(happy to report I found the CD I was listening to in my car during a road trip the other weekend and will post tomorrow. In meantime:)
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," says Richard Jordan.
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." It was along in there that I began to realize it’s really not what I do for the Lord, striving and being on the treadmill, thinking, "I gotta get there and I gotta accomplish that."
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.
******
From the beginning courses of speech class, 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, etc. The key is take what they say at face value.
Now, when he says "the disciple whom Jesus loved," who wrote the book? The disciple whom Jesus loved. So when John describes himself as "the disciple whom Jesus loved," he's telling you, "Here’s how the Lord thinks about me." The writer is so caught up in Christ’s love for him.
So which one of them had the close, personal, intimate relationship with Christ? The one who was talking about what he was going to do for Christ, or the one who was focused on what Christ was doing for him?
You want to have some intimacy with the Lord? You want to have a personal contact? If you want to have that personal intimate relationship with God the Father that He desires to have, it’s called eternal life.
If you want to have that in the present experience of your life, don’t focus on what you’re doing, because there’s only failure there. Focus on how much He loves you. That song about, "O how He loves you and me," well, that’s a good thing to think about it because "it’s the love of Christ that constrains us," as Paul tells us.
And John, this disciple whom Jesus loved, had his focus on Christ’s love for him. Because of that, he had this special relationship with the Lord that the others didn’t have.*****
Paul advises in II Corinthians 10:5, “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”
The warfare we’re in with the Adversary today is a spiritual battle that gets fought in your inner man. That’s why you need to keep your mind and your ears tuned like a laser.
Just like your tongue can taste the difference in meats, your ear needs to be able to hear that message . . . The key is to win the battle for the mind because that’s where the conflict’s ALWAYS at.
Paul asks the Galatians in Galatians 3:3: "Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?"
You see all this performance stuff, all this activity aimed at the physical outward external stuff, is backwards. Satan works through your body into your soul and then into your spirit.
Paul says, "Go over and grab all those vain imaginations; all those things you project in your mind, dream up or have other people put into your thinking." The course of this world is "bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop"--constantly.
He’s saying, "Take that stuff and just throw it out the window!" Imagine yourself on the third floor of a building and watch it go "splat" on the pavement.
*****
“Bringing every thought into captivity." You see, you’re to renew your mind to develop a positive habit of BELIEVING what God says. Develop a positive habit in your mind that says, "I am beloved of the Father."
When I bring my thinking into captivity to the grace and love of God given to me through the Crosswork of Jesus Christ, I’ll be free from self-occupation--free from thinking about me and my stuff--and I’ll start thinking about me and HIS stuff. In fact, I’ll just start thinking about His stuff.
And that’s when you find rest in the Father’s love. And it won’t just be a theological point and a doctrinal statement to say, "God loves you." It’ll be something that comes into your intimate experience moment by moment.
*****
When you’re trusting your performance, what do you get? You get failure. There are ONLY TWO CHOICES, folks, when it comes to effectually changing your life. One is law and one is grace. You either believe the law changes you or you believe love changes you.
Let me tell you this, simply warning people to change can’t change them. Giving people reasons for changing, for doing what’s right and for avoiding what’s wrong, doesn’t change them.
You get to Romans 7 and look at Paul’s description of the life of a Believer lived under the law and it’s very clear that the law endorses the need for change but is powerless to produce it. That’s not its job description.
The job description of the law is to point out failure. That’s why it gives the rules and regulations and the demand for perfection so it can hold up the mirror and say, "See, you can’t do it. You’re not perfect. You need a Savior."
Have you ever seen somebody headed for a mess and you begin to give them reasons why they shouldn’t do it? Think about yourself. You got all these reasons not to do something and you do it anyway.
You see, reasons only answer the question of "Why?" Why should I not do this and why should I do that. You need motivation to answer the "How?"
What is it actually that causes you to love God? Is it Him telling you, "Love me," or do we love Him because He first loved us? Where does love for Him really come from? It’s His love for us that motivates our love for Him.
That’s why I John 4:10 says, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." It says, "We love Him, because He first loved us.”
*****
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)
“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.”
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