Happy Resurrection Day!
May you be filled with joy today knowing our Redeemer lives!
Posts by Dorci
The Place of Victory
“And being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly…”
Luke 22:44
I grew up in a small, older house on a hill that had one unusual but useful feature: a sundeck. When things got especially stressful inside the house, which they often did, and I wanted to run away, I’d walk outside and up the stairs to my solitary place on the roof. There I sat alone and quiet, as far away from my troubles and the world as I could get, looking out over the valley below.
As I grew older and was able to get away from the house, without really realizing it, I carried my sundeck inside me. And when life got rough, which it often did, I’d run away by crawling inside myself, alone and quiet.
Even after Christ came into my heart, there have still been times when circumstances were so overwhelmingly painful that I did what I always did – withdrew inside myself, running away from the world, even from God.
There I’d sit, alone and quiet, where thoughts and anxiety replaced words.
But words are sometimes necessary for prayer. And without prayer I’d effectively shut God out of my circumstances, out of my pain, and out of my answers.
There can be no more painful trial than what Christ faced in the garden as He prayed about the speeding train that was coming straight for Him – arrest, rejection, torture, and death. Death on a cross.
A death that would cause Him, a perfect man who had never known the guilt and shame of sin, to feel more than an agonizing death, but the weight of every sin that had ever or would ever be committed.
If there were ever a darkness to descend on someone that could cause anxiety and a loss for words, this was it.
“And being in anguish…”
This was not just anxiety or worry. The Greek word for anguish is agonia, meaning agony, and it comes from another word agone, which is “a place of assembly (as if led), that is, a contest (held there); an effort or anxiety – conflict, contention, fight, race.”
Christ had withdrawn to the garden as He faced the darkest, bleakest time of His life, but not to shut out the world, to run to His Father. To pray, and not just any prayer. This was a fight.
He agonized with the conflict in His own humanity, asking His Father if it was His will that He would remove the suffering, and He fought against the enemy.
But the harder the prospect of deep suffering pressed in to Him and the anguish weighed on Him, the harder He pressed into the Father.
He prayed more earnestly.
The more He struggled the more intently and more fervently He prayed, so much that He sweat drops of blood falling to the ground.
By the time He left the garden of olive trees, He was strengthened in His Spirit, one with the Father, and resolute in His purpose. He was ready.
Because He turned to His Father, He went through the suffering and was victorious in accomplishing His will, for the joy set before Him…
Sometimes in our anguish we are tempted to turn to other things.
This world offers a million things and people and ways to get through our times of suffering.
But only one way will bring us through suffering even more strengthened, more courageous, and in the end victorious, and that is by pressing into God through prayer.
Sometimes all we have in prayer are groans, but even then the Holy Spirit knows our hearts and our minds and is able to interpret those groans and intercede to the Father on our behalf. He knows what we need even when we do not. All we need to do is show up.
Christ found victory in the garden through prayer before He ever saw the cross, and we’ll find victory, too, if we’ll show up in our garden, our sundeck, our closet, wherever we seek the Lord and His will and provision, and pray. Don’t mull, don’t pout, don’t feel sorry for ourselves, and don’t try to figure it out on our own.
Pray. With whatever faith we have, enter into the throne room of God by the blood of Christ and pray the boldest prayers we know how.
Prayer is the avenue that gives us His strength to keep believing in the darkest trials, to line up our will with God’s, to fill us with His peace, and to give us a vision of the joy set before us…
Christ showed us the way in the garden. And because He was victorious, in death and in life, so are we. His joy was to bring reconciliation and relationship between the Lord and us. His joy was to know us now and forever.
And our joy, if we’ll seek Him even in our darkest times, especially in our darkest times, is to be more than conquerors. To conquer our sins and our fears on the backs of those trials, and through it all to know Christ, our Redeemer, our Savior, our Friend, now and forever.
“Are your ears awake? Listen. Listen to the Wind Words, the Spirit blowing through the churches. I’m about to call each conqueror to dinner. I’m spreading a banquet of Tree-of-Life fruit, a supper plucked from God’s orchard.”
Revelation 2:7 The Message
How Can Salt Lose Its Saltiness?
I ask myself this question every time I come across these words of Jesus –
“You are the salt of the earth.
But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
It is no longer good for anything,
except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
Matthew 5:13
So, how does salt lose its saltiness?
What was Jesus telling us?
We mostly use salt now to make great burgers and to bring out all the good flavors in our food, but in Jesus’ day, salt was very important and used for many things. Besides being used to flavor food, it was also used to preserve food, to heal, and as currency, or trade. (The word salary comes from the Latin word salarium, the root word of which is sal.) And it’s essential to our health.
When Jesus sat on the mountainside teaching by the Sea of Galilee, not far from the salt-filled Dead Sea, the people who were listening had a much fuller, richer understanding of the metaphor “you are the salt of the earth.” And my guess is they would have also understood how salt could lose its saltiness and what a horrifying thought that was.
Salt is made up of a number of chemical compounds, but what it is mostly, what makes it salty, what makes it useful, is sodium chloride, which is very stable and will keep its usefulness for years.
But…
If salt is exposed to water, or diluted, the sodium chloride can be dissolved and removed, and the salt will lose its essence, or saltiness. It still looks like salt, but it’s no longer useful.
We, too, can look the same on the outside, but if we let our faith become weak, we’ll lose our usefulness in the kingdom of God.
So how can we, being the salt of the earth, lose our saltiness?
How can we lose our usefulness?
There are a million ways, but it all comes down to letting our faith become diluted.
Watered down. Weak. Tasteless. Flat.
“But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith
and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love
as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ
to bring you to eternal life.” Jude 1:20
Jude writes an impassioned letter to his fellow believers warning them that wolves have always, and will always slip in among the sheep, and will corrupt them and their faith if they’re not careful. The ungodly “pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.” (Jude 1:4)
In this age of television, computers, and smartphones, we no longer need to wait for the godlessness of the world to physically come in among us. The world comes at us constantly, and the more we allow it, the more we become steeped in it, the more we’ll begin to look like it, think like it, and believe like it.
Not only are there people who pervert the gospel itself, sometimes even calling themselves Christians, all around us there is a pervasive attitude of anger, hatred, judgment, unforgiveness, self-righteousness, salaciousness, among others. The apostle Paul warned about this explicitly in his second letter to Timothy.
God’s Word warns us over and over to be careful of allowing any false beliefs, no matter how subtle or how good or even inspirational they may sound, to water down the true gospel, and our faith.
Every day we have to be vigilant and spiritually discerning of what is true and what is not, and
“not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Rom. 12:2)
And by doing that we are able to build ourselves up as Jude exhorts us, and
“…make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.” (2 Peter 1:5-9)
The same word Jude used for holy faith is used for the Holy Spirit, in whom we are to pray at all times. He enables us to worship God over the world and ourselves, to seek God’s will above our own, to repent of our sins and be cleansed and made holy, set apart for the work of God.
Unless we’re walking in Him we will revert right back to walking in our flesh, to living for the world and for ourselves, and in that state we cannot be useful in spiritual things.
“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” (Colossians 2:6-8)
If we ever wonder what God’s will for us is, it must include this: “…to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1:27b
And whatever we do, we cannot allow anyone, especially those who have set themselves up as pastors or other type of spiritual leader, no matter how popular they are, to water down the truth in the Word of God and our faith.
“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what they itching ears want to hear.” 2 Timothy 4:3-4
Sometimes popularity comes at the expense of the truth that most don’t want to hear. Watering down the truth, appealing to our flesh, is exactly what the enemy will use to weaken our faith and our witness.
So, let’s determine to look and be more like Christ and less like the world, to live our lives worthy of the calling we have in Christ who paid for us with a hefty price.
Let’s be worth our salt.
Lesson From a Rescue – #2
“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted
and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
Psalm 34:18
It’s been almost two years since we rescued our furry, four-legged friend, and it continues to be apparent that he rescued us right back. The last time I talked about how the Lord used Rocky to remind me that no matter what, God never tires of loving us or taking caring of us. That He will continue to rescue us until that day He rescues us for the last time and takes us home to be with Him forever. And recently He reminded me of that once again.
As much as I hate it, there are still times when the pain I’m feeling is so deep, so encompassing, so overshadowing, that I wonder where God is. Is He still there? Does He see me? Does He know what’s going on and how much pain I’m in?
Recently I’d been suddenly faced with some new health issues, on top of an already far-too-full plate of them, and I was overwhelmed with it all. They were bigger than my brain could handle and I didn’t know what to do. I’d been running to try to stay ahead of them, but they caught up to me one day and I broke down in tears.
My bedroom door was closed and Rocky was at the other end of the house.
When I was finished, I knew when I opened the door Rocky would be right there. He always is.
And sure enough he was right there, waiting for me to open the door. His rescued heart knows what pain is and somehow he understands when someone needs a comforting friend.
I immediately thought that if a dog with a brain the size of a walnut and a heart not much bigger is right there whenever I need comforting, how much more is my Abba Father who sent His only Son to die for my sins and filled me with His Holy Spirit near to me when my heart is broken? And how much more will He rescue me when my spirit is humbled?
Sometimes I just need to open the door of my heart, to look up from the cloud of confusion and pain, to see that He is there. And even in those times I don’t see or hear or feel Him, I can know He’s there, just on the other side of the door, because I am called to walk by faith and not by sight. Sometimes pain is designed to be overwhelming, bigger than we can handle, so our faith will grow bigger than our need for sight.
The Friend we have in Christ knows what it’s like to suffer, to be in pain, and even to cry out to His Father, asking where He is. He understands our pain and is compassionate toward us. I’m convinced that when we’re prostrate on the ground in grief, He’s down there with us, holding us, and crying out to the Father on our behalf.
Rocky is my furry little illustration of that.
But the Friend we have in Christ knows our heart and our pain, inside and out, and His love and compassion bring Him near and rescue us, now and forever.
