Relational Bridges

  WHERE DOES YOUR VINDICATION COME FROM? Isaiah 54:17 “ But in that coming day   no weapon turned against you will succeed. You will silence every voice   raised up to accuse you. These benefits are enjoyed by the servants of the  Lord ;   their vindication, their righteousness will come from Me.   I, the  Lord , have spoken! ” Wholeness of life, being fully human at last, righteousness and the vindication of one’s life, one’s being are never the product of human effort. The vast chasm between the Holiness of God and the spiritual deadness of humanity, being separated from Him by our own sin and rebellion, cannot be bridges or mended by human effort or efficiency. When someone is dead, truly void of all life, no one expects anything from them. They cannot change their condition in the slightest. They cannot revivify a single atom let alone a molecule, cell, tissue, structure organ or system that used to be alive and make up who they used to be...

VISITED BY GOD Luke1:68 “ Praise the Lord, the God of Israel,     because He has visited and redeemed His people. ” Luke 1:74-75 “ We have been rescued from our enemies so we can serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness      for as long as we live. ” These are the prophetic Words spoken by the Priest Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, on the day of John’s circumcision, the day the baby was named, “John.” The prophetic Word was focused on the fact that God had fulfilled His promise to Israel and the whole of humanity, for the Messiah had been sent. God was visiting His people in Person, the second Person of the Eternal Trinity had become flesh and was growing in the womb of a young Hebrew virgin named Mary, who was living in Nazareth at the time. Zachariah was declaring something so profound, so needful to be heard and embraced in faith and hope. When God visits His people, things change. That is how it always is when ...

  HEARLING AND LISTENING Deuteronomy 6:4-6 “ Listen, O Israel! The  Lord  is God alone, the  Lord is One .   And you must love the  LORD  your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.     And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. ” Luke 8:18 “So pay attention to how you hear. To those who listen to My teaching, more understanding will be given. But for those who are not listening, even what they think they understand will be taken away from them.” Some versions of the Bible will translate a Hebrew word “hear” as the word “listen”. It is a clarification for the modern reader for the implication is that you can “hear someone talking and not actually be listening to them. I remember vividly my mother interjecting, in the middle of her scolding me, “Are you listening to me, young man?” Hearing means picking up the vibrations on the air that hit my outer, middle, and ...

PRAY Psalm 18:6 “ But in my distress I cried out to the  lord ; yes, I prayed to my God for help. He heard me from His sanctuary;   my cry to Him reached His ears. ” 1 John 5:14-15 “ And we are confident that He hears us whenever we ask for anything that pleases Him.   And since we know He hears us when we make our requests, we also know that He will give us what we ask for. ” We can know assuredly from the Word of God that the transformation of our lives is the will of God. It is written, “This is the will of God: your sanctification.” (1 Thessalonians 4:3) The Psalmist was crying out to the Lord because he knew that he was not able to save his own life to any degree. The Gospel makes it clear that salvation is of the Lord and is found nowhere else. We are encouraged and exhorted to know the will of God and to live into that will by the power of the Holy Spirit. God’s Word written, the Bible, gives clear revelation about the things God calls good, the things ...

  THE PRESENCE OF GOD Just before Jesus ascended back into heaven, He told His disciples, “ And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” ( Matthew 28:20b ) The profound reality of the eternal life given to all who will believe God, believe what He has done in and through Jesus Christ, is that Life is now being lived in us to be lived through us by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has united us to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He united us to the Vine. The life flowing into and working in the disciples of Jesus is nothing short of the Life of Jesus Christ, eternal life, being lived in us. If God IS Life within us, then His Presence in us never leaves us. He has made us one with Himself. Hebrews 13:5b states, quoting the Old Testament Deuteronomy 31:6, 8, “I will never leave you. I will never forsake you.” That is the confidence that holds fear at bay and defeats it. God is FOR us. God is WITH us. He has united us to Himself by grace t...

  WHY PSALM 22? To become a Rabbi in Israel, one had to have so studied the Scriptures that when tested by being given a specific verse of God’s Word, they could recite what came before and what came after. In fact, the way that Rabbis argued theologically about the interpretation of a text. They would use a means called “remez”. The word means “hinting” because in the question posed by a Rabbin was his opinion. They would then be answered by the other Rabbis with other questions. Discussions then were questions answered by a question and each question contained the belief or perspective of the Rabbi posing the question. When discussing this way, as one Rabbi posed their question with a verse or part of a verse from the Old Testament texts, the whole context would immediately come to mind in the listening Rabbis. All it took was one verse and a whole chunk of the biblical text was brought to the forefront of their thinking. Matthew and Mark record in their Gospels ( Matthew 2...

  BY HIS OBEDIENCE Mark 14:36 “…Father, not my will, but Yours be done.” It is because of the obedience of Jesus Christ that I can be obedient to God. Because Jesus willingly went to the cross as the one and only sufficient and perfect sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, as John states in his first Epistle ( 1 John 2:2 ), I can be born again by the power and will of God. In that Divine action, God gives me a new heart and new spirit where the Holy Spirit comes to permanently dwell and begins to live out within me the Life of Jesus Christ, Eternal Life. It is His Life within me that begins to make the Bible, Word of God, begin to come alive. As Moses said in Deuteronomy 32:4 , “Theses instructions are not empty words—they are your life!” It is by the Word of God that the Lord has revealed Himself in history, in time, that we might know about Him. It is by the Word of God that we understand that the Lord wants us to know Him and to be restored to Him. The Eternal Son ...

  WHAT ARE YOU DRINKING? John 4:13-14, 23-24 13  Jesus replied,  “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again.     14 But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.” 23  But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way.     24 For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” I was reading a devotional this morning and the author made the point that water is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, two tasteless and invisible gases. It is when they are combined in a specific was that they make water, a substance the human body cannot live without. Science tells us we are about 60% water. You cannot live very long without drinking water, in fact, you can only last a few days. It is essen...

  WHAT DO YOU HOLD TO BE TRUE? It has been said that the core of sin is forgetting that God is God, and we are not. We did not create ourselves. We are not the author of our own being. We do not understand what it means to be fully human. Sin has marred human life from the inside out so that we have lost who we are and what life is meant to be. But the hunger to fully become who we are meant to be still remains. It is a voracious hunger and one that cannot be satisfied by anything this world and its ways can ever offer as a solution for that ravenous thirst. The truth is, that whatever is not from God, of God, is dehumanizing. What the world system presents as the answer will never satisfy that hunger that drives humanity. The ways and means of culture do not fill up the emptiness, they only carve out a deeper cavern in the soul of a person. There is a sinister plot working to mar and distort the image of God that each human being still bears. That plot against us knowing and expe...

  RELENTLESS OR REDEMPTIVE I woke up tired the other day. I have had over 72 years of waking up and that morning a thought passed through my head that went something like this, “Life is just so relentless!” I stopped and had to respond immediately. You see, it is a lie from hell, a demonic lie to say that life is relentless for what follows that thought is too often the next black idea that, thus, life is without meaning. Your orientation towards life makes all the difference. For if the pursuit of pleasure, the desire to possess more “stuff” and pride in what you possess and accomplish are the things that drive you, then life can seem relentless, for all those things can be lost in the blink of an eye. You can become physically debilitated, a stock market crash or and fire consuming all you have accumulated can decimate everything you have based your identity and worth on. If your identity, worth, and meaning are grounded in this present world, your life has been built on shif...

  PART OF OR THE WHOLE? I was reading a devotional this morning and a phrase jumped out at me in the most jarring way. It went something like, “Make Jesus a part of your life and you will find peace.” That sounds like a great religious statement, but the truth is that I didn’t make Jesus part of my life. Jesus Christ made me part of His life, uniting me to His death and resurrection by the work and power of the Holy Spirit. I did none of that. All I could do was to respond to His initiative, to yield, to surrender the whole of life to Him. The truth is, for a follower of Jesus Christ, He is Life within you, you are not your own. In fact, you don’t actually have a “your own” for you have bought with a price and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. Scripture makes it very clear that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. There is not a single aspect of who you are that God has not laid utter claim to. You are His by right of creation and by right of redemption. He is the Vi...

 ALMOST RIGHT IS NOT RIGHT I saw the photo below and was concerned because it’s “almost right” but misses the mark. He doesn’t “walk beside you” if you are a follower of Jesus Christ. He lives His Life within you. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. The truth is, He IS Life within you. You can “walk in the Spirit” because He lives out in you the Life of Jesus Christ in Resurrection power. The focus is no longer what I am able to do, but on Him who is able to do in and through you far more than you could ever ask or imagine. You are His workmanship, His masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has for-ordained that you should live out, live into, walk in as a matter of new life in Him.

 LONGING That longing to be known, to belong, to be "home" is that echo of Eden that God has planted in us that we might seek Him...Who is our home. The world twists the longing telling us we can find it in ourselves or by using others or in distorting the essence of what God has made us to be. It can never be found in ourselves for we can only become our true selves in the One Who created us, came to redeem us and restore us to wholeness in Himself. Strangers and aliens can become sons and daughters once again by Christ Jesus.

  LIVING IN AUTHORITY In the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark we read that the people who listened to Jesus speak were amazed at His teaching because it had authority. Rabbis in Jesus’ day drew their understanding and application of Scripture from the interpretation of the Rabbis who had taught them or from the commentaries of more “learned” teachers of the Law and Prophets. When Jesus Christ taught about the Kingdom of God, the rule of God as it is meant to be in the hearts and lives of God’s people, He did not reference what He was saying to anyone or anything other than the plain Word of God. Here was the Word made flesh confirming the true meaning of the Word written. Jesus would say, “You have heard it said that… BUT I say to you…” Authority was and is intrinsic to who Jesus Christ is. What He declares is eternally true. As the Apostle John wrote in the first chapter of his Gospel, everything that has been made was made through the eternal Word of God. That very Word ...

  EPHIPHANY Today is January 6th. It is known as the Feast of the Epiphany, a date celebrating the visitation of a number of “wise-men” from the East, the region around Babylon. We don’t know how many of these men there were, we just that they brought the three gifts that would have traditionally been given when a king was born. Gold was the symbol of royalty, frankincense was the sign of worship, myrrh was the sign of preparation for burial. They had come to “worship” this new-born King of the Jews. Mary and Joseph were still in Bethlehem and Jesus was nearing two years of age. Joseph was a carpenter/stonemason and, with relatives in town, had apparently set up shop to ply his trade till the boy, Jesus, was old enough to travel. Traveling with a two-year-old even with a car-seat today is a challenge. It was a greater challenge back then. The family was living in a house, we read in Scripture. They were not still residing in the stable. As a side note, remember that it was only a r...

  WHEN YOU ARE ANGRY WITH GOD As the New Year unfolds...there will, no doubt, be times when you realize you are feeling angry with God. You're not alone. All through the Scriptures there are real folks like prophets, and kings, who expressed anger at God when they could not understand what He was doing or comprehend His timing. Sometimes it was because they thought they had done everything correctly and that difficulty should not have come their way. T hat performance orientation toward the Lord is, in some way, a vestige of the religious quid-pro-quo found in various pagan religions whereby they believe that doing all the right things, the gods are then beholden to do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. I t can be a subtle thing that our enemy tries to trap us in by whispering “Well, you’ve been faithful in prayer, Bible study, and evangelism, so…why isn’t God coming through like it seems He should?” Jeremiah expressed his confusion when God’s call on him to ...