“Satan has a religious system to catch you; in the Dispensation of
Grace it’s called legalism. It’s an external
operating system where what’s out there is
where you think God’s working and where you think you’ll find His revelation. Christians
reason, ‘What’s out there is the way
I know God’s value and esteem for me, so what I need to do is produce stuff out there,’ rather than being ‘strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man’ and having the identity God gives you inside of you live out through you.”—Pastor Richard Jordan.
*****
From the beginning courses in journalism, the student is taught to listen
for the main thrust of what a speaker is trying to convey, express, teach,
etc., in any given speech, lecture, interview, etc. The key is take what they
say at face value.
In a study I have on tape, Detroit-area
preacher Tom Bruscha, someone who has been in the ministry for three-plus
decades, makes the point, “Do you realize most of Christendom is spending all
their Christian life trying to get ‘rooted and grounded in the love of God’?" (Eph. 3:17)
Bruscha explains, “Instead of being
on the mountain peak, looking out and comprehending what God is doing,
Christians spend all their time trying to figure out, ‘Am I really saved? Am I
really forgiven? Does God really still love me?’ ”
“It’s when you just study and BELIEVE what God’s love has done for you, and how God IS part of your life, and what God IS going to do in you, that you then see that is YOU BEING rooted and grounded. Paul’s writing as if you can ALREADY be rooted and built up! Colossians says the same thing.”
“It’s when you just study and BELIEVE what God’s love has done for you, and how God IS part of your life, and what God IS going to do in you, that you then see that is YOU BEING rooted and grounded. Paul’s writing as if you can ALREADY be rooted and built up! Colossians says the same thing.”
*****
A fascinating op-ed column in
the New York Times,
“Your Brain Lies to You,” described how the phenomenon known as “source
amnesia” leads people to forget whether or not a statement is true.
“Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often
later remember it as true,” informs the article. “With time, this
misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a non-credible source
that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes
to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term
cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications
gain strength.”
Obviously, there are easily identified biblical implications. This is why you hear such outrageously untrue statements about what the Bible
really says. But people listen to other people’s lies and don’t remember what they
once knew as fact from God’s Word.
*****
In the Bible, truth is more than
just being right all the time; it’s the ultimate basis of reality. What makes
what’s real? God.
“You know that coffee table is solid, but at the atomic and
sub-atomic level it isn’t,” explains Jordan. “Well, what’s reality really made
of? In Scripture, the ultimate source of what’s real—not illusionary, but
what’s real—is who God is.
“There's the Indiana Jones
movie where, at the end, everything resolves itself. They figure out the
mystery they’re looking for in the crystal and Indy asks, ‘Well, did they go
out into space?’ The other guy says, ‘Yes, the space between things.’
“You know what he’s talking
about is not outer space. You take an atom
and it’s got all these neutrons, protons
and electrons that circle. Well, what’s between all that?
*****
“The first thing to understand is that life doesn’t begin in your emotions. Your emotions are the part of your makeup that God gave you to be motivators of your will. The way you’re made by God to function is in response to decisions that your will makes.
“Too often we live under the tyranny of emotional revolt because our emotions, as dumb and as uneducated as they are . . . Do you realize your emotions are just dumb as posts?!
“Your emotions think anything your mind is thinking is true. Anything your mind thinks, you project on the screen of your thought processes and your emotions think is true.
“That’s why you cry when you see a sad movie. It’s only a movie. You know it’s not real, but you project it into the visualization of your mind and your emotions respond as though it were true.
“Your emotions are designed to respond. e-MOTION. That’s what the word is. Most of that word is the word motion. And God has built you so that there’s a part of your inner man that is designed to put into motion the things that your heart and your mind have chosen to do.
“But the order is 'facts first.' Then you have to have faith in the facts. And once you have faith in the facts, it will produce fruit. And the fruit will then produce the feeling.
“You have to have it in that order, because until your faith rests in the reality of the facts, those facts can never go to work in your life. They’ll just be rolling around in your head. When your faith rests in them, your faith in those facts releases the power of that truth and it 'works effectually in you that believe.' ”
*****
“A huge turning point in a person’s Christian walk is when they realize that it isn’t really what’s done for Christ that’s the issue; it’s really that, ‘I’m in Christ and He’s in me and it isn’t what I’m doing for Him; it’s His life in me that’s the real issue.’
“At some point in my ministry I figured out that no matter what I did, and no matter how hard I worked at it, tomorrow I could look back and say, ‘Boy, I could’ve done better yesterday.’
“The Christian life is really Him in you, living out through you. Now that’s wonderful to understand in theory, but you’re like I am and we’re both like Paul was in Romans 7.
“He said, ‘To will is with me. I got all the will you want; my problem isn’t will power, my problem is want power. Because the good I would do, I don’t, and the evil that I don’t want to do, I do. How to perform I can’t find.’
“The answer to that, in Paul’s case, was it wasn’t in what he was doing.
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