The Promise Of The Spirit.5

"He will praise me and glorify me, by revealing my glory to you. All the Father's glory is mine as well. This is why I am able to make this promise to you: 

the Spirit will reveal my divine nature to you. 

If your child asked of you bread, would you offer a stone? If your child asked fish to eat, would you offer a snake? Would you serve a scorpion to the little ones who ask for an egg?" 

--Jesus

When we last visited the Happy Kuyper family they were basking in the joy of their infant daughter, Raleigh.  Recent news suddenly appearing on their Facebook page reveals they will soon triple their joy!  Identical twins are nestling comfortably in momma's belly!  More Kuyper's to bless the world!

One of the most sobering lessons of raising children, in my humble opinion, is the realization that (be patient, this takes years to completely comprehend) 

you never stop being a parent!

A vital lesson Jesus came to teach mankind is this: God, our Father, revealed in the Son of His love, 

never stops being child-like in His devotion to us!

How often did He stop to take a child to his arms in the midst of the swirl of doubt, despair, dullness and deceit to teach this vital truth: Receive the Child, Receive Me.  Receive Me, Receive the Father!  Be sure it wasn't the most beautiful child, nor the child we'd consider most likely to succeed, He'd choose to use so that eyes & ears become channels to the heart.  It was the child who most demonstrated child-likeness.

"For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and to our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hand he takes his father by the beard, and turns that father's face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? When even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished, and the heart is absorbed in loving?

In this, then, is God like the child: 

that he is simply and altogether our friend, 
our father

     our more than friend, father, and mother
          our infinite love-perfect God. 

Grand and strong beyond all that human imagination can conceive of poet-thinking and kingly action, 

He is delicate beyond all that human tenderness can conceive of husband or wife, 

Homely beyond all that human heart can conceive of father or mother. 

He has not two thoughts about us. 
With him all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end—namely, 
      that we should be as he is, 
           think the same thoughts, 
               mean the same things, 
                    possess the same blessedness. 

It is so plain that any one may see it, 
    every one ought to see it, 
      every one shall see it. 

It must be so. 

He is utterly true and good to us, 
nor shall anything withstand his will."

(George MacDonald, The Child In The Midst, Unspoken Sermons I)

The Promise of the Spirit.4

"I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot understand them just now. However, when the breath of God has come, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak of himself; but whatever he hears, that he will speak, showing you those things that are to come." 

--Jesus

The Wizard of Oz

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" 
-The Great and Powerful Oz

There is a narrative running throughout our culture that the only reality that has meaning is the virtual reality. The smart phone we carry in our pockets has less to do with its computing power than in shaping the way we see the world! A recent TV commercial sums up society: a young man tries in vain to get his girlfriend's attention as she focuses on her phone.  He looks around at every other patron in the coffee shop also deeply engrossed in their virtual worlds.  He finally realizes the only way to get her attention is to send her a text asking her to look up so that he can give her a real gift!

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto...

How to explain our addiction to all things technological? Surely it has something to do with a great fascination in knowing "the things that are to come".  Throughout history many people have made predictions that, accurate or not, impacted society. Nostradamus. Galileo. Muhammad. Cayce. Remember waiting in breathless anticipation for the carnage predicted for Y2K?  How about the turning of the Mayan calendar marking the end of the world?  Fortunes have been made and reputations built selling a compelling vision of the future.

More chilling, however, are those who attempt to shape the way we will experience the future.  By persuading us that there are forces at work beyond our control and selling an antiseptic vision of an ordered world, they lure us away from foundational truths. Vital truths such as our God-imaged individuality and the need for moral development.  Moral development that can only come by recognizing our need for oneness with our Creator God who can account for our existence, and through faith in His Son, help us overcome the difficulties of life, leading us toward our potential for love, truth and righteousness. 

Ray Kurzweil, an American author, inventor, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google, describes these forces in his book The Singularity Is Near. "The Singularity [a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed] will allow us to transcend [the] limitations of our biological bodies and brains."

His compelling vision of the future includes:

•  We will gain power over our fates
• Our mortality will be in our own hands
• We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever.)
• We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach.
• By the end of this century, the non biological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.

The lines are being drawn very clearly for followers of Jesus as more media takes up the drumbeat of ordered reality. TV shows like Almost Human, Intelligence, Person of Interest, and movies such as Minority Report and Transcendence craft a virtual reality that makes the merging of human & machine seem possible.  More subtle, however, is the message that we are the Masters of Our Fate and can explain all the mysteries of the Universe through faith in evolutionary science. Not so subtle this message: if you don't comply with the ordered reality of the Power Worshipers you will, at least, be marginalized, and at worst, destroyed. 

For woven into the crafted imagery of the new virtual reality are clear violations of conscience and conviction particularly in regard to concupiscence,  lasciviousness, licentiousness and fornication (words found in the KJV bible translation that served the church well for centuries to shine the spotlight of exposure on the awful, dark side of sin).  

"If the foundations be destroyed, 

what can the righteous do?" Psalm 11:3

Battle weary believers, who ought to shine brighter than ever as the darkness grows darker, are in danger of having lampstands removed.  Who among us does not now have to struggle with being light and salt to an ever growing number of friends, neighbors, relatives who have exchanged the truth of God's natural law (the conscience they're born with) for this worlds' new order?  Sadly, rather than growing more righteous and skilled in our response to the challenges of living in an increasingly pagan world, many rationalize with and seek scriptural justification for sin. 

For example, I recently got involved in an animated discussion on why some Christians pick on certain sins over others.  In the end, the "certain sin" they were most troubled that Christians picked on was homosexuality!  One debater simply dismissed it as even being a sin.  Another believed that the scriptures commonly used to identify it as sin are misinterpreted because of context, he thinks they are God's warning against pagan worship practices not deviant sexual behavior! Certainly others seemed to agree that identifying what is sin has as much to do with our comfort level as our interpretation of scripture!

Follower of Jesus, if you want to avoid error and understand the things Jesus still has to say to us, I have this exhortation: love the Truth, listen to the Spirit, obey what He says - comfortable or not!

The Promise Of The Spirit.3

"I will not leave you comfortless. Now it is necessary for you that I go away; for if I do not leave, the Comforter, the very breath of God, will not come to dwell among you. If I depart, I will send him to you.

When he has come, he will reveal to the world what is sin, and what is righteousness and judgment. 

Sin, because you do not believe in me; 

Righteousness, because I go to my Father, and you will not see me; 

Judgment, because the oppressive power of the prince of this world has been broken."

--Jesus

The number one movie in the USA now is Lone Survivor, the story of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell's dedicated effort to give an account to the heroism of his friends lost in battle. Trying to squeeze the events that shape a man's life into a ninety minute film is like writing his two paragraph obituary; unfortunately, its about the most an average person is willing to endure.

Endurance is the hallmark of the training it takes to be a 
SEAL and is the reason why average men don't make it.

Truthfully, not many even way above average men make it.  Of the 180 men who started the training in Luttrell's class only 32 completed it!  "Hell Week", a monstrously grueling week marked by explosions, gunfire, panic, sleeplessness, hunger, frigid cold, pain, danger, hallucinations, and exhaustion is designed to separate the pretenders from the defenders. A bell is situated near the various exercises and is used when a DOR (dropped on request) rings the bell and sets down his helmet next to the previous man who has signaled enough.  

"That line of lonely hard hats was a stark reminder not only of what this place could do to a man but also of the special private glory it could bestow on those who would not give in.  It drove me onward...I'd rather die than surrender." --Marcus Luttrell

Honestly, I believe that quote from Marcus describes the kind of comfort the Holy Spirit ultimately is sent to give us: not coddling from the difficulties of life but the internal inspiration that endurance through those difficulties is producing something in us of eternal value!

Now if we are honest with ourselves, don't we "ring the bell" almost daily? Jesus, the Captain of our Faith, takes us through grueling obstacle courses to reveal what in us is just not right...let's call it what it is: Sin.  Just yesterday my integrity and courage were tested in the course of a business transaction.  I didn't need a bible study to know I was wrong, I didn't need to argue that Jesus was unfair, misunderstanding, too harsh or demanding, I needed to renew my pledge to do the right thing to the Man who is our Righteousness.

"If you want to know righteousness, love a righteous man."  I love The Righteous One, whom, even though I've never seen him, I know him because I know something about righteousness and truth and love.  How?  Because He is constantly teaching me what it means!

Are you glad we have men of the caliber of a Marcus Luttrell defending the principles of our constitutional way of life?  Men who, because of the rigorous training and testing, can make capable judgement in the most demanding circumstances against a powerful and relentless enemy bent on our destruction.

May we have the wisdom and commitment, as followers of Jesus Christ, to recognize that although we have a powerful and relentless enemy bent on destruction of the soul, we are being fully trained & tested to endure and overcome!

"I have been initiated into the company of those whose work is to send sin out of the world, beginning with myself."

The Promise Of The Spirit.2

"If you love me, then keep my commandments. And I will pray to the Father, and he will give you another comforter to be with you forever. His is the breath of truth. The world does not accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you will know him, for he will dwell with you, and in you."

--Jesus

"I'm glad," sighed the retiring elder, "to leave ministry to you younger men...it's just getting too complicated."  As an upstart know-it-all, I easily brushed aside the remark with a careless thought: "ministry is probably glad to see you go, you old dinosaur".

Today, I'm the dinosaur.  And ministry is complicated a hundredfold. Just yesterday I ran into a former parishioner who, after an obligatory "how are you?", proceeded to unload her laundry list of grief.  A list that reflects the damage of a sin-torn world, and the frustration of not finding satisfying remedies - inside the church or out.

And as a former pastor I no longer have the vantage point of

dishing out my sage wisdom, pearls of advice and keen prescriptions perched upon my lofty branch of Doctrinal Purity.  The branch is broken and the "I told you so's" have lost their bluster.

The pain of sin manifests itself in so many ways

• destructive relationships
• destroying disease
• debilitating deadening of hope

Can there be any comfort outside of Truth?

This is the Truth we cling to: 

"I came that they might have Life!"

"...let us arise and live! 

-arise even in the darkest moments of spiritual stupidity, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us not trouble ourselves about the cause of our earthliness, except we know it to be some unrighteousness in us, but go at once to the Life.

Never, never let us accept as consolation the poor suggestion, that the cause of our deadness is physical/circumstantial.

Can it be comfort to know that this body of ours, because of the death in it, is too much for the spirit-which ought not merely to triumph over it, but to inspire it with subjection and obedience?

Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. So long as there dwells harmony, so long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones.

God is all right-why should we mind standing in the dark for a minute outside his window? Of course we miss the inness, but there is a bliss of its own in waiting. What if the rain be falling, and the wind

blowing; what if we stand alone, or, more painful still, have some dear one beside us, sharing our outness; what even if the window be not shining, because of the curtains of inscrutable good drawn across it; let us think to ourselves, or say to our friend,

'God is;

      Jesus is not dead;

           nothing can be going wrong, however it may look so to hearts unfinished in childness.'

Let us say to the Lord, 'Jesus, art thou loving the Father in there? Then we out here will do his will, patiently waiting till he open the door. We shall not mind the wind or the rain much. Perhaps thou art saying to the Father, "Thy little ones need some wind and rain: their buds are hard; the flowers do not come out. I cannot get them made blessed without a little more winter-weather."

Then perhaps the Father will say,

"Comfort them, my son Jesus, with the memory of thy patience when thou wast missing me.

Comfort them that thou wast sure of me when everything about thee seemed so unlike me, so unlike the place thou hadst left." '

In a word, let us be at peace, because peace is at the heart of things-peace and utter satisfaction between the Father and the Son-in which peace they call us to share; in which peace they promise that at length,

when they have their good way with us,

we shall share."

Adapted from The Creation In Christ, Unspoken Sermons III, George MacDonald, emphasis added. 

The Promise Of The Spirit.1

"It is the Spirit
 that has the power
 to give life."

                      -Jesus

Another Christmas season is upon us.  Do you suppose Jesus gets annoyed at all the people who won't celebrate the season properly?  Wait, what is the proper way to celebrate, it is His birthday after all?  
-Purge the urge to get caught up in the commercialism? (saw a young Amish-man at Walmart picking out a Nerf-gun, presumably for a child...are there no sanctuaries of simplicity left in this world?!). 
-Feel indignant at the insufferable secular infiltration into His important incursion? (Believe in Santa/Don't believe in Santa...)  
-Pout at the potency of pitiful popular sentiment? ("The Dog Who Saved Christmas"...seriously?)
-Antagonize atheists who attack our sacred symbols?  (Stop making me say "Happy Holidays!"...darn you!)

Or maybe its to quietly and thankfully remember that this season represents all that Jesus is about: attracting to himself all that makes life troublesome - our lack or want magnified by our inability to satisfy it!

My Christmas wish for you, follower of Jesus, is to be reminded of these wonderful truths, from friend George Mac:

• that the soul [filled with] harmony has more life, a larger being, than the soul consumed of cares;

• that the sage is a larger life than the clown;

• that the poet is more alive than the man whose life flows out that money may come in;

• that the man who loves his fellow is infinitely more alive than he whose chief effort is to exalt himself above him;

• that the man who strives to be better, is better, than he who longs for the praise of the many;

• And, best of all, that the man to whom God is all in all, who feels his life-roots hid with Christ in God, who knows himself the inheritor of all wealth and worlds and ages, yea, of power essential and in itself, that man has begun to be alive indeed.

Image Author Unknown

"Let us in all the troubles of life remember—that our one lack is life—that what we need is more life—more of the life-making presence in us making us more, and more largely, alive." 

--George MacDonald, Life, Unspoken Sermons II

May you, by the Power of the Spirit, experience more and more of the Life He came into this world to let us taste, and in our tasting create a greater longing for, the love that satisfies as it ever expands its own life-giving presence -- in us and through us! 

A Place For You.4

"A woman, when she is in childbirth, knows pain and agony; but as soon as the child is delivered, she forgets her suffering, rejoicing that her child is born into the world. For a moment you may experience sorrow; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will be able to take your joy from you."

--Jesus

A new Kuyper to bless the world;
photo by Mom

I met a man the other day who told me that he and his wife had decided years ago not to bring children into this corrupt world.  Some decisions we just can't take back...the regret on his face filled my heart with pity.  (Perhaps I shouldn't have told him about our Lyon's Pride of eight boys...)

The trauma of having children is not, in my humble opinion, limited to the physical pain of birthing them (no offense ladies, but how should a man ever understand this analogy if the Lord limited its meaning only to half the human equation), but also includes the day to day anxiety of providing for them, protecting them, disciplining and directing them in the way they should go!

Our Father wanted each of us and loves us into existence. 

That love begins at the intense pleasure of conceiving them followed by the suffering of childbirth, followed by the moment the child looks up into the eyes of love.  A lifetime cycle of love and suffering is birthed in that moment! 

But the great reward throughout the parenting process is:

JOY!  It may very well be the one analogy that we can truly understand about the very real love & suffering our Creator God feels toward us.  His stamp of approval and our confident hope is Jesus.  Take hope then, follower of Jesus, that the cycle will be broken when we see Jesus face to face - 

Joy 

will never again 

be taken from us!

A Place For You.3

"Do not marvel when I say: A little while, and you will not see me; and not long after that, you will see me again. You will weep and be sad; but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful; but your sorrow will be turned to joy."

--Jesus

My eleven year old granddaughter and I sat on the couch last night watching the Grammy Nominations program.  After Taylor Swift's sensually suggestive performance, we talked about the transformation of young ladies like Taylor and Miley from family-loving innocents of light to fame-following instruments of darkness.  

I asked her what she thought these girls would say if someone had shown them, at the age of eleven, the script

image from billboard.com

of their life  and the kind of things they would be promoting in their twenties.  "I think they wouldn't believe they would be doing things like that, grandpa," Vanessa replied.
____________________________________________ "The wicked strut about freely when what is vile is honored among men." -Psalm 12:8
____________________________________________ I pray that my granddaughter will continue to grow in her moral convictions and be a light to her generation who are easily duped by a wicked world system bent on violence and self-rule. A world that will not honor the King of Light, Love and Life.  A world that exalts death, destruction and disease while giving lip-service to compassion.  A world that demands tolerance to open mockery & disdain for all things sacred.

There is a sorrow that mourns for those caught in the web of deceit and the destructive power of sin.  There is a deeper sorrow that yields to fear when hope is overwhelmed by helplessness.  Imagine spending three years of your life in intimate contact with the Power that convincingly overcame the world.  Imagine the hope ignited in your heart for a world ruled by righteousness. Imagine the deep sorrow when hope was dashed at the cross by this rebellious world.  

Imagine the joy when Hope was resurrected!

Do not marvel, then, follower of Jesus, that darkness grows deeper as the vile strut freely about, making it harder to see the Lord.  While the world rejoices in less accountability and conviction, let us not lose hope knowing the joy we will see when Righteousness finally rules this world!