The bottom line

I remember the day, many years ago now, when I watched my neighbour backing out of his driveway to go to work, and wishing it were me. He had a great job as a stock broker, few if any financial worries, and for the most part worked with numbers, not people. I am not going to illustrate the differences between him and me, but you can fill in the blanks.

Have you ever day-dreamed about a life where there was no stress, no anxiety and no pressure? Have you ever looked around you and felt you were the only person in the room facing all those things? Have you ever wished you had the peaceful, happy and prosperous life of all those people around you?

Admit it. You have. I don’t think you’re any better than me.

There are several problems with this. First, you will never get a life that is so completely filled with endless positives. Nobody lives like that, not even the most enthusiastic prosperity preacher. Second, remember all those other people you are envying? Guess what? They all have problems too. Half of them are probably looking at you, wishing they had what they think you have.

I like to make a distinction between happiness and joy. I get this from C.S. Lewis as well as the Bible. Happiness is the delusion that we can find total serenity based on outwardly positive circumstances. Apart from the fact that nobody lives in such circumstances, it makes us hostage to every wind and gust of adversity that might threaten all the nice but flimsy supports we are relying on. Remember the house built on sand?

So are we, as Christians, to live in continuous gloom and despair? Not at all. Joy is the gift we receive as we realize we can find an inner peace and contentment in our relationship with Christ that is not dependent on outward circumstances but on the God who rules the universe.

Think of the most beautiful stained-glass window you can imagine. There’s an amazing rose window in Durham Cathedral that will take your breath away. Stained glass only comes to life when the light shines through it. God has created a magnificent stained-glass window. The window is his dominion over the created world around us -- people and circumstances as well as geography. The Holy Spirit is the light. When he enters your life and fills you, you see the window you never saw before.

It doesn’t mean everything suddenly becomes easy, but it gives us a very precious and vastly under-rated gift: perspective. Not just any perspective, but God’s perspective. It’s the gift of seeing as he sees.

Paul was writing to his friends about the reality of evil and the hardship of spiritual attack. Then he says this: “But the Lord is faithful” (2 Thessalonians 3:3). The small word “but” overrides everything that has gone before. And there’s something else. Normally the Greek verb “is” would be left out and the meaning understood without it, but it isn’t. That means the sentence should read: “The Lord IS faithful,” as if Paul is screaming the word “is.”

Seeing the stained-glass window puts everything in a different light. You start to see how what you wanted would not have helped you, and how what you didn’t want did help you. You remember that God works all things together for good. You start to become grateful. You begin to ditch the self-pity. And bit by bit, you stop looking out your window wishing you were your neighbour.

My neighbour’s literal bottom line was undoubtedly better than mine.

But after a while, I began to see the stained-glass again. And I reminded myself of the real bottom line:

“But the Lord IS faithful.”

Facing the flood

Do you ever feel overwhelmed?

We had that feeling last week. Our eldest son Michael was married to his fiancee Samantha on Saturday afternoon in our back yard. As the week progressed, our house filled up with people. Children and grandchildren appeared from every direction. Fridges and freezer were stuffed with wedding food. A marquee was erected. A stack of chairs materialized. Odd jobs put off for months were finished off in rapid order. And to top it all, the weather network decreed a sudden end to our three-month drought, predicting heavy rain, high winds and thunderstorms just in time for the outdoor ceremony.

And in the meantime, all the other challenges and circumstances of life and work continued. People did not stop have crises or needing help.

We were stretched, but in this case only by what I call the volume of circumstances.

What happens when it’s not just the volume, but the nature of the circumstances that becomes overwhelming? What happens when you’re not just physically exhausted, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually worn out?

I have found there are two possible options. One is to try to control everything myself. That means doing everything I can to change the circumstances around me. My end goal is self-protection. I want all the nasty things to go away and leave me in peace.

There’s only one problem with this. God’s end goal is not to protect me from everything that stresses me out. His goal is to draw me into a deeper dependency on himself. It won’t take you long to figure out how those two goals could easily be at cross-purposes.

So the smart thing to do is to take the second option. That is to throw myself on the mercy of God and ask him to keep me in the midst of whatever it is he is doing in me. In the end, it will work out far better for me to let God’s purposes take their course.

This is why Psalm 55:22 has always meant so much to me: “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.”

To cast your burden on the Lord means this: give the control over to him. Stop trying to interfere, manipulate and self-protect. It never works, and will only wear you out.

Your act of faith in casting your burden forms the bridge to his promise: “He will never permit the righteous to be moved.” To go over that bridge can seem like the scariest thing you’ve ever done. It’s that moment when fear and darkness will do their best to paralyze you and keep you back.

It is at that instant that an unshakeable belief in the sovereignty of God is so critical. That conviction involves two things: an assurance that God is all-loving and the knowledge that he is all-powerful.

Faith is neither intellectual certainty nor emotional serenity. Faith is a gift, a conviction that we are to step out in obedience, born at the place where God’s Spirit encounters our spirit. It stares down all that opposes the will of God. In utter human weakness it reaches out for divine strength, and in that strength it conquers. “And this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith” (1 John 5:4).

If you have that faith, it will come up under your feet like a solid rock. It will enable you to run boldly across that bridge. You can be sure of one thing: Jesus is standing on the other side to welcome you.

And what about our wedding? For twelve hours it had rained and rained, and at 1 pm, the appointed hour, it was still raining. But God’s timing is perfect. The bride was 25 minutes late. At the very moment she stepped out of the car in our driveway, the rain stopped. And it stayed dry all day. To the south of us, storms, winds, torrential rains and even a tornado raged all afternoon and evening across large parts of the province. But in our back yard, we had a great wedding, meteorological serenity, and a wonderful start to what we trust will be a great marriage.

Thanks be to God.

Life in the pressure cooker

We had a big pressure-cooker in the house I shared with 11 other guys as an undergraduate. It was always threatening to blow up if you didn’t treat it well, and take a load of potatoes along with it.

I spent a day recently trying to help three different people whose life is in the pressure cooker. All three situations were very serious and bringing almost unbearable stress and pain.

Life in the pressure cooker is not easy. We manage to fall into it different ways. Sometimes it’s our own stupidity. Sometimes it’s a complicated mixture. Sometimes it’s just stuff that happens totally out of our control.

The only thing we can manage is our response. And even that can be very hard when our resources have been so depleted. But there are two keys to surviving.

One is the lifeline of our relationship with God. I never fail to be amazed at how God hears my desperate and despairing cries at those low moments. One thing about God -- he is always there. That is one of his names -- Yahweh shammah, which means “the Lord is there.”

It doesn’t matter where “there” is. That’s where you’ll find him.

No matter how deep your darkness, God always has a light to turn on. But you have to ask.

The second key is friends and family you can count on. We all need friends who will also be “there” when trouble strikes. Cultivate friendships in the good times. Be there for others. Cast your bread on the waters and it will return. I can guarantee it.

And remember if you need to ask God for help, you also need to ask your friends. It never ceases to amaze me how we fail to reach out for the support we need. Sometimes we feel too ashamed, sometimes we’re too proud. Get over it. Let your friends help you. Tell them how bad things are. Their job is to help you: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

And so the question arises: “Where is God in all this?”

The answer is obvious. God is in the pressure cooker. Even though it may not be accurate to say he created it (after all, he is not the author of sin, sickness or any other earthly disaster or misfortune), he still is watching over it and using it.

The pressure cooker has a more Biblical name: the refiner’s fire. It’s where James tells us to count it all joy. It’s where Peter tells us our faith is being refined to bring forth gold.

Of course you can’t see any of that when you’re in the middle of it. That’s where it’s up to God and friends to carry you through. But when you look back, the gold is there.

And if there’s someone you know in extreme need, go just sit with them. A friend of mine was executive assistant to Margaret Thatcher. One day the great lady found a staff member in tears. Her husband had recently died. Mrs. Thatcher stopped her activities at once and focussed all her attention on this lady. She went and made a cup of tea, and then sat with her until she felt better. That was the best use the Prime Minister of Great Britain had for her time that day.

The God of all creation is there to sit with you until you’re through your crisis. Just ask him.

Your faith is proven real in the pressure cooker. You have faith even when you think you don’t. When all you can do is cry out to God in utter desperation, that’s all the faith you need. And out of that faith he will bring his gold.

When things look hopeless, just remember they’re not.

And that old pressure cooker never did blow up. It kept turning raw potatoes into something as reasonably edible as 12 young men who were more interested in either studying or partying could produce!

Surrender releases the supernatural

Joseph found peace in the midst of difficult circumstances. This peace allowed him a perspective on the sovereignty of God. Years later, this perspective allowed him to sum up to his brothers his whole harsh pilgrimage in these words: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20).

Joseph’s battle was not won the day Pharaoh released him from prison. It was won in the depths of the dungeon when he surrendered to the sovereignty of God. He took that tremendous leap of faith to believe that ultimately God was in charge of his life, working things together to accomplish a higher purpose.

When Joseph surrendered himself to the sovereignty of God, God released his supernatural power. Ultimately, in God’s timing, it was that supernatural power, manifested in Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s own dreams, that released him from prison and brought him in a single day from prisoner in a jail to leader of the nation.

As we read to the end of the story, we find out how God raised Joseph out of prison, placed him at the right hand of Pharaoh, and eventually restored his relationship with his family, all the while fulfilling the two original dreams God had given him those many years before. The road to that fulfillment was not at all what the teenaged boy had imagined it to be, yet by the end of it, he could say that it was all fashioned by God for good. Suffering was an integral part of the process. You could almost say it was the process. Joseph was refined and purified by the suffering he endured.

Sometimes we suppose we can have charisma without character. Joseph’s story shows that if necessary, God will suppress the charisma until he develops the character that can carry the charisma to his glory rather than to the glory of man.  Have we truly given God permission to do what he wants with our lives? Have we reached a place of peace and surrender to God’s sovereign plan and purpose for us? If so, we will start to see the power of God flow through us, but in our weakness, not in our strength (2 Corinthians 12:9). He will take us and use us as instruments of his purpose, even if that purpose takes us up a hill like Calvary where, as Joseph did many years before, another man surrendered himself into the hands of his Father, knowing that whatever man or the enemy meant for evil, God intended for good.

This is the victory of Joseph’s faith, a faith forged in the heat of terrible tribulation, through the death of all his dreams, and in the midst of a battle against soul-destroying bitterness. By the grace of God Joseph won that battle, and was raised from prison and seated at the right hand of the throne of Pharaoh. How much more today can we do the same, we who have before us Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2); we who have working so mightily within us the same power by which this Jesus was raised from the dead and seated in the heavens, where now he has taken up his authority to rule.

Joseph’s story is for us. God is still bringing good out of it every time someone reads it and understands its message. Take hold of it for yourself. Allow God to take you up out of your prison and into the revelation of his will, and show you the certainty of his purpose for your life.

How much power do you want?

Elaine and I have just spent a weekend in Niagara Falls with our friends at Niagara Community Church. Niagara Falls is an awesome sight, but it is more than that. Back 100 years ago, an engineer named Sir Adam Beck had the bright idea of installing underwater turbines to harness the incredible energy generated by the falls. When construction was finished, Niagara supplied most of the power in southern Ontario. To this day, electricity is called “hydro” in this part of Canada.

That’s a lot of power. But there is a greater power yet. According to Paul, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is now at work in us (Ephesians 1:19-20). The power generated by Niagara lit a million households, but it could not raise anyone from the dead.

That power was not only for a single event two thousand years ago, albeit an event all of history hung on. That power is available to us today. In fact, it is working within us.

The sad truth is that, although the Bible itself tells us that, we still don’t believe it. Well, maybe we do as a point of theological truth, but not as an experiential reality.

Dr Francis Schaeffer taught many years ago that there is no dividing line between the natural and the supernatural realms, as if God lived in one compartment and we live in another, and never the two shall meet. God is all in all. He controls everything. As Christians, we are meant to live within the same realm as Jesus did. The same power at work in him is today at work in us.

How much power do you want?

My friend John Babu from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, national security advisor to the Prime Minister of India, was converted through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, in which he first heard Jesus speaking to him, and then experienced a miracle of healing. His doctors had given him 4 months to live, after 40 years of abusing his body with alcohol. That day the power of God invaded his body. He was instantly healed and stopped drinking. The power of God invaded his mind and will also. He never beat his wife or children again.

In his life and ministry, John saw 6 people raised from the dead. I wrote about one of these miracles last December (see the two posts titled India Calls).

How much power do you want?

Why should God give me such power? Can I be trusted with it? The short answer is he will give you the power you need to do his will. John needed that power to confront the demonic opposition he faced.  It may well be different for us. Yet beware of this trap: do not let your western rationalism persuade you contrary to the Word of God that his supernatural power is not available to you today, or that it has somehow ceased operating, as if God had retired to the south of France or to Florida to play shuffleboard instead of ruling the universe.

The church in the West is weak, and for many reasons. We don’t pray enough, our lives are too busy with other things, we have way too much stuff. All this gets in God’s way.

But the church in the West is weakened far more by this one thing: we have no power. In the face of an enemy who has no hesitation using supernatural power against us, we are power-less for one reason only. We refuse to take God at his Word.

We say we believe the Bible, but we don’t mean it. Jesus had a word for that.

I know I’m simplifying complex issues - that’s what happens when you only have a few hundred words at your disposal.

But please don’t tell me God did miracles then but not now, as if even the conversion of one lost soul could be achieved without the exercise of supernatural power.

How much power do you want?

Let me gently push you into an encounter where you allow God to adjust your heart and increase your faith.

The world needs that power today.

It can only be exercised through you.