by RobertCummins | Mar 30, 2014 | 13. The Word Made Flesh
Isaiah asks, “Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?” He then proceeds to describe this; a man who was common in appearance, easy to overlook and even look down upon. And, as the obvious target of God’s wrath he would be, in his disfigurement, ultimately hard to even look upon at all. Isaiah asks rightly, “Who will believe that God’s saving power would come like this?”
If we are taken back by this our wonder must multiply as we discover that we ourselves are the cause of this circumstance. We who are all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost. We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way. We are not just physically lost, we are lost-of- heart, alienated-by-nature to God. Our lost hearts thought he brought this upon himself, that God was punishing him for his own failures while the fact was, it was our pains he carried—our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. This will all play out because we’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
He was beaten, he was tortured, but he didn’t say a word. Like a lamb taken to be slaughtered and like a sheep being sheared, he took it all in silence. Justice miscarried, and he was led off—and did anyone really know what was happening? He died without a thought for his own welfare, beaten bloody for our sins. They buried him with the wicked, threw him in a grave with a rich man, Even though he’d never hurt a soul or said one word that wasn’t true. Still, it’s what God had in mind all along, to crush him with pain. The plan was that he give himself as an offering for sin, piling all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong, on him, on him!
Why? So that he would ultimately see life come from it—life, life, and more life. However, to secure life he had to face off with death. Because he will not flinch, God’s plan will deeply prosper through him. Out of his terrible travail of soul, he will see that it’s worth it and be glad he did it. Through what he experienced, God’s righteous servant, will make many righteous. By carrying the burden of their sins, his saving power will come to bear in the new hearts of the lowly. He will have a family of those who are found-in-heart and like-in-nature. Mystery upon mystery! We the cause of this are ourselves the extravagant reward that is behind this inconceivable plan of God’s. How scandalous that we, the cause of his nightmare have always been the object of his dreams!
Truly, “Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?”
Father, Thank you. Thank you that you have born our sin and shame and that we do not have to grovel as the cause of your suffering. Thank you. Thank you for the new life that you have established in our hearts and are manifesting through our lives. May our hearts live in awe and wonder at the glory of this mystery and the majesty of your name. Amen.
Note; Today’s reflections are a byproduct of my paraphrasing and rearrangement of Isaiah 53. Grappling with the passage in this manner is just one of the ways I use to take in God’s words with the understanding that his Word is compatible with and intended to nourish my rescued heart and new nature.
by RobertCummins | Mar 28, 2014 | 13. The Word Made Flesh
Going through a long line of prophets, God has been addressing our ancestors in different ways for centuries. Recently he spoke to us directly through his Son. By his Son, God created the world in the beginning, and it will all belong to the Son at the end. This Son perfectly mirrors God, and is stamped with God’s nature. He holds everything together by what he says—powerful words! MSG
If the average Christian were to be asked about the Word of God what would come to their minds? Most of us would likely think of our bibles, those books from which passages are read on Sunday morning, which upon conclusion, the pastor adds the exclamation point, “And this is the word of God. Amen” However, the bible itself testifies that the Word of God is infinitely more than the book. The Word has never been confined by cowhide or ink or language or principles.
The Word was at the beginning and Jesus was that Word. The cosmos (not just the spec that is earth) was created by Him and for Him. From outside of time and space He created them and then elected to enter into it. It was as if He created the stage and then stepped out upon it, saying, in perfect humility, “I am the origin and the glue that holds your reality together. I am the ointment that heals this sin-scarred planet. Believe in me and become a co-heir of all that is mine.”
Let’s shift for a moment though from The Word to “words” in general and their value to our worship. In Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy – Discovering Our Hidden Life In God, he talks about the perpetual “dumbing down” our image of God has experienced over time due to language. He asks us to compare our contemporary description of God to one offered one hundred years ago by Adam Clarke: God is;
….the eternal, independent, and self existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and rich and kind.
Willard acknowledges that those word are pretty hard slogging for a modern reader but adds, still “we can all appreciate what a vast difference it would make in anyone’s life to actually believe in such a God as these words portray.” To emphasize his point he says that we might describe God as love “but this proves to be very different from forcing a bedraggled (dumbed-down) human version of “love” into a mental blank where God is supposed to be, and then identifying God as that.” As we drag shrunken discounted ideas of God into that place reserved for him and try to worship, it is not too surprising that the results would be lukewarm.
But even Adam Clarke’s words, as useful, eloquent and accurate as they maybe do not even get us close to fully describing The Word of God. And just as importantly, they are not our words. We must develop and express our own language with God. Hopefully, it will be for us as it was for the psalmists who found their own tongues, with voice and pen, animating their own worship to God.
We are the most fortunate of people since most recently God has revealed himself in His Son and this Son perfectly mirrors God, and is stamped with God’s nature. I have a fair inventory of words that I can draw from in my envisioning of God and I believe it is a tremendous aid in my worship of Him but more importantly to me is that God is my Father on earth as He is in heaven. When my mind is confronted with one the myriad doctrinal conunundrums out there, I will often simply pass it through my father-filter and see what comes out there other end. My point is that while vocabulary is wonderful, most importantly we need to stay focused on Jesus, the eternal Word of God, who is an exact representation of the Father. He who has seen the Son has seen the Father.
Father, restore an image of Your transcendent glory to our hearts that delivers us from every debased notion lodged in our brains. May we bow to the mystery and the majesty of the Word of God acknowledging His central place in all that was and is and is to come. Amen
by RobertCummins | Mar 27, 2014 | 13. The Word Made Flesh
To people like himself who joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man yet find a different law in the members of their bodies, waging war against the law of their minds and making them prisoners of the law of sin which is in their members Paul says,
Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves;
To people like himself who have the principle of evil present in them , wretched men that they are, he says,
….do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant….
It is no wonder (I am being facetious) then to a people who on the one hand, they with their with minds, are serving the law of God, but on the other, with their flesh the law of sin, he would need to say…..
…..work out (cultivate, carry out to the goal, and fully complete) your own salvation with reverence and awe and trembling (self-distrust, with serious caution, tenderness of conscience, watchfulness against temptation, timidly shrinking from whatever might offend God and discredit the name of Christ). (Amplified)
I have not studied the greek but it seems the Amplified translation certainly amped up verse 12. The New American Standard translation simply says..
…..work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
By just setting Romans 7 along side Philippians 2 it would seem that Paul is a deeply conflicted man who has constructed a spiritual tight wire that we are to cautiously navigate with temerity and self doubt. I get push back from some on this but I don’t believe Paul spent his life on a wire of introspective worry, freting that he may offend God. Read the New Testament, Paul was not a shy or hesitant person. I don’t believe the story of his life at all portrayed God as one easily offended. Listen….
I also do my best to maintain always a blameless conscience both before God and before men. Acts 24:16,
But to me it is a very small thing that I may be examined by you, or by any human court; in fact, I do not even examine myself. For I am conscious of nothing against myself, yet I am not by this acquitted; but the one who examines me is the Lord. 1 Corinthians 4:4
No, I believe the broad sweep of Paul’s life conveys something entirely different about God. At the end of Romans 7 Paul asks and then settles this question for himself.
Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
I believe Paul and all who come to know the Father receive a revelation of his heart. They all learn that the Father’s love is not easily offended; it’s patient. It’s not harsh; it’s kind. It’s not touchy; it bears all things, endures all things. It does not take into account wrongs suffered. This enduring love equips saints to say with Paul….
Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace
And with Jude….
Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy…
At some point in a saints life, they do hopefully reach a crisis where they throw up their hands and say with Paul, “The Christian life is impossible!” Ironically, when we do reach this place we may think we are washed up when in fact the opposite is true; we have actually been positioned to begin living out of His life instead of our own.
For us to have this servant attitude that was in Christ we must discover that we are in fact in Christ. This discovery usually requires some humbling and some emptying out of ourselves. Until this happens we typically are deluded with fleshly notions born of human strength alone which, by nature, cannot live the life of Jesus Christ. Only He can do that. And that is precisely what He is endeavoring to do. He aspires that His Word be made flesh through us for the joy of our own hearts and ….
…..so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Father, Help us to see in Christ the basis for our confident declarations of ourselves as new creations and temples of your Holy Spirit. Remind us that greater is He who is in us than our opposition who is in the world. Lead us in triumph for Your name sake. Thank You that as we work out our salvation with awe and wonder we discover that it is Your good pleasure that we find pleasure in You. Oh Lord, help us to believe the truth about ourselves no matter how wonderful it is. Amen.
by RobertCummins | Mar 26, 2014 | 13. The Word Made Flesh
“I love to tell the story of unseen things above / of Jesus and his glory / of Jesus and his love. / I love to tell the story / because I know ’tis true / it satisfies my longing as nothing else can do.” I promise we will get to the word made flesh if you will bare with me for a few paragraphs.
You know there are a lot of gospels that are preached around the world. There always have been. The bulk of the new testament letters were written to defend the true gospel from the false ones of that age. This caused me to ask, “Which gospel story was Katherine Hankey referring to her in her song?” I did some research. Most of what we can glean about her is through the community of which she belonged. She was a member of the Clapham Sect.
This was a group of Christian, influential like-minded believers living near Clapham Common in London at the beginning of the 19th century. They are described as “a network of friends and families with William Wilberforce as their center of gravity. They were powerfully bound together by their love for each other, by their spiritual values which overflowed into their vision of social activism. (Among many other things, they are credited as the primary force that over-threw slavery in England.) Many of their meetings were held in their houses. In their own time the group used no particular name, but they were lampooned by outsiders as “the saints.” In modern parlance they were a missional community.
So, I concluded that the gospel story that Mrs. Hankey loved to tell was the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. As you can derive from their fruits, her’s was more than the accept-Jesus-and-avoid-hell gospel (which sadly is rampant in western culture). Her gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, was the story that is rooted in our passage today that transforms hearts, communities and cultures (I believe in that order).
For in Him all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority…having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your transgressions….He made you alive together with Him.
The true gospel, the gospel of the kingdom of God always yields transformational fruit. And it always begins as revelation in the heart of man – the temple of God on earth. Where no transformation has taken place, it is valid to ask just which gospel was embraced. Here is my point; Where the kingdom gospel story takes root the Word continues to become flesh; the story is ongoing in the saints.
To find that place of intimacy and transformation, so many professing believers in the west are going to conferences, praying like mad, reading books, studying the scriptures more intently, just trying to gain that next essential piece of truth or experience that will put them over the top -allowing them to finally arrive spiritually. Others are laboring in the fields of performance Christianity where their activity and service rarely produce a sprig of new life; but their works are salve to their uneasy consciences and a sacrifice that (they quietly calculate) must surely be pleasing to God. Sadly, many have also just given up, having exhausted themselves on these religious hamster wheels. Listen to one sentence from the Message’s version of our passage;
Entering into this fullness is not something you figure out or achieve…..you’re already in—insiders….
Until our hearts are deeply rooted in the reality that we have already arrived, we will be working and our working, whether its expressed in reading, fasting, praying, serving or attending will undermine not generate the intimacy our hearts were created to know in Christ. Much of this middle with mystery blog is my story as one who was delivered from a spirit of fretful-seeking. It’s passion and sobriety looked great in religious circles but it was not transformational. It was mostly just fleshly religion. It reflected very poorly on my Father in heaven.
Katherine Hanky is now among the great cloud of witnesses that are cheering us on. Looking back on her story, I think she could have as easily penned these words…
“In Christ I am the story of the mysterious kingdom of God / of Jesus and his glory / of Jesus and his love. / In Christ, I am the story / because I know ’tis true / Christ has satisfied my longing as no one else can do.”
My prayer is that the earth will once again see the birth of communities of friends and families with their own unique transformational DNA that equip them to infect their networks with the kingdom of God – that original gospel lived out by Jesus and His disciples. I pray that we believers may somehow find the kindred spirits we were called to live among. I pray that spiritual fathers will arise and become the centers of gravity for these communities; that their homes would become safe houses and magnets for those the Father is drawing to Himself. Even if they do not have a corporate label; even if they are mocked as nothing more than “saints”, I pray that these cells would multiply, connect and become known for their powerful bonds of love for each other. So be it.
Father, Breathe on the cellular structure of Your Church transforming her chaos and clay into the resplendent Body You have envisioned and destined to take dominion over this planet. May the dreams of old men merge with the visions of the young to inspire redemptive activities in our hearts, in our communities, in our culture. May Your Word continue to be made flesh. Tell your story through us. Amen.
by RobertCummins | Mar 24, 2014 | 13. The Word Made Flesh
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it…
In the introduction of John’s gospel, we are given a glimpse into the origin of the cosmos and we find, mysteriously, it is ordered around the Word – a fact overlooked by the wise men of this world such as Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking. Even though all men were the beneficiaries of the Light of Life, John tells us, the darkness did not comprehend the bright Word. Yet, The Word is not deterred. He continued in His plans to make Himself known to those created in His image. So that no man would miss this effort, The Word sent John the Baptist to announce His coming.
There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light. There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man.
Even after John fulfills his prophetic duties as the herald of The Word, the intended audience, the Jewish nation, was clueless. That the Creator of the Cosmos personally shows up and goes unrecognized (and ultimately brutalized) by His chosen people has to be the most tragic event in human history.
He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him.
Still yet, The Word is undeterred. He continued in His mission to make Himself known….. and to the astonishment of the cosmos, He does so as a loving Father….
… ..But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
That the same Word that breathed the cosmos into existence aspires to not only reveal Himself but adopt us is the single-most amazing thing to me I have ever encountered. That a God of ultimate power and glory would become flesh, like me, in order to finally convey what He is really like and what He is really up to overwhelms my intellect yet utterly wins my spirit.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Father, we pray that the morning star would arise in our hearts; that every obstacle that would keep Truth from embracing us entirely would be demolished. Assault the strongholds of our hearts where we have learned to resist love. Draw us out from behind our defenses and convey Fatherhood to our spirits in ways that mend us emotionally and restore us to a flow of Your Holy Spirit. Amen.
