Good to the last drop!

 You can get coffee anywhere in the city. It’s pretty hard to go anywhere without passing a Starbucks. You can get coffee at 7-11, a Mc Café at Mickie-d’s, Kona that once could only be had at specialty roasters, can now be had at any hole in the wall. Whether you go for your morning Joe or a tiny thimble full of cappuccino, there is nothing like a good cup of coffee. Nothing ruins a good cup faster than reaching across the diner counter, or pulling a carton out of the fridge before you realize the cream you just poured into your cup has gone bad.

     Anything that is left long enough will start to sour and over time will become unusable. If we were not to use our legs, the muscles will start to shrink and over time will cease to function. If we do not exercise our faith, it will shrink. We can get to the point where we don’t see God working in our lives, after a while we can get to the point where we don’t see the blessings anymore. We act as if there is some kind of point system with God. When we get to that magic number, we get to quit, this far and no more.  We get to a certain age where we think that we have done everything that we were supposed to do. Our faith was never supposed to have an expiration date. 

     If you are living and breathing God has a plan for you. It is us who puts restrictions on how God gets to use us or work through us. Jeremiah was called to be a prophet of the people of God. All he had to do was to repeat everything that God told him to speak, but Jeremiah told God that God was wrong and that he was too young to be of any use to God. If Samuel had looked through the eyes of man, instead of God’s eyes, David would have been left in the fields tending the flocks. He did not look like the kind of King that the people expected. He did not even look like a King that they would have chosen for themselves.

      Moses thought that his time for serving God was long gone, dead and buried along with the Egyptian that he had slain. It was forty years later before God was ready to use him to bring Israel out of Egypt. Moses would later take the people to the very brink of the promised-land. The night before they were to take the land they sent spies into the land to check it out. God had said that the land was theirs, all they had to do was to go in and take it, and instead the people believed not God but the spies who told them it could not be done.

     For forty years the people wandered the wilderness, they trailed behind them the bleached bones of those who would rather listen to men than to God.  God raised a generation that would have the faith to follow Him. Forty years later when Joshua got them to the edge of the river Jordan, he would not listen to any voice other than the one that said the land is yours. They crossed that mighty river on dry land. Joshua told the people that God had given them everything that the eye could see from mountain to sea. There were still those who said,” There might be Giants.” Caleb at the age of 78 came forward and said,” There might be Giants, but God said go.” “There might be Giants, but give me the Mountain.” “There might be Giants for He makes Young out of the Old.”

     If you still draw a breath, God is not through with you. If you still draw breath, God still has a plan for you. We were never intended to sit, soak, and sour. Most of us think , I have done enough, I can sit and be fed; but what we find is that we have nothing to show for it but day old Manna. God has given us enough for today and if he has given you more than you need, it is up to you to pass on the rest. Look around you, there are plenty of ways that you can serve. Jesus tells us that even if we give someone a cup of cool water in His name we show our love for Him.      

      There are plenty of people who need to hear from God. There are widows and orphans who we are responsible for. There are prisoners who need to be visited and not all of them are in jail, some are in the prison of failing bodies.  We are responsible to the least of these. We have a job to do, but we hold to our excuses, I’m too young, God couldn’t possibly use me, I’ve failed God, and it’s too late for me. We tell ourselves, “There might be Giants,”    God still says “Go.”

         

NO!

For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11

      I have to say that God has given me a love for children. I must confess that it has not always been the case. Every teacher will tell you that come Friday; the last thing that they want is to deal with screaming kids, so to hear in the middle of one of those chain stores the plaintiff wail of a child screaming to his mother, “No, I don’t wanna!!! I DON’T WANNA!!!” set my teeth on edge like taking a huge bite of a juicy cringe inducing lemon.

     Sometimes I wonder what we sound like to God. Do we sound like the perfect little child of God saying,” Oh Father, you are so wonderful and we thank you for everything you do.” or do we sound like that child demanding, “NO!!! I don’t wanna!!!”

     We have spent our lives defying God. Some deny him, refusing to acknowledge that God exists and that he has a standard for our lives, for others they just fail to hold to Gods standard. Either way we distance ourselves from God. Our sins and failings build a wall between us and our Loving Lord.  We can be taken captive by our sins, captive by addiction, unhealthy relationships, even pornography can ensnare us.  We alienate ourselves from God and we become defiant in our disobedience. All of our Actions say, “No.”  

     Everything that we do tells God that we don’t trust Him to take care of us, to truly be there when we need Him. In Jeremiah God tells his people that no matter what they have gone through, no matter what they have done it is not too late to return to a relationship with Him.

      In verse 11 He reassures us that he does have a plan for our lives and that we can trust Him to bring us through. All of Gods plans are for our benefit, He offers us a huge life, beyond anything that we can think or imagine. Everything that God has planned for us is to give us a life and a hope.  A life that is better than the one that we have fashioned for ourselves and a hope grounded not in our finite abilities but in Him.       

      It is wonderful that we hold on to favorite passages of the Bible. God’s word has the ability to comfort us and to guide us but if we are going to hold on to them we have to realize what the verses mean.  Jeremiah 29:11 is one of those verses that we love. God promise the people of Israel that he has a plan for them and that the plan is wonderful but to really understand the passage we have to understand the context of the passage.

      The whole book of Jeremiah is Gods message to His people to return to Him. God’s people were disobedient, they were chasing after other gods, they were ignoring their commitments to other believers, and they were giving lip service to their relationship with God. They were saying No to God.

     In the middle of the Book we have this wonderful promise from God telling his people that He has this wonderful plan for their lives. There is a catch; if we stop at verse 11 we miss the conditions for the promise.  God says that He has a wonderful life planed out for us but we have come to Him if we want it. We have to return to Him, we have to seek Him with all of our hearts, and then and only then will He bring us back to where we had left Him, then He will restore us to where we were, He will hear us calling out to Him, He will hear our prays. If we want to experience the plan that he promises his people Israel it can only be had in relationship with Him, seeking after Him with everything that we are, on His terms not ours.     

It’s the end of the world as we know it… And I feel fine!

          Well if you are reading this, one of two things has happened.  Either the rapture did not happen, or you and I have a lot to worry about. Either way we need to talk.

     People have been predicting the end of the world and with it the rapture since the first century. Paul rebukes the people in his letter to the Thessalonians who had literally stopped working so that they could watch for Christ’s return. Paul finally had to tell them to get back to work and tells them that those who do not work should not eat.

     Every generation has thought that this is the generation that will see the return of the Lord. With each additional generation there have been people who have claimed to have known the date and the time of the rapture. Each time the date and hour have gone by without seeing the return of the Lord.

     Back in the 80’s a former NASA engineer and bible student named Edgar C. Whisenant predicted that the Lord would return in 1988. His book 88 reasons that Jesus will return in 1988 was followed the following year by his book 89 reasons why Jesus will return in 1989 when his predictions failed to materialize. Over the next decade Whisenant would make further predictions for the timing of the rapture each of which never came to pass.  

     Well here we are in 2011 and the faithful are still waiting for his return. In the past few years we have seen the signs that Paul talked about, we have seen wars and rumors of wars, and we have also seen earthquakes and natural disasters. We have taken Peter’s admonition to heart that,” The Lord is not slow as some count slowness but desires that none should perish.” But for some, we would be happy if His return was today, this very hour even.  

     Around Dallas the billboards started appearing a couple of months ago announcing that the rapture and Judgment day would be May 21, 2011.  Not only was the date stated on the billboards but the very hour of his return was predicted. At 6:00 pm in every one of the time-zones around the world the Faithful would be ruptured. Harold Camping who had previously predicted the return in 1994 broadcast on 55 radio stations and advertised on an additional 6,000 billboards that Jesus would return today May 21, 2011 beginning at sundown in Jerusalem.

     So either Mr. Camping was correct and you and I were Left Behind or he was wrong about the return of Jesus. Since we are Bible believing people we will let the Bible have the last word (hopefully the last word) on the subject. According to Mathew 24:36 “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” So according to scripture no one not even Jesus when he was here on Earth in His human form knew when he would return to earth. The only one who knows that date is God the Father.

   So where does that leave us? Well if you are a believer it means that we have a little bit of time left and God willing if we live that long there will come a day when we will be raptured, caught up with Him in the clouds. For those who are not believers it means that there is still time. Time to realize that you are a sinner and that you need a savior and without that savior you are lost and will face the wrath of God that the bible foretells. For you there is still time, for the rest of us we will just have to say Maranatha, and today would be nice!    

More Than Meets The Eye

      What is God like? You hear that question all the time. Depending on who you ask you will get a different answer to that question.

       Some describe Him as a kind of benevolent grandfather. Some refer to Him as the man up stairs. Others call him the absentee watchmaker who wound up the world, set it into motion and then left.  Most of the people today say that God is Love.  In itself that is a correct statement God is indeed Love but to say that that is all he is is to miss out on who God is.

      There is an Old story of the blind men who were asked to describe the essence of an Elephant by feeling one. Each of the blind men touched a different part of the Elephant. One said the the Elephant was like a tree, another said he was like a snake, another like a hose, etc…  

     None of the men could describe the essence of the Elephant because each had a limited view of what an Elephant was. We humans have the same problem when we are describing what the essence of God is. We have two distinct problems, the first is akin to the problem that the blind men have and that is that we know God only from our limited point of view. We only know God by our experience of Him. We say that God is this or that but it is really only part of what God is. He is so much more than we can ever grasp with our finite minds.

     We have such a limited experience with God. We humans have to put things in terms of what we know, so God can be like the father who ignores us, or like the friend who helps us in our time of need, or He can be the intimate love of our lives. For each person we can see a different aspect of who God is but we still miss the big picture. 

     On the other hand, we can willfully disregard who God is. Sometimes we really don’t want to know who God really is because to know him is to be responsible for the things that he has commanded us. The atheist denies the very existence of God for that very reason. God says “The fool says in his heart that there is no God.”  If they deny Him they do not have to deal with Him.  

     For others it is easier to just say that God is Love. That way they can say that a Loving God would never do XY or Z. They overlook that God is a Just God and that he has a standard for his people. If they ignore who God really is they think that they don’t have to obey his commandments.

     If they say that God is Love they can live like, well like hell and don’t have to worry that there are consequences for their actions. I’m a pretty good person, I don’t kick the dog, I’m good to the wife, I give to charities, well sometimes, God would never do something like send me to hell. They want to ignore what they perceive as the hard and messy parts of having a relationship with God. They think that it is just too much work.

     Jesus promised that if we take on His yolk that it is light and that he would give us rest. He also promised that” You will find me if you seek me with all your heart. How better to get to know someone than if you just seek them out and have a relationship with them. Better than flying blind.

Walking the wall

      I used to work for the United Artist Theatre Chain. I loved movies. Over those years I watched hundreds of Movies. It is little wonder that when I write,a reference or two from a movie will make its way into the text.
     Everyone remembers Jack Nicholson’s performance as Col. Jessep in “A Few Good Men”. Even before I write a single thing, I bet that you can guess the line I think about every time I think about that movie.
                                         “ You Can’t Handle the Truth!”
     That whole exchange between Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruz has come to be emblematic of the world that we live in. We hate what he stands for, we even hate what he did, but somewhere in his twisted logic we see a glimmer of truth.

Col. Jessep: “ Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have  to be guarded by men with guns. Who is going to do it? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom”
     We need men and women to protect us, to sound the alarm when danger is near. God has appointed men and women, watchmen, to warn the people to come in to safety. "Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman to the house of Israel;whenever you hear a word from My mouth, warn them for Me.” Ezekiel 3:17 Thewarning was not only for those inside of the kingdom who had fallen away, busy with their own lives, it was also for those outside of the walls, outside of the kingdom.
Col. Jessep: You don’t want the truth because deep down in the places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.
     From this passage in Ezekiel you would think that he was talking about the Pastors, the “professionals” But it is not. Each and every Christian has been called to walk that wall, to take their place as the watchman. God says, “I have appointed you.”
     Over the last decade or so we have slowly forgotten our charge. We do not want to offend anyone and we have watered down our message. What we are left with is a weak message. “ If you do not repent, so to speak, you might go to hell, as it were.” [1]
     We have lost sight of what the truth is.  Isaiah says; Israel's watchmen are blind, they all lack knowledge; they are all mute dogs, they cannot bark; they lie around and dream, they love to sleep. We are losing generations of people because we have fallen asleep at the switch. We are not innocent!  We will be held responsible for not sounding the alarm. One day the gates will be closed and it will be too late. Can you handle the truth?

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[1] Quote by Dr. David Allen

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