If you are one of Jesus’ followers who is in need of strength, comfort, or encouragement from God, then I invite you to join me tomorrow evening, March 20, 6-8 PM, in our church’s sanctuary. We are going to worship, pray, and invite the Holy Spirit to minister to us.

A few months ago, during one of my extended prayer times, I heard God speak to me about this: set apart March 20 (our normal Worship Intercession Night [WIN]) for an evening of worship and welcoming the prophetic.

Biblically ths is on target since we are to welcome prophetic activity. In the Old Testament God spoke through prophets. In the New Testament God gives his called-out people the spiritual gift of prophecy. We are told, in 1 Corinthians 14:1, that we are to desire spiritual gifts, and especially that we might prophesy. Why? Because, as Paul goes on to say in 1 Cor. 14:3 – through prophecy God can speak so as to strengthen, encourage, and comfort his people.

Last spring I had another one of those moments where a scripture that I had read many times became highlighted for me. It was 1 Cor. 14:1-3. At that moment my desire to prophesy increased. Here is how I now understand this.

Linda and I, every week, every day, help people who are struggling. We love doing this. Over the years we have seen many successes. These moments become the best moments of our lives. For us it doesn’t get any better than to engage in redemptive activity. It has also happened, many times, that God has given us just the right words to say that do a redeeming work in the person we are helping. And, we’ve had our moments of felt incapacity and inability. Even now we have friends that we love who are in deep struggles, and lack the words and ideas that would set them free. So – God, can you help us?

At this point the gift of prophecy becomes sought-after. I want this gift, operating in my life, now more than ever. I do not want it to be some “prophet.” I do want it because I long to see greater redemptive activity in the lives of people I care for and love. Surely God has the keys to a person’s suffering heart. Surely God knows the way out of bondage and darkness. What if, instead of just using our intellects, God, out of his all-knowingness, revealed words that functioned as agents of freedom and hope? That, for me, is 1 Corinthians 14-type “prophesy.” Who wouldn’t want something like that?

I have a sense of expectation about tomorrow evening. It’s been placed in my heart, by God. If either you or someone you know needs a word from God, I invite you to join me.

Darren Wilson’s film “Furious Love” will be showing at Redeemer Fellowship Church Friday evening, March 19, 9 PM.

$5/ticket

For information call 734-242-5277.

Thomas Merton wrote: “The history of the world, with the material destruction of cities and nations and people, expressed the interior division that tyrannizes the souls of all men, and even of the saints.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, 71)

Here we see the Merton-idea, and I think the Jesus-idea, that the genesis of moral evil lies in the evil within the human heart. Out of our own inner fragmentation comes the outward systemic fragmentation of families, marriages, and civic institutions. As long as one’s own heart remains untransformed so will the world around us.

Fifteen years ago I was invited to help develop the Doctor of Ministry program at Palmer Theological Seminary (then “Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary”). The thrust of the program was to bring renewal to all areas of life: to the church, to the city, and to the world. Ecclesial, urban, and global transformation – good things! But we agreed that, if there were no personal transformation of individual leaders, then the hopes of cultural tranformation were dimished, if not entirely gone.

So, a decision was made to place a course called Personal Transformation (PT) first. D.Min. students would take PT before our courses on ecclesial, urban, and global transformation. We resisted the temptation to get on to the exciting thngs of global transformation, and discovered the inner world of the self that awaited further transformation, restoration, and renewal. 

For the past 15 years I have taught PT as course #1 on Palmer’s D.Min. program. It’s been exhilarating for me as I have seen God time and time again heal the “interior division that tyrannizes the souls of all men, and even of the saints.”

Do you desire to be an agent of renewal and transformation in the world? Begin with your own self. If you choose not to do this your labors will prove to be inauthentic and even irrelevant. It is an act of sheer hypocrisy to work at changing the people around you if you are not yourself being constantly changed. But if you allow God to heal and retore and renew your own inner self, then you will find that the break-up going on within you will lead to breakthrough around you.

(Bangkok)

I’m just working some thoughts out here that are under continuous development…

A few years ago a man in our church named Carl broke his foot. Under any circumstances this is sad, but it felt especially so since Carl is a runner. Some years ago Carl ran in the Detroit Free Press Marathon and did well enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. One time when I was at Carl’s house he and his wife Sarah showed me pictures of Carl running his first Boston Marathon. Just to compete in that most famous of marathons is, to me, quite an accomplishment. I asked Carl about his training. “What did you do to train for these marathons?” Carl said: “Run.” OK.

When Carl broke his foot the following sequence of events happened. I write them in an unembellished form, as I remember them, as they occurred.

1. One day Carl felt something bad happen in his foot.
2. Carl went to the hospital.
3. X-rays/MRI showed the foot was broken, and exactly where it was broken.
4. Carl asked people in our church to pray that God would heal his foot – so, on a Sunday morning, we prayed for Carl.
5. Carl went back to his doctor the next week.
6. New tests on the foot were taken.
7. X-rays/MRI showed there was no break in Carl’s foot.
8. Carl believed God healed his foot in an answer to our prayers.
9. I have the medical records in front of me, on my desk, as I write.

Statements 1-9 are “factual.” I put quotes around the word “factual” since, as a philosopher who is fairly acquainted with the discussion about what qualifies as a “fact” in the first place, I realize that whenever the word “fact is used an entire universe of meaning opens up that itself needs to be considered. Nonetheless, and with that in mind, I believe 1-9 are statements that are all true.

Let’s pause here for a moment. An atheist who is a philosophical naturalist can agree that statements 1-9 are true. Even with #8, there is no reason to doubt that Carl believed, and still believes, that God healed his foot. The question then becomes: is it true that God healed Carl’s foot. With that we have a tenth statement:

10. The cause of Carl’s foot showing no break is that God healed his foot.

Carl believes 10 to be true, as do I. But #10 is a different kind of statement than are #s 1-9. Here we have a statement that is an interpretation of 1-9. 10 claims to be an explanation for the facts 1-9. 10 claims to be an ”inference to the best explanation.” Every interpretation is a function of some cognitive context. Which worldview or noetic framework best explains what happened to Carl?

When we talk of worldviews, noetic frameworks, or metanarratives, we have left the world of empirical realities discoverable (to a degree – because there’s controversy here) by “science.” “Science” qua “science” cannot give worldviews or metanarratives. One cannot see “theism” or “atheism” under a microscope. But it takes a metanarrative to interpret a “fact.” Or, perhaps, something becomes a “fact” or not based on a metanarrative. All facts are theory-laden. As a theist I can see that it is probable that God healed Carl’s foot. That explanation is not odd if theism is true. If atheism is true then 10 is, of course, false, and there must be some purely naturalistic explanation even if we cannot now see it.

This makes the central area of discussion that of adjudicating between worldviews. Statements 1-9 do not evidentially “prove” either theism or atheism; rather, it is “by” either theism or atheism (or some other worldview) that one comes up with statement 10. By inference to the best explanation we ask which way of seeing best explains 1-9? If I already believe there is no God then of course 10 above as false. If I already believe in God then, by the sequence of events (broken foot-receive prayer-foot not broken), I can accept 10 as true. If the atheist is stunned as to how someone like myself or even Carl could accept 10 as true, their being-stunned should not be as a result of some totally objective “facts.”

Note this: If the atheist-naturalist claims “No one gets healed today” after reading a clinical case like Carl’s, then I suspect this is but an epiphenomenon of their pre-existing worldview. “Evidence” gets filtered through their naturalistic metanarrative which removes any supernatural causes. Of course. And of course I rejoiced when God healed Carl’s foot.

(I have collaborated with two scholars who are now writing, independently, texts on divine healing. They have Carl’s medical records.)

(Bangkok)

This morning I preached on John 17:25-26. Here Jesus concludes his prayer for his followers. He says he is giving the love the Father has for him to be “in” his followers.

I spent some time developing the nature of the love the Father has for the Son. The Christian conception of God is: God is a three-personed being. This means: three individual persons sharing one essence. AKA the “Godhead.”

The essence of the Godhead is: love. On Christian theism God is love.Trinitarian love is:
- other centered
- freely given and freely received
- unconditional

To say that Trinitarian love is other-centered is to say it is, of course, not self-centered. Love this of the other. Love is not entertained by questions like “What’s in this relationship for me?”

To say that love is freely given and freely received means that God’s love for us is not out of any need God has for our love. What can that mean? To begin, “love” is relational. In love, one subject loves an other. Because God is a three-personed being, this makes conceptual sense of the idea that God is love. In the Trinity the Father loves the Son, the Son the Father, the Spirit the Son, and so on. In this sense, because God is love, God is not out looking for love in all the wrong places. Stanley Grenz says: “Because God is triune, the divine reality already comprehends both love’s subject and object.” (Stanley Grenz, Theology For the Community of God, 72).

To say that God’s love is unconditional is to say that love is not merit-based. It is NEVER based on the merit of the one receiving it. Rather, it is based on the loving nature of the one giving it. If the love of God were merit-based, then God would NOT BE LOVE. This therefore means there is no “striving” in the being of God. Within the being of the Godhead the Son, e.g., is not trying really hard to earn or deserve the love of the Father.

This has implications for you and I. When you feel you’ve got to strive to get God’s approval and love, you’ll start to compete with other Christians around you and judge them. That’s the bitter fruit of merit-based love. You see that when people start talking about others who either “deserve” or “don’t deserve” their love. There are a lot of ministries and churches and individual Christians out there trying to “outdo” each other for God’s approval, to impress other people, or to feel better about their own corporate selves. All of that is totally foreign to the being of the Godhead.

God’s love is also everlasting. It has always existed, and always will. And, its manifestation has been a 24/7 thing (understanding this metaphorically, since “time” is non-applicable in a being whose existence is everlasting). There has never been even a tiny micro-second where the love of God has slacked off.

Now think, as much as you can, about love within the Godhead. What if such love were in you? As outrageous as that sounds, that is precisely the claim Jesus makes when he says, in John 17:25, that the love the Father has for him will be in his followers. I love what New Testament scholar D.A. Carson has said about this. Carson writes:
 
“Jesus’ revelatory work will continue (through the Holy Spirit), so that God’s gracious self-disclosure in his Son will not be reduced to a mere datum of history, but will be a lived experience.” (Carson, The Gospel According to John, 570)  
 
Now watch this, as Carson writes:
 
“The crucial point is that this text does not simply make these followers the objects of God’s love, but promises that they will be so transformed, as God is continually made known to them, that God’s own love for his Son will become their love. The love with which they learn to love is nothing less than the love amongst the persons of the Godhead.” (Ib.)
 
Remember that Jesus, in John 14:23, has already told his disciples, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” I take all of this to mean that we are not to spend our prayers asking for a visitation from God. This is because God wants to make, with us, in us, a “habitation.” This is not “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” This is: “Guess who’s moving in with us, forever and ever and evermore.
 
When God moves in to your heart and makes his home there he brings his stuff. I want you to think… tonight… as you are in your home… that God lives with you… in you… “Christ in you, the hope of glory”… and He’s there with suitcases full of his stuff. And what wouold be in those suitcases? Things like: his peace, his joy, his all-knowingness, his all-powerfulness, his all-lovingness. And his love is grace-filled, good, truthful, righteous, pure, other-centered, freely extended, non-merit-based with no strings attached.

In short – When God moves in and unpacks his bags he brings his “glory.” “Christ in you, the hope of glory. The word “glory” means – the attributes of God. God’s resources and attributes and, above all other things, his everlasting love. The love of eternal Three-in-One God is in you and in me as we dwell in and with him, like branches attached to Jesus, the True Vine.

This an experiential thing. It is not some theory. It is not a bunch of words. Accept this as truth.

But, you may wonder, ”I don’t comprehend it all? You don’t need to. For example, a few weeks ago I was watching a guitar instructional dvd that had some amazing guitar work on it that is, currently, beyond me. I saw it with my own eyes. I heard it. It was glorious. And I did not understand it. I wondered – “How does he do that? I cannot comprehend it. But it is so, so beautiful.” I’d love for that to get inside of me! What i saw was real and beautiful and I wanted it. But I did not “know” it in the sense of comprehending it and being able to do it. It’s the same kind of thing when it comes to Trinitarian love.

Think now of the real and Incomprehensible love of God. Paul experienced it, knew it, and did not fully comprehend it. So, in Ephesians 3:16-19, Paul wrote:

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Jesus closes his prayer by adding, “…and that I myself may be in them.” D.A. Carson writes: “This is nothing less than the ancient hope that God would dwell in the midst of his people.” (Carson, 570-571) We see that ancient hope in a text like Isaiah 66:1:

“This is what the LORD says:
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
Where is the house you will build for me?
Where will my resting place be?

Here Craig Keener quotes Carson:

“Jesus’ departure does not have as its goal the abandonment of the disciples to solitary isolation. Far from it: his goal is to sweep up those the Father has given him into the richness of the love that exists among the persons of the triune God.” (In Craig Keener, The Gospel of John, 1064)

I am being swept up in the Trinitarian love of God. It’s for every follower of Jesus. It’s not merit-based. So…

Know that God loves you.
Accept that, as you dwell in Christ, Trinitarian love makes its home in your heart.
Be the dwelling place of God.
Host the earth-shattering presence of God.
Let’s God’s love rule in your heart.

(Robert DeNiro’s moment of redemption in “The Mission.”)

My mother loved music. I’m not sure if my father did. They started me on guitar lessons when I was five. I took lessons at Koster Guitar Studio, in Rockford, Illinois. Kay Koster was my instructor.
NAMM recognizes Kay on their website: 

“Kay Koster was a pioneering women retail owner, who not only successfully ran a business on her own beginning in 1940. She also personally repaired guitars and amps of all makes and models for decades –even after she closed her retail store. Koster’s Music in Rockford, IL was primarily a guitar store, perhaps the first such store in the country. As the Fender line developed, Kay was one of the first dealers in the state and soon became an expert of electric guitar repairs. In addition to her career in the industry, Kay has also been a respected guitarist, first in the big bands and then into rock and roll.”

I was small, and could not hold a “real” guitar, so Kay started me on slide guitar. I took slide guitar lessons from her for three years. At times, over the years, I wish I would have continued when I hear the amazing things that can be done on the instrument! My old National Steel Guitar hangs on the wall in my office, intact, well-used, with a broken nut. The fingerstyle techniques Kay taught me as a boy laid a foundation for my entrance into fingerstyle picking when I finally got my first acoustic guitar. I used to display my fingerstyle prowess before the audience of my mother.

My mother loved to hear me play guitar. The environment might be just me, or Linda and I, in the kitchen, with my guitar, playing and singing for her. In her last month of life I brought my guitar into the nursing home where she was at. One evening she was lying in bed, and I was sitting in a chair playing exquisite, lyrical, spontaneous finger-style for her. A lady in the room next to us heard my guitar and shouted, “Shut that thing up!” I played softer. I played as well as I could for my dying mother, who had music deep in her soul, and had introduced me to music and invested in my musical career.

This morning Linda, who is a piano-vocal instructor, told me that one of her piano students wanted to learn a song called “The Crisis,” by Ennio Morricone. I found it online and downloaded it. In the process I found out that Morricone wrote “Mission,” the theme song for the movie “The Mission.” Have you seen that movie? It has, for me, the most powerful scene of redemption there is on film, as a murderer played by Robert DeNiro is literally and spiritually released from his burden of sin that he carries with him.

I just downloaded Morricone’s “Mission” and began to listen, and can hardly bear it. The whole narrative of that movie now comes to me: a humanly unpardonable sin of the murder of one’s own biological brother in a fit of rage; imprisoned for the crime with nothing to do but sit in the filth of the unpardonable act, replaying it over and over; a tormented soul with life and meaning and future ripped out; physical release from prison but deep unrelenting bondage of the soul; until…  that amazing grace-filled moment… when the soul is unconditionally forgiven, the debt is cancelled, tears of gratitude flood forth…, redemption… another soul set free. I now listen to Morricone’s haunting-beautiful melodic masterpiece, and I am the recipient of the Christ’s redemptive activity. It feels like too much to bear, in a good way. It seems too good to be true. Yet it is true. It has become my entire life.

Every life is lived in some Grand Narrative. No one can escape the “metanarrative.” I live by the life-giving biblical metanarrative. I stand with C.S. Lewis, who said that by the Grand Narrative of Judeo-Christianity “I see everything else.”  N.T. Wright describes the Judeo-Christian scriptures as “a five-act play.” It becomes like a piece of music, with the motif of redemption introduced, rebelled against, searched-for, accomplished (“It is finished”), and now lived-out in all of Jesus’ followers who have the redemptive motif in their hearts and sing that song every day.

The Grand Narrative that makes sense of my life is remembered today, for me, in Morricone’s inspired song that plays on the strings of my heart the song of redemption and release and freedom. I’m seeing things clearly again.

(Linda and I, 1973)

I remember what, for me, were “the good old days.” Linda and I have had plenty of them! Actually, I think she remembers the good old days better than I, since I cannot now even remember where I left my car keys.

I can tend to distort the good old days, sometimes putting a more positive spin on them then was really there. Or, conversely, spinning the past in a negative way, making it look worse than it actually was.

I can remember a lot of people from my past. People in my youth group when I was youth pastor at Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. People of First Baptist Church, Joliet, Illinois. The many students we came to know and love when I was campus pastor of the Baptist Student Center at Michigan State University. So many good people, so many real Jesus-followers! For Linda and I, these people, and all that God did through them and us, define the meaning of “the good old days.” When I think of them (which I may do after I find my keys), the response for me is, “Thank you, God, for those people and for your Kingdom manifested in and through them.”

When thanksgiving time is done, it’s time to move on. Like at a meal, we thank God, then we eat. Since I’m always hungry, I’m saying thanks a lot these days. But when it comes to meals it’s all about the food that’s on the table. The memory of past meals… I rarely think of them. I would find something odd if Linda and I spent the bulk of our time reflecting on great meals we have eaten. When a person is hungry memory is not helpful.

So it is with real followers of Jesus. I desire God – now. I need to follow God – now. When we desire God now and follow God now he mostly does not take us into a “hall of memories” where we talk about how good or bad things used to be. The Kingdom of God is not a photo album, but is on set and filming now. That’s what I want to be part of.

But John, remember how it used to be back in the 70s? You had long hair (you had hair!), you wore bell bottoms so big you could hang-glide with them on, burgers were 30 cents, the “mullet” was coming in, you were young then, the “Jesus Movement” was happening! Why can’t today be just like back then? For many reasons, some of them obvious (the “mullet” & b-bottoms, e.g.), I never feel I want to go back to the past, not even to be younger. When you are part of a movement you don’t feel this way. If people begin to feel this way, then the movement has stalled, and that’s not good. When memory is all there is the movement has ossified into an institution.

Israel was a “remembering culture.” But the purpose of the remembering was to fuel and empower the present movement. Jesus tells his followers to “do this in remembrance of me” in regard to the bread and the wine. This remembering is not for the sake of being nostalgic. Rather, it’s a battle cry, like “Remember the Alamo,” or “Remember the Holocaust.” For Jesus followers the battle cry is, “Remember the Cross!” This kind of remembering propels us into the future, now.

Thank God for what he has done for you, in you, and through you.

Follow Jesus today. Make more kingdom memories now.

Many of you went to hear Nick Vujicic last Thursday evening in Monroe. The Agora (Monroe County Community College’s newspaper) has a nice report here.

(Me, doing some online self-reflection.)

TimesOnline has an article on internet addiction. Here are some bullets.

• Does internet addiction exist? “The medical world is divided as to whether internet addiction actually exists.”
• There are now 12-step programs for internet addicts. “Online Gamers Anonymous offers a 12-step programme to help compulsive players to wean themselves off games such as World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Final Fantasy.”
• Internet game-success substitutes for real-life non-success. The more a person plays one of these games, “the more they can “progress to being someone more important”, which they are unable to do in real life. To continue enjoying this elevated status they must get better and better at the game, playing for increasingly long periods of time.”
• A significant minority of internet users are addicted. ”Three years ago, an article in the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment posited that a “substantial minority” of the 46.6 million web users in Britain — some experts reckon 5-10 per cent — may be addicts. In 2006, a report from Stanford Medical School in the US estimated that almost 14 per cent of the 180 million Americans with internet access found it difficult to stop using the web for more than a few days.”
• Avid internet game-players have failing marriages. ”On Gamerwidow.com, other halves of avid players vent their frustration at failing marriages. One “widow” wrote recently: “At first I thought that [gaming] was better than him being in a bar, but he started to become detached from even me. For years I begged him to please come to bed — sometimes he would go to work on just one hour of sleep.””
• Addiction is built in to internet games. ”Hilarie Cash, a mental health counsellor in America who runs ReStart, a treatment clinic for internet addiction, believes that games makers deliberately give their products an “addictive quality”. Many, she says, use the principle of intermittent reinforcement — “you have to be rewarded often enough to stay engaged but not so predictably that you get bored” — in the same way that fruit machines are designed to pay out to gamblers at certain intervals, to make the games more attractive. “Game-making companies hire psychologists to help them to design the right intermittent reinforcement schedule, but there is little effort on the part of these companies to put out warnings.”

Are you an internet addict? Go here on the internet to find out. I took the test and am feeling good about myself. So good, that I am going to pick up a physical book to read, then sit and watch the Oscars with Linda.

It is a good thing to know the truth about one’s own self. The Jesus-POV is that such truth lies inside a person, in “the heart.” The heart is what Jesus is going after, not the appearance. While the outside of a cup may look nice, we want the inside to be clean. A tomb may be white-washed to look pure, but the bones of a dead person lie inside. It’s what’s inside that counts. The “inside” defines the real you.

Most people are deluded by this, having convinced themselves that their persona (“mask,” “false self”) is a manifestation of their inner person. Occasionally, the smiley mask or confident mask or hard mask slips off, and there is a moment of rage or weakness or tenderness. At that moment we have a window into the heart, a glimpse of who that person really is. What is in the heart is the person’s “normal”; the mask is the person’s “false normal.”

C.S. Lewis shows us how this can work in an opposite way. He writes:

“We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues – like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.” (The Problem of Pain, 53-54)

We have two untruthul situations.

1. Wearing the false-self mask to hide who we really are.
2. Mistaking a rare spiritual or moral success for who we really are.

Think of yourself as a patient in the doctor’s office. You smile and say “Everything’s fine,” but the doctor says “Let’s take the MRI to make sure.” Or, you say “I felt great for an hour yesterday!” The doctor says, “Let’s take the MRI to make sure.” We may be afraid to know the truth of our physical condition, but I hope you will agree with me that we need to know it, and it will be best for us to get it treated.

Who are you, really? God knows, surely. Make it your habit to enter God’s office regularly. Sit before God and pray, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23-24) God will show you the truth about your real self, and begin restoring your heart (removing layers of veneer to get at the original finish) and then transforming it (meta-morphing it; changing its form into Christelikeness).

If you can relate to 1 and 2 above, then you have a morally and spiritually diseased heart. The good news is that you don’t have to have this kind of heart disease. Be searched-out by God and allow him to restore and transform your heart into a new, clean heart.