November 2024 – Wisdom From the Word

Encounters

Encounters with the Living God can change us. Salvation, the new birth, is an encounter, an event that initiates a process. As we then walk with Jesus we should be growing and reflecting more of His character. Paul describes this ongoing process as Christ being formed in us (Galatians 4:19) and it is seen in his teaching around the works of the flesh in contrast to the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:19-26) and the sowing and reaping principle he presents (Galatians 6:7-10). The ongoing process of spiritual growth is built on daily faithfulness. Isaiah described is as ‘precept upon precept, line upon line (Isaiah 28:10).

In a faithful daily walk there are also moments or opportunities of encounter. There is an expression, ‘Character isn’t formed in crisis it is revealed.’ What we have daily sown into our lives is what will be revealed when we encounter a significant challenge. We see an example in the life of Isaiah in chapter 6, in particular, verse 3-7.

³ And one cried to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory!” ⁴ And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. ⁵ So I said: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The LORD of hosts.” ⁶ Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with the tongs from the altar. ⁷ And he touched my mouth with it, and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; Your iniquity is taken away, And your sin purged.” Isaiah 6:3–7 (NKJV)

Prior to this encounter, Isaiah had been prophesying judgement during the reign of Uzziah. After Uzziah died Isaiah saw Yahweh on the throne (John informs us this was Jesus – (John 12:37-41) and essentially said, ‘Oh no! I’m also in trouble!’ Isaiah shifted from pronouncing judgment on others to pronouncing it on himself.

When Isaiah saw Yahweh/Jesus on the throne he acknowledged that he was in need of cleansing. Then one of the seraphim flew to Isaiah with a live coal and when it touched his lips (Isaiah had been using his voice to pronounce judgment) said his inequity and sin were removed. As an aside, if you have an image of a cute cherubic figure in mind, banish that. Seraphim literally means ‘burning ones.’ These fiery creatures burned with holiness and zeal for Yahweh and His glory. Cherubim in scripture are similar, guardians of sacred space who protected Eden after Adam and Eve were banished and guard the ark of the covenant.

Now back to Isaiah’s encounter. The fruit of the encounter was a prophetic ministry that spanned decades (I once calculated it at 55 years, scholarly speculation varies from 40-60 years). It led to Isaiah prophesying Jesus’ birth, the restoration of the nation, the crucifixion and a number of other significant events with Isaiah being known as the ‘prince of prophets.’

Now the key here is not that Isaiah had an encounter, it is his response. I have sought to be faithful in my daily walk but I have also had encounters with His presence. I don’t claim anything like Isaiah’s experience, yet I once had an encounter where it felt like the Spirit unveiled eternity to me. It was a brief frightening experience that was only resolved in my heart and mind a couple of decades later. I trust that I responded correctly but don’t fully know. I do know that encounters with His presence are opportunities. Thus, I suggest, let’s daily walk with Him, seek His face and be prepared for encounters that drive our walk deeper.

PS – do you have something to share from your walk with Jesus?

Values, What a Concept Part 3

I close this series looking at the challenges of aligning our values and worldview with scripture. The first thing to note is that this is a real battle, spiritual warfare. As I noted in my last post, “The presentation of our body to His service and the considering of ourselves as dead to our former way of life, sin, are both acts of spiritual warfare that establish and enforce His victory in our lives and make us salt and light in our culture.”

To intentionally engage in this transformational process, we need to draw on His grace to swim against the tide of our culture and the spiritual influence of darkness, which is of course a significant part of our current culture. We draw on His grace in two ways. One, way is by asking for the Spirit’s help, the other is intentionally stepping into this battle by seeking to find and engage in the things He has prepared for us to do. Paul said it this way.

⁸ For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, ⁹ not of works, lest anyone should boast. ¹⁰ For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:8–10 (NKJV)

The Lord has already prepared things for us to do, our part is to discern and engage in them. While there may specific things each of us need to discern, some things are clearly laid out for all of us. Jesus presented a number of them in the Sermon on the Mount, here is a brief sample.

¹⁶ Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Matthew 5:16 (NKJV)

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, ⁴⁵ that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. ⁴⁶ For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷ And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? ⁴⁸ Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. Matthew 5:43–48 (NKJV)

If you haven’t thought of these as acts of spiritual warfare and engaging in cultural transformation, they are, and when you engage in them you are modeling the values of the kingdom. This is presenting our members as instruments/weapons of righteousness (Romans 6:12-14, 17-19) and presenting our body as a living sacrifice and aligning our thinking and acting with the values of the kingdom (Romans 12:1-2).

Let’s daily do that.

Values, What a Concept Part 2

When it comes to our worldview and values Paul says we are to renew our minds to align them with kingdom values. This renewal implies change, repentance. Repentance, a change of mind and heart, is part of salvation, yet repentance is not meant to be a one-time act that leads to salvation, it is meant to be a lifestyle that seeks to continually align our thinking and acting with the values of scripture. Our problem in the church is both wrong or poor doctrine, orthodoxy, and wrong practice, orthopraxy. Yet to be found faithful in both we need to develop the ability to swim against the strong currents of our culture. We are daily inundated with billboards, seemingly ‘omnipresent’ social media, regular media and in general a culture heading in the opposite direction of a scriptural worldview. I don’t think that as believers we intentionally choose to be conformed to the world, we simply become immersed in our culture and don’t know how to live out the old expression that we are to ‘be in the world but not of it.’

In Romans 12:2 Paul says very clearly that the solution is to renew our minds. However, I think the primary problem we encounter in trying to renew our minds is earlier in Paul’s exhortation. Let’s look at our passage again.

¹ I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. ² And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Romans 12:1–2 (NKJV)

Paul pairs renewing our minds with presenting our bodies, our whole lives, as a sacrifice. We see this same concept in Romans 6:1-4. This is really a description of Paul’s later summary statement in Romans 12:1-2 about presenting our whole selves as a living sacrifice and transforming our thinking.

¹¹ Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. ¹² Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. ¹³ And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. ¹⁴ For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace. Romans 6:11–14 (NKJV)

This pairing of the principles of Romans 6 with Romans 12 becomes more obvious when we find that the word ‘reckon’ in Greek in 6:11 has the same root as ‘reasonable’ in 12:1. Paul is saying in both instances that it is simply the logical thing to do and it is by extension a spiritual act. The word instruments in 6:13 also means ‘weapon.’ The presentation of our body to His service and the considering of ourselves as dead to our former way of life, sin, are both acts of spiritual warfare that establish and enforce His victory in our lives and make us salt and light in our culture.

I encourage you to reflect on these things and in my next post I will delve further into what kingdom values look like.

Values, What a Concept Part 1

Those of you who are older may remember a popular sitcom from decades ago, one where the broader populace was first exposed to the comedy of Robin Williams. The show was called Mork and Mindy and featured Robin Williams as Mork and Pam Dawber as Mindy. Williams played a bumbling alien from another planet here to study earth and humanity. One of the key ongoing plots was Mork not understanding our values and behaviours. In the midst of his attempts to understand, at one point in an episode he uttered a line, “Reality, what a concept!”

This brings me to our subject, ‘Values, What a Concept!’ In our multicultural society we are often exposed to people from other cultures. Not individuals from other planets like Mork, but from places with different values and customs. Which leads to the idea of the source of our values. I don’t know how often most of us reflect on the idea of where our values come from, yet I am confident that most of us are familiar with some version of the following verses.

¹ I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. ² Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:1–2 (ESV)

As an aside, I have addressed the ‘reasonable service’ versus ‘spiritual worship’ in the past. Suffice to say the first is accurate in terms of the meaning of the words and the second is accurate in terms of the spirit of the words. Thus, consecrating our whole being to Jesus is both reasonable and an act of worship. Yet for our purposes we need to consider why Paul penned these verses. From my perspective the answer is simple, Paul recognized that when people came to Christ their values need to be realigned to come into conformity with the values of the kingdom of God.

What is inherent in Romans 12:1-2 is a values test. I know that may not be your first thought when reading those two verses, yet the test is there. We see it when we recognize that there are two types of values, professed and expressed. That is, there is what we say and what we do. In these verses Paul is calling his readers to align their professed values, what they say, with their expressed values, what they do. Whether or not we recognize there is a values issue in the church there is one. When we recognize it, we are in a position to respond to the issue. The problem is well illustrated in the 2024 worldview survey from Arizona Christian University. Here is a sample statement, “The 2024 national survey shows that 66% of adults consider themselves to be Christians, yet just 4% of all adults – and only 6% of the self-identified Christians – possess a biblical worldview (i.e. Biblical Theism).[1] Canadian statistics are harder to come by but when I have found comparable ones in the past the results are very similar to the US results.

When we reflect on where our values come from, we can think of our family, community, those we associate with in our spare time, the media and the broader culture. We are always either influencing or being influenced by those around us. This survey tells us that our values are not being drawn from scripture or the church. In short, whether by design or default, we have not followed Paul’s injunction and the church has been largely conformed to the world in our day-to-day activities.

My goal here is not to merely highlight the problem, I will come to solutions as we head into one of the seasons that highlights the issue, Christmas. However, if we don’t recognize the need to change we have no impetus to do so, and by default continue to have our values shaped by forces other than scripture and the church.

As we continue this journey, I will present ways to actually live out Romans 12:1-2. For now, I encourage you to reflect on it.

More to come.

[1] https://www.arizonachristian.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CRC-Release-AWVI-2-April-23-2024.pdf

The Tree of Life Part 3

Continuing, we will look a little deeper at the soulish versus the spiritual aspects of our lives after our conversion. Many fail to make any distinction between our spirit and soul, viewing them as interchangeable. Scripture doesn’t view them that way. If we have become converted or born again, then we have partaken of the life of Christ, the tree of life. While I firmly believe that the two trees in the garden were literal trees, I also believe the tree of life represents Jesus. We see this in the imagery in Revelation.

⁷ “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.” Revelation 2:7 (NKJV)

² In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Revelation 22:2 (NKJV)

¹⁴ Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city. Revelation 22:14 (NKJV)

Methodius, Bishop of Olympus in the early fourth century saw the tree of life here as representing Christ, as does the present Lexham Bible Dictionary,

TREE OF LIFE (הַחַיִּים עֵץ, hachayyim ets; ξύλον ζωής, xylon zōēs). A tree that represents immortality, divine presence, wisdom, and righteousness as a path of life and an eschatological promise.

If we think this through, Christ is the source of life both now and in eternity. He created all things and He sustains us. The choice we have in this life is whether we learn to daily lean into and draw from Him. This is where spirit and soul take on their importance.

Like many important truths this one is hidden in plain site. It simply requires digging into and understanding scripture. We start with walking by the Spirit, which is of course drawing on Jesus.

¹⁶ I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. Galatians 5:16 (NKJV)

¹⁸ But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Galatians 5:18 (NKJV)

²⁵ If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Galatians 5:25 (NKJV)

¹⁴ For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. Romans 8:14 (NKJV)

When we take these verses seriously, it leads us to learning how to lean into and depend on the Spirit. The scriptures teach that we have both a spirit and soul and that they do not have the same function. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 shows that we have both a spirit and soul and Hebrews 4:12 shows that they have different functions. Even those who have not been born again have a spirit (1 Corinthians 2:11, Proverbs 20:27, James 2:26) though the Lord is not dwelling in it (1 Corinthians 6:17). God has a soul as well (Leviticus 26:11, 30, Jeremiah 6:8, 12:7, Zechariah 11:8) but His essence is spiritual (John 4:24).

Now to functions. With our spirit we can contact the Lord as Isaiah 26:9, Luke 1:46-47 and 1 Corinthians 2:12 teach. Although most translations do not have a difference in tense when referring to the functions of soul and spirit in the Isaiah and Luke passages, the difference is there in Hebrew and Greek. The lack of difference in most translations reflects the theology of the translators, not the teaching of scripture. The difference in Hebrew and Greek is brought out in the KJV, NASB, NKJV, LEB and interlinear translations.

In the Isaiah and Luke passages we see that Isaiah knew that no matter how much he desired God with his soul he was only going to contact Him via his spirit. Similarly, Mary’s soul magnified the Lord only after her spirit had encountered Him and rejoiced in Him. This is not a matter of splitting theological hairs. It is a matter of utmost importance because we in the church so easily follow after the things of the soul believing them to be spiritual. We need to understand what our soul is if we are to not be deceived into believing ourselves to be spiritual when we are merely soulish.

Most of those who recognize the distinction between soul and spirit view the soul as the mind will and emotions. This seems to fit with scripture with the soul as simply our natural ability to think, feel, choose and interact with others. In short, the natural man (literally soulish in Greek, it is the adjective form of the Greek word for soul) of 1 Corinthians 2:14.

If we think we can lean on the abilities of our soul once we are converted we need to read Matthew 26:38, Mark 14:34 and John 12:27. Here we find Christ very aware that His soul desired to draw back from the will of His Father. He had to choose to be led by the Spirit.

Practically, the difference between being led by the soul or the Spirit is that if we are responding out of, and first depending on, our mind, will or emotions, (the natural man) to lead we are open to deception and this is where counterfeit spirituality enters in. Many of the mystics down through the centuries had incredible experiences while leaning on their emotions and intellects but their experiences were contrary to scripture. Similarly, many down through the centuries have trusted in the intellect and ended up persecuting God’s people. Depending on and functioning out of the abilities of the natural man is in fact a major gateway of hell into the church (Matthew 16:18).

We can only follow our mind, will or emotions when they are in agreement with and in submission to our spirit joined to His Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:17). In practice the relationship between soul and spirit is a bit like that between a parent and child. The child is free to choose within prescribed limits or rules. However, the child needs to be attentive for the voice of the parent and if the parent speaks the child has to choose whether or not to obey. Just so the soul is free to choose within the guidelines of the written word, but when the spirit moves or leads our soul has to choose whether or not to obey. Spiritual believers obey, while the carnal do not, or they do so with mixed motives.

A scriptural example of walking in freedom and then responding to the prompting of the Holy Spirit is seen in Acts 16:6-10. Here Paul and the rest of his apostolic team were travelling and fulfilling the call on Paul’s life (Acts 26:16-18). At this point Paul was trying to go where he thought best because he had no clear direction from the Spirit. His soul was free to choose. As He followed his commission the Lord intervened and gave new direction. The result was that a whole new area was opened to the gospel.

I am not suggesting all or any of us will do something this dramatic by paying attention to the leading of His Spirit in our spirit. I am saying that it is how we are called to walk as believers. We know He has called us to prayer, worship, His word, godly relationships and to be salt and light. As we choose to walk this way, we simply need to be sensitive and attentive to His direction in our day to day lives and depend on His leading instead of our natural wisdom.

When we do life this way, we are both walking in the Spirit and continuously partaking of the tree of life!