April 29, 2007

• Eternal Freedom, and temporary slavery

  So many souls are dying apart from God, every day, in my own city and around the world.   They desperately need to hear (and see lived-out) the Gospel - the good news that God has provided a Way of salvation.

  And meanwhile, while I should be so freely explaining/preaching/proclaiming the good news to everyone (and exerting effort to get the message to those who have never heard), I am so inhibited...  by sin, by doubt/uncertainty, by 'the cares of this life', etc.   If you think to pray for me, pray that God would bring me very close to Himself ('at any cost,' as Nick says) and would give me wisdom and understanding about the gospel (and all the other issues I'm usually confused about), and freedom to tell the Gospel to my friends/colleagues/coworkers and other people.

  As Paul prayed for others: "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God."

  And as Paul asked for himself: "...pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel... that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak."
  "Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving; praying at the same time for us as well, that God will open up to us a door for the word, so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ, for which I have also been imprisoned; that I may make it clear in the way I ought to speak."

   

  As Glenn Miller resonantly writes:

  I am 'soaring' as I write this--borne aloft by the Spirit of the Living God, infused with tangible grace, warmth, goodness, glow. And there are no temptations in my 'normal sphere of moral combat' that can touch me now... I am as clean as I can be, transcending the pull to feel 'sarxy' (fleshly, from the Greek work for NT flesh--sarx), to get off track, to settle for less, to settle into comfortable despair, and other normal-glennlife challenges. [I am the beneficiary of God's love/outreach to some of you out there--something in this writing He intends more for you, than for me--but I get to learn it too, because I am in the media path(yes!). Otherwise, I might NEVER learn some of this stuff, honestly.]

  But I know I will fall back to earth again soon, and dance with sin and conceive some micro-death down here... and it will hurt my heart more than ever before... the higher I soar in love for our good-hearted God, the greater the loss of innocence in the next betrayal of that love... I really hate the little betrayals I do, to my Loyal Lover... and I hate them more and more, the more He grows my beauty within... Someday I will be free to soar in delirious-dance with this One--without stopping! But for now, I will continue to need His Cross, His foot-washing, and His pulling me out of the thorn bushes and thistles.

  It's a sad thing, really, that while the Spirit lifts my heart up to share with you precious people--you beloved of our tender-hearted God--my mind knows that my Judas moment is only minutes, hours, days away... and He knows it, too, and has made ample provision for it, but it doesn't lessen the sadness in my heart BEFORE I fall, nor the sense of grief AFTER I fall into betrayal.

  I will 'get up' and dust myself off, as always (“for a just man falleth seven times, yet riseth up again”--Prov 24.16), and I will know that I am forgiven (I Jn 1.9), and that my sin has not impacted His 'paid in full', and that I am still 'winning' in His work of progressive sanctification in my life (the sheer witness of my increased grief over this is proof that my moral sensibilities are growing more like His). But I will still feel that post-denial experience of Peter's in the courtyard (Luke 22.61, “and Jesus turned and looked at Peter”), and yet--like him--I will probably not see a trace of anger, disapproval, harshness, “I told you so”, or anything but a quiet love in His face.

  Hebrews 4:14-16 -

  Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

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