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!

NEW HABITS: THE FLYWHEEL OF HOLINESS

The pioneer psychologist, William James (1842-1910), once said, “Habit is the flywheel of society.”  He meant that so much of life is driven by the huge gear of habit.  It is the aggregate of our established ways of behaving automatically without need of forethought.  You may laugh, but it’s how many of us get from 6 am to 9 am each morning.  Major changes in life may call for new habits.  Old ways are not always best ways, or worse, they can lead to disaster.  Here’s what I mean.  My parents were Salvation Army officers (missional pastors and administrators).  The Army moved them from appointment to appointment on average every 4.5 years.  This meant that as children we were often changing homes, schools, friends, and communities, and sometimes twice in an appointment.  Such change sometimes occasioned small disasters.

One disaster stands out from all the others in my memory for its earthy nature.  One of my brothers was only five years old at the time we made a major move to a new house.  At age five he had been trained to avoid bed wetting in the old house by making his own way at 3 am from his bed to the bathroom and back to bed.   His old habit worked well even when he did so when still partially asleep.  He would take X number of steps out of the bedroom, turn, Y steps down the hall way, turn and Z steps to “le toilette.”  You may imagine the disaster coming.  In the middle of the night in the new house, the little guy rose and took X steps out of the bedroom, Y steps down the hallway, and Z steps arriving at my father’s closet.  You guessed it.  A disaster unfolded too quickly to be arrested by a panicking father. You can imagine our father’s displeasure.  I can tell you he did not wear his uniform shoes to the office the next day.

From the earthy nature of that narrative, I hesitate to make the comparison to a new life of faith, but the truth remains.  When we find ourselves moving from one place spiritually to another, our new life calls for new habits not only for sake ourselves, but also and for the sake of others.  Old habits, friends, tastes, language, old haunts and neighborhoods and social life, old patterns of life, and former steps onto dark paths and into dark places occasion undesired outcomes. Old habits and dispositions are the reason for so much recidivism back into the old life.   New life in Christ calls for new habits of the heart, new priorities, new routines, and new ways of living.  A new heart and life surrenders old, dysfunctional, redundant habits and dispositions and seeks new, spiritually healthy ones.

New life means waking-up to pursue new ways and means of loving and pleasing to God.  The old ways and means no longer meet our deeper needs.  Frankly, the old habits displease God, because they fail in the face of temptation and result in sin.  The new means are transformational.  They are spiritually healthy habits of the heart:  time daily in the Word, prayer, thanks and praise, wholesome fellowship, music, and literature,  worship, and serving others.  Such habits mature and foster our desire and ability to love God profoundly and to love others as profoundly as well.  These are the habits that John Wesley called the means of grace, not our means, but those means by which God provides us with His grace.  His means make us aware of his presence and strengthens us in our faith.  Together, the practice of diverse means of grace comprise a new set of holy habits, a new flywheel of holiness in a Christ follower’s life.  Glory to God!

Teach me your way, O Lord and I will walk in your truth.

Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name.

Psalm 86:11