From paralysis to hope

At times of discouragement in my life, I felt it harder and harder just to keep going. One awful day I remember so well, all I could do was put one foot ahead of another while I put the garbage out. At its worst, discouragement will lead you into paralysis. You can’t even make a decision or do the most basic things. Why? Because you have lost hope. There just doesn’t seem to be any point to doing anything. Hope is so incredibly important. Hope alone breaks the power of discouragement and the paralysis that comes with it, revives your strength and makes you bold instead of powerless.

On one level, hope is a gift that a friend can give us. “Come on Dave, you can do that!”  Maybe, just because somebody cheered you on, you actually went on that perpendicular rollercoaster at the theme park (though that’s definitely out of my league). Or maybe one chilly night last autumn you jumped into the freezing North Sea just because a crazy friend said you could do it (that one I actually did).

But on a far more profound level, hope is something that we desperately need in order to live. Hope is the dividing line between surviving and living. Hope is not a luxury, it is a necessity. The good news is this: hope is available to us. Listen to what Paul says: “Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face” (2 Corinthians 3:12). The hope he talks about here is not something that has to be or can be created in our mind or emotions. No, this hope is totally supernatural and it comes as a gift. It is based entirely on the power of the Holy Spirit: “But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is destroyed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:16-17).

The veil is what came between the glory of the Lord and the people of Israel. That veil is still over the face of people who are so full of religion they cannot see who Jesus is. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, Jew or Gentile, male or female, young or old, the veil is not only removed, it is destroyed! God wants to destroy everything that comes between you and his glory. What is his glory? It is his manifest presence in your life. It is his Spirit coming to you and breathing supernatural life into your weary spirit. The old hymn puts it in the form of a prayer: “Breathe on me, breath of God, fill me with life anew.”

Religion brings slavery, but the Holy Spirit brings freedom. This is freedom to enter into the very presence of God. It is freedom from the need to earn our salvation. It is freedom from the penalty of the law that brings death. It is freedom from the stranglehold of sin. It is freedom to behold the glory of God without interruption, without the veil of religion in between. What amazing kind of freedom is that? But how often do we take advantage of it?

The breath of God rushing on you will break your paralysis. It will give you power to live and not just survive, to do things you never believed you could do. The power of the Spirit is designed to transform us into a bold people, ready to go out to war in the confidence that God is with us!

There are no extraordinary people in the kingdom of God, only ordinary people touched by hope through the power of God’s Spirit.

“Since we have such a hope, we are very bold.”

May this boldness and this hope come to you today.

The only way to unity

Some feel unity comes through believing the same things. If we create a common statement of faith and get everyone to agree to it, we will have unity. Others think worship styles are the basis of unity. If we get everyone under one roof who likes the Hillsong style or the Bethel style we will find unity. Or forget all that and go back to traditional hymns and liturgy. Still others tell us the answer is to build churches with homogenous groups of people -- the same age group or social group or ethnic group. Or sometimes we think that if can build a movement with a “brand,” that will do the trick. Redeemer, Hillsong, Harvest, Bethel, Acts 29 and so on.

But in truth none of these things will create unity. It is not that doctrine or worship or church order is unimportant. It is just that they don’t constitute the foundation.  Ironically, we find the answer in going to the most divided congregation in the New Testament world. Paul teaches those fractious and difficult believers at Corinth that there is only one way to unity. Why are we one body in Christ, he asks in 1 Corinthians 12:12? The answer comes in verse 13: because we have been baptized in the one Spirit and given the one Spirit to drink. What makes them one is their common experience of the Holy Spirit.

Only the Holy Spirit can create unity. There are lots of ways we can hinder unity, but there isn’t a single way we can create it. Only the Spirit can do that.

When you are born into a family, there’s nothing you can do to make yourself part of that family. By virtue of birth, you are part of it, whether you like it or not. And even if you try to leave your family, you will never cease being your parents’ son or daughter, or brother or sister to your siblings, or grandson or granddaughter to your grandparents. Birth places you into family.

Human families can fracture. But something stronger than flesh and blood holds the body of Christ together. And that is the presence of the Holy Spirit. Birth places us into natural family. New birth places us into spiritual family. And the new birth occurs through the Holy Spirit: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). The Holy Spirit has the incredible ability to join people together who otherwise would have nothing in common with each other, and to create one family out of them. The Holy Spirit enables us to travel to the farthest corners of the world and encounter fellow believers with whom we feel instantly at home. What we have in common is always far more than our outward differences.

We need a strong and real experience of the Holy Spirit. Christianity does not depend on an experience. It depends on the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. But we are meant to have a tangible experience of the Holy Spirit when we submit to what Christ did on the cross and receive its benefits for ourselves. The Holy Spirit changed Peter from a coward who denied the Lord three times into a man who stood up to testify to his faith in front of thousands, went into the Sanhedrin and rebuked the religious leaders publicly, wound up beaten and in prison and never turned back.

How this comes to you or to me is not something that can be programmed. After all, you never know where the Spirit is coming from or where he is going (John 3:8).  How the Spirit met you last year or last week may not be how he is going to meet you today. How the Spirit met your friend is not necessarily going to be how the Spirit meets you. What are the signs of the Spirit’s presence? The knowledge of the love of God (Eph. 4:14-19). The peace that passes understanding (Phil. 4:7). The joy of the Lord, unspeakable and full of glory (1 Peter 3:8). The presence of a clear conscience (2 Cor. 4:2). And the assurance that the Lord is with you and will never leave you or forsake you (Heb. 13:5).

The purpose of our common experience of the Spirit is not so much that we all get along with each other. No, Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 12:12-13 it is above all that we be formed into one body. Why is this so? Because only in the one body is the fullness of the reality of who Jesus is made manifest to the world.  Only when we are all working together is the fullness of who Jesus is in the midst of us made visible.

That’s why unity is so important. The world will only know the love of God when they see it manifest in the unity of his people with him and with each other (John 17:23). Seek a fresh encounter with his Spirit each day and let your joy spill over into the lives of those around you. Then unity will come.

The power of praise

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46). So opens one of the greatest expressions of thanksgiving recorded in the Bible. Yet it was spoken by a woman whose circumstances were far from ideal. Mary was living in an enormous tension. She was an unwed woman who was pregnant. Her fiance Joseph had contemplated canceling the wedding, and was only stopped by a dream. The comments of the legalistic religious community they were part of must have been intolerable to bear. She was a woman who had done nothing wrong, a woman with a story no one would believe, a woman in disgrace. And in disgrace for the sole reason that she had obeyed God. She had allowed herself to become the handmaiden of the Lord (Luke 1:38). Elizabeth identifies the one and only thing that kept Mary: she had believed what God had spoken to her (verse 45). No matter what the circumstance or crisis, the way to victory is to believe what God has spoken.

God often calls us to believe him in spite of the circumstances. Otherwise faith would hardly be faith! A sad thing sometimes happens when Christians take bold actions of obedient faith: their fellow believers desert them at the very moment they most desperately need their help. Those who do not walk in a deep and abandoned relationship with the Lord will never understand the motivations and actions of radically committed believers. The hardest thing can be to feel alone even among our fellow Christians. But God does help us by sending those who will stand with us, people who also believe what God has said. Surround yourself with people like that. You may need them some day! Mary had Elizabeth even if she had no one else. Elizabeth and Mary were both women who had experienced the supernatural power of God. We need to find people on the same wavelength, people who believe God as we do, people who are on the same page as we are.

Mary’s response to God was, I think, amazing. She did not complain.  She did not ask God why he had done this to her.  We forget how desperate her position was because we have the advantage of hindsight. We know how  how the story turns out. But she did not! At that point, she was in a place of great pressure and enormous need of faith. And by faith, she found the ability to see the present from the perspective of the future -- from God’s perspective. Faith enables us to see beyond the difficulties of the present to the promises of the future.

And so her response to her suffering, as recorded in the verse I quoted at the beginning, was to exalt the Lord -- and it was, as the Greek word aggaliaso indicates, a wild, unrestrained rejoicing!  Mary's response to trial and difficulty was not the first response I usually come up with.  Her response was praise. “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thess. 5:16). There is power in praise. Praise is not just an emotional response. Praise is an act of our spirit in which we reach deep down into our innermost being where the Spirit of God indwells us to ask God for the resources to release in us an attitude of thanksgiving we could never produce in ourselves. The praise we release toward God can only originate in God.

The decision to offer praise in the midst of suffering releases in us the energy of the Holy Spirit. Somehow, we begin to know deep in our "knower" that even in our present suffering the sovereign refining and loving power of God is at work. Somehow, we know he will keep us. Somehow, we know that suffering that comes as a result of obedience always results in the advance of the kingdom and the manifestation of the glory of God. How and when that happens we must release to God. But happen it will, for God will have his way. Somehow, we know that in the end it will all be worth it.

In the meantime our job, no matter how challenging the circumstances are, is to follow in Mary's footsteps. At a very hard time in his life, David gave you and I an invitation we should be quick to accept: "Oh magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!" (Ps. 34:3).

The spirit and freedom

So much misunderstanding has revolved around the word "charismatic."  The phrase itself represents the Greek word charisma or "gift."  The problem is we spend so much time arguing over "gifts of the Spirit" we forget the far more important issue, which is the gift by the Father of the Holy Spirit to us. You cannot be a Christian without having received the Holy Spirit: "Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him" (Rom. 8:9). The Holy Spirit is God. He is the way in which God is present among us from the day of Pentecost until the day the Lord returns. Without the Holy Spirit we have neither God nor Christ. It is about time Christians learned to remember that the Holy Spirit is God as much as the Father and the Son are! Some Christians have relegated the Holy Spirit to nothing more than a doctrine, and their churches show it! But other Christians have seen the Holy Spirit as nothing more than a purveyor of gifts, and their churches show it!

Why then does God give his Spirit? The answer is clear. The Holy Spirit is given to us so that we can enter into relationship with God as his sons and daughters. The person who understands what it means to be a son or daughter of God and has entered into that freedom is a truly charismatic person. Whatever else God does in our lives by way of the activity of his Spirit flows out of that central reality. What divides believers in actuality, at least in my experience, is not whether or not we believe or operate in spiritual gifts. The difference is whether or not we really know God as our Father and are living in true freedom, or whether we still have the attitude or identity of a slave, of one looking in from the outside, never sure of whether God really loves us or not and trying in our insecurity to earn his favour. After all, Paul says if we don't know the love of God, what is the point of prophesying, good works or anything else (1 Cor. 13:1-3)?

But there is good news for us!  Paul begins his letter to the Galatians with a stern warning and an appeal (chapter 1). He takes chapters 2-4 to explain what the gospel really is, then returns to his theme of freedom in 5:1. And he does so with a shout: “For freedom Christ has set us free!” What he means is this: freedom is our destiny. We are no longer slaves. He was speaking into a Greek culture steeped in pagan thinking that all men are controlled by fate, are slaves of fate. Even the gods are not free.  All we can do is accept our lot in life. We can do nothing to change it.  The Greeks even believed that if you tried to change your life for the better or tried to be a better person morally than you were fated to be, you would be committing transgression.  Transgression (the same Greek word Paul uses for sin in Romans) had nothing to do with good or evil or any moral values.  In pagan thinking, transgression was the violation or the crossing  of the lines of fate.  An evil man who prospered was fated to prosper, while a good man who suffered was fated to suffer.

Christ died to set us free from a world in which our fate was determined either by ourselves, the gods or anything else.  We don't believe in fate, we believe in destiny.  And our destiny is in God's hands alone.  We are no longer slaves, we are free. The way God conveyed that freedom to us is through the gift of his Spirit. The Spirit makes real in our lives the result of what Christ did for us on the cross. He literally regenerates us -- which means he brings us to life!  So the cry of the gospel that we are set free in Christ was a radical message for those who heard it. And it is as true today as it was then.  God paid a high price for your freedom and mine.  There's only one way to take hold of it: through the gift of his Spirit.

If we seek his Spirit, we will find everything else he wants for us.  That should be our focus.  "The one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life" (Gal. 6:8).

Claiming our inheritance

“Strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light” (Colossians 1:11-12). There are three things listed here that should characterize a Christian: power, patience and joyful thanksgiving. They are described here as part of our inheritance… what Christ has made available to us. Imagine having an inheritance, yet not knowing about it, or, knowing about it, not claiming it! The Christian life is not just a grind, as we keep on trying to become better people. We cannot change at all without the continuous empowering of the Holy Spirit being poured into our lives.

People seek the power of Spirit to make them feel better or because they get excited about the supernatural. But the power of the Spirit is given to change our lives and make us more like Christ. Even when we witness a miracle, it should motivate us to know the Christ who performed this miracle better. A changed church is a powerful church. There should be no contradiction between character and charisma. The fact is that God will pour out His Spirit most powerfully on those whose lives He can trust to use that power wisely and in a way that will reflect well on Him.

With power comes patience. When we have experienced the power of God in one area, it gives us patience to wait in others. And along with power and patience comes thanksgiving. Life for the world is always cup half-full and cup half-empty. Some cope better with it than others. But for the Christian who is growing in the knowledge of God, life is always cup overflowing even in the face of suffering. The same man who wrote the opening words also wrote this: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21) He is the same man who, with his back raw and bleeding, sang praises to God in the Philippian jail. Was it not the power of his praise that precipitated the earthquake that set free not only him and Barnabas, but also everyone around him?

Think about the consequences of your praise. Power, patience and thanksgiving…. we cannot work any of them up by our own strength, but they are freely available in the Holy Spirit to those who ask for them — an inheritance to be claimed.