Made In His Image (Tuesday) – Romans 8:18-27

by RobertCummins | Jan 6, 2015 | 01. Made in His Image

Genesis 8:18-27

The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. MSG

This is the verse that first stood out to me in our passage. Are you conscious of any birth pangs within you? Are you conscious of anything alive inside of you that is growing? Have you longed for things you haven’t seen but hoped would be? If so, I believe you are very blessed. I cannot help but think of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit and those who mourn. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and those who are marginalized because of their faith.” I believe those who carry life (of this painful type) within are likely sharing (something of) the sufferings of Christ.

I believe there are many who are not yet aware that it is Christ’s life, niggling and disrupting from within which has brought them to places of personal despair, questioning why this life does not satisfy. The irony is that this humbling place which we would never choose for our hearts is where Truth can often introduce Himself. We can then discover that He is also the Way and the Life. Again, you are blessed if this is you. Think of Paul’s words….

Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

Materialism and prosperity can be real enemies to the Life within. For many of us, I fear who may be taking the broader road, we can override the precious and troubling still small voice of Life within with the constant diversions of our dollar-driven lives. Instead we must become Spirit-led. This will require us to stop and really listen to what is going on inside us. For many the fear of even facing this busy monster within is sufficient to further motivate the perpetual flight of our hearts.

It is so easy to let the world interpret life for us. We watch the evening news and it seems to more closely resemble an abortion than a potential live birth. We take it in and we never quite admit it but we quietly conclude that all is lost for this world. It is way beyond redemption. Yet, we remain tuned in to our favorite political talking heads, entertaining some vain hope that our party will rise and lead us to glory. To walk in the Spirit we must continually defer to the plumb line of scripture….

All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.

All is not lost. God is holding all things in trust for the kingdom’s sons and daughters. Let’s allow the Spirit to speak to our hearts and convey to us that normal Christianity involves the mysterious process of living simultaneously with pain and joyful expectancy.

That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.

If you were to take inventory of your hopes and expectations (acknowledging them as your treasures), which kingdom would this exercise indicate you are invested in? God’s or your own?

Made in His Image (Saturday) – 2 Corinthians 3:12-18

by RobertCummins | Jan 4, 2014 | 01. Made in His Image

For many years I envisioned the primary tool in accomplishing the Great Commission as evangelism. Of course we know to succeed it has to be bracketed by intercession and follow-up but verbally sharing the gospel was, to me, the dynamic responsible for any growth the kingdom of God had or would ever enjoy. Today’s passage is an excellent one to help explain why I no longer see evangelism (in this traditional sense) as the primary dynamic of the Great Commission.  I will never forsake the telling of the old old story but today I see the essential ingredient of kingdom expansion as simply living brightly…..

….our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.

Have you ever wondered how the Church grew so rapidly in the first 3 hundred years? By our standards they were very under-equipped. Their pastors did not come weekly with a sermon prepared from the Bible and various commentaries. For one, the Church was 350 years away from having a Bible and another;  their pastors were not hired professionals. They were simply those in the body who had been recognized as their gifts for nurturing and equipping became visible within the community of saints. They had no printing presses for books or tracts. They had no means of mass communication or transportation. They had no real estate of buildings. So then,  what accounts for the explosion of Christianity? The Church had a supreme advantage over us; simplicity. They had nothing but one another, trouble and, most importantly, the Holy Spirit, who was teaching them to live out of the new Life that was now theirs through a brand new covenant with God.

This new covenant enabled both Jew and Gentile to draw near to God as their Father. God was no longer a distant and angry deity who had, long ago, etched His 10 Commandments into stone tablets . No. God had now taken up His stylus and had begun writing His story on human hearts which were no longer hard like stone. And, He gave a new covenant to them exceedingly  greater than the constrictive Law of Moses. God had now torn the veil in the temple in two, offering those entrusting themselves to Christ, face to face access to the Living God. In the midst of scarcity and hostility, there was simplicity, where all they really had was Christ living inside and among them. The consequence?  Something incredible began to happen….

….. when God is personally present – a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation (the Law of Moses) is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.

The Great Commission was being well executed by people who probably had no clue what it was. They were just living out their lives alongside others who wondered about the changes they were witnessing among their friends, neighbors and relatives.  The first disciples had laid hold of the essential dynamic of the Great Commission; living brightly – becoming the light of the world – reference point of eternity in a temporal decaying world.

They had no need of holding crusades. They were the crusade! The Holy Spirit was expressing Himself through the Body of Christ (not just the Church staff) in a variety of powerful ways. They had another tremendous advantage. Church attendance had not yet been invented. These primitive and simple people were spared from the snare of that debilitating concept. They had become the Church and their lives were individually and corporately radiating credibility for the Carpenter who had conquered death and His kingdom which He claimed had come. In the heat of persecution, in the company of each other, they were being….

….transfigured much like the Messiah, their lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters their lives and they became like him.

Father, grant us the grace to repent of our misplaced priorities and dependencies. Grant that we would return to the simple message of Christ alone – our sufficiency in all of life and the hope of glory. Help us to see that we ourselves are the essential and intended good news – those stories that God is daily publishing that the world would read and believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that in believing, all might have life in His name. Amen.

Made in His Image (Friday) – Ephesians 2:4-10

by RobertCummins | Jan 3, 2014 | 01. Made in His Image

God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ, and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Ephesians 2:4-10

Paul said this nearly two thousand years ago. Do you think those ages Paul has referenced will come after God has executed a rapture maneuver, extracting the Church out of the hot-zone of warfare on this earth? Or, is there a chance we could actually be living in those ages that Paul said were to come?

The answers to these question have far reaching implications. One scenario presents the problem of having been left behind. The other involves just being left out. The Jenkins/LaHaye Left Behind series presents an eschatology where the rapture is The event preceding a time of great tribulation where the saints are snatched up out of this world. The rapture essentially becomes the get-out-of-trib-free ticket. Everyone else is left behind.

Another eschatology might be referred to as a kingdom-now theology where the Church does not see itself overrun by evil. On the contrary, it envisions that her destiny is to shine brightly and to overcome; especially where evil has abounded. The overcoming Church knows that it has historically shined the brightest when the heat has been turned up. They base their anticipation on Jesus’ words, “In Me, the kingdom has come.” and, “My kingdom is within you.” This group remembers God’s original mandate for man to subdue the earth and rule over it. They believe the kingdom will emerge as God answers the prayer that Jesus taught them to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This tribe has hearts like Joshua and Caleb that reason; “The giants in the land may be big but they are no match for the Lord God Almighty who has given us this land to possess.” This tribe is not fearful of being left behind, it just doesn’t want to be left out of whatever battles are ahead.

As a new believer I anticipated that Christ’s return was imminent. I truly was surprised each year when the rapture had not occurred. Over the decades I have lost confidence that the timing of the rapture or the events surrounding it are that critical. Whether it is mid, post or pre; all I have been told to do is “be prepared.” I don’t believe that prepping in fear for shortages of food or ammo are at all what Jesus was getting at either. I believe he was talking about our hearts. I believe our hearts will be best served by giving the Word of God the benefit of the doubt. Please listen to this paraphrase of Jesus’ prayer taken from John 17 ….

Father, it’s time. Display the bright splendor of your Son. I have given them this very same glorious splendor that you gave Me. I’m not asking that you take My children out of the world.  In the same way that you gave Me a mission in the world, I gave them a mission; It is simply to display My life in them. While I will no longer be visible to the world; they will. Since I am in them and you are in Me, they can be one heart and mind with Us. This is so the world might believe. This will give the godless world evidence that you’ve sent Me and that You have loved them in the same way you’ve loved Me. I am in them. Guard this life within them which You conferred as a gift through Me. Father, I want those you gave Me to experience My completed joy and I also want them to be with Me, right where I am, so they can see My glory, the splendor you gave Me, having loved Me long before there ever was a world. As You put Me in charge of everything, I have given real and eternal life to all in My charge. And this is the real and eternal life: That they know You, The one and only true God, and Myself, whom You sent. 

I just cannot reconcile the victorious army, a purified Bride, or the overcoming Church of scripture with a rapture which seems to say; the Holy Spirit can only work through new resurrected bodies. A rapture implies to me that the Holy Spirit just could not subdue the flesh and that Jesus cannot exercise His rulership as Lord in a fallen world through a fallen Church. In other words, the condition of fallen men has trumped the Spirit and the kingdom of God. I must ask, “Has our failing experience as the Church shaped our theology where victory is precluded by virtue of the Church’s own distorted image of itself?  Perhaps our experience would be victorious if we were to build our theology from scripture instead of our experience.

What if we were to discover afresh who we actually are in Christ and that our mission is as simple as displaying His life in us? What if we are to discover afresh that we are not essentially fallen beings rather we are new creations in Christ, citizens of an eternal kingdom who are even now seated with Him upon HIs throne? What if He opened His Word afresh to us and it burned so upon our hearts that we knew that in Christ, today is the day of salvation; that today is the appointed time for His Bride to make Herself ready and to display the splendor of His glory to the world?

It has struck me that the left behind mind-set puts the Church on the defensive, managing our sin natures anxiously awaiting the rapture so we can be done with this life and get on with the next. It is much easier for me to reconcile a kingdom-now theology with the the teaching of Jesus and the spirit of the New Testament.  That the kingdom of God is a now affair fills our lives with responsibility and adventure and an opportunity to see the Word of God vindicated in through the Church.

Father, may Your Words take precedence above any demonic doctrines of defeatism that have infected the Good News. May we see that You have answered Your Son’s prayer; that we are in deed with You where You are – seated at the Father’s side. Help us to see that we have not been orphaned in a hostile land but that we are kingdom sons and citizens commissioned to display the life of Christ. Succeed in sanctifying us and simultaneously overthrowing the ideologies that have discounted our identity and muddled our destiny. Amen.

Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, So they might be one heart and mind with us. Then the world might believe that you, in fact, sent me. The same glory you gave me, I gave them, So they’ll be as unified and together as we are— I in them and you in me.

Made In His Image (Thursday) – Psalm 8

by RobertCummins | Jan 2, 2014 | 01. Made in His Image

Made in His Image (Wednesday) – Colossians 3:1-17

by RobertCummins | Jan 1, 2014 | 01. Made in His Image

Colossians 3:1-17

Have you ever tried a diet that didn’t work? Who hasn’t? Have you ever tried a spiritual diet that didn’t work – some structured plan and commitment to read through the Bible in a year? Perhaps it was to use a particular devotional. Most of us have and with similar bad results as with the food diets. The power of the initial commitment fades and things return to familiar and often unprofitable patterns of thinking and behavior.

May I be so bold as to say, as for the spirit, the Blue Book is a diet that works. I know so many people who were handed this book by a friend. It was often met with these kinds of responses. Outwardly there was the, “Oh another devotional…well thank you!” Inwardly the response was closer to, “Oh great, another devotional.  Hmmm.. It doesn’t even have a dust cover. I can’t even tell who wrote it. Why, It doesn’t even have a copy write!” Yet, more often than not, the unpretentious little Blue Book draws the skeptic into its pages.

I looked at the book for months before opening it. The last thing I wanted was any structure to my free-flowing communion with God. I found quickly that even though the book is structured it was anything but constrictive. I would not want to rob you of discovery, because discovery is part of the Blue Book adventure.  However, I will reveal one of its secrets.

This diet involves eating smaller and more frequent meals. It involves slowing down and chewing each bite longer. People learning to linger regularly at a banqueting table with the best possible company who has served the richest of fare is why the Blue Book is in circulation. This book, which has never been advertised, is in the hands of well over 20,000 people. This phenomena is due to a growing community of saints who are hungry to personally know their God in more intimate ways. This is just a little tool the Holy Spirit is using to quench the hunger of His precious children. Is it possible that nourishment can be lost in the predigested meals of someone else’s sermons or teachings? Is it possible that for some, a glut of massive bible reading is not the best way to intimately connect with the Father?

In a very real way, the Blue Book is all about His beloved precious children. So is our passage today in Colossians. The starting point for the spiritual life is having a correct identity – understanding not only who we were but especially who we are now. One of the devil’s greatest ploys is to convince a saint that they are victims of the Fall of Adam, that their core identity is governed by depravity.  It is impossible for a child to enjoy any kind of abundant life when their pedigree and legitimacy are still in question. Paul knew this. Even though it is a great mystery, he is hammering home the higher truths that will affirm our identities as His Beloved……

Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life.

Pursue the things over which Christ presides…. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective.

One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above

We have to ask ourselves, “Was Paul deluded, thinking he had found the fountain of youth?” Or rather was Paul enlightened, having found the fountain of eternal life?  My heart tells me that Paul had perosnally tasted and seen that the Lord, He is good. My heart also tells me that Paul’s advice is sound. While he was convinced of God’s sovereignty, it certainly did not lead Paul into passivity. On the contrary, Paul advocates a vigorous and intentional spiritual life ….

Look up! Be alert!  Forget what lay behind! Reach forward to what lies ahead! Press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus! Keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God! Set your mind on the things above!

We have been caught up into a great mystery; We are hidden in Christ and He is our life. The essence of our lives, regardless of our belief or our experiences (which have unfortunately shaped our beliefs and doctrines) is Christ Jesus Himself. The deepest and truest thing about us is our identity in Christ. Paul knows the enemy’s tactics and he knows our propensity to look down into our old lives or behind us at our history of failure. It is no problem for him to remind us of the facts. He wants us to arrive at that place in our experience where we have made these facts our own.

I am suggesting the Blue Book is a proven tool in assisting us in our looking up; in our reaching forward; in our pressing on; in our seeking and the setting of our minds.  Out of Christ, who is your life, may you prosper in spirit soul and body!

Father, may this be a year where our hearts release a fragrant aroma to you as we more deeply discover the birthright of our divine identities; this imperishable glorious inheritance that is ours even now in Christ. Amen.

Made In His Image (Tuesday) – Romans 8:18-27

by RobertCummins | Dec 31, 2013 | 01. Made in His Image