Train yourself to be godly.                                                                                                    1 Timothy 4:7

The pursuit of holiness is not a downhill stroll on a pleasant afternoon, an easy Sunday jaunt upon which one can hardly help but progress. It is an uphill traverse upon treacherous terrain!  It’s a workout!  

You cannot advance along this path in whimsical folly.  You will not one day awake to find you’ve tumbled into it’s tidy end.  This journey is one of blood and grit!  Of muscle and sinew, of sweat and determination, of persistence, effort, and down-right force of will!

Look around you!  All of life today belies the notion that we could ever ‘fall’ into holiness.  Without the work, THIS is what we become:  degenerate, immoral, loathsome, angry, selfish, lazy, conceited, shallow, foolish, vain, petty, deluded, and self-seeking!  

That path, that’s the one we stroll merrily, carelessly upon.  

Something more, something better, something more lofty, noble, worthwhile, and eternal, now that, that takes work.

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.  Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”  Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else–to the nearby villages–so I can preach there also.  That is why I have come.”                 Mark 1:35-38

This story explains exactly what it is that is wrong with believers today.

Got your attention?

The heading for this section in my Bible says Jesus Prays in a Solitary Place.  We’ve already come to the first area of faultiness among so many of us these days.  The example we have from Christ is one of great discipline.  Just in the heading we see Him showing us that in order to live a life of design, we must be disciplined to do that which WILL NOT come naturally.  The one discipline you can easily pick out, prayer.  But did you know that solitude is also a discipline?  How well do you handle moments of quiet and solitude?  When everyone leaves you alone in the house, what is your gut reaction?

Do a little test for me, next time you get in the car alone, turn off the radio, get off the cell phone, and see how long it takes before you are itching for another way to spend the time.

If you want to hear your Lord talking, you might need to find a quiet place to listen.

Moving beyond the heading: ‘very early’, this one hurts me.  I’ve been through seasons where getting up before the crack of dawn worked great for me.  I’m not in that season now.  I’m a night owl, that I can do.

Christ is demonstrating a point here.  That which you deem important to do, you make sacrifices in order to get done.  You willingly give over things, not just things that you want, but things all of life around us tells us we need.  You know what the truth of the matter is, Man does not live by bread alone.  (Matthew 4:4) God can make us rested without our closing our eyes, He can fill our bellies without our eating a bite, and He can keep us healthy and fruitful without our worrying our little heads over those things.  He knows what we need and is good at providing it.  (Luke 12:22-34)

The next part is where we all seem to fall apart.  Picture it, Peter comes frantically searching for Jesus, astounded that He would run off at such a time as this.  There is a following, there are people who need Him and sickness waiting to be eradicated and demons to be banished.  There’s a lot to do and they don’t have time for all this silly sitting on mountainside business.  Quiet moments staring at the clouds, eyes closed in silent reverie, who has time for that!  Notice the urgency.  They search for Him, Peter “exclaims”, his cry ends in an exasperated exclamation point.  

How would you have responded if you were in the picture?  

Your answer shouldn’t be hard to find.  Look at real life today.  Aren’t you the Jesus in this picture a hundred times a day? Someone needs you!  Something needs to be done.  Someone is searching frantically for you.  There are things to do and people to assuage and please and meals to cook and eat and meetings to go to and work to complete and service to conduct and hands to shake and connections to make and chores to complete and lists to write up and studies to conduct and errands to run and exasperation to feel!  

And then we come to what so many of us are missing so many endless days on end.  

Jesus says no.  

There is a need, there are people, there is sickness and demonic possession and urgency.  But He says no to them all.  How did He know that that wasn’t where He needed to be?  If you just look at the situation logically, who wouldn’t think it was the place to go.  

Now do you see how it all fits together?  Only by having His moments of solitary prayer was Christ able to determine where He needed to be.  

There will always be something vying for our time and attention.  There will always be need.  There will always be someone seeking you out.  It is only the Lord who know which needs to leave unmet, which are waiting for someone else to meet them, and which are on your list to tackle.

That is why I have come.

Why is it that you have come?  What are you uniquely here to do?  Is it to answer the frantic calls by countless people with selfish or hidden or even good-hearted requests?  Is it to follow the exclamatory cries of every soul needing healing and help?  Or might it be you’ve come for some reason you never even stopped looking logically long enough to find.  God often defies logic.  And somehow the plans still end up great.  

I don’t want to be logical.  I don’t want to be led around my own life by frantic voices pulling me toward the latest and loudest need.  I don’t want to take within myself other people’s anxieties and inabilities to slow down and trust.  I don’t want to spend all my energy chasing needs I might not be the best one to meet.  I don’t want to pour myself out for that which is temporal.  

It starts with checking out how Jesus managed to do that (there’s no better example of how it’s done!).  And then attempting to do the same.  

Be still, be quiet, be disciplined.  Let Him fill you in on why you’ve come.   

There are a handful of issues that I believe create the greatest barrier to belief in Christ in the United States.  One of those is brought out in the words of Romans 4.

Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation.  However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.                                                                                                                                       Romans 4:4-5

We naturally distrusts that which is free.  

Many years ago, I was visiting a jewelry store in Colorado.  I was wearing a t-shirt that I still own.  The young man behind the counter made a startling and searching statement that caught me off guard and to this day it stands as one of my greatest regrets and failures.  

                   This is the front.

                      And this is the back.

He said, “How is Jesus simple?  I don’t see that at all.”  I can’t remember what I told him, but it wasn’t anywhere near the truth his heart was longing to hear.

One day my husband came home and I had put a word on the wall outside the glass shower in our bathroom.

It had actually been a demonstration by a friend of mine who was selling those wall cling things about how easy they were to apply.  I found it fitting for other reasons.

Life is really much more simple than we make it out to be.  The idea that anything could be free or easy makes it seem cheap and not worth having.  Think about that.  “If it isn’t worth working for, it isn’t worth having.”  “If it comes cheap, it probably is.”  These are the mantras that Americans grow up being taught. And so when grace and freedom and life and fullness are offered at the bargain basement price of faith alone, our minds just can’t comprehend that level of simplicity.  

Once we have relinquished ourselves to believing that righteousness might be free–and only then because we know it wasn’t free to Him who offers it–we still have the obstacle of all the promises that stretch so far beyond merely entrance into eternity with Him.  “Yes, He may have offered me admission, but that just gets me in the door.  If I want an audience with Him, fullness in Him, a mansion in that eternity, surely that will cost me.”  

Life really is more simple than we allow ourselves to believe.  

Usefulness, purposefulness, fullness, they are all more simple than our minds can fathom.

It is as simple as this: If today I make myself wholly available to Him, He can and will make something beautiful of it.  

I don’t have to understand how or why.  I don’t need to know what it’s going to look like in advance.  I don’t need the answer to every question or a detailed itinerary.  I simply need to trust that He has all of that and then some.  It isn’t what we’re taught to believe, but it is what is ultimately true. It cannot be earned or bought.  It cannot be deciphered or created, it cannot be forced or manipulated.  It can only be freely received as the gift one cannot otherwise possess. It is that simple.  

Salvation, fullness, purpose, life.  While costly to Him, only come free to us.  

If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed.                                                                                                                            John 8:36

We Americans prize our freedom.  We celebrate it, we exercise it, and, thank you eternally, we have many who willingly lay down their lives for it.

Can the same be said of believers?

God’s design is that we live free of the burden of sin and shame and guilt and unrealistic expectations and judgement and the entanglements of slavery to sinful self.  We know this.  Every believer can testify to the truthfulness of the above verse and yet shockingly few have I seen know how to move the truth from knowledge to practice.  

If I am free, what might that mean to me?  What might a life of ‘freedom’ look like?  

Christ says we are free from our bondage to sin, no longer slaves to sin but now adopted sons and daughters of a God who has offered us forgiveness and freedom in Christ.  While we do continue to sin, our sinful natures no longer reign supreme over our lives and thoughts and emotions.  We are no longer slaves to sin without authority and power to depose that old master of the flesh.

And yet there are so many areas of my life where I feel powerless against it, where try as I might, that besetting sin just wins every time.  By its constantly winning the victories, I’m relegated to the loser, handing over my powers to resist more and more with every defeat.  

And then there are all those chains that bind our souls daily, those we either ignore, cherish, or aren’t even aware of.  Shame often wears this dress.  We allow ourselves to be enslaved to our pasts, our mistakes, and our guilt.  We wear the chains for decades, feeling it some sort of just punishment for our misdeeds.  

We also live enslaved to tradition and religion.  There’s an old song, I think it was Jars of Clay that sang it, where they speak of churchgoers sitting on their pews who ‘can’t feel the chains on their souls.’ When we miss an opportunity to walk in the church, when we say no to filling a volunteer need, there’s this touch of guilt that we buy into that tells us we might not have made Him happy by doing that.  Or perhaps it’s the other extreme, we feel that by all we have done, we have earned it, He is happy with our innumerable offerings.  As if somehow, somewhere deep inside us we really do believe that the greatness of eternity with Him can be both won and lost.

Those are ‘religious’ enslavements.  How about the social ones?  So many live lives enslaved to things they either love or hate.  They want desperately to offer their families the finer things and they sell their souls to the taskmaster of wealth.  They want to be popular and influential and so sell their very lives to the harsh and ever changing god of social acceptance–chasing the Jones’s who move mansions daily.  Those are the more noticeable, but don’t think there aren’t others that might hit home with the more docile of us.  We allow ourselves to be bound by  every other enslaving master without even realizing what’s become of us, often wearing our chains as a badge of honor and importance, not at all sure of how to work and live and survive without the weight of them.  

Might busy-ness be your master?  While freedom is what’s been offered, have we, like the Isrealites of old, denied the freedom in favor of another King instead?  It’s not a new story.  I think of our pet rabbit.  She likes closed, confined spaces. With all the available space of her cute little house, she passes over such freedom in favor of something far more limiting.  I believe we do it for a number of reason, but that one of them is fear of what might be outside our limited nest.  If we are free, we may wander into something we haven’t faced before.  We may wander away from where things are going on we want to be ‘in’ on.  We may wander away from what people would call normal or socially acceptable.  We may even wander away from the known, controlled, and safe.  

I see people every day  enslaved, chained to every manner of taskmasters they don’t see or concede to, masters they never realized they’d sold their freedom to.  You are no longer a slave, you are a free child of a gracious Father who grieves at the thought of your handing over the freedom for which He so painstakingly moved heaven and earth on your behalf.  Who is your master?  Who or what is it that has the final say in what you do, where you go, how you dress, how you spend your time,  what it is you’re working for?  I haven’t yet been able to ask myself that question without feeling the sting of knowing that that throne is, in fact, divided.  

May He sit uncontested on the throne of my heart, with all other far lesser gods relegated to their rightful places of service to Him.  I long to live a life that testifies to my desire to no longer serve the god of busyness, of approval, of comfort, of ease, of self, of indecision, of money or alcohol or lust or anger or bitterness or rage.  But to live in the weightlessness of glory.  Under the full and gracious reign of the God who has indeed secured my freedom.

It wasn’t cheap for Him nor has it been cheap for we Americans.  Someone, many someones live, lived, and died to gain it for us.  Let us not disrespect the gifts we’ve been given by either party by dismissing them, handing them over without a fight, allowing them to be taken, or denying the ones who secured them for us.  May we be a people who truly and daily let freedom ring in every corner of our lives and hearts. And may we be grateful for the opportunity to do so.

In Exodus chapter 17, we find the all to familliar story of Joshua and the battle with the Amelekites.  It’s the one where Moses and Aaron and Hur stand on the top of the hill overlooking the battle and, hands raised, seem to control the battle outcome from afar.  As long as Moses’s hands are raised, Joshua and his men are winning.  When the hands come down, the victory is lost.

I’m heading out on mission soon.  I just this morning asked a young man to be a part of the team that is working the will of God in that foreign land.  In thinking through my request and looking to this biblical story, I see the beauty of God’s plan.

From the beginning there were three.  God set the perfect model of life in community with His own very existence.  We are, for better or worse, whether we like it or not, whether or not we fully embrace or utilize it, a part of a larger whole.  The Body of Christ.  

As members of this Body, our roles aren’t stagnant–‘I’m a foot, that’s what I do’ or ‘I’m an ear, it is my place.’  No, there are many roles, many parts to play, and many scenarios in which your role may sway and shift.  

Perhaps in one area of your life, to one hurting friend, you are an ear.  Perhaps to the lost in a far off land, you will come as the hands and feet.  Maybe today, the Body needs for you to breathe life and joy into the darkness around you.  Maybe your church needs eyes to see that which they haven’t been open to before.

Here’s the truth of the matter:  we are not so different from Joshua on any given day.  Every day is a battle.  Satan is after our hearts and our witness and our lives and our children.  He is ruthless and prowling.  Whether you go looking for it or not, the battle is coming to you! (see Exodus 17:8, who came after whom.)  And in every fight, you have a role to play.  On this battlefield, you may be the one getting your hands dirty like Joshua.  You may barely walk away from this one bearing the battle scars of a long and vicious fight.  

If you don’t find yourself on the battlefield itself today, have you considered that that might not mean it is your day off?  

While the battle is undoubtedly won or lost at the hands of those who fight, victory requires far more than brawn and brute courage.  There are others whose roles are every bit as necessary, every bit as imperative as those who carry the weapons of war.  

Moses, in the raising or lowering of his hands, turned the tide of the battle below. His intercession, his concession to play his role in the battles that raged around him had a profound impact on the outcome of those battles.  The battle was won or lost depending on whether or not he carried out his role, whether or not, with hands raised, he offered his clean hands in ceaseless intercession.

Let us not forget Aaron and Hur.  How often we pass over their role, perhaps hoping that if we don’t acknowledge it it won’t be handed down to us.  How many seek the lackluster burden of namelessly carrying the burden of another? The battle can be won or lost on whether or not they show up for the job.  Moses couldn’t do it alone, and Joshua was only half the team.  Theirs was a place of submission and subservience.  And on their obedience, the outcome of the battle rests.

Rubber meets the road: do you believe that the victories that you pursue today can be won or lost based on the ability of the Body of Christ to carry out the roles they were intended to?  Do you believe that the battles that others around you face can be won or lost depending on whether or not you show up to work?  

What does it really look like to bear one another’s burdens?

Bloody hands or upheld arms, muscle and grit, brawn and focus, sweat, tears, and intercession.  Where’s your battle of the day and what role are you to play there?

But the Lamb will overcome them because HE is Lord of Lords and King of Kings.                                                                                                                                                                                                       Revelation 17:14

HE conquers the greatest enemies of heaven, in hell, and all between simply by virtue of who HE is.  His victories are not secured because He happened to be stronger this time, or the enemy was weaker that time, or He had the better strategy, or because His army did or didn’t do something well or by the plan today.  He wins every time because HE IS.

If He is that powerful and His victories are that sure, doesn’t it beg the question, “Who is HE that HE so effortlessly subdues the nations, defeats the enemy, and secures the victory?”

If there were any man with that kind of reputation or power, we would look to him, we would investigate his bio, pry into his affairs.  We would pick up the magazines with his face on the cover.  If at all possible, we would ingratiate ourselves to him; attempt to benefit from his position.  And he would ultimately disappoint us.

And yet this “HE” has more power and authority than all others combined and we so often shrug off the realities of His might.  We leave the ‘articles’ unread and we fail to even wonder what life might be like in His shadow.

If HE can do this, what can’t HE do? And why should I not investigate Him and find out?

Who is HE?  What can I know and what have I so often and so foolishly convinced myself that I can’t?  HE desires to be known by me.  Otherwise why would HE have gone to such lengths to ensure I get this Love Letter from Him telling me who HE is and what He’s done for me?

Far too often far too many look to the Lord and see the infinite and profound nature and nothing more.  We see that we can’t possibly know it all and so resolve to know very little.  We content ourselves with knowing He’s enough to save me, what we need to know in order to get on ‘the list.’  Like poor students, we ask the teacher what might be the minimum needed to pass the class and we set the bar as low as that.  As the Teacher, don’t you think He’d like for a student to actually want to excel in this?

Not every spiritually profound truth flows like liquid off the page and into your soul.  Some jewels have to be mined.

The understanding of the deep, profound riches of His Word is not reserved for the spiritual elite.  We need no intermediary to communicate with the God of the universe any longer, all access has been granted and there is no longer a spiritual hierarchy through which our wisdom must be translated.  We have a High Priest who can teach us, we don’t have to rely on others besides Him.

You can discern the great wonders and beauty of God’s Word.  While teachers are wonderful, gifted, necessary, and called to help us flesh out Truth, see with greater clarity, and fill our intellectual tanks, the ultimate Teacher is perfectly capable of having lessons of His own.  He just needs a few students who believe in coming to class.

Who is HE? Crack the Book.  Pursue the knowledge. Investigate the facts.  Mine the riches.  Know who it is in whom you have believed.  He can stand up to our scrutiny.  And HE can be known by you.

And the depth and riches of His character that you uncover will build your faith, and guide your days, and give meaning and purpose to your pursuits, and be of greater value that any other thing you might have accomplished with your time.

HE can be known.  And in the knowing, you can be full.

You will seek me and you will find me when you seek me with all your heart.                                                                                                                                                                        Jeremiah 29:13

This summer God worked in me to help me see and acknowledge just what kind of love He might have for me.  We all know the word Abba.  We’ve all heard He is our ‘Loving Father.’ And as great as my Dad is, I thought I had a pretty good vision of what God being all that for me might look like.  To add to my personal knowledge, I am a parent who knows the joy of giving good things to my children.

Surely I have a sufficient grasp of the love of my Father.  Right?

Not even close.

No other love like this.

I’ve spent the last hour pouring over my favorite chapter in the Bible.  Pop Quiz, what is it?

Revelation 19.  Get’s me every time.  That’s my God, that’s my King and my Deliverer!  It just doesn’t get any better than all that.

As the Rider of the white horse passes me by, set on His course to complete with grand exclamation His saving power on my behalf, I can see Him.  His name emblazoned on His chest and then again as He passes by, written across His thigh. He looks down on me as He thunders past to secure my victory so profoundly.  Close your eyes and see that look.  In the midst of battle, while treading the winepress of the wrath of God Almighty, you can still see it.  He can’t be distracted from it.  He doesn’t ‘turn it off’ until the work is done.  It doesn’t get ‘tabled’ while He’s at work.  It’s always there, always burning, always fierce and present.

He loves me.

In ways I can’t dream up.  To an extent I can’t even envision.  He loves me with a fervor and a sweetness and a selflessness that no relationship on this earth can possibly do justice to.

He won’t just show me all this One day.  He wants to show me today.  Because it’s so high above me, I stop looking at some point.  It’s as though I’ve set my eyes on a wonderful and distant expanse and excitedly look as far as that for His gifts and provisions, but the idea that His love could stretch further just doesn’t even register.

While in Costa Rica this summer I felt the Lord prod me.  Test me, He said.  Let’s do a little experiment.

I know all those thoughts and verses about testing.  But this one was God having fun with me.  Almost showing off.  Let me show you what I can really do. He wanted me to see just the tiniest realization of what all my eyes had never conceived.

So I prayed for monkeys.

Yep, monkeys.

I love monkeys and especially the sweet little capuchin ones.  And I’d never seen one.  They do live on Costa Rica, so I was still ‘playing it safe,’ but at least I was stepping in the water.

I really looked for them all week.  Everywhere I went and everything I did, I wondered with such excitement, will it be here?  Will I encounter my gift today? It was days in and still no monkeys and I’m so thankful that He kept me faithful to believe.

We went on a river cruise.  Literally dozens of these cruises went out that day.

Only one saw monkeys.

We sat in that boat and watched a whole slew of capuchin monkeys play and eat and frolic right in front of us, not 10 feet away. We watched until we just had to leave.  My heart was full.  I got to see monkeys yes.

But I got to see God.  The Abba who delights in me and who Himself got a great thrill out of giving me a childish desire. His gift to me put a smile on both our faces.

And His love goes so much deeper still.

He isn’t distant.  He isn’t callous. He isn’t too busy to be bothered by our needs nor our desires.  He longs for us to rush to Him– to, like a child, approach Him in love, longing, anticipation, and faith.

Does that sound like the God of your day?  Kids don’t avoid loving dads.  Kids don’t have to put, ‘spend time with daddy’ on their to-do lists and make themselves have to do it.  If you only knew what kind of Daddy you have and the love He’s longing to shower you with, you’d run.  You’d run hard after Him and long for a moment in His presence.

If ease is the goal of your day, there is a very good chance that the path you desire is not the one being dictated by the Lord. Our God has a long history of taking His children along the circuitous route.  Life with Him is never promised or slated as ‘easy.’ If your desires are for the path of least resistance, of ease, comfort, fluidity, certainty, or full disclosure, He’s not the Man for you.

Consider the daily lives of most Americans.  We eat ‘comfort food,’ we listen to the instruction of ‘time-saving’ electronics, we spend our money on that which isn’t even good, but is ‘fast.’ To most of us, if it isn’t easy that’s only because we haven’t invented the technology yet to perfect the process—but fear not, it’s on its way!

To endure that which isn’t easy simply isn’t sensible.  It isn’t necessary, economical, or wise.  The path of least resistance is well trodden and therefore easier to travel.

We all hold some level of belief in the validity of that thought. But is it biblical?

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter.                                 Exodus 13:17

I know your affliction and your poverty-yet you are rich!             Revelation 2:9

In this world you will have trouble.  But take heart! I have overcome the world.                                                                                                                  John 16:33

Consider this: all but one of the original 12 disciples died a horrible, tragic, and painful martyr’s death.  And the last of the 12 was exiled in his old age only after, tradition holds, he was dropped into a boiling vat of oil only to escape unscathed!  Peter was crucified (upside down); Andrew was also crucified, but with ropes rather than nails to increase the duration of his pain; tradition holds that James the son of Alphaeus was very old at his martyrdom but that didn’t stop them from beating, stoning, and then clubbing him in the head!  They were beaten, stabbed, crucified, skinned, tortured.  Paul faired no better, his list of ills takes up many verses of his second letter to the Corinthians (chapter 11).

A New Testament occurrence alone?  Nope, the Israelites went many spells of numerous days without water in the desert.  Jacob laid his head to rest on rocks in the woods, was royally screwed over by his in-laws, and endured a lifetime of backbiting amongst his wives (not that he didn’t deserve a little of that torment!)  Abraham feared for his life among foreign peoples, to the point he felt compelled to lie and allow his wife to be taken by another (Genesis 12).  Levites were asked to kill their own brothers and children and friends at the base of Mt. Sinai (check Exodus 32). This list could get very long and follow the same theme precisely.

Life with the Lord is not a historically easy road.

I truly believe that almost all of us would say that this is a truth that we all concede to, grasp, and agree with.

Why then do we attempt to live our lives so centrally focused on the idea of finding ease?

Why do we dismiss that which is too difficult as being unrefined or poorly devised?  Why do we so often search out the ‘easy’ route?  Really sit down and think about how much of our lives is dictated by attempts and finding or following ease—from electronics that make answering questions easier, to chains that make feeding our families easier, to google maps that chart for us the easiest route, to contraptions making it easier to haul all the items necessary to make things easier!

Perhaps you tell people your day is going beautifully because it is easier than explaining the pain that’s marked your morning.

Perhaps you don’t tell co-workers that you’re a Christian because it’s easier than having to answer their deriding inquisitions of why.

Perhaps you talk only of others—their faults, their lives, and their persona—because it’s easier that talking about where you are.

Perhaps you leave the radio on all day because it’s easier than being left alone with yourself.

Perhaps you table the tough talks with your children, the discipline and guidance, because it’s easier than trying to slate out the one-on-one time in your busy schedule.

Perhaps you don’t make the time to be still before the Lord because it is just plain easier to not add one more seemingly unproductive thing to your calendar.

Perhaps.

Perhaps this isn’t at all what life with the Lord is supposed to look like.

Enter through the narrow gate.  For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.                         Matthew 7:13-14

Finding that which is hidden and valuable isn’t easy.  Be the few.