Dem Bones....

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Today we sang Elevation Church's song Rattle!  in worship.  It stirred up all kinds of things in me.

See...there's a lot going on IN me right now. I'm in a changing season, and, like any season of change, my footing feels uncertain, my direction is not clear, and I'm looking at old dreams thinking their time has passed...which makes me grieve a bit.  I was so looking forward to seeing those dreams happen.  But...if they are, they are not going to look anything like I thought.

So we are singing about dry bones coming back to life.  To be honest, I struggled.  I just wasn't feeling it.  So I had a little conversation with Holy Spirit about what was going on.  

While I'm singing, you understand.  Does that happen to anyone else?

What I heard was ...the song is about dry bones.  To quote Ezekiel, very dry bones.  And what the Spirit told me was...your bones still have meat on them.  Old, decaying, smelly meat.  You gotta let it die and fall off.  The bones have to be dry.

That's not to say there's anything bad about what was there.  Or what it accomplished.  Or negating the focus and training that working toward the dream accomplished in its time.  But...the old and the past-its-prime has got to drop away to clear the way for the new and the strong and the vibrant.  The bones get bleached out.  Dry isn't just dry...it's also clean.  Rotting meat attracts flies and repels people;  dry bones do not.

I have been thinking a lot about John the Baptist lately; probably a bit because season 3 of The Chosen is about to start up and, according to the chronology in the synoptic gospels, we are going to lose John the Baptizer in this season. I did a little character study of John back in the Desert series;  my thinking has been along those lines, but especially thinking about those guys who were disciples of John....how they had to make the transition from the ministry of John to the ministry of Jesus, who seemed to come along and push aside their rabbi.   I'm sure it was more than a little tempting to resent Jesus and his disciples for supplanting the ministry of John. Everybody is going over to that guy you baptized, they told him.

John's ministry was good, necessary, and part of the prophesied coming of the Messiah. He was in the progression of ministry of national prophets that had gone back centuries.  But it was done.

This is the sound of dry bones rattling...

Not done.  Transforming.  Into following the one that John and all the prophets before him proclaimed.  Into the thing it was intended to be all along.

But the old has to dry up.

SO I began to sing the song as a declaration that when all the old stuff had fallen off and the dreams were truly down to dry bones...the resurrection will come.  In some way, it will come.

Just ask the stone that was rolled at the tomb of the garden what happens when God says to move...

I'm not there yet.  But I can believe it's coming.

Friday Faithfuls Two: 2 Corinthians

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Second Corinthians...Paul's second letter to the church in Corinth, which had some issues.  He wrote them a pretty strong letter earlier...rebuke, instruction on discipline...and in this letter he kinda sorta says, 'Sorry, not sorry'...because he was sorry to have caused them grief, but was rejoicing at the repentance that grief brought about.

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.  -- 2 Cor 7:10

I wonder if, in our reluctance to offend/ hurt people, we forget that godly sorrow is a good thing.  How can one be brought to repentance without godly sorrow...the recognition that one has done things that need repenting?

If there is no repentance, there is no forgiveness.  Repentance is KEY.    There's a big difference between 'I truly regret that I ever did XYZ; I recognize that it was wrong and I renounce that behavior and will walk away from the lifestyle that produces such things' and 'I'm sorry you caught me/ called me out for XYZ; I'll be more careful in the future,'...which implies that repeat behavior is likely, for whatever reason.

If we confess a thing as sin, and repent...he is faithful and will forgive.  However many times it takes.  But if we just confess it as a 'problem' or a 'habit' or even 'that's just how I am'...there's no repentance.  Somehow our little pet failings don't seem to be sinful.  They don't hurt anyone.  It doesn't even affect anyone else.   But if GOD says it's sin....then, my friend, we must own our sin. Agree with him.  Then we can be forgiven.

And it is quite a sorrowful battle to come to the place to admit that... whatever...is sin.  The thing that separates me from God and his blessing.  Sin cannot come into God's presence.  And, while we might believe we can drop the sin at the last minute, the plain truth is that sin has hooks.  Only repentance and forgiveness can remove those hooks. Ultimately, we don't hold sin...sin holds us. If sin is not forgiven and washed away, the hooks will pull the individual to the place where sin will ultimately end up...outside of God's presence.  The wages of sin is death.  Because sin cannot come into the presence of God any more than darkness can come into a place that's filled with light.

So...how can we, as believers carrying his truth, inspire godly sorrow...and not just plain ol' offense?  What needs to change in me?  In the way I interact with those around me? 

Friday Faithfuls Two: 1 Corinthians

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

At various times in my life, when I questioned whether or not I am a profitable servant of the Most High, a Bible verse has landed in my life from one source or another that spoke right to my insecurity.  On more than one occasion, it was a particular verse from 1 Corinthians.  A verse that, to be honest, I forgot was from 1 Corinthians until I hit it when skimming through.

And once again, I find myself in a need of a little encouragement.

So I got it.

Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you.  Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.  -- 1 Cor. 15:58

Even if you don't see the fruit, even if it seems to be done in a corner, even if it gets wearying, know that your work done in Him is  Not. In. Vain.  

If no one else notices, your work is not in vain.

If nobody appreciates it, your work is not in vain.

If it seems to go nowhere, your work is not in vain.

If it's done out of love and obedience to HIM...HE sees.  So stand firm and don't give up.  It's worth doing.  For Him.

Friday Faithfuls Two: Romans

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

I love Romans.  So much richness.  Such beautiful logical arguments.

I need to spend more time in Romans.

Likely because we were in a conference last weekend about the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, the verse that stood out to me the most (among several that resonated) this week is 1:16

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes:  first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.  (NIV 84)

All of the folks who spoke at the conference were Messianic Jews, and one of them commented in telling his story:

"When someone would begin to speak to me about Jesus, I would reply, 'Oh, I'm Jewish.'  And they would apologize, saying something like 'Oh, I'm so sorry.  I wouldn't have said anything if I had known.'.  So I definitely felt that Christianity and Judaism were not at all compatible.  If just one had replied something along the lines of, 'Oh, man, that's awesome!  Salvation belongs to you first!' It would have changed everything for me."

I have never understood Christian based antisemitism.  In the beginning, Christianity (the folks back then referred to it as 'The Way'...'Christian' was a derogatory term most akin to 'Jesus Freak' now) was considered a sect of Judaism.  Jesus was Jewish, as were all of his disciples.  The foundation of the Christian faith is Judaism...the radical idea that God is one, and he actually cares about and is involved in the lives of his people. A holy God, who is completely 'other than' humans, not a host of squabbling deities who were just immortal human types with supernatural powers.

People who want to cite the verse about the guilt of Jesus' death falling on the Jews missed the point entirely...it wasn't the Jewish PEOPLE who rejected him...it was their LEADERS.   To blame the Jews of that day would be to blame Andrew, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, John the Revelator, John Mark, and all the others who followed him...who had the Jewish leaders so alarmed that they had to turn the execution of Jesus over to the Romans, lest there be a riot...for Jesus' death.  They were not to blame. Nor are their children.  We owe our faith to those very folks who told others who told others who told others; without those Jewish followers of Jesus, non of us non-Jewish folks would have the hope of the gospel.

So what sense does it make for believers to reject, harass, abuse, steal from, marginalize, disenfranchise and ultimately kill folks who are Jewish?   None at all.  

The power of God for the salvation of everyone is, first and foremost, for them.

Friday Faithfuls Two: Acts of the Apostles

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

This sorta - weekly skim through a book of the Bible has brought us to Acts...the only history book in the New Testament.  The folks who had followed Jesus were figuring out how to follow the leading of Holy Spirit, how to follow Jesus' instructions.  

I thought I knew what verse I would pick before I started reading, but right off the bat I got slapped with something else.

Isn't that always what happens, lol?   That'll preach on it's own...anytime I think I  know what God is going to say/ lead/ whatever...we go a different direction. 

After his suffering , he showed himself to these men [the apostles he had chosen; v. 2] and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive.  He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.  - Acts 1:3

Maybe it's because I was teaching a class this week about the validity of the scripture, but the immediacy of this...that Luke had likely spoken to a number of these disciples, the ones who had spent time with Jesus, as he researched the events he wrote about...suddenly hit me.  

I think I have mentioned this before; but, in archaelogical terms, the New Testament is yesterday's newspaper, full of eyewitness accounts.  No other manuscript from antiquity can even come close.

Two of the tests given to ancient texts to validate them are 1) how much time passed between the original manuscript and the oldest existing copy and 2) how many ancient copies or fragments of copies do we have in order to cross - reference the text.  Obviously, the lesser amount of time that has passed between the original writing of a manuscript and the making of the copy that still exists will make it more likely to be accurate, while the larger the number of documents we have to compare to one another the more confident we can be that it has been accurately perserved.

I'm not going to get into the specifics of this here...if you want all the numbers and such you can find them in Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, in which he goes into all the details of these kinds of studies, but I will say that the New Testament completely blows all the other ancient documents out of the water.  Writings of Aristotle, Pliny the Younger, Caesar, Homer...have hundreds of years between the writing of them and the oldest extant copies.  We also only have a very few...less than 10 for some...ancient copies of the manuscripts. 

The oldest fragment of the New Testament is 50 years away from the original source, and we have over 5, 000 ancient documents...over 25,000 if you count all the tiny fragments...that reproduce the text.

We have a very, very high level of confidence that what we have in our Bibles today is what was written.  

And what was written was written by those who saw, who experienced or, as in the case of Luke, who were closely acquainted with those who were witnesses of the life and resurrection of Jesus and the power that his name had in the years following his ministry. The concept is repeated in Acts.... phrases like 'we have seen' and 'we were witnesses' appear several times in the text.  The original writings were floating around while the folks who lived the events were still  walking around on the planet. 

...many convincing proofs that he was alive

Yes, it is a fantastic story...bizzarre, even.  Hard to wrap one's head around. 

Maybe that's why Romans says we must believe in the heart...

Friday Faithfuls 2 - John

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

John is one of my favorite books.  It is so deep and so rich and so...intense.  I sat down and, instead of doing the normal 'skim through' for this series, I just read it through as if it were a novel.  Try it sometime...ignore the chapter/verse notations and just read.  You'll catch things that you would otherwise miss if you let the chapters and verses break up the text.  

It's hard for us to remember sometimes that those divisions are just there to make referencing the text easier; there's nothing particularly inspired about them.

But, be that as it may, after reading through the whole book I still ended up back at the beginning for this week's choice.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made....and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us"  -- John 1: 1-3, 14a  NIV84

I was freshly struck by John's statement that everything was made through the Word...and the realization that God spoke things into being.  Using words.

It could be aruged that God did not speak mankind into being but actually fashioned  man from the dirt, but God did declare the intention to 'make man in our image'...and then created Adam from dirt that had been spoken into existence.  So words were still involved.

That gets really abstract, right from the beginning, but I love that it takes God out of the Michaelangelo- inspired concept of a muscular giant with a flowing beard.  God is the Word He spoke...that became flesh and lived among humanity.

While mankind was made in God's image...God is not an image of mankind.  It doesn't go both ways.  A reflection only shows a semblance of the original.

Status check

 Posted to Beer Lahai Roi by Lisa Laree

And I said September was a crazy month...

My Sweet Babboo had his turn with the shoulder surgery on Thursday last week; he needed a bit more repair than I did...more than the surgeon expected, actually, and he's in the immobilzer brace for 3 more weeks.  So I'm working from home in order to be around when needed, and to get him to his appointments without a crazy amout of back-and-forthing.  And I'm still working on my own rehab.  Um, yeah.  right. 

*insert sheepish face*

So, hence the kind of unplanned hiatus.  But we should be settling into some sort of routine here shortly and I'm hoping to get back on the Friday Faithful track; John is up and I want to give it good consideration.

So...just a wee check in.  We should be done travelling for the rest of the year; I have a LOT of catching up to do.  On lots of levels.  But I haven't forgotten...