Jimmy On The Go!

ISAIAH 53:4-6 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned-every one-to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

In mirrors I see myself. But in mirrors made of glass and silver I never see the whole of myself. I see the me I want to see, and I ignore the rest.

Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. They reveal an ugliness I’d rather deny. Yow! Avoid these mirrors of veracity!

My wife is such a mirror. when I have sinned against her, my sin appears in the suffering of her face. Her tears reflect with terrible accuracy my selfishness. My self! But I hate the sight, and the same selfishness I see now makes me look away. “Stop crying!” I command, as though the mirror were at fault. Or else I just leave the room. Walk away.

Oh what a coward I am, and what a fool! Only when I have the courage fully to look, clearly to know myself – even the evil of myself – will I admit my need for healing. But if I look away from her whom I have hurt, I have also turned away from her who might forgive me. I reject the very source of my healing. My denial of my sin protects, preserves, perpetuates that sin! Ugliness in me, while I live in illusions, can only grow the uglier.

Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal – and these are mirrors of dangerous grace.

The passion of Christ, his suffering and his death, is such a mirror. Are the tears of my dear wife hard to look at? Well, the pain in the face of Jesus is harder. It is my self in my extremest truth. My sinful self. The death he died reflects a selfishness so extreme that by it I was divorced from God and life and light completely: I raised my self higher than God! But because the Lord God is the only true God, my pride did no more, in the end, than to condemn this false god of self to death. For God will be God, and all false gods will fall before him.

So that’s what I see reflected in the mirror of Christ’s crucifixion: my death. My rightful punishment. My sin and its just consequence. Me. And precisely because it is so accurate, the sight is nearly intolerable.

Nevertheless, I will not avoid this mirror! No, I will carefully rehearse, again this year, the passion of my Jesus – with courage, with clarity and faith: for this is the mirror of dangerous grace, purging more purely than any other.

For this one is not made of glass and silver, nor of fallen flesh only. This mirror is made of righteous flesh and of divinity, both – and this one loves me absolutely. My wife did not choose to take my sin and so to reflect my truth to me. She was driven, poor woman. But Jesus did choose – not only to take the sin within himself, no only to reflect the squalid truth of my personal need, but also to reveal the tremendous truth of his grace and forgiveness. He took that sin away.

This mirror is not passive only, showing what is; it is active, creating new things to be. It shows me a new me behind the shadow of a sinner. For when I gaze at his crucifixion, I see my death indeed – but my death done! His death is the death of the selfish one, whom I called ugly and hated to look upon.

And resurrection is another me.

Merciful Lord,
Hold me to the fire long enough to know my whole self truly, long enough to be cleansed by your burning forgiveness. Let me feel your passion again, studiously and well, to my good and to your glory, forever.

Amen.

WAITING & SEARCHING:

BETTER THAN A STIMULUS PACKAGE

Sometimes hearing God speak to us is just a matter of waiting and searching.  In a world where we expect our barista’s to spit out “orange mocha frappuccino’s” like a machine gun, this can seem like a excruciatingly time-costly thing to do.  But none the less, it must be done.  May we never forget, He is GOD after all.  We ought to work around His schedule not expect Him to work around ours.

Besides, if we do not invest the time to wait and search His voice out in our lives now, in the future it’ll cost us a heck of a lot more than what we think we might be losing out on by spending that time today!

In fact, it could cost us our relationship with God!  Let me explain.  There are some parents who live in complete regret because they were too busy with work and other things to spend quality time with their kids.  Now that their children are all grown up their relationship with their children is weak and even non-existent.  They can’t communicate or relate to them because time and effort were not invested beforehand over the years to develop those things.

God loves us so much.  He is in fact jealous for our time and attention.  He beckons us to seek Him with all our hearts.  Not so that He can waste our time, but so that we can “find” Him, know Him, and develop our relationship with Him!  There is joy even in waiting on God, and as we mature in our faith we see that even the “pain” of desire and desperation spent in waiting for Him to speak is a type of joy as well!

*As a word of practical application, I advise start searching and waiting on God to speak by reading and studying His Word!  Go here for some great personal bible study resources: bible study resources.  In future posts I hope to elaborate more on the different ways God speaks to us.

VERSES FOR FURTHER MEDITATION & STUDY

Jeremiah 29:13 (The Message)  “When you come looking for me, you’ll find me. “Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.” God’s Decree.

Psalm 27:8 (English Standard Version) You have said, “Seek my face.”My heart says to you, “Your face, LORD, do I seek.”

JESUS: GOD INCARNATE AS A REAL PERSON

A very convicting point that Stephen made was about how most of us that profess to believe in Jesus are not emotionally moved by the Passion account.  The main reason being is because Jesus is still largely not a real person to us.  He is a distant “God” and past “Savior” but not the living God, the living Man who is present with us today.  The one who is more real than the person next to us, more present than all the air around us.

As it would stand in our “earthly” relationships, to not intellectually AND emotionally identify with the incarnation of Christ – one of the greatest pillars of our evangelical doctrine – is symptomatic of  a degenerated relationship with God.

Now, to say you are not an “emotional” person is not a very good excuse.  Imagine if your loved one, your husband, wife, dad, mom, sister, brother, or friend went through what Jesus went through.  What if they were punched in the face, beaten with a stick, whipped mercilessly, had their flesh torn off their back, a crown of thorns forced through the flesh of their head, mocked, taunted, spit on, and then nailed on a cross, naked and exposed for all those that pass by to abhor and call cursed?

Yeah, we would be moved emotionally.

If not, there would be something wrong with us.  Even the person that goes numb with shock is still giving a kind of emotional and psychological response.  In such an event, you simply cannot have no emotional response at all without being considered seriously emotionally dysfunctional.

With that said, for most of us, if something like the Passion happen to a loved one we would experience the heights and extremes of human emotions in ways unimaginable from wrath and anger to sorrow and torment, guilt and powerlessness, to utter, utter remorse and brokenness.

I know that I do not fully know Jesus and His Passion this way yet.  But, I WANT to know Jesus like this.  I WANT Him to be that real of a person to me because, while He is yet God, He IS that real of a person.

He is not conceptual or distant.  He is not a theory or a mere belief.  He is a real person.  He is God, who became a man and loved me more than life itself.  I WANT to be moved to tears and great emotion just at the mention of His Passion.

The Passion of Christ is not a one day, “Good Friday” thing.  It is more than just a day.  It is a life-long journey and relationship of getting to know God.  If we desire maturity and genuineness of our faith, we will think this way.

PHILIPPIANS 3:7-16 [ESV]

⁷But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— ¹⁰ that I may know him and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. the power of his resurrection, and ¹²Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal for call of God in Christ Jesus. ¹⁵Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. ¹⁶Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

LOVING & KNOWING

Happy Easter everyone!

Today is the “Celebration of His Resurrection” and so I’m a day or two late with this entry, but I wanted to share with you about Good Friday.

I heard an awesome message about it here at IHOP.  The speaker was Stephen Venable.  It was one of the best “Good Friday Messages” I’ve ever heard.  I can’t do it justice here, but I’ll share some of his points mixed with some of my own thoughts broken into a few short entries over the next few days.

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Loving and knowing a person goes hand-in-hand.  This is plain if you asked a husband if they love their wife and they said “yes” but then could not tell you the most important details about his wife’s life much less know all there is to know about her.

“So, what’s her favorite color?”

“Um…”

“What did she major in college?”

“Hmmm…”

“Where did she grow up?”

“Uh, let me go ask her…”

Dude, you’re an idiot.

Yeah.  Not good.

The four gospels cover the Passion account more than any other part of Jesus’ life.  In fact, it is astonishingly lopsided when you compare the amount of content the Gospels spend on the Passion as opposed to any other part of Jesus’ story.

“The Passion of Jesus” refers to the events leading up to and the actual execution of Jesus on the cross.  And so, in light then of what it means to love somebody – previously established – loving Jesus is to know the details of what Jesus went through physically and emotionally…

…when he entered Jerusalem that last time and was deafened by the shrieks and cheers, when he shared his last meal with His disciples, when he called out is betrayer, when he got up from the table and washed the feet of His closest friends, when he prayed and felt the sweat of blood run down His face in the Garden of Gethsemane, when He found His friends sleeping instead of praying, when he felt the ropes and chains bind his arms tightly as he was led away, when he watched his friends run away in fear, when he stood before the blood thirsty council, pompous Herod, and morally torn Pilate, when he was beaten, mocked and crucified.

Loving Him means to know all this and so much more.  The depths of the meaning of Christ’s message is immeasurable.  To love God must include spending our entire lives searching out, remembering, knowing and responding with great joy to this immense part of His life and story.