Sonnet XIII

On The American Election 2008 - A Sonnet To My King
By Jonathan D. Eller

My God, Your wisdom far exceeds my own,
And I draw comfort from this very thing.
For by Your great omnipotence You've shown
That You determine president and king.
Yes, You know all men's hearts - this fact is true -
And render unto them a payment just,
Rewarding men and nations what is due.
Lord, in Your goodness I have learned to trust.
Your discipline is sorrowful for sure -
Your wrath and blows seem ever so severe -
But chastisement is sent to make us pure,
And by its cleansing helps us to draw near.
My God, this nation's nothing without Thee.
Please cleanse our hearts and truly make us free.

November 5, 2008

Holiness

Jim Laffoon has written an excellent devotion on his blog about seeing the consequences of sin and using those examples to create in himself a fear of God and a hatred of sin. It is a most worthy read. Here is an excerpt:

In my own life, God has allowed me to be involved in spiritual autopsies more times than I care to count.

Every time I have to face the horrible consequences of rebellion and sin in the life of a person I love, it makes me fear God and hate sin all the more. Whether it is the horrors and pain of sexual immorality, or the pride and insecurity keeping a man or woman of God from confessing the sinful habits which would later destroy them, these close encounters with God’s judgments have helped to make me a wiser man today.

May your heart be filled with the fear of the Lord and a hunger for holiness as you consider the message of this story.

- Jim Laffoon @ Our Daily Blog

We must be careful to not trample underfoot the grace of God or to take sin lightly. The wages of sin have always been death and will remain so, but Christ's sacrifice gives us the power to live holy lives through the Holy Spirit.

Shocking!

... by one offering He (Jesus) has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. And the Holy Spirit bears witness to us; for after saying, "'This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days,' says the Lord: 'I will put my laws upon their heart, and upon their mind I will write them,'" He then says, "and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more."

Hebrews 10:14-17

Offended?

After Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in the towns of Galilee. When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?"

Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me." Matthew 11:1-6

...Out of every human on the planet, how could John the Baptist be in danger of falling away? What had offended him so deeply that he would question the very man whose ministry he had been sent into the world to confirm?

These questions are important because sooner or later, you, too, like John, may be tempted to become offended at the God you love so much....

...like John, they have been placed in difficult circumstances. Whether they feel imprisoned emotionally, physically, financially, or spiritually, their sense of reality gradually becomes distorted in their darkness.

In this state, they can easily begin to question God’s love for them and His purpose for their life....

Wherever you are today, I beg you not to become offended with God. It doesn’t matter how horrible your circumstances are, or how disappointed you have become. If you simply wait on Him, He will bring to light His purposes for your life in the midst of your darkness.


Jim Laffoon @ Our Daily Blog

Oh Rats! A Thought for Many Days

“…Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way, the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light. Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my soul. Now that cellar is out of reach of my conscious will. I can, to some extent control my acts: I have no direct control over my temperament (emotions). And if what we are matters even more than what we do—then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about. And that applies to my good actions too…I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps of the Christian life we realize that everything which needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God…and in reality, it is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us.” C S Lewis, Mere Christianity.

Quote Of The Day

But what is repentance? Is it grief and sorrow for our sins? That is part but only part and not even the most important aspect. It is not just remorse but a transformation, a reorienting of our lives toward God. It is a state of being in which we find ourselves in a great light. It is not a dark place. We may think all this emphasis on repentance is dark and oppressive, where is the joy of the Christian life? The answer is in repentance! We can only truly repent when we have come into the light of God's presence and we see ourselves as we are.

Repentance is the daughter of hope and denial of despair. The ultimate sin is to despair of God's mercy. To live a life of repentance is a life of great faith, we must believe that God loves us and desires to extend His mercy to us and we must believe that He has the power and is willing to change us and make us holy. Many experience great anguish over their sins but are unable to forgive themselves. They have not repented; they have not come to the revelation that love is more powerful than their own failings. They are still too self absorbed and without faith in God's power and mercy. Their eyes are on themselves and not on God. They have not been converted...

To repent is to look, not downward at my own shortcomings, but upward at God's love; not backward with self-reproach, but forward with trustfulness. It is to see, not what I have failed to be but what by the grace of Christ I can yet become.


- Rev. Patrick Cardine

One Of Those Days...

I hate to lose. I mean I REALLY HATE to lose. You might not know it from my mild mannered alter ego but it is very true. In fact, deep down, I'm so competitive that I don't much like the fellow I become when I lose. Over the years I have developed ways to cope with this dark little me. Most of them have involved locking competitive me away in a dark dungeon and not giving him an opportunity to come out and do his thing.

It is a poor solution, really, because I have allowed myself to shut away one of my most masculine traits merely because it is dangerous. If you subscribe to John Eldredge's view of masculinity, you know that that is a cardinal sin. But I digress. See, this post isn't about how I have managed this aspect of my life so much as it is about the warfare that we find ourselves in constantly and more particularly about the warfare in which I found myself yesterday.

One of the neat things about being a Christian is the foregone certainty that we are on a winning team. While this is true, it is also very true that our sanctification doesn't occur overnight. The reality is that we struggle against our flesh for the remainder of our days. Until we die we will contend against its desires. Our enemy does his part too to make sure that we trip often.

As a young Christian I had great success in the battle against the flesh initially. Quite a few of my more fleshly habits dropped to the wayside very easily. However, there came a time in my life (and from my observation the lives of all Christians) where the Lord allowed the enemy to start fighting back. This generally comes as a shock to new believers, and the real hard work of sanctification is begun.

Over the years you become more accustomed to the fight. Indeed, you can even get in the habit of winning these skirmishes with the enemy. Then God takes you to a new place where the demons that you are battling have entrenched themselves deep in the areas of your personality that are so close to your perception of who you are that it feels like the guns of heaven, the blasts of the enemy, and even your own weapons are turned upon you. The very things that we are fighting are the attitudes and mechanisms that we have used to protect ourselves from the wounds that we have received throughout our lives. They were adopted as means of the flesh to survive the awful attack of the enemy who sought to destroy us even before we came to know Jesus our Savior. The difficulty of this part of the fight is that the habits are so deeply ingrained that we often do them without even realizing that we are doing them.

Such is the battle that I have been fighting. Recently, the Lord began to show me that the very root of all of the sinful manifestations that I have been resisting for all of my Christian life are bound up in one thing: FEAR. He has begun to show me through the Scriptures that if we truly know Him and truly understand the relationship that He wants to have with us then we need fear nothing. When we have acknowledged Him as Lord and are submitted to His will for our lives then we have nothing to fear in all of creation.

I pretty well have this down in my mind. I understand the theology behind it. I assent to the logic of it. I believe it is right. And yet I discovered yesterday that there is a big difference between knowledge and true belief. Knowing your enemy does not guarantee victory over him.

Yesterday I had to deal with a financial matter that I was aware of. I knew that I needed to work on it, but wasn't afraid of it. I wasn't afraid, that is, until I sat down to start working on it. It was then that the enemy hit me with everything that he had, and I found myself resorting to all of my old tricks. In short, I totally blew it, even though I knew what was going on, and even though I knew to fight, I found myself totally overwhelmed.

I hate losing. And by God's grace, in the next battle it will be the enemy licking his wounds, not me.