Enemy of the State

You are about to enter into a world sure of some things,  gravity pulls you down, matter cannot change, buildings remain the same, but no matter what happens things keep changing, it is as if the world itself is against you…   

Imagine that you are a secret agent trying to kill the #1 enemy of the state.  This enemy is not like anyone you can imagine.  He is worse the Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Nero….He attacks the mind of those around him, making him puppets to do his will.  You must stay ever-vigilant in your fight against him so that you do not fall prey to his attacks, and become yet another zombie following him.  

Your luck has changed, and you have caught wind of his secret hide-out, but not some far off cave he is right here in your city.  Never did you think you could be so fortunate in your fight.  You hunt him day and night and then…You can see him in your sights.  Just as you think you have killed him, fired the deadly shot, the world shifts…blinks and jumps.  What you thought was your 9mm, government issue pistol in your hand is no more; what you thought was the thunder of the bullet just you yelling bang, and once again your “prey” is out of sight, and worse still you have lost your weapon.  You panic and try to regain your headings.  Two things become crystal clear to you, first: you must try and find the weapon again, and second: you must try to search for and kill the enemy.  

You grab your faithful partner and start to pick up the trail.  He leads you to a tall building with classic, Greek architecture.  Huge columns supporting a giant bowl shaped balcony.  As you approach you can see the unthinkable happening…there are people blindly walking off the building to their death, but worse still you can see your weapon.  A man is holding it and just shooting blindly into a crowd of people.  When they are hit they fall dead.  No one seems to care that people are dying all around them, worse still is that they keep walking toward the edge and when the reach the edge, they don’t stop, they don’t take a second thought they just keep walking as if they are expecting the balcony to continue, when it clearly doesn’t.  This is clearly the work of the enemy who you see laughing in the middle of the crowd holding up his hand like a gun and shooting at the crowd, when he shoots people are falling dead because of the man using your weapon.

With sudden urgency you know that you must reach this evil thing.  You start to run to the building and you reach the main floor but there aren’t any doors on the front of the building.  You run around till you find an open door.  You get inside to find people walking, walking, walking, running into doors but being so blind to the world around them they just keep walking again and again running into the doors.  You hurry to a door marked stairs and run into it.  You run up what seems like hundreds of stairs before you find this top floor, the main floor where everyone is walking to their death.    In the vast ballroom you see the mad-man, the enemy and start to run towards him.  You are about to tackle him, thinking that all this is over when the world shifts…blinks and jumps again.  The enemy disappears and you go sliding into the hallway.  You get up desperate to catch this evil fiend.  Knowing the layout of the building you and your partner decide to split up you were going to run right and she is going to run left, and you will meet somewhere in the middle of this vast circular tower.  As you start to run it happens again the world shifts, blinks and jumps.  The hallway seems to start to fall apart the tiles tart to separate and twist the floor is no longer flat and it seems to move about like a roller coaster.  The harder you try the harder it is to move, like trying to escape from quick sand, your struggles just make it impossible to get free.  Then something catches your eye.   It’s a….It’s a….man….Calm and serene.  Not trying to catch the enemy nor overcome by his pull, he is just looking at you.  With the most peaceful and calm face you have ever seen.  Suddenly you recognize this man, He is Christ.  

You fall and bow at his feet, and the whole place seems to stop moving. You weep before him and start to plead for his help.  In an instant the enemy is defeated and people return back to normal, your world is normal….is brought to peace once more.  Allow Jesus to be your “secret weapon” and aim Him at the enemy of the state…of your mind.  Find peace tonight with Jesus. 

There are things in life that seem unobtainable.  We can try with all our might to become a better man.  We can struggle, stretch and chaise after dreams and goals, but no matter how hard we try they are just out of reach.   Think of yourself as someone entering into an Alice and wonderland type world, trying to kill the jabberwocky.  The things you take for granted are no more.  There is but one thing that remains…God.  There is not place you can go to get away from him, no place you can hide, even into the very lair of the evil one, God is still there, and it makes him shutter.  In this story the evil one, is that sin, that wrong thing, that monkey on our back that we refuse to let go.  We have tried to take it out ourselves.  We have fought with it numerous times but without the help of God we will never have victory over it.  Only when we stop and bow and God’s feet, at the feet of Jesus and ask for his help, laying down our troubles before him can we rid ourselves of this affliction.   In the story only when he tried nothing, and allowed Christ to help did the world return to peace.  

You may be going through some hard times.  You all have your own enemies, and struggles, but allow Christ to take care of it for you.  Allow him to overcome for you, because He already has victory.  Turn your struggles over to him. 

If it be your will

I am reading Mark Batterson's book Primal and he is talking about something completely unrelated to this blog, but mentioned as a little aside, and it got me thinking....He was talking about how he went forward at an altar call to receive a blessing, He wanted God to multiply his blessing in the form of selling 25,000 copies of In a Pit with a Lion on a Snow Day, but he ended his prayer with "If it be your will"  and mentioned how it was more a spiritual cop-out to the faith it required for him to ask for what he felt he should have--100,000 copies sold (which is where it actually ended up).  It started me thinking about that phrase  "if it be your will"....

While Jesus did pray for God's will on earth, was often seeking after God's will, He told us to:

Matt 7:7-8

7 "Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 

 I feel that sometimes we limit God, or rather limit our faith by praying "if it be your will"  I've heard and on occasion prayed it myself, people ask God to heal a person, "if it be your will"  but when we pray in such away we give ourselves an out, we allow the miracle not to happen, but what would happen if we really tested our faith and prayed what we claim to believe, that Jesus can heal, when Peter and John prayed they did not pray if it be God's will that the lame man walk, but they TOLD the lame man to get up and walk, to get up then they lifted him up!  They had the faith that God could heal and knew that God's will was to bring glory to God not to Peter and John and they acted like it, that being said, why can't we act like we know we should? We know it is our job to pray for the sick to be Healed, not to pray that nothing happens.  Let's take a stand as Christians and believe in God like He is the creator of the universe and the one who can heal, not who may heal, but the one who will heal the sick, and lets stop giving our faith an out, but rather put our faith into true action!

Why aren't we reaching?

Friday after work and stopping at the church shortly I drove onto the Richardson Highway to head home.  Right as I got off the entrance ramp there at 5th ave I saw a man hitch-hiking.  I have picked up hitch-hikers in the past, but not often.  This time was different I felt an urging in my spirit to stop for this man.  I stopped asked where he was headed (down to moose creek) and I drove him to the Bathing Beauty pond right near where I live.  The whole ten miles this man talked, I'm not sure about what because I had the windows down in my car and he wasn't speaking loud enough, but I gathered he was here for work, and was up here from Anchorage longer than he expected so he decided to go visit friends down in Moose Creek.

Well upon getting out the man said to me that I would be in his prayers tonight.  He then said "I really mean it, I believe in that sort of thing."  I replied with he will be in mine and I do too, I'm a pastor.  I don't like to publize that all the time, but I felt it right at the moment.  When I said that the man stopped talking and his jaw just about hit the ground, and for the first time since I picked him up he was speechless.  Now this leads me to a question why was he so speechless.  Aren't we supposed to be helping, supposed to be God's hands and feet here on earth?  If we (as Christians, at the church however you want to call it)  are the body of Christ why is it that when we show compassion and love to people that instead of being accustom to the kind person being a Christian they are surprised?

Jesus took time to talk with people.  He took time to share and love everyone, even the sick, poor and young.  The people that were considered nothing in society Jesus spent the most time with.  Herod only got to see Jesus when he was on trial--not when He was preforming miracles.  Jesus told the story about the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37 and the majority of the church treats the sick and poor like the men before the Samaritan.  We don't have the time.  We have to be somewhere important, but is this always the case, is this really the case the majority of the time.  Why don't we trust in God to protect us against what may happen and let the light of Jesus shine through us.

Casting Crowns has a song: "If We Are the Body" Check it out, then I challenge you to show the Way, show His Love for the downcast and brokenhearted.  Let's be the body of Christ, the way He showed us to be!  Let's touch the untouchable, lets heal the sick, lets give water to the thirsty and feed those who are hungry and offer rides to those who don't have them.  Let's be the body!

Coincedence or the Hand of God.

The more I get to know God, the more I am convinced that nothing, and I mean nothing, happens simply by coincidence.  Romans 8:28 says: "And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them." (NLT) I have found this true so many different times.  I use a variety of curriculum and resources for my kid's church lessons. I pray before starting each lesson that God would have the kids there who need to hear this lesson, and that He speaks to everyone there--even my adult helpers. I have found on numerous occasions that what God has to speak through that weeks lesson is the very same thing He has been speaking to me for quite awhile and the very same thing that God has given the morning speaker in the adult service.  God knows what He is doing. 

This past Sunday I several kids come up to stating that they wanted to be baptized, but upon further questioning I realized that while they knew they should do it, they didn't understand why it should be done, or the significance of it, and I was pondering teaching a lesson upon baptism so that they might understand it more fully.  Well I started to prepare my lesson this week, from the BGMC curriculum (I do one every 2nd Sunday of the month)  and the True Missionary Story is about a group of people wishing to be baptized!  How cool is that!  This leads me to be able to do a very short explanation of baptism for the kids without having to go into a whole lesson solely on baptism.  God just has a way of working these things out.  And it is not the first time this has happened.  I'm so blessed to be serving a God that knows how to bring it all together.  I just love to serve and follow Him! 

Change

Why is it that as the summer ends we long for winter?  Or as the winter months drag on we long for the kiss of the summer sun.  Is it that we long for change?  For if we do not change, what are we? We long for things to stay the same, but in the same breath we wish they would change.  Change happens, there is nothing we can do to stop it, slow it down, or speed it up.  Change happens.  Some change is much sought after, others is uncomfortable.  We have been changing since our very conception in the womb and will continue to change until the day we die.  This is simply called aging.  Other changes like the weather or seasons come and there is nothing that we can do to stop it.  Other changes come that are caused by others, and this is what fears us the most.  But not all of this type of change is bad.  If others did not change us when we were infants we would still stink!  If others did not push us to change in the educational realm we would be stupid.  If others still did not push us in other areas we would not grow.  Change is a huge part of life, but we fear what that change may bring.

Of the things that change in our life there is one thing that we know God doesn't change, He brings about the change of others.  He is the one true anchor of the universe the Bible says He is the same yesterday, today and forever more, and in times of change it is Him who we must put our trust. Even when the hard times come-especially when the hard times come-we must put our trust in Him to be our constant during our times of change.