The bottom line

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I remember the day, many years ago now, when I watched my neighbour backing out of his driveway to go to work, and wishing it were me. He had a great job as a stock broker, few if any financial worries, and for the most part worked with numbers, not people. I am not going to illustrate the differences between him and me, but you can fill in the blanks.

Have you ever day-dreamed about a life where there was no stress, no anxiety and no pressure? Have you ever looked around you and felt you were the only person in the room facing all those things? Have you ever wished you had the peaceful, happy and prosperous life of all those people around you?

Admit it. You have. I don’t think you’re any better than me.

There are several problems with this. First, you will never get a life that is so completely filled with endless positives. Nobody lives like that, not even the most enthusiastic prosperity preacher. Second, remember all those other people you are envying? Guess what? They all have problems too. Half of them are probably looking at you, wishing they had what they think you have.

I like to make a distinction between happiness and joy. I get this from C.S. Lewis as well as the Bible. Happiness is the delusion that we can find total serenity based on outwardly positive circumstances. Apart from the fact that nobody lives in such circumstances, it makes us hostage to every wind and gust of adversity that might threaten all the nice but flimsy supports we are relying on. Remember the house built on sand?

So are we, as Christians, to live in continuous gloom and despair? Not at all. Joy is the gift we receive as we realize we can find an inner peace and contentment in our relationship with Christ that is not dependent on outward circumstances but on the God who rules the universe.

Think of the most beautiful stained-glass window you can imagine. There’s an amazing rose window in Durham Cathedral that will take your breath away. Stained glass only comes to life when the light shines through it. God has created a magnificent stained-glass window. The window is his dominion over the created world around us -- people and circumstances as well as geography. The Holy Spirit is the light. When he enters your life and fills you, you see the window you never saw before.

It doesn’t mean everything suddenly becomes easy, but it gives us a very precious and vastly under-rated gift: perspective. Not just any perspective, but God’s perspective. It’s the gift of seeing as he sees.

Paul was writing to his friends about the reality of evil and the hardship of spiritual attack. Then he says this: “But the Lord is faithful” (2 Thessalonians 3:3). The small word “but” overrides everything that has gone before. And there’s something else. Normally the Greek verb “is” would be left out and the meaning understood without it, but it isn’t. That means the sentence should read: “The Lord IS faithful,” as if Paul is screaming the word “is.”

Seeing the stained-glass window puts everything in a different light. You start to see how what you wanted would not have helped you, and how what you didn’t want did help you. You remember that God works all things together for good. You start to become grateful. You begin to ditch the self-pity. And bit by bit, you stop looking out your window wishing you were your neighbour.

My neighbour’s literal bottom line was undoubtedly better than mine.

But after a while, I began to see the stained-glass again. And I reminded myself of the real bottom line:

“But the Lord IS faithful.”

Facing the flood

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Do you ever feel overwhelmed?

We had that feeling last week. Our eldest son Michael was married to his fiancee Samantha on Saturday afternoon in our back yard. As the week progressed, our house filled up with people. Children and grandchildren appeared from every direction. Fridges and freezer were stuffed with wedding food. A marquee was erected. A stack of chairs materialized. Odd jobs put off for months were finished off in rapid order. And to top it all, the weather network decreed a sudden end to our three-month drought, predicting heavy rain, high winds and thunderstorms just in time for the outdoor ceremony.

And in the meantime, all the other challenges and circumstances of life and work continued. People did not stop have crises or needing help.

We were stretched, but in this case only by what I call the volume of circumstances.

What happens when it’s not just the volume, but the nature of the circumstances that becomes overwhelming? What happens when you’re not just physically exhausted, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually worn out?

I have found there are two possible options. One is to try to control everything myself. That means doing everything I can to change the circumstances around me. My end goal is self-protection. I want all the nasty things to go away and leave me in peace.

There’s only one problem with this. God’s end goal is not to protect me from everything that stresses me out. His goal is to draw me into a deeper dependency on himself. It won’t take you long to figure out how those two goals could easily be at cross-purposes.

So the smart thing to do is to take the second option. That is to throw myself on the mercy of God and ask him to keep me in the midst of whatever it is he is doing in me. In the end, it will work out far better for me to let God’s purposes take their course.

This is why Psalm 55:22 has always meant so much to me: “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.”

To cast your burden on the Lord means this: give the control over to him. Stop trying to interfere, manipulate and self-protect. It never works, and will only wear you out.

Your act of faith in casting your burden forms the bridge to his promise: “He will never permit the righteous to be moved.” To go over that bridge can seem like the scariest thing you’ve ever done. It’s that moment when fear and darkness will do their best to paralyze you and keep you back.

It is at that instant that an unshakeable belief in the sovereignty of God is so critical. That conviction involves two things: an assurance that God is all-loving and the knowledge that he is all-powerful.

Faith is neither intellectual certainty nor emotional serenity. Faith is a gift, a conviction that we are to step out in obedience, born at the place where God’s Spirit encounters our spirit. It stares down all that opposes the will of God. In utter human weakness it reaches out for divine strength, and in that strength it conquers. “And this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith” (1 John 5:4).

If you have that faith, it will come up under your feet like a solid rock. It will enable you to run boldly across that bridge. You can be sure of one thing: Jesus is standing on the other side to welcome you.

And what about our wedding? For twelve hours it had rained and rained, and at 1 pm, the appointed hour, it was still raining. But God’s timing is perfect. The bride was 25 minutes late. At the very moment she stepped out of the car in our driveway, the rain stopped. And it stayed dry all day. To the south of us, storms, winds, torrential rains and even a tornado raged all afternoon and evening across large parts of the province. But in our back yard, we had a great wedding, meteorological serenity, and a wonderful start to what we trust will be a great marriage.

Thanks be to God.

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Life in the pressure cooker

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We had a big pressure-cooker in the house I shared with 11 other guys as an undergraduate. It was always threatening to blow up if you didn’t treat it well, and take a load of potatoes along with it.

I spent a day recently trying to help three different people whose life is in the pressure cooker. All three situations were very serious and bringing almost unbearable stress and pain.

Life in the pressure cooker is not easy. We manage to fall into it different ways. Sometimes it’s our own stupidity. Sometimes it’s a complicated mixture. Sometimes it’s just stuff that happens totally out of our control.

The only thing we can manage is our response. And even that can be very hard when our resources have been so depleted. But there are two keys to surviving.

One is the lifeline of our relationship with God. I never fail to be amazed at how God hears my desperate and despairing cries at those low moments. One thing about God -- he is always there. That is one of his names -- Yahweh shammah, which means “the Lord is there.”

It doesn’t matter where “there” is. That’s where you’ll find him.

No matter how deep your darkness, God always has a light to turn on. But you have to ask.

The second key is friends and family you can count on. We all need friends who will also be “there” when trouble strikes. Cultivate friendships in the good times. Be there for others. Cast your bread on the waters and it will return. I can guarantee it.

And remember if you need to ask God for help, you also need to ask your friends. It never ceases to amaze me how we fail to reach out for the support we need. Sometimes we feel too ashamed, sometimes we’re too proud. Get over it. Let your friends help you. Tell them how bad things are. Their job is to help you: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

And so the question arises: “Where is God in all this?”

The answer is obvious. God is in the pressure cooker. Even though it may not be accurate to say he created it (after all, he is not the author of sin, sickness or any other earthly disaster or misfortune), he still is watching over it and using it.

The pressure cooker has a more Biblical name: the refiner’s fire. It’s where James tells us to count it all joy. It’s where Peter tells us our faith is being refined to bring forth gold.

Of course you can’t see any of that when you’re in the middle of it. That’s where it’s up to God and friends to carry you through. But when you look back, the gold is there.

And if there’s someone you know in extreme need, go just sit with them. A friend of mine was executive assistant to Margaret Thatcher. One day the great lady found a staff member in tears. Her husband had recently died. Mrs. Thatcher stopped her activities at once and focussed all her attention on this lady. She went and made a cup of tea, and then sat with her until she felt better. That was the best use the Prime Minister of Great Britain had for her time that day.

The God of all creation is there to sit with you until you’re through your crisis. Just ask him.

Your faith is proven real in the pressure cooker. You have faith even when you think you don’t. When all you can do is cry out to God in utter desperation, that’s all the faith you need. And out of that faith he will bring his gold.

When things look hopeless, just remember they’re not.

And that old pressure cooker never did blow up. It kept turning raw potatoes into something as reasonably edible as 12 young men who were more interested in either studying or partying could produce!

How can I forgive?

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The life and death battle I was going through was very real. We had been badly hurt by people we trusted. After God delivered us from that danger, I found myself in an even harder battle I had not expected. My bitterness was destroying me. And one day the Lord spoke to me that if I did not resolve this, I would do more damage to myself than what had been done by others to me and my family.

The first time I heard my mentor and spiritual father, Duane Harder, make the following statement, I could not have disagreed more: “A woman who has been raped will damage herself more through unforgiveness than through anything the rapist did to her.” How could he say that? All I heard was what seemed like a minimizing of the rape. But what I really missed was the fact that I was minimizing the reality and power of forgiveness.

I should have got it. After all, Jesus said a person who refuses to forgive will be handed over to the tormentors (Matthew 18:34).  Let’s be clear: Jesus was not addressing the person who committed the act, but the victim.

The reason for this is simple: you were forgiven an infinite debt. Therefore, you must forgive others who owe you a finite debt. Your debt is infinite because it was paid by One who was sinless, whereas you, already a sinner, have been sinned against by other sinners.

If we can’t truly forgive, we are letting ourselves in for a lot of trouble. So why is it so hard for us to forgive?

I believe the answer is in our failure to understand what forgiveness is. We live in the deluded belief that forgiveness somehow involves the idea that we have to forget or deny what was done to us. And that we find it understandably impossible to do.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Forgiveness cannot in fact take place without the blunt acknowledgement of the wrong that was done. After all, God, our perfect Creator, is more violated when wrong is done to us than we are. It is God’s standards and God’s law which are being violated.

The Bible paints a very clear picture that God hates sin. When a woman is raped, God hates that even more than the woman does.

So forgiveness begins by putting on the table the wrong that was done to us. Being open about it before trusted friends and mentors also makes us accountable for how we may have had a share in the wrong that was done. The fault is very rarely one hundred per cent on one side.

As we put the wrong on the table, we also declare alongside those with us how much greater God was wronged than we were, and how much more even than us he hates the sin that was committed.

But here is the key. The God who was offended is the only one who has the right to judge. And so in the declaring of the wrong, we hand the person over to God for him to deal with as he chooses.

This, I am convinced, is the key to forgiveness: I renounce my attempt to be the judge, and hand that right over to God, to whom it alone belongs.

If I take the place of judgment, I hand myself over to Satan, the greatest legalist of all, who knows I have no right to it.

And handing the person over to God does not mean I have the right to petition God to do anything other than act in the same mercy he showed toward me. Prayers for God to visit judgment on my enemy are not heard by God, but they are heard by the devil. That is why Jesus commands us to bless those who harm us, not curse them.

Over the years, my wife and I have had more than enough things to forgive. We have been through some truly awful situations. The hardest thing to accept is the fact it has most often been professing Christians who have been the perpetrators. In the end, we came to realize some of these folk were not really Christians at all. The hurt at the time, no matter who the perpetrators were, was very real.

But our story is this. When we forgave, we were free! The burden of hate and hurt lifted. We were no longer controlled and dominated by those who had hurt us and what they did to us. When you refuse to forgive, you allow the wrong that was done to be replayed and re-enacted in your mind every single day of your life. What will that do to you?

Let me give you some advice. Time does not heal. It only allows the wounds to fester.

There is only one way to freedom. Hand those people over to God. Let him be the judge. And move on.

And know this: his Spirit will set you free.

The day I almost gave up

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I remember so well the day I almost gave up.

We had experienced a major division within the church which looked completely unresolvable. The division was both doctrinal and personal. Twenty years of my life were about to go up in smoke and I could be out of work with no place to go.

It was garbage day. As I walked down the driveway carrying the garbage out, I realized two things. First, the only thing I had strength to do was to put one foot ahead of another and get the garbage to the end of the driveway. Second, that was in fact all that God required me to do that day.

And in that instant, I learned the first secret of never giving up. Don’t stop moving forward. It’s as simple as that. Why is this so critical? Because it’s the simplest way of acting as if you still believe God has a plan for your life. You may not know how he’s going to deliver you, and all your emotions may be shot to pieces, but deep in your spirit you still believe he is God and he will come through for you. Even if you can only move one small step ahead, just do it. The steps will add up, and eventually the darkness will begin to lift.

The strange thing is that it was something I loved -- the church -- that brought me to that place of of despair. I am convinced that both the problems and the answers for our lives often revolve around church. Let me try to explain.

The Bible presents the body of Christ as the place of healing. It is the place where we are loved and cared for, and also the place we are discipled and corrected. So far so good.

When people become Christians, they bring all their own baggage along with them. That includes you and me. It isn’t acceptable for us simply to complain about the problems people have. Church is the place where those problems begin to be fixed. In the process, a mess usually occurs. How could it not? This is where love and patience is required, just like in any family.

But when those problems are not handled with maturity and integrity, it isn’t long before the enemy shows up. That’s when the mess can turn into pain and hurt.

There is no such thing as a spiritual vacuum. If church stops becoming a healthy place where people receive healing, it quickly becomes a toxic place where people get hurt.

The devil does not play merely to win, he plays to destroy. The best strategy he has of winning is to destroy the place God designed for healing. In effect, he bombs the hospital.

If the first secret of not giving up is to keep moving forward, the second secret is not to give up on God’s plan for his church. That’s hard, because it involves believing for others, not just for yourself, and for others who may at this minute be hurting you. At that awful time, I cried out to the Lord to save the hospital and the people in it -- including me and my family. And he did. He acted very quickly and very powerfully. It was a supernatural intervention. To this day I give thanks for it.

I have watched with great dismay the shrapnel hitting people when churches or movements divide or break up. Why should we be surprised at the hurt that causes? What difference is it from the way children are affected for life when their parents break up? Family break-up is often caused by selfishness. How sad it is when the same selfishness invades the family of God. You can give up and walk away. But remember this. If you walk away and church implodes, who will be there to help you when you hit your own personal wall?

It takes a decision of the will to keep moving forward when things are very bleak in your own life. But if you do make that decision, God will come in behind it and help you. And it takes energy to step into the breach when the enemy is ripping your church apart. But if you do, God will come to your aid.

Bob Mumford once said these words to a room full of leaders: “There isn’t one of us here who hasn’t thought of giving up. The difference is some of us have not.”

The very point the battle is hardest, the point where you are tempted to give up, may be the moment the battle is about to turn.

Never give up. You won’t regret it.