It seems that everywhere I go, I find someone ready to tell me the solution to the world's problems. My cube mate wants to shoot sex offenders. My barber wants to legalize marijuana. My Facebook friends want political change. Down with Obama. Out with Health Care Reform. The if onlys are full of ideas.
See C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity - on the innate God given universal quest for morality. Why does everyone want the world to be right? Why do we all have this quest for justice and peace and rightness? Because God put it there. Otherwise the chaos we experience would be nothing compared to the survival of the fittest Darwinian horror that we would experience. Why don't I just shoot you in the head and take your stuff. If this is all there is. Seize the day and all of that.
I too have some dreams and am quite certain I could solve much if made dictator for a season. I am not short on ideas, some are quite sound, but the whole idea would be horrific.
1 Samuel 8:7
And the LORD told him: "Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.
Ever since satan and a third of the angels thought they could take over Revelation 12:4 and then Adam and Eve got bored living in utopia and thought they would sniff around the tree, (see Genesis 3) life has not been so hot.
Israel (and all the rest of us) want a king/president/dictator that we can see, touch, respect, control. Way back in Samuel's day, simply living in God's presence and allowing Him to provide, protect and fill us was not what we wanted. We want control.
It hasn't worked so well. We have tried it all Dictators, Kings, Socialism, Communism and yes I am saying it - Democracy.
Interesting how God is not slow as some count slowness, but is patient wishing that none would be lost, but all would come to repentance. 2 Peter 3:9. He is letting us try everything we can. Democracy has been our greatest hope, but we see how greed has nearly ruined the country. A quote from others:
The average lifespan of all the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about two hundred years. During that two-century span, easy of these nations progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; and from dependence back into bondage.
Our turn is coming. The Arab states now have Trillions of dollars in Oil revenue and can't invested it all. America is in massive debt. The outset of the recession pulled $1 trillion dollars out of the stock market almost overnight. The U.S. Dollar has been propped up for decades because it was the gold standard in world currency. This is changing to the Euro and the new proposed world currency. Who is going to buy our Treasury bills when their value is falling like a rock. You can't just print money forever. One natural disaster or terrorist activity and this country could be offline for a longtime.
You can feel the tension. Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, Libya, Afghanistan, Israel. It is all ready to pop.
The answer is not in the next election, or the right judgeship appointment or legislation. You do not win the culture through pathetic last ditch efforts to control the culture through laws. You achieve peace through the winning of culture to common believe in central truth.
When the church will awaken to it's duty to be the hands and feet of Christ, to love the unlovely, to give like there is no tomorrow, to do what makes no sense, to cause people to stop and take notice. Then the world will be flipped on its head. 2 Chronicles 7:14
Church we are plan A for this world and there is no plan B.
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Recommend 9/27/2009 The Trinity: Who it is and why it matters
Deuteronomy 6:4
Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!
John 17:11
"I am no longer in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are.
John 17:21-22
that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. "The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one;
1 John 3:1-2
See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.
Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be, but we know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.
All of the saved will be one. Your worst enemy, ex-spouse and worst repentant criminal will be one.
Romans 8:14-25
14For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
15For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!"
16The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God,
17and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.
18For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
19For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.
20For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope
21that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
22For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.
23And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.
24For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees?
25But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.
C.S. Lewis – The Weight of Glory – The Weight of Glory – page 40
The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door won which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being “noticed” by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that this may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—expelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored.
Revelation 20:4-6
4I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. 5(The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. 6Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.
Are some people given a part in the judgment?
Revelation 20:11-21:4
Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them.
And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds.
Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire This is the second death, the lake of fire.
And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.
And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them,
and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away."
(interesting He dries our tears after He condemns our unbelieving friends and family-wouldn’t you rather tell them the good news now than tell them they are forever separated?)
On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.
And this brings me to the other sense of glory—glory as brightness, splendor, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine morning if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do you want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
Note from Greg::
Lynn Anderson (former preacher of mine) talked about his home in Canada, with mountains several miles away. People would come to visit. He was amazed at how many people were drawn to the beauty and would want to walk there, not appreciating the distance or the climb. This inner yearning to see beauty and want to pull it, to be apart of it, to embrace it, to desire deeply to draw it in. To climb one mountain peek, only to want to endlessly summit another and another
Note from Greg regarding this following section from PhilipYancey’s “Disappointment with God”:
The church is plan A. There is no plan B for reaching a lost and dying world.
John 14:12
"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.
Matthew 28:19-20
Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age."
Philip Yancy – Disappointment with God page 153 and following:
The progression—Father, Son, Spirit—represents a profound advance in intimacy. At Sinai the people shrank from God, and begged Moses to approach him on their behalf. But in Jesus’ day people could hold a conversation with the Son of God, they could touch him, and even hurt Him. And after Pentecost the same flawed disciples who had fled from Jesus’ trail became carriers of the Living God. In an act of delegation beyond fathom, Jesus turned over the kingdom of God to the likes of His disciples—and to us.
But enough. All these misty ideas about the Spirit must somehow accord with the glaring reality of the actual church. Look at the people in the pews of any church. Is this what God had in mind?
Delegation entails risk, as any employer soon learns. When you turn over a job, you let go. And when God “makes his appeal through us” (Paul’s phrase), he takes an awful risk: the risk that we will badly misrepresent him. Slavery, the Crusades, pogroms against the Jews, colonialism, wars, the Ku Klux Klan—all these movements have claimed the sanction of Christ for their cause. The world God wants to love, the world God is appealing to, may never see him; our own faces may get in the way.
Yet God took that risk, and because he did so the world will know him primarily through Christians. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine of “the church”: God living in us. Such a plan is the “foolishness of God,” a Paul says in one place, and writer Frederick Beuchner marvels at the folly: “to choose for his holy work in the world…lambrains and misfits and nitpickers and holier-than-thous and stuffer shirts and odd ducks and egomaniacs and milquetoasts and closet sensualists.”
Page 162:
Dorothy Sayers has said that God underwent three great humiliations in his efforts to rescue the human race. The first was the Incarnation, when he took on the confines of a physical body. The second was the Cross, when he suffered the ignominy of public execution. The third humiliation, Sayers suggested, is the church. In an awesome act of self-denial, God entrusted his reputation to ordinary people.
Yet in some way invisible to us, those ordinary people filled with the Spirit are helping to restore the universe to its place under the reign of God. At our repentance, angels rejoice. By our prayers, mountains are moved.
Genesis 1:26
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
Genesis 1:28
God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Genesis 2:15
Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
Genesis 2:19
Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
Summation:
We were created to walk with God every day, to enjoy Him, to rule and to wage war in a cosmic life and death struggle for the eternal souls of men and women (Eph 6:12). All of heaven and hell look on in eager expectation for the work of Christ’s bride, the church, us, you and me. Just as all of heaven and hell looked intently on every thought and action of Job, a baby in a stable (Luke 2:13-14) and Jesus in the garden.
It is our turn.
All of history has been about restoring creation to the original purpose. For the creation to worship, to be in united with God and to rule. Scripture says, we will judge angels (1 Cor. 6:3). The garden was step one in God’s plan. We cannot begin to imagine what God has planned next
1 Corinthians 2:9
However, as it is written:
"No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him"
But we know it is bigger than all we could ask or imagine (Eph. 3).
Heaven is not the goal, it is just the beginning. To be restored to relationship, to be made to rule, to participate in the divine glory
The fight is bigger. The stakes larger. The consequences – eternal.
Somehow God has opened Himself to allow us to have a place to be united together and to be like Him (Ps 8), not that we will ever be anything approaching equality with the Sovereign Lord, but that somehow we will be transformed to the image of Christ and all be one united bride and in His image, is amazing. That somehow we can not only miraculously coexist with his Divity and Infinite Holiness, but to have a place at the table, to participate in His work, to be united with Him and to reign with Him is beyond imagination. It drives me to me knees, fills me with awe, causes me to pour out a river of tears and to laugh uncontrollably with joy.
This is good news and it desperately needs to be told.
Heaven help me to be bolder, more intentional and ready to give a defense for the hope that is within me.
