by RobertCummins | Jan 26, 2017 | 56. Home
Two others also, who were criminals, were being led away to be put to death with Him. When they came to the place called The Skull, there they crucified Him and the criminals, one on the right and the other on the left. But Jesus was saying, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots, dividing up His garments among themselves. And the people stood by, looking on. And even the rulers were sneering at Him, saying, “He saved others; let Him save Himself if this is the Christ of God, His Chosen One.” The soldiers also mocked Him, coming up to Him, offering Him sour wine, and saying, “If You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself!” Now there was also an inscription above Him, “THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
One of the criminals who were hanged there was hurling abuse at Him, saying, “Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!” But the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:32-43)
In approaching our passage, I find myself praying, “Lord, please do not let me just read this and move on to my toast and orange juice. This content cannot remain just an idea or a historical fact to me. My hope and the hope of all men hinge upon this scene. Open my heart. Breathe into me its inspiration, its instruction, its rebuke.”
My mind, as it often does, connects with other passages of scripture or, more often than not, with an experience from scripture, which I have to look up. I am thinking of Paul, who was absent from both the Colossians and the Corinthians, yet claimed to be there with them in spirit. Had Paul’s understanding about time and space been altered in Christ? In asking this, I feel as innocent as a child with his imagination intact. I sense God’s approval.
Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him. (1 Corinthians 2:9)
I am rejecting the idea that Paul had time-travel powers that I don’t. I am also rejecting the idea that in the spirit means something like: in a particular attitude. No, I believe Paul was with the believers in those two cities in an actual yet mysterious way. He knew the Body of Christ was an eternal living thing with many parts. What is time to eternity anyway? I believe Paul’s revelations had loosened the bonds of materialistic logic on his reasoning. He had grasped the spiritual nature of his being and ours. This is why I am free to ask, “Where am I in this Crucifixion scene?”
Am I the criminal on the left or the one on the right? Am I the soldier with the hammer and pin? The one casting lots? Am I an onlooker, come for the show? Did I yell, “Crucify him?” I am recalling the teaching of scripture: men are either in Adam or in Christ. I can claim my innocence based upon my absence but, in Adam, I was possessed by every evil motive playing out at Golgotha. So, I acknowledge:
“Lord, I would like to think that, with Peter, I would have been prepared to die with you, but I know better. I am made of the same stuff as him. I denied you too. I was also the thief, in pain, insanely hurling abuse at you: “Are you not God? Will you not do something!” (In my own whitewashed way, I have done this even recently.) I was also there casting lots—hoping to gain a little something out of this Christianity thing. I was also there looking on, at a safe distance so as not be confused as one of your disciples. And, in my heart I have both mocked you and sneered at you. I, as much as any human monster, need you.”
The mystery gets even deeper…
I was also the thief on the cross, whose insanity was overtaken by grace, enabling him to acknowledge divine justice, to see Jesus’ righteousness and his divinity. I was there, hearing myself take ownership of my sin and, having no one else who can save me, asking, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!”
Jesus, heard my cry and not only promised to remember me in Paradise, but he folded me into himself—the redemptive Mystery of the ages. He transferred me into the kingdom of his beloved Son. He gave me the right to become his child. He grafted me into the Vine, who is Jesus, and promised me that nothing will ever, ever, ever, separate me from his love. Death (in its truest spiritual sense) has been abolished. When did he do this? He did it before time. He’s doing it now and will be doing it forevermore. Truly, “It is finished!” I was in Adam; I am now in Christ.
Father, how can it be that such wonderful providence has overtaken me? I have been caught up (with you) into the middle of a blessed Mystery. Amen.
by RobertCummins | Jan 25, 2017 | 56. Home
The Lord your God is in your midst, a victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy. (Zephaniah 3:17)
The New Covenant is a better covenant. It has been enacted on better promises. (Heb 8:6) This verse reminds me why the glory of the new exceeds that of the old. Its the promise of a new heart …
And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances and do them. (Ezekiel 11:19)
Here is how God fulfilled it…
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)
Christ living in us changes everything or, at least it should. We could modify our old testament promise in light of the new …
The Lord your God is in you, a victorious warrior. He exults within you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice within you with shouts of joy. (My paraphrase)
However, because we inflate the value of our feelings, we think, “OK. Christ is in me – the Bible tells me so, but I’m not feeling it. So we try (and fail) to hear his voice in the clamor of our fickle emotions and busy lives. I can testify, this road has many unnecessary ups and downs and some very un-scenic turnouts.
Perhaps we have not known his presence within simply because we were not taught that we could or we were not taught how. Perhaps the full import of having a new heart has not been realized because we have not learned to be quiet long enough to encounter him. Perhaps the place of our tryst frightens us because of its unfamiliar stillness and quiet. Yet, we are told, that is where we shall come to know him …
Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)
Perhaps if we made peace with the quiet, we would experience the promise …
Indeed, I will give you renown and praise among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes,” says the Lord. (from Zephaniah 3:20)
The Blue Book has served thousands of Christians by inviting them to slow down and discover their God who lives within them. Those who develop this habit ultimately find it was Christ himself they longed for and that he resides within them. The process of coming to know our God is an experiential mystery, a blessed one, which awaits all persevering saints. Our simple calling is to …
Watch over our hearts with all diligence for from them flow all the issues of our lives. (from Proverbs 3:24)
May God succeed in his ambushes and may we succeed in our perserverance. Amen.
by RobertCummins | Jan 24, 2017 | 56. Home
Simon Peter said to Him, “Lord, where are You going?” Jesus answered, “Where I go, you cannot follow Me now; but you will follow later.” Peter said to Him, “Lord, why can I not follow You right now? I will lay down my life for You.” Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for Me? Truly, truly, I say to you, a rooster will not crow until you deny Me three times. (John 13:36-38)
When Jesus tells him he was going somewhere and that he could not go with him, Peter is thrown for a loop. He’s not on track with this at all. He’s been Jesus’ shadow for three years! Peter protests, “Lord, why can I not follow You right now? I will lay down my life for You.”
Jesus’ response: Really?
In the years following his denial, Peter must have looked back and said, “I sincerely believed I was the type of man who would lay his life down for Jesus. Wow, was that ever an essential lesson for me. Following a risen but unseen Savior—walking by the Spirit—is another thing altogether.” And he no doubt mused: “Had the Spirit not taken up residence in me, if Christ were not in me, I would still be thinking absurd thoughts about myself and believing everything is supposed to happen right now.”
The Father disciplines each child he receives. Peter’s lesson is essential for us as well. None of us are the people we believe ourselves to be, at least initially. We are all driven by our false selves. (“I am this or that sort of person.”) And Jesus says: “Really?” We each grow up, figuring out a way to make life work with the least pain. We all learn to protect, at all costs, our fragile spirits born into a dog eat dog world. When we’re children, our spirits protect themselves as instinctively as a falling cat landing upon its feet. As teens and young adults, the soul’s habits of survival became more deliberate. As grown ups (what a misnomer), our personalities have become conditioned to see themselves in a particular way. Ergo, falsity is embedded in our identities.
This is a problem when the self-made person (and we all are) is nothing like the person God created it to be. When we erect walls around our hearts to protect ourselves, we construct barricades between ourselves and love, which was (and is) to be our chief vocation: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
These instinctive and deliberate acts of self-protection also create a barricade between reality and us. Our walls wreck our capacity to see and hear things without distortion. We all have specific blind-spots. We would be fated as the last to know if it were not for God’s discipline. However, since God is making all things new, we do not have to remain in the dark. That which has been lost or stolen in the way of our personhood can be restored. That is what Paul is getting at when he says:
We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. (II Corinthians 3:18)
For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren. (Romans 8:29)
We foreknown ones are invited to share the sufferings of Christ (in minuscule ways) through various trials and tests so that we might experience the full kingdom gospel—the gospel that not only saves souls from hell, but also transforms them along the way. When we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are inviting God to transform us into the image of his Son and to teach us to live as Jesus did. Jesus was not just our Savior. He is our Life! The Spirit’s mission is to see that the children ultimately resemble their Father.
If we are to press on as disciples, we can anticipate God exposing our false selves. The old things have passed away, behold new things have come! Like Peter, we will discover that we were not who we thought we were. If we will persevere, we will discover that we are in fact something far different, far greater. In Christ we will eventually find that our old false selves were but a sad parody of the self that God is making anew. And, we will learn with Peter that things don’t often happen right now. God is big on process. It is in the ebb and the flow, in the living and the dying of everyday life, that we come to truly know Jesus as our all in all.
A contemporary of Jesus’, a man who became known as Pliny the Elder, is credited for saying, “Home is where the heart is.” Not too shabby for a pagan, but Jesus is credited for saying:
“Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going.” (John 14:1-14)
Our home is where Christ is, and he is in us. Our hearts are Christ’s home. In truth, we are inseparably intertwined in him. Together, we foreknown ones comprise Christ’s Body on earth. We individually and collectively have become, in our new and better covenant in Christ, what the Temple was in the Old Covenant—the dwelling place of God. It was expedient that Jesus ascend to our Father so that we could become the temples of the Holy Spirit—a community of souls destined to become expressions of resurrection life, the light of the world, revealing the Way.
Blessed King, my heart extolls your beauty and your wisdom. That I am your son is my chief delight. May my vision be forever restored that I might behold you with even greater clarity. In the midst of whatever unfolds, may you continually be the chief treasure of my heart. I love you Father, Thank you so so much.
by RobertCummins | Jan 23, 2017 | 56. Home
And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.” Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son. (Revelation 21:5-7)
Overcoming is a recurring theme in Revelation. Who comes to mind when you think of overcoming? How does one go about overcoming? What is it specifically we are to overcome? When I served as an elder in a local church, these questions and a hundred more, haunted me. As one entrusted with the spiritual health of others, finding the answers to these questions seemed important. However, I eventually discovered the limited relevance of question-askers inside the local church.
Admittedly, some questions have a dark side, masking unbelief and evading truth, questions such as: “Who is my neighbor?” or “How shall I know that these things shall be?” But there are also honest questions, which come from thirsty souls. Some are on a heart-quest for reality and truth, which requires them to peer beneath things. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Chuck Swindoll’s encouragement to those challenging the sacrosanct and the status quo in Insight for Today. (Use his search tool and look up; “The Problem With Progress,” Parts 1 & 2.) You will appreciate this if you are one inclined to turn over stones.
Our local church was shrinking along with most churches in America. Why? “Why” is a pry bar word, and I suspect the absence of those anticipated harvests with their 30-60-90 fold returns may be related to our aversion to it. Jesus is the most captivating personality in the universe, yet church in its traditional form is repelling people. What if leaders were to get out the pry bar and look beneath the definitions, the traditions, the doctrines, and the experiences and see if Jesus somehow got left out?
And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them. (Revelation 21:3)
We are now the tabernacle of God. Christ is in us. Christ is now our very life. This is the greatest mystery of all. This was the big stone the prophets were trying to pry up in the Old Testament: Christ in us—the hope of glory. Living with Christ as Lord in our hearts inevitably plays out as an intimate relationship between God and man. When Jesus eventually trumps religion, a bright light, previously unseen, will shine from the Church. In Christ, we hold this bright day in trust.
Because I have seen God pry things up in my own life, unearthing the spring, I project he could do this on a larger scale. After all, I’m made of the same stuff as my brothers and sisters in Christ. Perhaps I am in error, but I am assuming that it his intention that the well within each of us be unearthed. I write to assist other thirsty hearts. I pray my story would encourage others to make sure Jesus is not being lost in the serious business of a religious life. I’m evidence it can happen. We will know when the well is open and running because, flowing from our innermost beings will be a river of life that washes our consciences clean of guilt and shame. This is overcoming. This life of freedom flows from “the spring of the water of life,” which is Jesus, “without cost,” affirming our identities as His daughters and Sons.
Father, let us not fail to see that it is in you and you alone that all things become new. Even if your prying exposes us where we are false, strengthen us to persevere, knowing the sorrow of discipline is but for a moment. May our hearts be liberated from any old things preventing the Spring of Life from overflowing our vessels. May our hearts see they are the created objects of your affection and that you will conclude the matters which you have begun. Make all things new Lord, especially us! Amen.
by RobertCummins | Jan 22, 2017 | 55. Joy and Celebration
Imagine that day when we will awaken in the new body-phase of eternity. Our first morning thought will not be a fuzzy, “Ugh, another day.” No. It will be more like, “Whoa, something is up! This is going to be an amazingly wonderful day!” Perhaps the next thing we will hear will be a rap on our door by Jesus himself. After a long warm embrace, he wipes away our tears; he looks us in the eye and says, “You are right, something is up and it is certifiably wonderful, but you are also wrong, there are no more days and nights. There is no more darkness.” And then he adds, with a wink, “My voice is familiar isn’t it?”
Being a journal junky I have imagined my diary entry following this first day (although I’m not quite sure if it is a day that has passed or a thousand years).
Date: ? / Time: ? / Place: Heaven (I presume)
I went out today with joy and was led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills broke into shouts of joy before me, and all the trees of the field clapped their hands. It was awesome!
It was so true that the Shepherd’s thoughts were not my thoughts, nor were his ways my ways. And this newness of life! This is “newness” of a caliber far far beyond my expectations!
For as the rain and the snow came down from heaven, and did not return there without watering the earth and making it bear and sprout, and furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so was his Word which God spoke. It did not return to him empty, without accomplishing what he desired, or without succeeding in the matter for which he sent it.
Oh how glad I am that I sought the Lord while he could still be found; that I called upon him while he was near. I am so extremely grateful that he enabled me to forsake those thoughts and ways of mine that were so errant! How can I ever say thank you sufficiently to the Shepherd for drawing me back to himself, showing me his compassion and offering me such an abundant pardon? I don’t know but it appears I will have the time. (I hope Isaiah does not mind my plagiarizing.)
Well, that is then; this is now. Until that day, we must keep in mind that Jesus himself was the Word God spoke and that he did not return to his Father empty handed. He accomplished the matter for which he was sent. He led captive a host of captives. While heaven is appealing, we are already inside eternity where the kingdom has been birthed. Right now, Jesus is the new creation. In him is Life. He was and is the Life. There is no newness of Life outside of him. These are now-realities. The kingdom has both come and is coming.
Our kingdom beginnings start when we are born again. That is why Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born anew.” Must! Must! Must! Are you born again? If you cannot answer this question with an emphatic “Yes”, the command remains for you; “You must be born anew!” Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go straight to the Lord and seek him while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Forsake all thoughts that you might be a child of God because you have participated in some ceremony or given mental assent to some creed. Forsake the notion your morality or deeds are relatively good and have surely earned you God’s favor. Forsake this self-righteous idea and the Lord will have compassion on you and he will abundantly pardon you.
Christ came as the Word Incarnate – the only Seed that can grow into kingdom newness. Truly Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. If you cannot identify newness of life in yourself and you profess to be a Christian, this MwM post may be disturbing. I hope so. Keep in mind, God’s thoughts are not your thoughts. His ways are not your ways. Being disturbed is an excellent sign the Seed may be trying to germinate. Take heed! The Lord is near; this is that opportune moment to find him. Today is the day of salvation. Humble yourself. Invite the Seed into your heart.
Tell him you want him to grow there and take precedence in all matters and that you are willing to forsake your rights to nurture your old previous life. You too will find that his Word was not sent in vain, that it indeed accomplishes the mission for which it is sent – the rebirth and transformation of your life. As his life takes root, and you are a good steward, you will find that very soon you too will …
Go out with joy and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
Father, may the gospel of your Son be spoken anew into all the traditions and institutions of this earth with kingdom authority. May the true prophets and teachers be heard. May your saints declare this clarion message from their own housetops. May their razor sharpened words distinguish between sentiment, ceremony, human goodness, sound creeds and Life himself.
Heavenly Father, Your name is holy and sacred beyond human knowing. May Your kingdom flourish! May your Word succeed in every way for which It was sent! We confess to you our sins. Forgive us Father and we shall certainly forgive those who have sinned against us. Deliver us from the evils of anti-Christ messages, offering ways into the kingdom other than Jesus. May your emerging Life testify of the power, and the glory of Your kingdom forever and ever. Amen.
