Jesus

Just One Question

“To know him in your world now is to live interactively with him right where you are in your daily activities. This is the spiritual life in Christ.” – Dallas Willard

I love the account in the Bible about the Jesus followers who walked with him on the road to Emmaus and didn’t realize who he was – at least not at first. But, what an opportunity they had to talk to him, to ask him questions, and to be in awe of his resurrected presence. If only they had known who they were walking with!

Then I wondered: If I had a chance to walk with Jesus along a path, what would I want to ask him? Then, what if we had limited time, and I could ask only one question. What would it be?

I was surprised at what my question was when I imagined myself in that situation. It was not all the “why’s” I have demanded of him throughout my life. It was not asking for a miracle or a rescue. I realized that the real question I had for him wasn’t about any of my personal issues, it was about him and who he was.

Then I thought back on my prayers – for direction or special provision, or “why is this happening?” I couldn’t help thinking that if I had a better picture of Jesus in his glory, not just as a good teacher or a friend, my prayers would undoubtedly be different.

How about you? If Jesus gave you a chance to ask him only one question, what would it be? What would your heart want to ask? We don’t see him physically now, but he is present. Go ahead and ask your question!

“Jesus asked them a question, saying, ‘What do you think about the Christ?'” – from Matthew 22:42 

Image from Flickr

Encounters with Jesus

True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation.  
—Thomas Merton 

How can we live in such a way that encounters with Jesus, as Merton describes above, are possible for us?

We start by wanting to know everything we can know about him. As Christians, one of our missions should be to read and reread the Gospels to keep gaining insights into Jesus – not only his teaching, but also his actions, attitudes, and habits.

Then we will want to know him, not just intellectually, but experientially through a one-on-one relationship with him. We will want personal encounters with Jesus – times when we can sense his presence or hear his voice as a thought in our mind or feel his love reaching out for us.

These moments with Jesus are possible, but they cannot be commanded. They can only be received. We can prepare space for them by walking in obedience to Jesus, desiring to please him in every possible way. Such a moment might happen when we pause in our prayer to listen, or when we’re driving to an appointment, or as we sleep at night. Every encounter with Jesus will cut to our heart, it will change us, we will never forget it, and we will want more.

Jesus, in the person of the Holy Spirit, lives within everyone who has put their trust in him. If we tune in to his presence and his power, he will respond in his own way and time.

“. . . “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” – John 14:2

How well do you know him?

“We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.” Philip Yancey

Jesus, when you were on earth, you were busy, but never hurried. You stayed calm even when your closest disciples didn’t understand what you were trying to teach. How did you do it?

Even as a human, I knew the Father better than you do. I went to him all the time when I was tired or stressed or afraid. Yes, I was afraid. Remember Gethsemane?

And there were times I was so frustrated, like when I saw God’s people as sheep without a shepherd. Their shepherds were their religious leaders and they were leading people away from the Father, not toward him. I was angry!

And many times, I just needed help making decisions, trying to understand what the Father wanted. So I went to him a lot. Praying, asking, listening for direction. It always came and, when it did, I acted. I wanted nothing more than to do what he wanted, not what I, as a human being, wanted.

So, little one, if you are frustrated by what you see in the world around you, or angry at injustices, or afraid of what is to come, turn to the Father. Turning to him will help you know him better and the better you know him, the more you will rely on him and the more you will want to please him.

Let him love, lead, encourage, and correct you. That’s what loving fathers do. And our Father in heaven does all those things perfectly!

“Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior, who daily bears our burdens.” – Psalm 68:19

The View from Above

“God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain.” – Philip Yancey

Why is life so hard? What have I done to deserve this? Why doesn’t God do something?

Job asked those questions, too. At the beginning of his story he had it all. Then everything began to fall apart. He lost his wealth, his children, and, finally, his health. His friends insisted God wouldn’t be doing this to him if he hadn’t sinned. If he would just admit his sin, everything would be OK.

So Job began to pray asking what he had done wrong and what he could do to appease God and get the pain to stop. No answer. What he doesn’t know is that God didn’t do any of this to him. Satan did – with God’s permission. It was not punishment, it was a test to see if he would trust and serve God even when things didn’t go his way.

There are some standard take-aways from Job’s story including that God doesn’t always protect us from the evil in this world and that trouble isn’t always (maybe seldom actually) a punishment for sin.

Those are good points, but, in my mind, the greatest lesson from Job’s story is this: Though others criticized, condemned, and shamed him, it is what God said about him that mattered. And God said he was blameless and upright.

When we choose to trust Jesus with our lives, God sees us as one of his beloved children. When we focus too much on what others think of us, or what Satan says about us, maybe the story of Job will remind us to ask God what he thinks*. That’s all that matters really.

” . . . you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you (Isaiah 43:4a)

*Hint: He tells us in his word.

Letting Him Speak

“When God speaks to you, he is not writing a new book of Scripture; rather, he is applying to your life what he has already said in his Word.” – Henry Blackaby

Ready for a spiritual experiment? Try this:

Worship Jesus. Adore him for who he is, what he’s done, and what he promises.

Remember. Ask him to bring to help you remember a story about him from one of the Gospels. See which event comes to mind (don’t sort through several – just take the first one).

Meditate for a few minutes on that story.

For me recently it was the account of Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter. The detail I zeroed in on was that, though there were many people there, Jesus allowed only three to go in with him. My heart went immediately to “I want to be one of the three!” I want to be close to Jesus, one of his most trusted companions, one who can see everything he does and hear everything he says.

Draw a conclusion.

Jesus reminded me that, if I wanted to be like Peter, James, and John, I need to stay close to him and not lag behind. I need to ask questions and listen for answers. I need to suggest things I’d like him to do and then learn from his response – just as they did throughout the Gospels.

When we give Jesus our attention, he responds. His response encourages us and deepens our desire for more of him. If you’re ready for that connection, you might want to try a spiritual experiment like this one.

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” – John 16:13

Stay for dinner.

“Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend.” – Henri Nouwen

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock”.  Jesus announces his presence at the door of our heart. If we let him in, what will he do? Criticize the dirt that’s there? Tell us our closets need to be cleaned or there’s stuff we need to get rid of? Or maybe he’ll turn around and leave when he sees what’s behind the door.

No. None of those things. Here’s what he says next: “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me (Revelation 3:20).” If we let him in, this verse tells us he wants to have dinner with us. He wants to sit at our table and have us tell him about our day. He wants to enjoy the vegetables we bought from the farmers’ market. He wants to share our everyday life.

Eating together is an important value to God. Psalm 23 tells about him preparing a table for us. Some of the sacrificial offerings in the Old Testament times were fellowship offerings. The sacrificial lamb was eaten as a sign of communion with God. And don’t forget Jesus fed 5,000+ people at one time and 4,000+ another. God seems to love the relationships that come from sharing food.

If Jesus is knocking on the door of your heart today, or mine, let’s let him in. Then invite him to stay for dinner. Let him become a friend. He will surely change some things in our lives over time, but, for now, he just wants us to invite him in.

“And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts . . .” – Acts 2:46

Things God Never Says #5

“All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.” – J. I. Packer

We humans tend to think of God as human-like – just bigger, stronger, wiser, and holier. But that’s not good thinking. He is so, so different from us.

I hope this short series of “things God never says” helps us realize that God doesn’t say the things humans say or think the way humans think. Our Creator is different, and he’s outside of anything he’s created – including us.

So, when God, a being we cannot even imagine let alone understand, wants to communicate with us, is it any wonder we don’t always “get it”? Even when God took on a human body and came to earth to help us understand him and his plan for us, his disciples often misunderstood. They didn’t really grasp Jesus’s mission until after his resurrection.

God doesn’t give up. He continues to teach and reveal and guide. Jesus is the bridge between the knowable and unknowable God, the Holy Spirit enlightens us, and the Bible is God’s revelation of himself, and still he says, “. . . my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . .” (Isaiah 55:8).

But, what he never says to us as we struggle to know him is, “Why can’t you understand?” He knows all our limitations and views us with compassionate patience.

Paul says it’s like we’re looking into a mirror now, seeing images and reflections, but someday we’ll see face-to-face. Then things will become clear. Until then, we’re grateful that God still communicates, and that he’s patient with our dusty efforts to understand.

“As a father shows compassion to his children,
    so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
    he remembers that we are dust.” – Psalm 103:13-14

Things God Never Says #2

“We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.” – Brennan Manning

We have all experienced rejection in our lives. The close friend who moves away and you lose touch. You feel that the friendship wasn’t all you thought it was if it could fade so easily. Or an adult child turns away and doesn’t look back. The worst, though, and we’ve all seen it and some have experienced it firsthand, is when a spouse quietly announces, “I just don’t love you anymore.”

At Jesus’s last meal with his disciples before he was crucified, John tells us that Jesus, “. . . having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1b). These are friends who would that very night walk away from him in his trial and crucifixion. There was one who would betray him to authorities and another who would deny even knowing him. Jesus knew about their cowardice and disloyalty, and yet he loved them. To the end. Never wavering.

He loves us to the end, too! When we walk away, he loves us anyway. He waits for us to turn around and come back. When we are tired or discouraged, his love is always there holding us up. No matter what we do, we cannot make him stop loving us! And, the funny thing is that when we begin to believe that, it changes us. We want to please him, to talk to him about everything, to get forgiveness when we sin, to always be close. Just accept it. He’s never going to say, “I just don’t love you anymore.”

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.” – Lamentations 3:22-23

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Adventuring

“. . .if you have not been enchanted by this adventure – your life – what would do for you?” – Mary Oliver

Do you ever just pause and consider the wonder of living? The amazing fact that we are alive, breathing, thinking, seeing, processing, planning, eating, talking, sleeping, and waking? It’s an adventure walking through this life with God. We trust him, we know he has our best interest at heart, and we know that, no matter what, he is with us.

But, someone reading this is saying, “Adventure? But, I have big problems.” Yup. There are problems. As I was taught by a friend many years ago, “Problems are opportunities.” Opportunities to grow, to be courageous, to prove ourselves, to learn, and to know the joy that comes at the end of the struggle.

Attitude plays a big part in living an adventurous life. Every person on this planet has problems, it’s just that some people’s issues are more visible than others. We get to choose how to face life – with joy and anticipation and trust in our all-powerful, all-wise Father or with dissatisfaction and fear, thinking we have to control everything ourselves.

What is it that would make us truly joyful about the life we are living? I believe it is when we walk in lockstep with Jesus, following him and his teaching, believing he is preparing a place for us, and trusting that everything that happens to us has a benefit we cannot see. That’s trust. Faith. Confidence in the One who is in control. As we learn to do this, it becomes easier, and life, even with problems, turns into an adventure!

“Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy,” – 1 Peter 1:8

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Extraordinary Things

“Jesus was God spelling himself out in language humanity could understand.” – S. D. Gordon

I don’t think we are supposed to live ordinary lives. Why? Because we follow Jesus and, because of him, we have a chance of participating in the extraordinary every day. There’s a great example of this told in the gospels.

Jesus was teaching, and people had comes from miles around to hear him. Some caring friends brought in a paralyzed man. They had come in through the roof because the crowds made it impossible to get close to Jesus any other way.

Jesus looked at this man who couldn’t walk and told him his sins were forgiven. Who says things like that? The religious leaders who were watching knew exactly who says things like that – they knew he was claiming to be God.

Then Jesus healed the paralytic, who promptly got up off his mat and walked!

And then we read about the reaction of the crowd: “. . . amazement seized them all, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, ‘We have seen extraordinary things today’.” (Luke 5:26)

The One we follow still teaches – through the Bible, other Christians, and in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Crowds are still following him from all over the world. Jesus still forgives sins. He still is God who came in the flesh so we could be with him forever. He still works miracles. These are all things that should amaze us every day!

Lord, I want to live close enough to you to see extraordinary things – to participate in them, to know you through them, and to share, with anyone who will listen, who you are. With you, no life will ever be ordinary!

“We have seen extraordinary things today.” – Luke 5:26b