Centered Life

A poignant thought in today’s malaise is that we are trained to be relativists but are expected to act ethical. Our culture condemns those that assign any moral boundaries or state absolutes while it derides the established boundaries and decries the lack of ethics that results in the chaos in the world.
The Apostle Paul pointed this reality out to the Roman church, “When outsiders who have never heard of God’s law follow it more or less by instinct, they confirm its truth by their obedience. They show that God’s law is not something alien, imposed on us from without, but woven into the very fabric of our creation. There is something deep within them that echoes God’s yes and no, right and wrong.”
The reality is that God made humanity in His image and it is the reflection of that image that expresses the moral nature of God, defining the “Absolutes” of His judgment. The only true relative issue is our relationship to the Living God and our reflection of His moral nature. This will result in an absolute outcome!

We are daily bombarded with fearful reports of the conspiracies of men grasping for power, many of these are true and many more are the results of paranoid imaginations. The fearful victims of this world’s systems exponentially multiply their fears in response. As Christians, we have the revelation and a responsibility to live in faith and obedience to God and His Word as we promote the expansion of His Kingdom through the conspiracy of love. The conspiracy of the Kingdom has been at work since the beginning and was ultimately consummated in the life of Jesus, the Messiah. His words clarify this reality when He said that “all authority in heaven and on earth have been given to me.”
The word ‘conspire’ has developed a negative connotation in its recent use. However, it means to act in harmony, of the same breath, for a common goal. When the conspiracies of men that oppose God are exposed, Christians are to act in harmony with the values, principles and commands of the Kingdom of Heaven. We are to “obey God rather than man.”
The current “secularist socialist” attempts to redefine our constitutional right from the “freedom of religion” to a “freedom of worship” is a good example of the conspiracies of men. Their goal is to exclude the faith of Christians from being expressed in any public arena. Their deception lies in the attempt to redefine this freedom and limit the expression of faith to a private act rather than a faith lived out in public. When our government establishes laws that require us to violate our conscience and oppose our Christian principles and values, we must respond with a civil disobedience, to obey God rather than man!
One thing all Christians in this country should do is to read and sign the Manhattan Declaration as we stand together for orthodox Christian values and principles. This declaration is found at www.manhattandeclaration.org. Read and sign it today if you are of the same breath as the Kingdom conspiracy.

We live in a culture that is just as carnal, just as self absorbed and just as fearful as at any previous time. The ‘Jesus follower’ is challenged to live “in the world” but not be “of the world”, that is, this world system. It is obvious that this world system is built on the values of money, sex, and power. Now, the greatest of these is money, with it men purchase sex and power! Oh, but the value system of the Kingdom of God is faith, hope, and love, the greatest of these is love!
The Apostle Paul reminds us through his letter to the Corinthian church in II Corinthians 10:12:
“For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some of those who commend themselves; but when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding.”
Paul is responding to the carnal attempts of those who seem to be competing with him for influence. He is not, understand, putting himself in a league with those who boast that they’re his superiors. We wouldn’t dare do that. But in all this comparing and grading and competing, they quite miss the point!
Many in the church are “of the world”, worldly, but not “in the world.” That is, acting like the world while condemning it from a distance. We must be cautious in our ‘holiness,’ our separateness, from exempting ourselves from the ministry God places in our lives while separating from the sin.
The only one we have a reason to compare ourselves with is Jesus. When we do this we will bow humbly before Him with Whom we have to do. So be careful in this worldly process of envy, greed, and selfish ambition. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord!
The American poet and humorist, Strickland Gillian, hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “Egotism is the opiate that nature administers to deaden the pain of mediocrity.” If we are not careful, our ego will blind us to the purposes of God as we get entangled in the spirit of this world. Let’s live by faith and walk in obedience to the light that we have received.

Jesus exposed a spiritual value in His Sermon On The Mount, Matthew 5 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
In this life, we are not meant to escape the reality of loss, but to process our losses with God’s Grace. We live in a broken world with bodies that are “appointed once to die” and, therefore, endure losses every day. We are not to “waste” the experiences of life but grow by them. This process of mourning is a carving out of our souls. The deepening of our souls that results from the sorrow and pain will result in a “vessel for His honor” to be filled with His Spirit and poured out for many.
A life without true spiritual experience and spiritual truth results in a Christian faith that will collapse under the sheer weight of the spiritual mediocrity it is compelled to carry.
We must escape the shallow life of hedonism, the cheap pleasure seeking existence that is self-absorbed and empty. The theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoffer, called this “cheap grace”.
Cheap Grace is defined as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church, discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
The author Dallas Willard calls this a “Consumer Christianity.” He defines this as “One who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his life and innermost thoughts, feelings and intentions over to the Kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it.”
Jesus said in John 16:33 “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

A fresh start! What a great thought. The longer we live, the more we value this blessing.
At the start of a New Year we have the sense of beginning again. We want to do it right, or at least – better! But, our experience is usually not so. We continue in the same way, doing the same things expecting a different result. This is a form of insanity, a misconception of reality. If you could change yourself, you would have done so already!
The prophet Isaiah reveals a foundational and humble reality;
“But now, O LORD, You are our Father, We are the clay, and You our potter; And all of us are the work of Your hand.”
Only a life yielded to the hand of the potter, to His mind and mold, will be truly changed, really improved. A prayer is noted in the classic devotional, “A Cloud of Unknowing,” that powerfully states our need.
“God, unto Whom all hearts be open . . . and unto Whom no secret thing is hid, I beseech Thee so for to cleanse the intent of mine heart with the unspeakable gift of Thy grace, that I may perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee. Amen.”
This is the heart attitude that will allow change to be made in our lives. The Psalmist (139th) also wrote this powerful prayer of yielding,
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.”
Now here is the fresh start that is needed!

Another year races to a close.
The days and weeks peel away as the pages of a Sunday paper in the strong winds of life. Their passing awakens our hearts to the reality of the fleeting grasp we have on our time and our future.
The prayer of Moses, the ancient lawgiver of Israel, brings clarity in our brief accumulation of days. Though he lived an exceedingly long life of 120 years, his days so quickly came and went that he was prompted to cry out to the source of life Himself for assistance in his preparation. He observed the reality that;
“The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years” Psalm 90:10

Many people live their lives in a growing despair of hopelessness, forced into this reality by the difficulties of time and life. But, there are some, those with hope in God and His Word, that look at the future with a smile. Rather than a hopeless end, they live with an endless hope! Moses was such a man and wrote this prayer in verse 12 of the same Psalm;
“So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.”

Let us finish the year in the great hope that our days originate in God and are lived for Him. Let us endeavor to stay alert, aware of the passing days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom, so that we may honor God with our lives. This is indeed going to be a Happy New Year!

We live in a time when the voices of this world are using derision and ridicule to discount the voice of faith. They intend to deride those of us that do not agree with them, particularly in the area of biblically moral truth and the creator God. They hypocritically deny any thought that does not line up with theirs or there pseudo-science. The Apostle Paul wrote in II Corinthians 10:3-5 NLT
“We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.”
So, we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, armed with the ammunition of His redeeming love, we follow Him and believe His Word. We do not reject true science nor do we exclude any truth. Reality is truth, or truth is reality from God’s perspective, not mans. True science is defined as knowledge; a systematic gathering and building of testable and reproducible data. Science is the systematic attempt to discover and expose nature’s patterns. As believers, we acknowledge our foundation of faith in that which cannot be proven and build on the discovered truths of science and history, but we are not to be ridiculed into silence.
jc

The 2nd Coming & Earthquakes!

On Wednesday evening I introduced the series of events listed in the Revelation, Chapters 6-16. This is the global scale of the consummation of the ages. That is, global, major earthquakes.

All three series of events in these chapters of the unfolding cataclysms, the 7 seals, the 7 trumpets, and the 7 bowls of wrath conclude in a global crescendo with a major earthquake. Earthquakes occur everyday and their seismic results are monitored and can be seen on the IRIS site www.iris.edu/seismon.

When the earthquake of global proportion occurs, you will not need to go to this site to see if it has occurred!

My daughter’s recent resolution to conquer time on www.maniacalmother.blogspot.com has stirred a challenging thought.

     We should endeavor to conquer time. We exist “in time,” and are creatures “of time.” Since time is relative to our perspective and our perspective is bound by our existence and our existence is reflective of our actions, we can and should control or conquer these actions. Our actions are reflective of our faith, or to say it more pragmatically, “we do what we believe”.

     So, if we choose to act and follow through with selected actions, we have, in a sense, conquered time. It is a good resolution!

jc

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The Joseph Company is a gathering of small businessmen and entrepreneurs.

The name is taken from the story of Joseph as told in the Bible, Genesis 37:1 through Genesis 50:26. God used Joseph to save Israel and all of the known world at that time.

This audio message was given to the group that gathered today.