Beating the Lukewarm Christian

As I'm reading through 2 Kings, I keep reading about kings who are either walking or not walking in the ways of their father David, and even read reminders to the Israelites about what happened in the desert (approximately 1400 BC). This keeps happening over and over as I'm reading. For example, 2 Kings 16 says that Ahaz (king in approximately 740 BC) did not follow in the ways of his father David (king in 1000 BC).

I sucked in history class. My excuse to my parents, my teachers, my peers and whoever else learned that I didn't do well was that I only cared about what was ahead and didn't think it was worth time to learn about what had already passed. The wars of the past were over and decided. I was living now in what the result was, so why did I care about the events that led to the result?

Based on what I'm seeing in Scripture, I think God would still show up today and ask us if we remember how He took us out of slavery and into the Promised Land? Of course, most of us are not Jewish, but I think the significance of the journey and the promise is for the entire body of Christ.

Let's look back at the years I mentioned in the first paragraph - 250 years after David's reign, God is still referring to him as "father" of the current king. Almost 700 years after God brought the Israelites through the desert, He's still pointing them back to it as a reminder that He is faithful and that He loves them. Do you know where your descendants were 250 years ago? 700 years ago?!

God wants us to look back at His sovereignty in our past to know that we can trust Him in our future. Interestingly, God doesn't just point us back to our past, but to the past of our fathers, our grandfathers and even further back than that. He wants us to know that He's been there before and He'll be there again.

That's a problem for me (as it has been for people all through history - the exact reason they needed to be reminded of it all through the Old Testament). My wife and I were looking at videos from our African safari honeymoon a couple nights ago - something we did less than two years ago, and it already feels like a dream. My memory has lost hold of the details and the moments in between the highlights. That's what happens in our walk with God. We forget about the details. I have to work hard to remember that when God asked me to move across the country, He helped meet my every need as I asked Him to. I remember the hard times and the times of struggle, but it's a lot more difficult to remember the times when God stepped in and opened doors. Even as I try to remember that God was helping me and answering prayer, it's hard to remember in what ways. I know that I am remembering some instances and forgetting others. Overall, most of my memory of the situation is just reminding myself that I knew at the time God was present and walking me through the situation.

Satan wants us to forget. He sends new people and new events into our stories to try to create forgetfulness and confusion. He wants our focus to be on something different. He wants to get us to a point where we, even for a moment, forget about the power of Christ, and try to do things on our own because it creates doubt and creates a barrier in our minds from the moments that God led us through difficulties. He wants us to be confused enough to depend on our own power to create change.

I was thinking about all of this in relation to Matthew 18:3 where Jesus tells us to have the faith of little children. What do children have differently than we have as adults that gives them that child-like faith that Jesus is pointing us toward? I think it's an inability to see and remember the faults of their parents and leaders. Why do little children cry for mommy and daddy every time something goes wrong? Because they know mommy and daddy have made it better in the past. They don't have any pride in their own abilities yet. They rely on their "perfect" parents to make everything better every time. It's not until they get older that they start to grow in pride and maybe even realize that their parents aren't as perfect as they had always thought that they start to make their own decisions and decide certain things their parents led them away from might be permissible or may even lead to some sort of enjoyable gain.

We don't need to get that way with God. His reminders throughout history show us that He's never let us down and that He has power over every situation. At what point do we start to put more trust in the doctor than we put in the Creator of the world? At what point do we decide that the temporary satisfaction of sexual immorality or alcohol and drugs is a better feeling than the Holy Spirit flowing through us? At what point do we decide that our tongues and the words we use can be shared for both cursing and loving? At what point do we start to walk in the things that we teach our children to stay away from?

We think that because we're older we have some sort of wisdom that allows us to partake in things that we don't trust our children to partake in. We forget that Paul had to write letters to the churches reminding them to stay away from the things that the culture around them was partaking in. We forget that the alcohol addiction that our relatives had ruined their marriage, or that the drug addiction led them to overdose. We forget that sexual relationships outside of marriage have caused harm to the people we love or separations of families. We forget when we've seen words and phrases cause division or pain, or when heard by a child, confusion and a loss of witness. We forget about the life of pride that lost everything, causing the pushing away of everything else. We may be older, but we're still the children of God. We still need to remember where God has been present in our past. We still need to look back and see where we may have had a golden calf moment or a desire to seek something out that wasn't God.

In Matthew 18:3, Jesus is telling us to be in a place where we don't live as if we have the power to avoid temptation. He's asking us to live a life that doesn't think we can take care of it on our own or that we have enough wisdom in an area to do it apart from God. And all throughout the Old Testament, God is pointing us back to moments in history that teach us how living as wise and independent adults was the beginning of downfalls.

Watch how young children act in response to their parents. I'd suggest watching children that you know and not just watching children at the park... that's just not a good idea. Watch where the child goes when something bad happens. Watch how the child includes mommy and daddy when they meet a new friend or experience something new. Watch how obedience is learned and tested, but then how it is installed and lived out. Is that how your life looks with God?

That's the relationship He wants from us. That's the relationship that keeps God at the forefront of our minds so Satan doesn't get a foothold. It's the relationship that keeps us from thinking we can play with temptation and beat it, but instead helps build a wall in front of it. A relationship that gets us across the monkey bars for the first time without a fear of falling.

Power of Intercessory Prayer

I've had a few moments in my life when I know that God woke me up from my sleep to intercede for either a person or a situation through prayer. Some of those times I knew exactly who I was praying for and the situation, other times I just knew that God wanted to hear from me.

It doesn't have that often, but I actually experienced this last night. There was a girl in my dream who I was never particularly close with, never really actually got along with, and who I haven't seen in over 10 years, but I woke up fairly instantly and felt the need to pray. I don't have any idea why, but I was obedient like I have been in the past and after praying felt right back into sleep.

Unlike last night, most of the situations or people that I've felt God ask me to pray for are close to me. And even though I know that God has called me to intercede in those situations, I'm often hesitant to ask others to intercede for me. When they announce the prayer teams at church, I typically decide I'm strong enough to battle it on my own and that I don't need to waste their time. When my friends ask me if they can pray for anything I typically tell them while thinking that it won't make a difference. I've never been able to understand why someone else interceding on my behalf would have any more power than my asking God directly. That's why this section of scripture I read last night was so profound to me.

In Acts 12, King Herod murders James the brother of John - one of the original 12 disciples. After murdering John and seeing that the Jews approved, he arrested Peter and threw him into prison with the intent to do the same to him. Verse 5 - "So Peter was kept in prison, but the church was earnestly praying to God for him."

That verse stands alone in the text. Verse 4 talks about how the prison was guarded and verse 6 talks about the result of their prayer. Without verse 5 there is no other reason stated for what is about to happen. We don't know if Peter was pleading with the Lord to be rescued, although I'm sure he was, but that's not what we're told. God specifically wanted this verse to tell us that the church was earnestly interceding for Peter as he was in prison.

In the following verses, Peter is laying on the ground bound by chains and guarded by two soldiers awaiting his trial the next day, where he would surely be murdered, when an angel appears to him and tells him to get up. His chains instantly fall off, and the angel leads him out of the prison, right passed the prison guards and out the city gate which opened on its own as they approached it. Herod and the soldiers didn't even find out until the next morning.

The power of the church called on God to intercede into Peter's situation. Although Peter was most likely asking for rescuing as well, it was the church that the passage credits for praying.

The church is the family of God. The sons and the daughters. When one person in a family stands tall against an injustice, some people may notice. When the entire family fights together, walls come down. God created us to be in community with each other - not just to live alongside each other, but to live for each other and to fight for each other.

Remember the battle of Jericho? God ended up bringing the walls down, but He asked for the entire army to show up. We aren't created to go into battle alone. We're created to go into battle as a family that loves one another as much as we love ourselves. God loves to bless obedience. Through obedience Isaac isn't killed, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego arne't burned in the furnace, Solomon is made to be the wisest person to ever live, Daniel closes the mouths of lions, Lazarus is raised from the dead, the bleeding woman is healed, the lame man can walk, the blind man can see, Rahab and her family are saved.... and probably a thousand other Biblical references to God blessing obedience.

Let's be the family God calls us to be. Let's fight for each other. Let's love each other and care to fight for each other as much as we care to fight for ourselves. When a family stands together in God's name, mountains are going to move.

The Seriousness of God's Wrath

There are some topics that never seem to find their way to the pulpit. I'm sure there's a fear of certain topics and what kind of response would result from a sermon focused on one of those topics. But, I just write blogs and I don't even know who reads them, so if what I write scares someone away, I'll be okay! I'm confident in the truth that I write about, and trust that God will use Biblical truths to lead people where He wants them to be.

Ever since I started reading the Bible I've always been confused how a loving God can command the Israelites to go into a town and kill every living thing, including women and children. Even Jesus told us that unless we approach Him as little children, we have no place in Heaven. Through Jesus, we know that God loves children immensely and He instructs us to protect them in every way we can. If Jesus is God and shares the same Spirit as God, then why do we see two completely different attitudes when it comes to sinners and children?

The answer is in the character of God. I can't even begin to explain the character of God through one little post, but we can touch on a couple little pieces.

• God is 100% free of sin and can not be approached by sin. That means that not one person, baby or elder can approach God. Romans 3:23 tells us; "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Through this verse and others, the Bible teaches us that we are born sinners. As soon as we have life, we are already destined for Hell. Nothing our parents do can help us escape that fault. The sin of Adam and Eve opened up the door to allow all of humanity to be affected by temptation and sin that separates us from God. This means that the babies and women that God commanded the Israelites to kill were not pure and blameless as we like to see most people through our worldly eyes, but they were just as guilty as the robbers, murderers, sexual immoral, and other transgressors of that time and our time. 

• God sent Jesus to bridge the gap. God wasn't able to be around sin, but loved the people that were covered in sin. Imagine someone who gags around poop and a baby that's covered in it. That person can love that baby more than anything, but until someone else comes and cleans the baby up, they aren't able to approach the child. Because of God's character, He wasn't able to cleanse us of our sin Himself, because He couldn't get that close to it, so He sent Jesus to clean us up. The only way that Jesus was able to provide a way for us to be clean was to die a sinless Man. So, God sent His Son to die for our sins because He loved us so much that He didn't want to be eternally separated from us. 

I think this also explains the phrase "the fear of God". We learn to fear God in a healthy way when we realize that he completely hates the sin in our lives. It's never permissible. It's never ok. It's never something that He can just accept as a mistake. It's never just a little booboo. Every time we sin, it's deserving of death... as powerful of death as killing off an entire city of babies because of it! That's hard to hear, but the God who loves us can not stand the evilness that lives in us when we are living in sin. The only solution we have and the only reason the New Testament is completely about love and is completely free of God commanding people to kill others is that fact that Jesus washed us clean. He died once and for all to wash us clean for ever. We now have the freedom to approach God as clean children, and to be seen by Him as forgiven, clean and pure. 

I'm thankful for the sacrifice Jesus paid and the love that God had for us that led to a way we could be with Him. There's nothing greater.