PREMEDITATED LOVE

The word “premeditated” is almost always used in relation to murder.  Its use is not restricted though. The whole event of Christmas may be viewed as divinely premeditated.  While murder is the taking of life, Christmas is God's gift of everlasting life (John 6:40).  The irony is that man’s premeditated act of Christ’s murder made possible God’s premeditated gift of our salvation.  It was a reality that God envisioned and intended from the very beginning.  "For God so loved the world . . ."

 Christmas is far from a celebration of divine impulse.  Our Father did not make a spur of the moment decision to send Jesus his Son to earth for our salvation.  We see this in God’s premeditated plan for John The Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, to go before Jesus with the message of repentance and the good news of the Messiah’s coming.  Well before that, seven hundred years before, He told the prophet Isaiah about his plans (Isaiah 40:3 & 53).  God’s deep love for us has always been premeditated.  He planned our salvation from the very beginning. 

Over the millennia, our Father God has been faithful.  Now his prevenient grace calls us to respond.  How are we to respond to such lavish love?  We respond in his likeness as a people of intentional, premeditated love in celebration.  In his likeness, filled to the measure of the fullness of God, we arise each morning meditating on and remembering how long, wide, high, and deep is the love of God.  Then we go forward faithfully into his day with anticipatory thanks and praise as celebratory expressions of our love for Him and for all others.   We are a people of hope grounded in the optimism of God’s grace.  Hope anticipates. Hope expects.  Regardless of the circumstances, hope believes that God loves us and is faithful. 

Christmas focuses light on God’s premeditated love.  It calls us to celebrate his never failing love seen in His great gift of His Son and the continuing gift of the Holy Spirit.  Thanks be to God for his premeditated love!

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

IT'S THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

We become the company we keep.  It can be our glory or our demise.  The people with whom we spend time can bring health and healing.  And yet some people’s toxicity can be like the slow workings of arsenic poisoning spirit, soul, and body.  The company we seek for friendship and fellowship makes all the difference.  It is a matter of healthy or toxic exposures and encounters.

For two years, 1980 & ‘81, I served in an adjunct faculty position at the University of Hawaii while at the same time Chief Administrator of an array of mental health, drug, and alcohol recovery programs.  In the eight programs operated by The Salvation Army on the Island of Oahu, it was the Womens' Way residential program that worked exceptionally well with addicted women and their children to restore them physically, socially, and spiritually to health and wellbeing.  Womens' Way diverted women from the criminal justice system into treatment permitting them to bring their children with them. A woman's stay in the  program was only temporary lasting nine to twelve months.  It was artificial in not being the reality in which they would live for the remainder of their lives.   Eventually the women had to enter back into the real world.  But there would be variations on their real world going foreward depending on the company they chose to keep.  

A major principle of the program was to help the women and their kids eventually become established in a healthy, positive social and spiritual context that would continue the process of healing and lead to complete restoration.  This included avoiding the old life, the old neighborhood, and old toxic friends.  It meant helping them keep company with those who are healthy, loving, kind, generous, and affirming rather than others who were like social/spiritual Ebola, toxic, exploitive, and dangerous .  The company they were to keep going forward would make all the difference.  It would ensure the glory of recovery and restoration or their recidivism, exploitation, and demise.

At the heart of the program was introducing the women and their children to Christian faith communities.  We knew that there were grace filled, Bible believing fellowships on Oahu  who would embrace them, love them, and give the support that would strengthen them in their faith.  The social/spiritual milieu of a church family would help them discover Jesus and accept his loving embrace.  It would nurture and strengthen their faith and help them see the esteem that God has for them.  The company they would keep in such a faith community and the glory of God revealed in their love would be their glory as well.  The women and children who recovered from the trash bins of life would discover the love of Christ in the presence of His company.  His company today is their glory.  It's all about the company they keep!

"Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness
and all life will be added to you."  Matthew 6:33

PARIS IRONY?

"WHO WILL KISS THE DEVIL?"
1 PETER 5:8 (KJV)

Europe is a post-Christian continent of declining culture.  Churches are empty or they’ve been converted into concert halls, antique shops, and even upscale homes and condos.  Most people are agnostic at best.  Atheism is pervasive.  Islam is the fastest growing faith due to immigration and escalating birth rates among Muslim families.  In such a social/spiritual context.  Imagine a large gathering of young people, hands raised in the air, singing their hearts out while the band sang and played a very upbeat tune.  It sounds like enthusiastic worship of a faith community at a local, contemporary church.  Look at the photo taken at a concert just moments before the terrorist attacks began in Paris.  Look closely as the symbolism of the hand gestures of devil’s horns.  It’s a photo of fans at the Eagles of Death Metal concert.  Here’s some of the lyrics of the tune being sung:

Who’ll love the Devil?  Who’ll sing his song?

Who will love the Devil and his song?

I’ll love the Devil.  I’ll love his song.

I will love the Devil and his song.

Who’ll kiss the Devil?  Who’ll kiss his tongue?

Who’ll kiss the Devil on his tongue?

I’ll kiss the Devil.  I’ll kiss his tongue.

I will kiss the Devil on his tongue.

As the crowd sang along with these lyrics in a love offering to Satan, “all hell broke loose.”  The concert hall became a terrorist target.  Hundreds were killed or wounded.  It poses a question that an agnostic or atheist likely would avoid.  Did the Devil respond in a way not surprising with destruction and death? Some might dismiss massacre as total coincidence.  Others may say they know exactly what happened that Friday night at 9:40 pm GMT in Paris.  Did the crowd at the concert unwittingly ask for intimacy with the Devil in a form of worship and he didn’t disappoint?  Is that irony?  It is something to ponder.

Source: JULIE BROWN PATTON (NEWS@GOSPELHERALD.COM) Nov 18, 2015

GROWING SAINTS: MAKE DISCIPLES, NOT JUST CONVERTS!

Add https://www.asbury.edu/salvationa…/growing-saints-conference

General John Gowans (1934-2012), the 16^th international leader of The Salvation Army, once said, “The Salvation Army was invented to save souls, grow saints, and serve suffering humanity.”  The same may be said for the church universal regardless of doctrine or denominational distinctives.  The fact is that these three aspects of mission are not to be separate initiatives, but a continuum of conviction and covenant for all Christians and every faith community.  When people come to faith in Christ, it is the mission and obligation of every Christian to help new believers become established in the Kingdom.  The ministry of every faith community is to come along side of new followers of Christ to help them stay on the journey with Christ, and to help them get beyond the siren songs of temptation and sin to a spiritual place of power over sin.

The challenge is to help saved souls to grow on to become mature, Spirit-filled disciples who can disciple others.  This means tossing out the self-serving idea that the only importance to becoming a Christian is to get saved and go to heaven, and maybe even save others who can go to heaven.  Getting into heaven is not the goal of the Kingdom.  Such a goal is self-serving and narrow-minded.  As someone said, "It's getting heaven into us."  The actual goal is Christ-likeness and purity of heart, filled with the Holy Spirit “to the measure of the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).  Why?  So that then God can do immeasurably more that we could ask or imagine. (Ephesians 3:20&21). Ultimately, the goal is glory to God. In other words, the goal is to multiply Spirit guided, Spirit compelled, Spirit empowered servants whose service brings glory to God, who let their light shine in such a way, the way of holiness, that seeing the glory of God is inescapable.

So we take Jesus seriously (Matthew 28:18-20).  Faithfully, we lovingly obey Christ’s Great Commission.  We make disciples.  It is a directive, not a great suggestion take it or leave it.  It means making disciples not just converts.  It means walking along side new believers to help them make a decision of faith and repentance, and then to continue the journey with them as they become rooted and established, built-up, mature in Christ, and transformed by the Holy Spirit, restored to the image of God (Imago Dei).  This is the calling of every Christian, to spiritually reproduce and grow saints who reproduce and grow more saints.

So then, just as you received Christ as Lord, continue to live in him,

Rooted and built-up in him, strengthened in the faith as you

were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

Colossians 2:6&7

Come to the Growing Saints Conference, January 29&30, 2016
https://www.asbury.edu/salvationa…/growing-saints-conference