The True God, a True Help

“Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me” (Psalm 54:4).

In the Bible this is not a rare saying, that God is our help in times of trouble. But if you think about it, it is the reason the Lord Jesus says he came not to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom.

You’ve heard the saying, “Good help is hard to find.” In God’s case, it’s more likely to be that the goodness of the help is hard to appreciate. Sometimes we measure God by the troubles that come along, oblivious to his invitation, as if all along he were expecting us to deal with them.

Instead, God is inviting us into his life. Inviting us into maturity. Inviting us into joining him as a servant. His help is not meant to make us lazy taskmasters who order up the next item on the menu of amusements. God is not a codependant helper.

God as a helper is like a parent helping a child grow into responsibility and productivity.

When I am tired and feel pulled this way and that, wondering how I am going to manage, it helps me to remember who God is and to think of myself in alliance with him. God is my help, and I am here to help. I don’t have anything of my own to give, but all that God has given me.

Creeds in the Bible

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

“If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).

These are the basic “creeds” of the Bible. The Jewish people who are active in their religion still recall this verse daily: “Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Of course, they also recall that the Name of God is too holy to speak, so they substitute “LORD” for “Yahweh,” the Name revealed to Moses that indicated He is the “I AM.”

When Christians say that Jesus, the man from Nazareth, IS Lord, we are saying that this child of Mary baptized by John IS Yahweh, whose way was prepared by the voice crying in the wilderness (Isaiah 40:3).

What difference does it make to say that? Well, the point is to believe it. And what difference does it make to believe this? For one, it results in salvation from the judgment we deserve from our sin. The Lord Jesus saves us from eternal death.

That is true but it sounds so utilitarian, so self serving. It’s more about being in relationship with God our Creator, who designed us for a relationship with him that would last forever. That’s the point.

Any time you get to know someone, you learn their name and their background and what makes them tick. The creeds of the churches come from the creeds of the Bible, but more than anything they are like a “curriculum vitae” of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who wants to have us in relationship with himself.

The One True God

“For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live” (1 Corinthians 8:5-6).

The next sermon series at CTK is “The One True God.”

In the first century the predominant view was that there were many gods. People generally personified all the powers of the universe. They saw all reality as intensly personal.

It’s different today. We tend to see reality as impersonal–driven by cause and effect, understood by scientific reasoning, and managed by data driven decisions. It’s nothing personal–the job losses were driven by economic realities, the insurance rates by risk assessment, and so forth.

But there’s a part of us that rebels against this cold view reality. “What about me?” It screams inside. “Why is this happening to me?” Emotional pain isn’t very scientific, is it?

Although such questions are typically inexplicible and often unanswerable, they set up the immature or superstitious person to believe all kinds of lies, because it is often the case that a wrong answer is more satisfying than no answer at all, because an answer to the cause of the problem sets up a plausible expectation of being able to control or even solve the problem. The problem is, solutions based on lies don’t work very well.

The so-called gods of the pagans were just such solutions. Not that they were imaginary. If the Bible is taken at face value then there were demonic, spiritual beings who responded to and were empowered by the lie-based, superstitious faith of idol worshippers. Such a view is verified by observations of current practices of paganism, such as when the voodoo priest or priestess is possessed by a demon.

But for us there is one God. Immensly more powerful than all the other powers, whether personal as in demons or impersonal as in laws of nature. He is the creator of them all.

What is more, this God is intensly personal. And if we don’t come to know him personally, then it isn’t the one true God we are worshipping.

The Lord’s Prayer for Your Spiritual Battle

It is not a metaphor, we are actually in a battle.  The enemy seeks to pull us away from God.  His goal is to have us place someone or something before the Lord.  As we would not keep the LORD first in our hearts, then we have a skewed sense of who we are, and how we are to live.

As a means to combat Satan, I have learned the value of praying the Lord’s Prayer as an offensive weapon against the enemy.  I pray each petition over my life, the lives of my family members, and the community of believers with whom I journey in this life.   I invite you to consider using this prayer as a weapon.  Pray it daily, pray it often.  Think of it in terms of pushing back the enemy as you advance forward with the words taught to you by Jesus.

Our Father in heaven - (the LORD alone, nothing else before him).

Holy be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. (God’s character to dominate my life, God’s ruling in my life, God’s will in my life.  With the same power in my life as it is in heaven!)

Give us this day our daily bread (God is the giver, I am not left defenseless against Satan’s desire to get me to complain.  I live thankful for God’s provision).

Forgive us, as we forgive others.  (Lord, let a spirit of forgiveness permeate all my relationships!)

Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.  (God, protect me from that foe who attacks so regularly.  Thank you that you are stronger than him!)

For thine is the kingdom…  (God, fill my heart with praise, giving you the honor and glory in all I plan and do!)

Amen!  (God, let’s move into this day, you and me, with all the joy that you provide through the life I have in your son, Jesus!).

God is with you always!

Pastor Al

Pastor Doyle’s Blog

By the way, I (Pastor Doyle) have begun a new blog which I will be trying to update daily. It’s my own devotional exercise. Talk about accountability–anyone who is interested can hold me accountable! I’ve decided to reflect through the book of James. I think the link can be found in the blogroll to the right.

The Battle for the Peace

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (Colossians 3:15).

Americans are used to peace being the goal of war. Peace, not just as an absence of conflict, but the guarantee of fundamental freedoms appropriate to the dignity of human beings. The surviving citizens in Germany, Italy, and Japan, our enemies in World War II, came to experience greater peace in their homelands after defeat than they had under the despotic rule of fascist governments. With the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the question is whether we won, and the answer depends on whether we will see an enduring democratic government there that protects minority ethnic and religious groups.

Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, even though he said he did not come to bring peace but a sword. He was referring not to physical combat, but to a spiritual war for the hearts of sinners who had been lost to God. By his message of God’s love and his sacrificial death, he softened many hearts that had gotten hard against God. By his outpouring of the Holy Spirit and through communities of followers, he still wins hearts that have gotten disillusioned by the temptations of this age.

But even in these very communities, which are the agencies and outposts of his Kingdom, the battle goes on for the heart, because our hearts have been assaulted by deceits and wounded by betrayals and disappointments. Jesus noted that it is from our hearts that evil thoughts, lusts, and other such unclean disturbances spew out. So it is the gift of a new heart, through the washing and regeration of the Holy Spirit, that brings peace.

The new heart from Christ the Lord is the only place where we may experience true and lasting peace, which means that we must renounce the desperations of our old nature and receive the forgiveness and renewal of Christ before we can experience true peace. It takes a decision, an act of the will, often repeated and habitually ingrained.

One Amazing Book

“I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book” (Revelation 22:18-19).

Despite this warning, there have been a lot of people who have “added” to the prophecies of this book. They have added a sensational spin that seeks to link these ancient words to specific political events or circumstances.

For the most part I haven’t paid much attention to it. Hal Lindsay’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, was for me a brief, teenaged fascination. I started the Left Behind series, but I got put off by what I considered distortions of biblical truth, not to mention the writing style. I couldn’t ever find the energy to continue through those books.

Yet the Revelation has continued to fascinate me, even when it baffles me or worse. What I find most interesting is how it serves as the end-cap of the Bible. It goes with Genesis like Alpha goes with Omega, like beginning goes with end.

The first chapters of the Bible deal with creation, the last with the new creation. We have a tree of life in the garden of Genesis, and so also in the New Jerusalem.

If for no other reason I would believe the Bible, it is for the coherency and unity shown throughout. Mind you, this is a book that came into being over centuries, by a vast number of authors from different cultures, occupations, languages, and time periods. Yet the whole of it is one story.

Of course I am aware of what detractors would call the contradictions in the Bible. But I have found that the bigger picture always puts these into perspective, makes them understandable in their own contexts while taking them as independant witnesses to a greater whole. On the whole, the contradictions seem bit nit-picky to me.

I almost seems to me like the author of the Revelation knew that there would be a collection of writings assembled to become the New Testament, and that this apocalyptic book would be the one to wrap it up.

It is amazing the number of allusions in the Revelation to other verses in the Old and New Testament. In fact, I consistently find that a study of Revelation becomes a study of the whole Bible.

So when I encounter this warning about the prophecies in this book, I tend to think not just of this book of the Bible, but of the Bible as a book. According to the Gospels Jesus gave many warnings against false prophets, against hypocrisy, pride, materialism, and so forth. The warnings of Revelation go hand in hand with those.

One of the common commands that Jesus gave his disciples, particularly towards the end, was to be ready, for you know not the day or the hour.

Personally, I am looking for a couple of signs to be fulfilled before he comes again. We haven’t yet seen the Gospel preached completely to every tribe, nation, people and language group, and we haven’t seen a wholesale apostasy of the institutional church nor a worldwide, intense persecution of orthodox believers in Jesus. But it seems like these things could be on the verge.

And you never know. Particularly you never know your own last day or hour, which is for all effects and purposes the final opportunity to repent before the judgment. Which is why every day is a day to repent like it’s the last one.

Tolerating Sin, Or Not

“Let him who does wrong continue to do wrong; let him who is vile continue to be vile; let him who does right continue to do right; and let him who is holy continue to be holy” (Revelation 22:11).

In an odd twist of coincidence I saw this verse quoted in a news story last week. It seems an Ohio church had been protesting a local strip club by camping out on the weedy parking lot of the seedy locale, then videoing and posting license plate numbers of the clientelle. The pastor is quoted as saying, “The word of Jesus Christ says you can’t share territory with the devil.”

So the strip club owner retaliated by having his (not exactly glamorous) girls protest the church on Sunday morning. One of them had a sign with these words, “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still” (Revelation 22:11).

And the debating point goes to . . . the woman in the bikini. She quoted actual words of Jesus. The pastor made an assertion about what Jesus says about sharing territory with the devil.

But what did Jesus actually say? Love and pray for your (spiritual) enemies (Matthew 6:43-45). Credit has to be given to the church member who talked and prayed with one of the girls that was out there protesting. I suppose this might also be the moment to give credit to a local ministry that distributes gifts to dancers in hopes of building relationships that can rescue them from their lot in this life and the one they are in risk of eternally (Jesus Loves Dancers).

Back to the debate, I suppose the main thing Jesus said about sharing territory with the devil is in the parable about the weeds. An enemy came in and sowed weeds where the landowner had sown grain. The owner decided not to have his workers pull out the weeds right away because he did not want any of the grain to be lost. The separation could happen at the harvest, when it would be completely obvious which was which.

“As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 13:40-43).

So, technically Jesus doesn’t exactly say what the pastor says that he says. Jesus does say that the gates of hell will not prevail against his church. He does give his disciples authority to cast out demons and to forgive sins. He does say that we should flee when we encounter persecution, but spend time with those who welcome us.

Perhaps the pastor would have been on stronger ground if he had said, “The apostle Paul says don’t share in works of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11). Paul, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says, “Don’t be partners with them” (Ephesians 5:7, 2 Corinthians 6:14), “come out from them and be separate” (2 Corinthians 5:17, citing Isaiah 52:11). The Revelation says the same thing, by the way.

The fact is that this age is an age of toleration. In the new creation, there will be no more toleration of sin. This is the age of redeeming sin-sickened and damaged lives through the healing of forgiveness and the washing of renewal in the Holy Spirit. This is the age when God gives the unrepentant over to their hardened hearts to more fully experience the bondage of their passions–let them hit bottom–but then God brings freedom to those who repent and believe. in his Son.

A couple of weeks ago Ann Rice, the one-time writer of dark novels who had converted back to  her childhood Catholicism, announced that she was quitting organized Christianity but adhering to Jesus Christ. Apparently she was upset over a statement made by the bishops of her church arguing against gay marriage. She wrote, ”I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. . . .  In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science.”

I don’t entirely agree with her position, and not just because being a Christian in church is my job. Followers of Christ do need to be holy, and churches do need to cultivate places where people are being freed from their bondage to sin. As a pastor I would refuse to marry same sex couples. But the politics of this are less clear to me. Politics is about compromise, after all. I would be willing to compromise on the legality of same sex marriage if, at the same time, marriage laws were strengthened to eliminate no-fault divorce, and as long as pastors and churches are not forced to go against conscience and the Word of God.

My prayer is that churches will be places of freedom from bitterness, greed, selfish ambition, pornography, adultery, homosexuality, abuse, etc.–that Christian communities will truly be a light in the darkness. Right now, churches are on the whole are too much like the culture of sin and too little like Christ. We need to practice intolerance of sin in ourselves, while tolerating sinners in society. That would be how the Father acts. Meanwhile, we need to be known more for what we are for than what we are against.

The ironic thing is that it is not the preaching of hell-fire and brimstone that brings freedom from sin, rather the preaching of the forgiveness of sins in an environment where people openly admit and discuss their sinful tendencies and actually practice forgiving others as they have been forgiven.

Of Angels and Sons of God

“I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me. But he said to me, ‘Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers the prophets and of all who keep the words of this book. Worship God!’” (Revelation 22:8-9).

This is virtually a repeat of an incident John reported in earlier (Revelation 19:10).  It seems simple enough. We don’t worship angels. Angels are ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation (Hebrews 1:14).

Remember that the word “angel” simply means “messenger” in the Bible. Sometimes it is obviously referring to a spiritual being in the service of the Lord. Each person has an angel (Matthew 18:10). But the devil is also said to have his angels, which we can easily see as referring also to demons, or unclean spirits.

There are several places in the Old Testament where “the angel of the Lord” appears. For instance, the angel of the Lord appeared in the burning bush to Moses, and said, “Take off your shoes, you’re standing on holy ground. . . . I am the God of your fathers.” A man appeared to Joshua as “commander of the Lord’s armies” and Joshua bowed down to worship him. Rather than rebuking him, the angel said he was on holy ground. So it’s easy to conclude that this “angel of the Lord” is identified with the Lord himself–the Son of God appearing to Moses and Joshua as he existed prior to being born of the virgin.

So John would seem to have good precedent for falling down to worship an angel, particularly when the words coming from that angel appear to be the words of Jesus himself. Moreover, the visions of Revelation provided cues that would have us associate certain angels with the Lord Jesus in his role as Priest and King, and associate a group of seven angels with the seven-fold Holy Spirit of God.

This is why I find this passage a little confusing.

I think light is shed on this by a passage from Paul’s letter to the Colossians:

“Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow” (Colossians 2:18-19).

And from Paul’s letter to the Galatians:

“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!” (Galatians 1:8-9).

So the message is the main thing, not the messenger. The devil masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). We can suppose that when the great deception comes there will be lots of “revelations” and worship of angels. But it’s faith in the unchanging message of the Gospel that connects the members of the body to the head, Christ. So maybe the example of John’s temptation to worship the angel is for us a warning something along the lines of ”better safe than sorry.”

But I think there may be even more to it. By virtue of the Gospel we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). We become “sons of God” by faith in him, but it’s only in the New Creation that this magnificent status will be fully revealed (Galatians 3:26, Romans 8:19). By the way, in the Old Testament “sons of god” was a term sometimes used of the angelic beings that served as God’s messengers.

At the same time, in the New Creation, Jesus will have handed over the Kingdom to the Father, will have become subject again to the Father, so that God may be all in all. All this seems to indicate that the Lord Jesus will be present to us as equals, not by virtue of condescension but because he will have raised our status to what God intended for us when he created us in his image, which Adam had not fulfilled. After all, these words could apply to Jesus (according to his human nature) as well as to any angel: “I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers the prophets and of all who keep the words of this book. Worship God!” (Revelation 22:9).

Thomas touched the physical hands of the risen Lord Jesus and proclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” This is the mystery of faith, that God has become man, and that in so doing he raises our nature to a new level, allowing us to share in and participate in the actual eternal life of the Godhead.

Rooting out Cowardice and Unbelief

“He said to me: ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life. He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death’” (Revelation 21:6-8).

One of the things about the Revelation is how it keeps the distinction between God and the Lamb. They are always together, but different. For instance, the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of this New Jerusalem. Here it is the Lord God Almighty who is speaking as the “Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.” In the next chapter, 22:13, Jesus is saying the same thing of himself.

In this way, the Revelation shows that Jesus is equal to God the Father according to his divine nature, from eternity, but he is submitted to God according to his human nature, which he took on when Mary became pregnant. During the time from his ascension to his return, Jesus rules as Lord at God’s right hand. After his return, after death is destroyed, he will hand the Kingdom over to the Father and again be subject to God (1 Corinthians 15:28).

This means he will function again primarily from his human nature. That’s how he will relate to us. This is why, then, it is the marriage of the Lamb and the Bride, because the Lord Jesus will be relating to us as fellow human beings. With one difference; he doesn’t lose his essential divine nature. He is still the sun, we are the moon. He is the source of light, with the Father; we walk in the light and live in it. But all that he is by nature and by obedience he will share with us, so that we can possess it by gift and by faith.

Because He is holy, and our holiness will be complete, that means that everything unholy and unclean will be outside–cowardly, unbelieving, sexually immoral and practitioners of the occult. That’s an interesting choice to head the list: the cowardly. Along with cowardly goes unbelief. When Jesus would encourage his disciples he told them, “Do not fear,” and when he rebuked them he said, “O you of little faith!” They were often afraid and slow to believe. Fear and unbelief go together.

One of the aspects of a “fearless and moral inventory,” the fourth of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is the fear inventory. You make a list of the persons or situations that cause fear, followed by the causes of those fears and the results. All of this leads to the recognition of how self-reliance twists your character up around the pole of fear, binding you up in unbelief, and it becomes the preparation by with to pray to God to remove the fears. Prayers that are specific and self-aware are more effective that general prayers. If we confess our faults to one another and pray for one another

So here is an example from another perspective of how the human nature interacts with the divine. What happens within the personal union of God and human in Jesus Christ, happens in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. We don’t overcome fear by denying it, and praying. We overcome it by entering it and following it to its source: excessive reliance on our own understanding and control, and then acknowledging it and consciously releasing it to God. It takes practice, and there is plenty of opportunity for that.

Fear and unbelief, by the way, are at the root of all the other sins that are excluded from the New Creation. Murderers are generally inwardly frightened acting out of self-protective rage. Drunkenness and sexual promiscuity are mear distractions to momentarily soothe the fearful soul in its unbelieving condition. Sorcery and the magic arts are the fullest expression of trying to assert human control over otherwise uncontrollable events–it amount to a bargain with the devil–manipulating demons by means of formulas and rituals in order to control circumstances. It’s all fear based.

But those who look to things other than God to manage their fears will be excluded from God. Think about that.

How much better to simply submit to God and rest in him. Like Jesus did, and does, and will do. Like we all will do who long to see his appearing, and to have our tears dried and fears fully dispelled. When we see God face to face, filled with the glory of his presence who will be all in all, there will be no more fear. All the cowardice will be eliminated.