen to Holy Spirit, and do what you feel is appropriate.  Be bold.  This is the reason we were created.

I have really enjoyed writing this series.  Everything in bold print I owe to A. W. Tozer.  Much of the rest is my ramblings or seeds planted in me by somebody somewhere in the past. 

Friday, July 3, 2015



Not all worship is acceptable before God.  Part 2 of this worship series is about acceptable/unacceptable worship.

Tozer identifies several types of unacceptable worship before presenting his thoughts on acceptable worship.
  • Cain Worship - Cain assumed to know God but really didn't know God.  He assumed he occupied a relation to God that he didn't occupy.  If he had truly known God and had relationship with Him (to be made "at one" - "atone"), he would have understood his need for cleansing.  Therefore, he came before God without being cleansed by the blood of the atonement and the fire of the Holy Spirit, and God did not receive His worship. Cain's worship was without the atonement. 

  • When man assumes that sin, especially his own, is less serious than it is - This type of worship falls into the sphere that Dedrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace."  Jesus paid a very high price for our redemption, and when we do not take sin or the cross seriously, we cheapen the price He paid to set us free, to make worshippers out of rebels.

  • Samaritan Worship/heretical worship - This is when man chooses what he wants to believe in scripture and rejects or discards the rest.  Every book in the Bible is about Jesus and God's great RECOVERY mission.  Many of the words that Jesus spoke during His life here on earth were quotes from the Old Testament.  We cannot just camp out in the book of John; we must respect the whole counsel of scripture.  When we pick and choose, we are giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to God's very words.

Here's a little history.  The Samaritans occupied the country formerly belonging to the tribe of Ephraim and the half-tribe of Manasseh.  When the ten tribes were carried away in captivity to Assyria, the king of Assyria sent people to inhabit Samaria. (2Kings 17:24) These foreigners intermarried with the Israelites still in the area and at first worshipped the idols of their own nations.  Because of trouble with lions, this mixed race supposed that they had not honored the God of that region.  Therefore, they found a Jewish priest to teach them about the Jewish religion.  Though educated in Jewish customs and religion, they still practiced their idolatrous customs.  They embraced a religion that was a mix of what they found worthy in Judaism and their idolatry.  Because they had intermarried, the Jews considered them half-breeds and despised their worship practices.

  • Nature Worship - This is when man chooses to venerate the creation and the creative nature of man instead of venerating the Creator.  We are more like God than any other creation.  He placed in our DNA creativity and giftedness because He Himself is the first Most Excellent Creative and Gifted One.  People who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of nature, music, poetry, art, architecture, technology, fitness, ethics, etc. without celebrating the goodness and generosity of the Creator are guilty of this type of worship. 

ACCEPTABLE WORSHIP

Jesus Himself explained the nature of acceptable worship.

(John 4: 23-24.)  Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth,
for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.
 
  • Only the Holy Spirit can enable fallen man to worship God acceptably.  Only the Holy Spirit can enable fallen man to pray acceptably.  Only the Holy Spirit can enable fallen man to use his gifts acceptably.  These must be Spirit led.  I believe that is why Jesus asked the disciples to wait, to tarry in Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high.  They would need the work of Holy Spirit in their life.  We need the work of Holy Spirit in our lives.  Everything else is wood, hay, and stubble.
 
  • Only worship that presents the truth is acceptable to God.  Tozer identifies five areas of truth.  We must believe what God has said about these five areas in order to worship Him in an acceptable manner.
    1. What God says about Himself
    2. What God says about His Son, Jesus, the Christ
    3. What God says about Us - all the good and all the bad
    4. What God says about His grace and love and mercy, etc. - that all of these are as excellent as He says they are
    5. What God says about sin

When we accept and believe the truth of God and when we are filled with and led by the Holy Spirit, our worship will be acceptable to God.

This is the second part of a three-part series. 
                                         

In the late 70s and early 80s, Jim Bentley, Wayne Findley, and I had a spiritual awakening.
We were all teaching at the same school.  During this time, we ravenously read every "beefy" book we could find on pursuing God.  If we couldn't find three copies of something, we would share the book.  One of us would read the book marking it in a particular color and remarking in the margins.  Then we would pass it on to one of the others all the while discussing the nuggets of gold we had found every opportunity we could find at school.  By the time all three of us had finished reading the book, it was a three-colored maze of ouches, ohhhhs, amens, and wows among other thoughts.

Tozer's books were some of our faves.  In 1961, Tozer spoke to an assembly of pastors in Canada.  He gave three messages on worship which were later edited into a booklet entitled Worship: The Missing Jewel.  This booklet is stil the most important reflection on worship that I have read.  Lately, I discovered Tozer's Whatever Happened to Worship?  "The Jewel" was included in that book.  After rereading "Jewel," I thought I would share some of Tozer's insights in a 3-part posting.  

  • We were created and redeemed to be worshippersGod created man out of no external necessity.  He is self-sufficient and does not need us the way we need things.  He created us out of an internal necessity.  God who is infinitely perfect, infinitely beautiful, infinitely glorious, infinitely admirable, infinitely loving had to have some creature who was capable of admiring Him, loving Him, and knowing Him. 

So, He made us as near to being like Himself as it was possible for a creature to be like his Creator.  The most godlike thing in the universe is us - our soul makes this so.  

In the beginning man was a worshipper.  Man loved God.  He walked and talked with God.
He knew God and trusted Him and obeyed Him.  Man's sin separated him from relationship with God.  He could no longer worship Him as he had done before.  The whole reason for Jesus' life was to make a way whereby we could recover what we had lost to sin - the ability to worship and know God.  Many people make light of "recovery" meetings, but God has been in the recovery business since day one. 

Worship is composed of two actions.

  • to feel in the heart and to express in some appropriate manner what you feel

What do we feel when we worship? 

  • a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder, an awesome overpowering love in the presence of the Ancient Mystery.

We are humbled by the awesomeness and love and mercy and grace and goodness of God.  As I wrote in the song You Are Good, "This is the majesty of God.  This is the glory of our King.  This is the hope of all mankind.  You are everything. "  That He is who He is should cause me to worship.  That the God who created the universe and me loves me and made a way for me to have relationship with Him should cause me to worship.  That He is interested in every area of my life and in my wellbeing should cause me to worship.  That He gives me purpose should cause me to worship.  That He is nothing but good all the time should cause me to worship. 

  • The purpose of God in sending His Son to die and rise and live and be at the right hand of God was that He might restore to us the missing jewel - worship; that we might come back and learn to do again that which we were created to do in the first place - to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, to spend our time in awesome wonder and adoration of God, to feel it and express it and let it get into our labors. 

  • We should do nothing except as an act of worship to Almighty God through Jesus Christ - worshippers first; workers second.  The power given to us should be divided about 90 percent worship and 10 percent service.  Out of enraptured, admiring, adoring, worshipping souls, God then does His work.  The work done by a worshipper will have eternity in it.
  
If we're not worshipping, we shouldn't be working because our work will be in the flesh and not by the Spirit.  Worship isn't just a way of life, a lifestyle; it should be our whole life.

This is the first part in a three-part series.