CHANGING GOD'S MIND

What do you do when you desire the best for others, but there is sin in the camp?  This is an age-old problem that keeps raising its ugly head.  What do we do?  And what do we mean by “the camp”?  Camp can be a metaphor for home, church, summer camp, business place or organization, city or nation.  Camp can mean any collective reality of gathered people with a shared mission and purpose.

A powerful example we find in Moses’ account written in Exodus, chapters 32 and 33.  When Moses finally came down the first time from Mt. Sinai with two stone tablets of the “Testimony” he confronted sin in the camp.  Put yourself in Moses’ sandals.  He’s just had a long, personal meeting alone with God on the mountain.  God gave him explicit directions for the life and wellbeing of the people beyond the Ten Commandments.  His directives included matters of the protection of property, laws of justice and mercy, social responsibility, the building and furnishing of a tabernacle for worship, and so on.  We can imagine Moses’ was excited to share with the people God’s remarkable interest and confirmed covenant with them. 

 Arriving back down the mountain, Moses was slammed by two realities:  Sin in the camp and God’s wrath in response.  In spite of God’s salvation and all his blessings, the people had lost faith in God.  They had replaced him with a lifeless, impotent idol in the form of a golden calf.  They bowed down to it, sacrificed to it, and attributed to it their salvation from Egypt.  God was furious.  He said, “They are a stiff necked people. . .  Whoever sinned against me I will blot out of my book. . . I will punish them for their sin.”  Then God said to Moses, “I will not go with you to the land I promised.”  God withdrew his presence

By this time it looked like God’s patience had run out.  God decided to fulfill his covenant, but also a devostating one, to abandon his relationship with Israel.  After all, his reaction was in response to their sin of abandonment of him.  His relationship to his chosen people would end.  

What would you do if you were Moses?  Moses loved being in the presence of God.  Prior to his encounter, Moses was in the habit of seeking God's presence by taking his tent and pitching it some distance outside of the camp calling it “the tent of meeting.” At these times a pillar of cloud, God’s presence, would form and stay at the door of his tent.  The Lord would speak to Moses face to face.  So, in light of the people’s sin, this is what Moses did once again.  There in the tent he argued with God in prayer and interceded for the people.  He asked for God’s favor and pleaded for God’s continuing presence in the journey ahead, not just for himself, but for all the people.  He said to God, “If your not going with us, we are not going anywhere.” And “If you withdraw your presence from us, what else will distinguish us from all the other people on the face of the earth?”  Moses moved God’s heart and God changed his mind.  God finally responded, “I will do the very thing your have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.”

Moses’ relationship with God was deeply intimate.  He pleased God deeply.  He had high favor with God.  In intimacy, he  sought more favor from God on others’ behalf. It was Moses’ faithful, intimacy with God that made him a successful intercessor.  What a lesson for us.  God knows our hearts, but wants to hear from us what is on our hearts.  He gives us time and attention.  He calls us to love him and to love others. And he permits us to intercede on their behalf no matter how crazy, hopeless, and undeserving of forgiveness and mercy their situation may be.

Did Moses change God’s mind?  He seems to have influenced it.  When there was sin in the camp, Moses called it what it was and responded accordingly.  Then he shifted into prayer interceding on behalf of those who occasioned the sin in the camp in the first place.  He was a bold activist with a two-fold response seeking restoration of the people’s relationship with God.   The greatest need today is for deep people of character based on their intimacy with God!

When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai . . .

his face was radiant because he had 

spoken with the Lord.

Exodus 34:29

WHEN THE TIDE SEEMINGLY GOES OUT . . .

William Booth’s best known piece of writing may be the seven verses of his song, O Boundless Salvation . . . deep ocean of love.  Recently it was the theme song of The Salvation Army’s 150^th anniversary celebration in the city of its birth in 1865, London, England.  The song is a powerful metaphor for the saving grace of God, his immeasurable and unfathomable love for the world.

Samuel Logan Brengle also makes reference to the love of God as an ocean of love when he states that when the Holy Spirit fills our hearts and lives and abides in us, “the low water mark of our experience will be ‘perfect peace’.”  He writes that he doesn’t dare say what the high water mark will be.  Brengle raises a helpful word of assurance for those who worry that the tide has gone out.   To those concerned when all the high, spirited emotion of spiritual experience seems to disappear, and when it seems like the Holy Spirit has left us high and dry.  He writes –

“Don’t think that when the tide flows out to the low water mark that the Comforter (the Holy Spirit) has left you. . . Don’t think he has left you because you are not overflowing with emotion.  Hold fast to your faith. . . The Holy Spirit is not capricious and fickle. . . Be true, be full of faith, and you will be able to say with Paul: ‘I am persuaded that that neither death, not life, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Rom. 8:37-39.”

In our daily experience of God’s deep ocean of love, the emotions of the experience will ebb and flow.  There will be higher and higher water marks as we mature and grow, and as God’s infilling of his holy love increases.  But there will be low water marks as well.  That’s a good thing.  It means that as we grow in God’s grace our capacity to receive his love increases.  What was a high water mark becomes merely a lower water mark in the process of our growing in capacity more and more.  What at first was a thimble like capacity to love becomes the capacity of a coffee mug, then a bath tub, swimming pool, and Lake Michigan.  The purpose of our growth in grace and in his likeness is to be filled each day to the brim.  Each day we grow.  He sets the brim a little higher and fills us again with his very self.  

When you think the tide has seemingly gone out, rejoice!  God is steadfast and faithful.  He is at work growing your capacity to be filled. He then fills to the brim and we do unimaginable things for the Kingdom. Glory to God!

Fill my cup, Lord.  I lift it up, Lord.

Thy Kingdom come!

THE WAY SOCIAL HOLINESS WORKS

The Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is social in nature.  While the three in one nature is a mystery, what is amazing is that God’s love seeks to draw us into the social life of the Trinity.  Our life in Christ is social, that is to say dynamic, interactive, interpersonal, intimate, collective, and filled with loving fellowship.  That is because at the very heart of life is the holy, love of God. For God so loved the world, loved us so much, that he took sacrificial action on our behalf (John 1:14).  Christ’s life and death was a labor and offering of unreserved love for us.  The gift of God’s very self at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, was a gift of perfect love, holy and pure.  The entire story of God and man is a love story, a social narrative of God’s grace and our response over millennia.  It is a story of God’s great gift of our restoration to holiness, his likeness and infilling.  It is a story of how God deploys human agency to make possible a full salvation.  Its a story of the way social holiness works.

Here is a snapshot of how God’s love is passed to us and then from us to others.  It is a snapshot of the social nature of holiness.  I’ve known Dr. David Rightmire nearly all my life.  I first met him at his sister’s birthday party in Waltham, Massachusetts when he was five years old and I was eight.  While we have traveled different paths over the years, we now live in the same town (Wilmore, Kentucky) only a block from each other and enjoy a renewed friendship.  David is a professor at Asbury University.  He is a highly respected teacher and scholar.  He is the author of Sanctified Sanity: The Life and Theology of Samuel Logan Brengle.  Brengle was a Salvation Army officer and a renowned proponent of Wesleyan Holiness in the early twentieth century.  David’s writing on Brengle is a labor of love, a gift of knowledge to others.  His book is so well written, covering the life and theology of Brengle, that after reading it I gave a copy to my daughter and son, and more recently to my

daughter-in-law.

My daughter read Sanctified Sanity thoroughly then took up reading Brengle’s Helps to Holiness and other books.  She began telling her husband about Brengle and gave him a copy of the book as a gift.  He then shared Brengle with four of his friends: a pastor, and three seminary students. This led the five of them to use Brengle’s writings on holiness as the focus of their weekly Bible study on early Friday mornings.  How wonderful! 

David’s labor of love, Sanctified Sanity, is now  available in a revised and expanded edition.  I expect it will be passed on to others inspiring a renewed interest in the writings of Samuel Logan Brengle, God’s remarkable soldier/saint.  This is how social holiness works. It moves from the love of the writer to the reader.  In love the reader passes the Good News of a full salvation exposited by Brengle to others  so, they too may be “filled to the measure of the fullness of God” (Ephesians 2:19), and then share the message of that fullness with yet others.  Thanks be to God for his unimaginable gifts that keep on giving!

That we might be partakers of the divine nature.

2 Peter 1:4

THE WAY, THE WHOLE WAY, NOTHING BUT THE WAY

Not all nations who describe themselves as a democracy maintain the essential forms that make true democracy possible:  an independent judiciary, a free press, the separation of administrative, legislative, and judicial branches, and free elections.An essential pillar of a true democracy is an independent justice system that makes possible The Rule of Law.  In all the courts of the USA and Canada, from local to national, justice requires the absolute truth.  The same pledge is mandatory for any and every witness:  “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.”  Half-truths don’t suffice.  In fact they are dangerous.  Embellishing the truth, adding irrelevant and/or fictional content, often distorts pure truth.  In pursuit of justice, protecting a high standard of truth is the court’s first obligation.

 The same may be said for The Way.  Jesus proclaimed in his Last Supper teaching to his disciples that he was their “Lord and teacher” (John 13:14).  Then he went on to announce to them -  “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”   In that one declaration he proclaimed his essence, the embodiment of God’s nature: Pure, Holy Love making possible The Way of a full salvation, The Truth of God’s love, and The Life of eternal fellowship of God with us and with each other.  He was declaring himself as The Way, The Whole Way, and Nothing But The Way.

Jesus by the Spirit is the way out of our disobedience and sin, the way to power over sin, the way to a life of obedient faith, the way to a complete cleansing from sin and growth in grace leading to the sanctified, Christ-like life of holiness, the way to an unimaginable life of service to the glory of God!  He is our all in all, our full salvation, our true vine within whom we abide as branches bearing much fruit (John 15:1-8).

All of this was for the purpose of our restoration and fulfillment to the vision of us that God had from the very beginning of creation.  All of this is Truth made possible by God’s grace through our steadfast, obedient faith.  It is not through cheap grace, but grace paid with a cost on the cross that calls for a response.  Jesus Christ is the Way, the whole Way, nothing but the Way to a destiny in Him that requires faith, brokenness, surrender, steadfast obedience, and an undivided heart given to service and glory to God.  What a undeserved blessing!  Thanks be to The Way!

Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on me.

        Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me 
And use me to your Glory!