Every Christian must fight

There is a reason we are given the imagery of armor in preparation for the life before God in Ephesians 6. This imagery is used because our life is a fight. It is a constant fight against the things which keep us from getting to God. Closeness to God is our ultimate good as indicated in Psalm 73, but our life is always full of things which prevent us from that ultimate good of closeness. Those things never cease to present themselves each day. They must be fought and laid aside so we may continue to come closer to God.

This is why Ephesians 6 gives us a whole and complete armor for our daily fight. Every day we are to prayerfully and intentionally put on this armor that we might fight back all those things which prevent us from getting to God.

The life of the follower of Jesus is anything but lazy. The life after Jesus is a fight, and if we fight correctly each day it will only be done with the strength of Jesus Christ found in intentional prayer.

Missing God

Our world is saturated with the Holy. It is full of God's presence. God's presence are the very waters we swim in each day, and yet every day and every week I can close each one having completely missed Him. When we realize the truth of Ephesians 4:6 that is over all, through all, and in all, there becomes a saddening reality on our part. We realize God is present everywhere, and we still miss Him entirely in the course of a day or a week.

We need what Richard Foster calls prayer of examen of consciousness. We need to recognize what Erwin McManus calls divine moments in need of seizing. We need with Brother Lawrence to practice the presence of God.

Each day is full of God's presence, and my mind and heart need to be attentive to His presence. I need to 'prayerfully reflect on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of my days to see how God has been at work among me and how I respond' to those moments.

Each day is my opportunity to be present where I am. God invites me to see and hear and respond to what is around me, and through it all, to discern the footprints of God.

What may God be doing in and through my kids today? What may God be inviting me into through the neighbor, the barista, the homeless man I come across today? What may God be teaching me or forming in me through the loss of a job, the loss of a love one, a confusing circumstance, or a relational altercation?

These are all divine moments when heaven invades earth. More specifically, these are all moments Heaven invades my world today.

I only pray and ask that I have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Avoid the slow leak

When you have a slow leak, it may go unrecognized until it is too late. All the necessary fluids are leaked out until seizing breakage happens.

This is the nature of our relationship and connection with the Father. Oswald "Ozzie" Chambers writes, "spiritual leakage begins when we cease to lift our eyes unto Him." We can allow this leak to continue over the course of days and weeks until life brings about that seizing breaking moment. Suddenly our lack of care to look to God with routine has caused our greatest breakdown. "Only when God brings you to a sudden halt will you recognize how you have been losing out [all along]."

When you look at your heart and life, is there already a slow leak beginning in your routine connection and entanglement with the heart of God? Do not wait for the screeching halt and ultimate break down to care for that slow leak. It will be too late by that time. You will have to only take on the bigger cost of repairing the broke down heart that could have been cared for with ongoing routine maintenance of the heart.

Doing without the gospel

Once I come face to face with the real gospel of Jesus, it will well up within me either of great appreciation or joy or a rebellion and resentment. Many of us, particularly many Americans, resent a vital part of the gospel, namely the giftedness of it. Once many are face to face with the fact they have to accept a gift rather than give and give and give of their earning efforts, we are resentful of the gospel.

The gospel makes clear we are "justified as a GIFT by His GRACE through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ" (Rom. 3:24). Oswald Chambers writes, "We cannot earn or win anything from God; we must either receive it as a gift or do without it."

Here is a stark challenge to the way many of us try to understand the gospel. If you are not receiving it as a gift and trying to work for it with all your own efforts, you are missing it. If you are trying to work and earn God's love, you are choosing to do without it.

It is gift and it is to be received. It does not require your giving or your work. It is selfish pride just as much for me to refuse a gift, because even in that refusal I make way more of myself and less of God.

4 Things on God's distance and absence

There are moments in every honest believer's journey when God seems distant. It can be hard to sort out. Sometimes knowing with your mind God is omnipresent makes the sense of his absence all the more painful.

Those moments it feels as though your prayers bounce off the ceiling and walls only to return to you, we lose touch with the sense of God's intimate tenderness as we once knew. These are moments and periods of time when we ought to know a few things.

1. Every honest believer has known this place. Every believer has or will come to a point when God feels absent or distant at best. It is important off-the-bat to know you are not alone.

2. Do not assume you made this happen. Do not assume you have done something wrong to drive God away. While our sin does separate us from God, that is not always the reason for this distance. There are times when the experience of distance is simply part of the experience of limited beings attempting intimate connection with a limitless God.

3. God has the freedom to come and go. What kind of god would you have created who answers your every beck and call? What limited god would you have created who only comes and goes as you wish? If God appears at your beck and call, it is not likely the Biblical God you are relating to. God will not be formed in our image. He is free to come and go at His will; not yours.

4. The experience of absence is not the absence of experience What might God be doing with you in this time? St. John of the Cross wrote about this part of our journey, calling it "The Dark Night of the Soul". He says there are two "purifiers" at play during this time. One, you are learning not to depend on external things as proof of God's presence. We can move further within ourselves to know the truer senses of spiritual connection. The second purifier is stripping us of our interior dependence. We are forced to challenge what we really believe about the character of God. Is God truly good and loving? What things have I created in my own image to demand God to do in order for me to believe he is good or loving? These times of feeling absent or distant make me truly realize God does not have to fit in my limited understanding of goodness and love.

I am forced to let go of my stipulations and come to know the God whose love is a reckless raging fury I cannot form as I wish. Then, I can finally let go and trust.

Sit still in the presence

Today, God, I want your Word to affect both my mind and my heart. I need to know your tenderness, your intimacy, and your love in a way that I have not known it in some time. I will soak up your Word today. Please help my heart understand. Speak to my heart and may I come to know you more?

"and though you have not seen Him, YOU LOVE HIM, and though you do not see Him now, you BELIEVE in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls." -1 Peter 1:8-9

I greatly desire my heart to know the joy of salvation my mind knows it is. My soul is saved, and my mind knows the good news of the reality, but my heart does not often sit and rest with the very good news that this truly is for my soul eternal. God, help my heart rejoice today. I want to love you more.

Help my heart today. Give me a heart of flesh to replace the bits of built up stone.

Taught to hear

So here I stand with you, God. I want to see my nature become more and more like you so that your Word speaks more clearly to me. If my character is more and more like yours, then your Word would make more sense to me. It would speak more clearly to me. Your Spirit speaks to that which is within me, but my natural and sinful heart will not hear Your words as they are intended to speak. Only as I become more and more like you through increased obedience, your voice in your Word grow that much clearer. Teach me to hear you, and draw me closer to you that you would be all I ever needed.

The trouble with self-reliant leaders

Self-reliant leaders are relying on limited resources.

I became a self-reliant leader over time, and in so doing, I was dependent upon limited resources. I had not really learned to rely on God and others.

The self-reliant leader is, first, not dependent upon the Holy Spirit. In his book Lion and Lamb, Brennan Manning wrote, "How vast are the resources of His power open to us who believe in Him!" This self-reliant leader is not resembling the gospel of Jesus Christ which has said all of this vast power of God has been available to you to depend upon.

Secondly, the self-reliant leader relies on limited resources in his lack of dependence upon others. Self-reliant leaders lead in isolation from others, and pride is the reason for all our isolation. Often those who lead alone find an interesting resistance in their heart and lfie. Perhaps they blame it on Satan, but that resistance is not Satan; it is God. For "God resists the proud, and he lifts up the humble." (James 4:6)

Great leaders are not self-reliant. They learn to rely wholly on God and also on others for strength.

Abba, I belong to you

Abba, I belong to You. Abba! I have allowed the fact I can address You with such intimacy and tenderness to become far too plain and pallid. It has been years since I have allowed myself to wonder and gawk at the fact You have given me a spirit of Sonship by which I can address you as "Abba Father!" (Rom. 8:15)

I have known for too long or too familiarly that "Abba" is the equivalent of our English "Daddy". I have known that children would slowly learn the term Abba to address their father with an intimate tenderness. I have known it was and has been a scandal to the pious and righteous that you would be addressed with such intimacy.

That You who created this world out of the power of your voice, You by whose beauty and glory the Grand Canyon is dwarfed, You who hold all things together in life-sustaining precision, would ask to be addressed in such tenderly intimate terms has truly become too common and plain to me.

This is my confession and my repentance today. May I recognize and rest today in the wonder of the intimate spirit within me, who can address you so tenderly as my Abba!

Save some for Me

Last night I had a real hard time sleeping likely due to the great hunger from eating less and less these days on a diet, but I believe it was equally a spiritual hunger from less and less experience of God's presence these days. When I could not sleep, I chose to listen to that spiritual hunger. God spoke to my listening heart last night, and it was to say, "Save room for me."

Over and over God spoke these words to my heart last night. "Save room for me." I laid in my bed hearing those words over and over until the word "enough" was added to the phrase. God spoke to my heart and said, "Save enough room for me."

In a time of spiritual hunger and wilderness, God has made clear to me I need to begin setting aside and saving time for Him. Also, that time needs to be enough for Him to fit. I am not to save time for my God in the forced margins of time I concoct.

With no job, I have been surprised how little time it seems I have now. I am walking a wilderness. D.T. Olson said, "When one is forced to endure the wilderness for a time, it may be experienced either as a place of maturing and learning or as a place of disintegration and death." At this point, I feel more pressed than I did when I was employed in full time ministry, and right now has been a difficult wilderness season for me.

I have been challenged to begin asking WHAT instead of WHY. "O my God, what are you doing in my heart and life while I am waiting?" I do not need to ask WHY God is doing anything, because most likely is a question to which I will never get the answer.

Right now, though, I am to save enough time for my God, my Abba, and my Jesus. I am to save time that is enough for Him to fill rather than cram tightly within.

The grammar of power

2 Timothy 1:7"For God has not given you a spirit of fear, but of power, and love, and discipline."

Here is a verse so many Christians love to misuse for the courage to face daunting moments in life. We are reminded in quoting this verse you ought to not be fearful because God has placed within you power. We will quote this verse and challenge one another to live in the power God has given to you instead of neglecting it by living in fear.

But there is a misuse here, and it is entirely grammatical. We are placing a period where there are commas. We read and quote this passage as though all we need to do is not be afraid, but be powerful, PERIOD! We have removed the commas and cut off the rest of the passage.

No! You are not given a spirit of fear. Yes! You have been given a spirit of power, COMMA, AND love, COMMA, AND discipline. In the moments most daunting, you are given a spirit of power, and love, and discipline. In the most difficult and "fearful" moments of life how often have you ever been challenged to draw upon love and discipline as much as power? Could the spirit of power only be found in the compound of love and discipline? In the daunting moments of life when you are tempted to fear, will you discipline yourself to love God and people; because there is power in that!