Tag Archives: Bible

Spotting a Fake – Part 2

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This world is full of false preachers, scam artists who seem to be following Jesus but who in reality are working to become wealthy and famous.  John calls these guys by the right name: “antichrists.”  Last time we considered one of the clues to look for in spotting this type of charlatan.  John says watch out for those who do “not really belong to us.”  (See Spotting a Fake).   But there is a better way:

But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.   I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth.  (1 John 2:20-21)

God designed humans to be intimately connected to Him by His Holy Spirit.  Sin destroyed that connection.  Jesus came to restore it.  (There is more detail about this in many of my earlier posts.  Click on the “New Here?” link above.)  To all those who would believe in Him, trust Him and follow Him.  He said:

“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—  the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.”  (John 14:16-17)

The reason Jesus called the Holy Spirit the “Spirit of Truth” is because:

But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.  (John 16:13a)

John says, if you truly follow Jesus, He has “annointed” you (given you, filled you) with the Holy Spirit, the One Who guides you into all truth.  Listen to Him!  He will show you how to spot a fake!

I appreciate your tuning in to this “blog,” chewing over neat things from the Bible with me.  I hope you will share it with people you know who have never developed a “taste” for the Bible.  Let me wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving!  God is so good.  His blessings, His faithfulness are experienced new each day.  I’ll be taking a few days off from writing this as I spend time with family.

Flood Muck and Koinonia

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After the flood hit Longmont Colorado,  houses down along the river had 3 to 4 feet of river muck inside and needed to be shoveled out.  Furniture needed to be removed, washed and dried or thrown on giant, growing piles of trash.  Drywall had to be cut away.  Incipient mold had to be treated. Homeowners saw all that needed to be done and despaired.  But then neighbors began to gather and spontaneous groups of volunteers showed up from churches across town.  They grabbed shovels, waded into the muck and began to work.  Others set up cleaning stations.  Food tables appeared and soon were loaded with sandwiches and fresh water.  After a long day of work, those workers, covered with mud, were smiling with exhaustion and satisfaction.Flood Workers

There is a special kind of relationship that is formed when people work together.  The Greeks had a word for it: koinonia.  That word shows up a lot in the Bible.  Most of the time it is translated into the English word, fellowship.  But fellowship is a pretty weak word.  Don’t think standing around chatting and sipping tea.  Think shoveling muck together, struggling, helping, working and laughing.

Now, imagine having a relationship like that with God!  John says Jesus makes that possible:

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.  (1 John 1:3)

Can you picture yourself sharing a smile of satisfaction with God at the end of the day?  John wants you to know about that.  More than knowing, he wants you to have that.  Chew on that…

Been There, Done That

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You remember the scene in the movie, Titanic, where the cocky oceanographer guys were skeptically interviewing Rose Calvert, the fictional character who had survived the disaster?  Once they began to realize she was for real, they presumed to tell her what the sinking would have been like, using their finest computer simulations.  She listens quietly.  Then, with exquisite understatement, she says, “Thank you for that fine forensic analysis, Mr. Bodine.  Of course, the experience of it was somewhat less clinical.“  There is no substitute for personal experience.  No so-called expert or scholar can ever come close to knowing, not like the person who was actually there.

That’s what makes the Apostle John so interesting.  These days, we have self-proclaimed experts and scholars who presume to tell us what Jesus was really like, or even that He never really existed!  Those guys get a lot of exposure in magazines and news shows.  But John was there.  Look at how he begins his letter, the one called 1 John in the Bible:

That which was from the beginning (he’s talking about Jesus), which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. – 1 John 1:1(with my added emphasis and explanation)

Even back in John’s day, there were people who called into question the identity or personality of Jesus, who presumed to redefine Jesus according to their own preconceived ideas.  John said, “Baloney!  I was there; I knew Him, I saw Him, I touched Him.  And I know from first-hand experience that the Man called Jesus, is the “Word of Life!””

Let’s spend several days examining some of the best stuff from 1 John.  I hope you will share this with people you know who may have questions about Jesus.  John knows what he’s talking about: he has been there and done that and got the t-shirt.

What’s Your Gift?

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When the Bible talks about a “gift of the Spirit,” it might sound all spooky and hocus pocus to you.  You might wonder if it involves flipping into a trance and exhibiting weird behavior.  But, in reality, the Bible explains what a spiritual gift is in pretty down-to-earth language:

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12:7)

To put that in other words, everyone who has the Spirit living in his or her soul (i.e. everyone who has trusted Jesus) will begin to show the evidence of that Spirit, as He begins to transform their mind, emotion and will (the soul) from the inside out.  Romans 12:2 calls this process being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  The evidence of those changes are “the fruit of the Spirit.”

Each of us has been designed by God to show (manifest) the influence of the Holy Spirit in a particular way.  We do not all have the same “gift.”

Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. (Romans 12:4-5)

Each of these unique “gifts” do have something in common, however: they serve the common good (of the body of believers).

Paul goes on, in verses 6 through 8, to  illustrate some of the possible ways this gifting will look, such as wisdom, strong faith, leadership, etc.  This is not an exhaustive list, just examples.  However the Spirit transforms what you do in a particularly effective and helpful way is your gift.  Those gifts call attention to Him, not you.  Paul says, when you find your gift, use it!

I know someone whose gift is to provide a calming influence in meetings in which several strong opinions have been expressed.  It is amazing to watch the Holy Spirit work through that man.   I know someone else with the gift of making brownies.   If you ever tasted those brownies you wouldn’t wonder if that was really a spiritual gift.

So, what’s yours?  When you open a Christmas gift, it is fun to experience the anticipation, the surprise and the joy that follows (assuming its not a tie…).  If you keep it simple, “unwrapping” your gift from the Spirit can be a lot like that.  Enjoy!

Can I Do New Stuff?

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Don’tcha love it when the software fairies announce that your computer operating system has just been updated?  Me? I seize up at first, thinking that they have just erased all my passwords and favorite tunes.  But then I go exploring, trying to figure out if, as a result of this new software, I can actually do new stuff.  When you trust Jesus, He gives you a new operating system – the Holy Spirit.  Question is, can you actually do new stuff?  Yes you can!  But, but, but…

At first, you may not notice any big change, because the Holy Spirit has been added to an operating system that has grown accustomed to operating without Him.  But soon enough, we start looking to see if we can do new stuff.

Think of your “self” in three parts: Body, Soul (your mind, emotion & will), and Spirit.  The Body takes orders from the Soul.  But where does the Soul get its information from?  We are designed to have the Spirit (of God) inform the Soul, so it can operate the Body correctly.  If we don’t have the Spirit, the Soul has to get all of its information from the Body (the eyes, ears and Facebook).  That is backwards.

The Bible calls a Body and Soul with no Holy Spirit, “flesh.”  Flesh is the nickname for our old operating system.  When God gives His Spirit to that person, now he has “flesh” and “Spirit.”   We have a new operating system, but we still have the habits we formed when all we had to work with was flesh.  Just like with new computer software, when you have to train yourself not to do things the old way, there is a natural conflict between our old habits (flesh) and our new operating system (Spirit).  It takes awhile to learn to operate (or “walk”) by the Spirit, instead of the flesh.  But that is how we discover the new stuff we can do.

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. (Galatians 5:16-17 ESV)

When you first read that, you might think it’s saying you have to stop having fun.  Nope.  It’s saying “Learn to use your new operating system, so you can do new stuff.”

Keep the Faith – Part 1

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A few days ago, a mob in Egypt burned down a Christian school and then took 3 nuns out into the streets, to parade them around as prisoners of war.   There have been recent reports of courts in Iran sentencing people to death for the crime of believing in Jesus.  It is impossible for us to imagine how great the pressure is in these situations for people to deny their faith in Jesus, or at the very least keep quiet about it.

In my community the pressure is much less forceful (there were 2 letters to the editor in our daily newspaper today, telling Christians to keep what they believe to themselves.) but when it comes against you, personally, it still feels very challenging.    When the push of the world becomes shove, when faith is tested in painful ways or even simply embarrassing ways, there are some things we can do to help us stand firm.  We’re going to look at some of them in more detail over the next several days.

You may think the Bible was written by a drill sergeant and just tells us to suck it up and be strong.  But back when the early Christians were doing a lot of bleeding, real people needed real ways to keep their faith strong.   The book of Hebrews spent a whole chapter telling of great men and women of faith, who resolutely continued to believe in God and His promises, despite severe pressure from the world.  And then, the author of that book gave some practical tips for Christians facing similar threats to their faith. He said, here’s what you can do to stay strong, too:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Hebrews 12:1-3)

We’ll take this in pieces.  The first tip is this: Remember that your suffering has come because you are playing on a great team!   The word, witnesses, probably doesn’t mean that the souls of dead martyrs are watching from heaven as you struggle.  It means that they have borne witness by their lives that holding on to faith in the midst of suffering is really worth it.  The word, witness, is the Greek word from which we get the English word, martyr.  The idea here is that when you are tested because of your belief in Jesus, you have come off the bench to play on a great team that has left a legacy of fearless faith over the centuries.

There is a reason that pro sports teams retire the number and display the jersey of a great player.  The fans love it for sure but the deeper reason has to do with the impact on the team.  Implied in those acts that honor the former greats, is a message to the rookie on the bench: “This is who we are; this is what we play like and this is what we stand for.”

The great cloud of witnesses gives that message to the lonely soul who is being threatened for her or his faith today.  You may feel like giving up, caving in, but look up as you come off the bench.  Look up to the rafters and see those sweat and blood-stained jerseys of the great men and women who have played on this team before.  Remember their courage.  Know that they are glad to know you are standing in the lineup today.

Stay tuned over the next few days, and we’ll dig deeper into the next tip for keeping the faith.

Dangerous Faith

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Speaking of people who lived by strong faith, the author of Hebrews says:

Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—  (Heb 11:36b-37)

Of course, that was back in the old Bible days, right?  What challenges do we face today that test our faith?  Well, last week, 20 churches were burned to the ground.  Homes were ransacked and torched.  People were beaten and a few were killed.  Why?  They were Christians living in Egypt.  In some areas of Egypt, Christians are living as prisoners in their homes, afraid to go outside, even to get food.  Most of us cannot imagine what these people are dealing with, much less really know how we would respond if we were in their shoes.  They are facing a stark challenge to their faith.  What they choose to do, in response to these attacks, will show what they believe.   The world urges us to fight back, to get even, take revenge.  Jesus taught: 

But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…  (Matthew 5:44)

Sadly, the situation in Egypt is hardly unique.  Levels of Christian persecution are higher than they ever have been.   This faith business is dangerous business.   Would you join me in praying for these brothers and sisters, asking God to strengthen their faith?

Loud and Clear

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Maybe someday we will understand how God connects with salmon and butterflies.  From our perspective, His connection with them seems built-in, automatic.  But the connection between God and humans is conditional.  It depends upon our being in the right condition.  You’ve seen the thriller movie scenes in which the guy in the airport tower is frantically calling to the pilot of an airplane but can’t get through?  That’s a conditional communication; the airplane radio must be set on the right channel and be in good working order or the communication doesn’t get through.  

But what is the necessary condition for communication with God?  God has designed our interaction with Him to depend on faith.  Think of all the other conditions He could have chosen.  He could have given us radios that we needed to set on the right channel.  He could have required us to bring burnt offerings.  We could have been required to follow His tweets.  But God chose faith.  Interesting…  Why faith?   The answer begins by considering  what faith is.

The essence of faith is solid belief that exists in the absence of tangible proof.  The Bible says it like this:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1)

(By the way, the word “hope” in that sentence did not mean wishful thinking, it means a confident expectation.   It’s not like, “I hope it doesn’t rain on Thursday,” but like our “hope” that Summer will follow Spring.)

If you think about it, if what you believe is true, then faith frees you from the cumbersome process of seeking proof.  When you walk in the dark in an unfamiliar place, every step must be tentative until you know you have solid footing.  But when you walk in the dark in your home, walking by faith that your home is unchanged from when you turned out the lights, then your steps are freer and more fluid.  Scientific measurement methods, by contrast,  are necessarily tedious and plodding, designed to help us feel our way in the dark and they work well for that.  But they don’t work well for an activity that is done with spontaneity, like dancing.  Dancing is done by faith.  And so is talking with God.

God designed us to communicate with Him, not on the basis of touch or sight or measurement, but on the basis of faith.  The more I consider His design choice, the better it seems.  Can you imagine how suffocating it would be to a relationship if you had to stop and measure how much you loved each other several times a day?   Do you remember how cool it was when you didn’t need training wheels?  We are meant to swoop and glide when we communicate with God, not wobble along in tentative fear.  

Without faith, we are not in touch with God.  We are left to our own devices and guesses.  Adam and Eve discovered that in the Garden of Eden.  When they stopped trusting in God, they were left wandering in the dark.  When Jesus came, it was to restore our connection with God.

Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”  Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”  John 6:28-29

To believe in Jesus is also to believe God loves us.  Faith is sure of that.  To believe in Jesus is to believe God will forgive us our many sins, that Jesus willingly paid with His life to settle our accounts.  Faith nails that down.  More than that, faith opens up our communication and relationship with God.  Wow!

When I dish out caramel fudge ice cream, my scoop seeks out the mother-lode veins of gooey, rich, stuff that clusters in the middle.  When it comes to faith in the Bible, one of the gooey, rich, mother-lode veins is found in the 11th chapter of Hebrews.  You saw the first verse quoted above.  Most of the rest of that chapter is a Hall of Fame listing of great acts of faith.  But there is something else, too, something surprising and thought provoking.

Stay tuned…

God’s Name

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The bumper sticker said, “God is too big to fit into just one religion.”  Hmmmm…  If they meant that Jews and Christians worship the same God, okay, I agree with that.  But if they meant that all religions share the same God, then we got a problem – sloppy, illogical thinking.  If one person’s God says He has chosen a small tribe of people and will use them to extend blessing to the world, and another guy’s “god” says that that same tribe of people must be eradicated from the earth before his blessing can come, then those two guys are not hearing from the same God.

Because we humans cannot fully perceive or understand God, we have a tendency to define Him according to what we think He should be like.  We say things like, “If there is a God, then why do people starve?”  Questions like that presume that we have the capacity and the right to define God’s character.  We give God a make-over, according to our own preferences.  And we wind up with many different gods.

News flash: We are not in charge of Who God is.  He is.  When He called Moses to rescue the Israelites from slavery, Moses asked Him for some ID:

Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’  ”God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.  (Exodus 3:13-15)

What a perfect name: “I Am Who I Am; deal with it!”  Throughout the Bible, humans try to redefine the character of God and pretend that He is the way they want Him to be.  Tragic things ensue.  But God doesn’t change; He says, “My name (the essence of Who I am) is I AM WHO I AM.”

An acquaintance,  who is in recovery, talked about how, in AA meetings, everybody seems to have a personal “Higher Power,” each of them with different personalities.   Then he said, “But I am the lump of clay; I am the one who needs to be molded and changed, not God.”   My friend may have done some dumb things in the past, but he has discovered the beginning point for wisdom.  He knows Who God is: He is Who He Is.

You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to him who formed it,
“He did not make me”?
Can the pot say of the potter,
“He knows nothing”? (Is 29:16)
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”  (Proverbs 9:10)

When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He said they should start out by praying that the Name of their Heavenly Father would be held in high reverence.  Once you know God’s Name is I AM WHO I AM, everything else can fall into place.

One Plus Two Equals One

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… or at least that is what we’ve been told.  God is One and God is Three.  He exists in three Persons, the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  But explanations of how three can equal one usually fall short.  People resort to tortured analogies (“It’s like three sides of a triangle…”) that don’t really help.  It’s a lot like asking a software engineer to explain what he does for a living.  Beyond answering you with “techno-speak” (“I manage the cloud-based infrastructure of network algorithms…”) your engineer friend is hard pressed to help you really understand.

The Bible explains the mystery of three in one by focusing on Jesus’ part in it.  Like this:

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,  (Heb 1:3a)

No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only (i.e. Jesus), who is at the Father’s side, has made him known. (John 1:18 – with my added explanation)

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.   (Col 1:15)

God is invisible to our limited human senses.  Even if we could somehow see Him, we would not be able to understand what we were seeing.  But Jesus, these verses say, is an exact representation of Who and What God is, given to us in a form we can understand: human form.

My favorite (and somewhat tortured) analogy begins with a desktop computer.  If you look at your computer, what you see is really just its case, not the actual computer.  You open it up and look at the circuit cards inside and you still cannot see any computing going on; you don’t have any way of knowing what it is doing.  What “it is doing” happens at a microscopic level, the invisible flow of electrons and “holes” (whatever those are…), in complex patterns, and at the speed of light.  Even if you invented special goggles that enabled you to see that flow of energy, you still couldn’t make any sense of it.  Balancing your checkbook would look very much like a game of Angry Birds.  Nevertheless, this invisible computing process is being done for you!   But there is no way for you to take advantage of it unless the process is somehow translated into a form you can see and understand.

That is why your computer has a monitor.  When you turn on your monitor, voila!, it translates the invisible and inscrutable flow of energy in the desktop unit into words and pictures that you can understand.  Assuming your desktop unit is connected correctly to your monitor, the monitor is the “exact representation of” the computer’s “being.”  The monitor has “made the computer known.”   It is the “image of the invisible” computer.  That’s why, when you talk about your computer, you are referring to all three parts of it as one thing – the processor, the monitor and the connection between them.  Like God: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Who is the wireless connection between the Father and Son!).

If you follow all of that, perhaps it will give greater understanding to these words of Jesus:

Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. (John 14:9b-10)

Does that make it clearer?  Two plus One equals One.