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2014
D runk B elievers Why the Bible is Enough
Hungry for Power? A publication of On My Own Now Ministries, Inc.
GENUINE MOTIVATION Young Christian Man Oct/Nov 2014, Vol. 5
in this issue...
On My Own Now Ministries, Inc., Publisher
Foremost
Rob Beames, Editor
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Alisha Mattingly Asstistant Editor Donna Schillinger Page Design Contributors Rob Beames, Will Dole, Erik Guzman, Sam Harris, Thom Mollohan Except where noted, content is copyright 2014 On My Own Now Ministries. Articles may be reprinted with credit to author, Genuine Motivation and www.OnMyOwnNow.com.
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Drunk Believers Erik Guzman
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Press On
The Bible is Enough by
Will Dole
Real Relationships
Helping Hands for the Hurting by
Sam Harris
Can You Relate Hungry for Power? by
Thom Mollohan
On My Own Now Ministries, Inc. is a nonprofit organization with a 501 (c) (3) determination. Your donations aid in our mission to encourage faith, wise life choices and Christ-likeness in young adults during their transition to living on their own.
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We welcome submissions of original or repurposed articles that are contributed without expectation of compensation. May God repay you.
May God Bless the Hell out of You Skin Bags
Visit us at www.OnMyOwnNow.com.
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Grace
Enter the Fifth Dimension by
by
Rob Beames
Erik Guzman
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How to Get Ahead Proverbs 25:6-7, 11-12, 14, 19, 13, 15, 27 (how I would say it)
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hen you think you’ve finally arrived—this is your chance, your golden opportunity—be careful not to move too fast. Wait for those key people to take notice of you, rather than drawing attention to yourself. You don’t want to impress others as being an upstart who doesn’t follow protocol. (v.6-7) The best way to make a first-class impression is to just listen and do what’s asked of you. (v.12) When someone asks your opinion, a sincere and intelligent reply will earn you a stellar reputation. (v.11) A person who talks himself up and then doesn’t deliver is about as useful as a taxi that never shows up. (v.14) Yep, depending on a flake is as frustrating as a flat tire on a rainy morning. (v.19) Competency and loyalty are as rare and refreshing as a 50°F day in July—in West Texas! (v.13) Just be patient and wait for those key people to discover your good character and qualities through their dealings with you. Remember, flowing water eventually carved the Grand Canyon. Pace yourself. You wouldn’t eat an entire cake just because it’s your birthday. Likewise, don’t try to get ahead too quickly, even when it seems like this is your big break.
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Foremost
Drunk Believers
By Erik Guzman
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publisher asked me to write a book on living sober. I laughed… out loud, right there in the publishing meeting. The publishing folks just smiled and stared. It turns out they were serious. When I told my wife about the request, she laughed too. “Don’t you have to stop drinking to write a book about living sober?” she asked. I poured myself a glass of wine and said, “We’ll see.” I like to drink. I enjoy drinking beer, wine, and whiskey. I like to drink with friends. I like to have a couple drinks with dinner and then stop. Sometimes I drink way too much. Sometimes I drink on the weekends. Sometimes I drink every night of the week. Sometimes I don’t drink for a year; sometimes longer. There are aspects of living with and without alcohol that I love and hate. I’ve been open about that on our talk show and in what I’ve written for Key Life. I suppose that’s what
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started this talk about me writing a book on sobriety. Here’s the deal, with all the ways I’ve abused alcohol, and all the fights that it has caused between me and my wife, I have never been able to take the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” – The Big Book of AA Yes, as a husband and father, I have been concerned about my excessive drinking, but after a lot of counseling, I don’t believe I’m an alcoholic; a self-medicating manic-depressive, but not an alcoholic. I just can’t admit that I’m impotent to control the way I drink or don’t drink. I am willing to admit I may be living in denial. Maybe I just haven’t hit rock bottom yet. I may be lying to myself. But I doubt it. Why? Because with all my faults, I really do live sober.
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What is Living Sober?
When it comes to drinking, I can stop at one or go without. However, I am aware that many can’t make that statement. Maybe you are one of those people. If so, you need to know that I have no intention of attempting to universalize my relationship with alcohol. Living sober is another matter entirely. The need for sobriety is universal. Living sober is way more than putting down the bottle. Any drunk will tell you that being dry is not the same as living sober. To put it succinctly, living sober means embracing reality. Sobriety is not simply about a compulsion or relationship with a substance, but a relationship with ultimate reality that quenches our thirst. To live sober strikes at the heart of what it means to be fully human. The psychiatrist and therapist, Carl Jung, wrote this in a letter regarding an alcoholic patient of his:
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“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God ... You see, ‘alcohol’ in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.” Spiritus contra spiritum means “spirituality against spirits,” and this concept is the seed that ultimately grew into Alcoholics Anonymous. The 12 steps guide the addict toward spiritual awakening. The guys who started AA knew that the only way to combat the lesser spirits is with the Spirit, and that is just another way of saying we need to combat the counterfeit with reality. We need to live sober. True spirituality is simply desperation. We are all desperate to experience the
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transcendent, and when we don’t find that experience in dirt-under-our-fingernails reality, we look for it elsewhere. When we give ourselves to the lesser spirits, our lives become unmanageable. But when, in our desperation, we give ourselves to the Spirit who loves us unconditionally and hovers over our dark emptiness, ultimate reality invades our lives and brings order from chaos. The radically good news is that transcendence is ours for the taking by faith. Jesus said, “…the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out” (John 6:37). And what do we experience when Jesus receives us? Nothing short of union with the Trinity! Jesus told the Father, “…the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one” (John 17:22-23). This is the thirstquenching living water of ultimate reality. As a fallen creature without the Spirit, I am weak, needy and susceptible to alcohol abuse. But as a creature in communion with his creator, I have embraced reality by faith. I am sober. I am the image of God, filled with his Spirit, and by his strength in my weakness I can enjoy making good choices. I’ve proven that over and over again. Yes, sometimes as a child of God I choose to disobey my loving Father who
We can't selectively numb out; the ache and the ecstasy both go when we give up on reality. 6 NOv14
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wants the best for me. But I never stop being his child, and that is sobering. My life is certainly not without its sin or struggles, but by God’s grace, living in union with the Spirit, life is quite manageable.
Embracing the Pain and Pleasure of Reality
Reality is infected with the pain of what we’ve done, what we’ve left undone, and what’s been done to us. Reality is also overflowing with the Spirit, God’s merciful presence, and all of the undeserved blessings and joys in life. On top of that, we have access to the Godhead and the ultimate redemption of the worst evil this bent world can dish out. Sobriety is letting all that hit you with full force. Sharon Hersh is a therapist and an expert on addiction. She’s also one of my counselors (and she agrees I’m probably not a drunk, so there). Anyway, Sharon says that addicts believe two things that fuel their destructive behavior. The addict believes he or she deserves relief, and that he or she should be able to choose when and how he or she gets it. In that sense, we’re all prone to addiction. We all construct barriers out of behaviors that provide protection from pain, but these walls also cut us off from all that we were created to enjoy. That’s easy to see in the behavior of an addict, but it also happens when we misuse religion, shopping, power, sex, or achievements... pick your prison. We’re all users and abusers, but addiction sets in when we abandon reality in exchange for self-protection. We can’t selectively numb out; the ache and the ecstasy both go when we give up on reality. When we become addicted to providing our own relief, paradoxically, pleasure is drained from our lives. Living sober in union with the Spirit is the alternative. Granted, we can never be completely free from addictive tendencies. In fact, realizing that we can’t perfect ourselves is part of sobriety; it’s dealing with a hard reality.
However, we can move forward into greater degrees of sober living. To do that, we have to be willing to let the waves of pain knock us down, so the pleasure can wash over us. t’s scary. We have to own all the ways we’ve hurt ourselves and others. We have to name all that we’ve lost, mourn, and ultimately accept that it’s gone. We have to trust we really are one with God, give ourselves to the cycle of death and resurrection, let go, and hope for redemption. We have to face the fear that relief may never come, and then choose to trust the Spirit. When we ignore the reality of our pain and the presence of the Spirit, we feel alone, aching for the transcendence that’s ours if we would only believe it. Refuse to embrace the pain and pleasure of ultimate reality and what’s left except to seek relief from the lesser spirits? It’s so tempting to settle for comforting ourselves, but remember, true spirituality is simply desperation. Nobody is as spiritual as the addict who has encountered the futility of selfsatiation. If you’ve come to the end of yourself (alcoholic or not), what have you got to lose? Why not face reality and take a step of faith toward sobriety?
Daring to Believe
Here’s where it gets messy. There’s an exhortation in 1 Corinthians that contains a hidden hope: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not!” (1 Corinthians 6:15) Before that verse, the apostle Paul just got done telling the Corinthians that all things were lawful, but not necessarily helpful. Then he brings up picking up a hooker. Certainly there are some negative consequences at this point, but those consequences do not include God leaving the believer. In fact, he says that believers are so “one” with Jesus, that if we have sex with a prostitute, Jesus is having sex with a prostitute. He goes on to remind believers that
we are the temple of the Spirit. Isn’t that great news? The ultimate reality of your union with God can’t be undone by your bad choices! Even if you’re drunk right now, God is right there with you, loving you no matter what. That will drive uptight religious people nuts, but if you’re an addict who has tried to quit over and over and over again, that will give you some hope in the midst of all the shame and guilt. “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39) Spiritus contra spiritum! Focus on the joy of your union with God instead of what you just drank and it will lessen the attraction to your addiction (especially if the bottle is making your life unmanageable). Will you dare to believe that you already have the transcendence you’re looking for in that bottle? Will you dare to thank him with lips wet with whiskey? If so, you may not stop drinking right away, but you will begin to live sober... and you will always be as loved and as close to the Father as Jesus is. Erik Guzman is VP of Communications & Executive Producer at Key Life Network, and co-host of the nationally syndicated talk show Steve Brown, Etc. and announcer for Key Life. Erik is the author of the upcoming book, The Seed of Love: A True Myth. He has a BA in Mass Communication and an MBA, and is perpetually working toward a Masters in Theological Studies. Erik is also a drummer, a 4th degree black belt in Aikido, and a self-obsessed over-achiever who can’t stop talking about himself. Erik’s wife tolerates his insanity and his three children enjoy it.
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Press On
The Bible Is Enough
by
Will Dole
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ho is God and what is He like? To answer this question, people will turn to many different places, but we must begin with the Bible for a sufficient answer. The Bible is God’s revelation of Himself. Other religions and systems claim to discover knowledge about God via other means, but these invariably fall woefully short. Why is this? In the words of theologian Michael Horton, “God makes himself known on his own terms, when, where, and how he chooses. God can be an object of our knowledge only if he has revealed himself to us. Consequently, theology can exist as a legitimate enterprise only when it begins with God’s self-revelation.” We can believe the Bible’s claims about itself. Peter asserts, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy
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Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20–21). God chose men to write as they were carried along by His Spirit, so they spoke and recorded the words He desired. This wasn’t some sort of mechanical dictation, as is evident by the many styles and personalities of the writers. Even above all of this, there are four attributes of the Bible which cause us to trust it. First, there is the necessity of the Bible. It tells us that we need the Bible to understand God, because the Bible is God’s self-revelation to us. In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis explains, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Perhaps, the reason so many folks quote this statement is that it resonates with us at a very deep level. We all have longings for something deeper than this world has to offer. Genesis chapter one tells us that we are made in the image of God. We were designed to mirror and
reflect Him and to enjoy an intimate fellowship with Him. However, only a couple chapters later sin enters the world through Adam’s disobedience, severing his closeness with God. So, we are subsequently born apart from God, under the condemnation of our sin (see Psalm 51:5 and Romans 6:23). What then is our fundamental need? It is God. We need forgiveness and to be reconciled with Him. That’s why we desperately need His Word, since it’s the only way we can know Him! The second aspect is the authority of the Bible. We need the Bible. But can we trust what the Bible has to say? Yes, we can! Timothy tells us, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). If all Scripture is breathed out by God, then Scripture is as true as God. Paul reminds us, “Let God be true, and every human being a liar” (Romans 3:4). Jesus himself applies these words not only to the person of God, but to God’s Word when He asks God to, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). Obviously, God is truth. His Word, inspired and breathed-out by Him, is our standard of all truth and the highest of authorities. Wayne Grudem, in his book Christian Beliefs, summarizes this point for us, “All the words in the Bible are God’s words. Therefore, to disbelieve or disobey them is to disbelieve or disobey God Himself.” So, we need the Bible in order to know God, and we believe His Word speaks authoritatively, not only on who He is, but on all matters to which it speaks. However, what good does this do us if we cannot understand what the Bible says? Fortunately, the Bible is not only necessary and authoritative, it is also clear. Perhaps you are understandably intimidated by the Bible—for who can understand God? Paul says that the Scriptures, “are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15). They can only do this if they are clear and able to be understood. Additionally, the Psalmist praises the Lord for His ability to make a simple man wise through His Word.
“The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple” (Psalm 19:7). God’s Word is clear. It is clear enough for anyone to understand. The final attribute of the Bible that causes us to trust it is that the Bible is sufficient. It is enough. Following the two verses above, Paul gives us the reason that Scripture is able to make us wise for salvation and is useful for all things. He concludes, “so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:15-17). So, we see that the Bible is profitable and not only marginally. It is so profitable that the careful study of scripture by a man of God will completely equip him for every good work. The Bible is all we need for salvation and it is all we need to live the life God desires for us. This has a couple implications. First, it guards against any tradition that teaches us we need anything beyond the Bible. For example, Mormons have the Book of Mormon and Islam has the Koran. These religions claim the Bible as part of their sacred literature, but they say the Bible is not enough. The results are always disastrous because the Bible becomes distorted and often contradicted. This error may be easy to see, but the other may be a bit more subtle. Most of us have some desire for extra-Biblical revelation, as well. It’s natural in our weakness to want a personal word from the Lord. But the author of Hebrews says, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2). So, we don’t need to seek some quite place in order to hear from God. God speaks to us in His Word. Any time we pick up the Bible and read it, we are reading God’s personal revelation of Himself. How amazing is that! God has spoken finally, authoritatively and sufficiently in Jesus. We need nothing more. The Bible is enough! Will Dole is pursuing a life in ministry and currently works with South Lake Youth Ministries in Plummer, Idaho. Visit him at www.cdubthinking.blogspot.com.
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Can You Relate
Hungry for Power? by
Thom Mollohan
T
here is something very strange going on in the lives of many Christians. It seems to me that they possess the insidious perception that their Christianity is all about a lifestyle and/or general affiliation. This false concept causes them to experience little in the way of power in their personal lives. Yet, if it is true that God actually dwells within us, should there not be a meaningful realization of His power in our everyday circumstances? Unfortunately, people do not often see the power of God for what it is and what it means for the believer. This is evident in the various interpretations of and responses to our circumstances. Despair, hopelessness and patterns of bad choices may indicate a lack of genuine conviction that help from on high is at our disposal. Enslaving habits, bondage of negative attitudes and the ongoing brokenness resulting from dysfunctional relationships may be horizontal evidences of a lack of vertical alignment and may even indicate a divine disconnect. Of course, the term “power” conveys various images 10 NOv14
and ideas, some of which don’t necessarily coincide with what God intends for us in the hum-drum of life. Everyday activities and demands incessantly threaten to quagmire us in ruts of boring tedium or stressful anxiety. For instance, many who use the word “power” envision earthquakes, fire, mighty winds and thunderous booms. Others see it as prodigious means to financial gain, vocational success, popularity and acclaim. Divine healings come to mind for others. God can speak entire galaxies into existence and knows when even the smallest songbird falls to the ground, so He is certainly able to manifest such power, but the greater miracles and the most profound workings of His power are invisible to us and must be sought inwardly. In the Gospel of Luke, the Bible recounts Jesus’ encounter with a paralyzed man. The man’s friends, after a short misadventure involving some minor demolition of a certain man’s house, lowered their paralytic friend in front of Jesus. He promptly did a work of awesome power by forgiving the man’s sins. Those who witnessed the proceedings casually
dismissed Jesus’ words and works as a non-miracle— because they couldn’t see it—but the Lord then backed up the genuine outworking of His power, which was forgiveness, by a simple restoring of strength to the man’s legs (Luke 5:17-26). “Which is easier,” Jesus said to them in verse 23, “to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk?” The point is clear. What those people wanted in their small-mindedness and lack of authentic spirituality is a short-cut for what faith really is: daring to trust God on His terms and entrusting ourselves to Him in obedience. While some will say that faith is about insisting God answers prayer our way and in our time, real faith involves bravery in believing. God’s power has the ability to turn, “all things...for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose,” (Romans 8:28), but we must also believe in God’s everlasting love that sometimes subjects us to temporary measures of suffering to produce an eternal victory for His glory. Power then, as God intends it, is that which turns our hearts to Him and aligns us with His will for our lives.
Not only that, it also keeps us on course when winds of doubt and affliction taunt and torment us. From where does such power come? It comes from reading and believing His Word, the Bible. If we want more of God’s power in our lives, there is only one remedy for our desire: believe His Word. Peter sums it up nicely by reminding us, “His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires” (2 Peter 1:3-4). Thom Mollohan and his family have ministered in southern Ohio for more than 18 years. He is the author of The Fairy Tale Parables, Crimson Harvest and A Heart at Home with God. He blogs at unfurledsails.wordpress.com. Pastor Thom leads Pathway Community Church and may be reached for comments or questions by email at pastorthom@ pathwaygallipolis.com.
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Cornered
by
Grace
image Courtesy of http://david-cowan.artistwebsites.com/
Enter the Fifth Dimension by
Rob Beames
I
n physics and related studies, the fifth dimension is a hypothetical existence outside the generally accepted three spatial dimensions and one time dimension—although no one can entirely describe it. Popular literature, movies and television use the mysterious nature of this unproven dimension to summon a feel of the supernatural. Although we are now able to experience movies in what is being called 4-D— the extra dimension being motion seats that spray water—any eventual move to a 5-D experience would be nothing more than a marketing scheme having very little to do with the postulated fifth dimension. The supernatural world also has dimensions that correspond to some extent with the natural world. Many of Jesus’ miraculous healings were not just acts of compassion,, they also served as symbolic representations of spiritual realities and His mastery over them. When Jesus healed the blind, He did so out of overwhelming love, but in the process He communicated that only He could reveal God’s truth to a world blind to it. When He caused the paralyzed to physically jump in the air for joy by the power of the Spirit, those who were
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so paralyzed by pride or fear were shown that they no longer had to live spiritual inert. Although we can never fully grasp the dimension in which He dwells, God speaks to us from heaven in ways we can understand in our dimension, because He loves us and wants us to believe in Him. Could it be that heaven is really the fifth dimension? Either way, we are meant to understand the magnitude of what the gospel of Christ means to us in the spiritual realm, even though we can only taste it now in our corporal element. Fortunately for us, God has not waited for us to discover Him. We would have never done it. Instead, He broke into our dimension in order to fulfill the required demands of His infallible laws. Paul puts it in a way we can easily understand: But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and
since you are his child, God has made you also an heir” (Galatians 4:4-7). In our visible universe we have defined at least four dimensions, and perhaps a fifth. There are at least four dimensions of the gospel, and perhaps a fifth, as well. We belong to God based on the implications of Christ’s death and resurrection which address different aspects of our need and could be said to exist in four dimensions: justification, propitiation, regeneration and reconciliation. Since, we could not attain the level of perfection required, as God said, “...therefore be holy, because I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45), the death of the only holy One justified us in His sight. Our guilt begs our condemnation, but in His mercy, God placed the blame and punishment we earned on Jesus instead (propitiation). Since our sin and unbelief paralyzes us, God made us new through the power of the resurrected Christ, so that we could live with the freedom to be what He created us to be (regeneration). Our rebellion, selfishness and overall sin nature made us enemies with God. He sacrificed His Son to repair the relationship with Him we had previously destroyed (reconciliation). While there is a sense our adoption into the family of God is merely a deeper reality of reconciliation, we might say that adoption is that mysterious fifth dimension of the gospel in that our adoption is no less a mystery than a theorized fifth dimension. When we ponder that God’s wrath targets His enemies in order to utterly destroy them, we struggle to comprehend why we, having once been that enemy, no longer have to fear this awful plight. Our relationship with our Father is restored due to the work of Jesus. Not only did God remove our devastating destiny, but he also took the relationship to the next level by making his enemies his sons and daughters. Godly adoption is more than escaping annihilation and living out our lives in as conquered enemies of a great power. Instead it means we are considered by Him in all aspects, revered, honored, much loved and well esteemed, even as much as He considers His beloved and blameless Son. What He has promised to Jesus, He has also promised to us! He wouldn’t bequeath to us all that is His if we were merely a conquered nation. No, for some reason hidden only in the folds of His eternal will and pleasure, we
are brothers and sisters to Christ. We had nothing to do with it, as Paul explains, “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves” (Ephesians 1:4). It’s not molecular mechanics. It’s not string theory. It is, however, a spiritual reality in which we exist because of the accomplishments of Jesus on our behalf and because God wants us in it. The relationship between Jesus and His Father is tight and dear. It is not a distant one between king and subject or between slave and master. Thanks to adoption, so is our relationship with Him! We have to accept it by faith, but it is no less real. By God’s Spirit, we are family. This is astounding and worthy of more consideration than there are theoretical physicists studying a proposed fifth dimension. After a lifetime of studying the implications of Christ’s death and resurrection, we have one choice: to praise and thank Him for placing us in this beautiful dimension of adoption. This gives us the capacity to do what we were created to do. (Ephesians 2:10) Life in the fifth dimension isn’t creepy or scary at all. In fact, once there, we will never want to be anywhere else. Due to His great power and love for us, we won’t ever be! (I believe He wanted me to remind you of this.)
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Real Relationships
Helping Hands for the Hurting by
Sam Harris
I
t’s a dark world out there. It seems like we can’t go one day without some kind of reminder of just how dark it is. We hear reports from overseas about innocent people being put to death in the most brutal ways. While that’s an extreme scenario, things on the home front aren’t necessarily a whole lot more hopeful—being on a certain side of the world doesn’t make us immune from tragedy. Shootings are becoming more common across the country. Celebrities and everyday people alike succumb to depression and suicide. Everyone knows someone with a dying relative, a failing relationship or a crisis of some sort in their live.—someone on the verge of losing hope. The compassionate among us legitimately ask the question, “How can we help?” It’s difficult to say but there are a few things to keep in mind as we
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offer helping hands. We can’t fix it. As difficult as it is for problem-solvers to admit, we can’t fix people or their problems. When someone we love is hurting, we want to say or do the right thing to instantly make the pain go away, but it doesn’t work like that. Hurt goes deep, so it’s helpful to recognize that it’s not our fault if someone is still hurting after our encouraging words. We also need to be careful to treat hurting people appropriately. No matter what the circumstance, people need love. People are never tasks to complete or problems to solve. We should always strive to be genuine and authentic with our love, offering true friendship and personal investment, rather than just token words or gestures out of obligation. Anything less cheapens the individual as
a person and the pain they’re going through. The issues of others are real and meaningful to them. They deserve to be treated as such. Love people. Loving people sounds simple in theory, but it can encompass more than we realize. Obviously, love includes supporting someone through difficult situations. It includes listening, being available, having authentic conversations and doing one’s best to empathize with the person’s feelings. Additionally, to love people during hardships we must offer friendship, solace, and hope, no matter how bad things get. Lastly, loving people can include random acts of kindness or sympathy to remind people that they’re not alone. Love means investing our time, energy and attention into someone else’s wellbeing. In a way, it means laying down our lives for our friends, which is the greatest possible kind of love we can give (John 15:13). Sometimes a bit of tough love is necessary, too. Occasionally the most loving thing we can do for friends is to tell them a hard truth, like they shouldn’t go back to a destructive relationship, or that they have a personal responsibility to make healthy choices. Loving someone can involve getting other friends or possibly professionals involved to bring urgent help that we aren’t able to provide. Being loving and supportive doesn’t always mean supporting every choice someone makes, but it does mean helping to define what is best for them. As Proverbs 27:6 says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” In some situations, we may need to hurt someone in the short-term in order to encourage and cultivate their longterm healing. Pray and seek godly solutions. Even Christians, who are supposed to believe in the power of prayer, can be hesitant to openly talk about and exercise prayer. We worry about offending people or sounding cliché. We may even doubt that psychological issues and other real-life problems can be solved by prayer. But if we truly believe in a loving, active God, then seeking His wisdom through prayer is an essential activity that we should never neglect. We must not be so self-sufficient as to think that we, in our own
strength, have the power to heal broken hearts or restore peace to people’s lives. We must not be so faithless to believe that time is all that’s needed for healing. When comforting a Christian, we should be ready to pray with them. Praying for each other is a command (James 5:16), and doing so aloud, together can also serve to bring mutual encouragement to both believers involved. If dealing with people who legitimately would be offended or turned off by spiritual things, we should take our cues from the Holy Spirit and be sure to pray for them diligently on our own. Petitioning the Creator of the Universe and our Heavenly Father on behalf of a hurting soul is the greatest service we can do a person. Nonetheless, prayer shouldn’t take the place of other actions. No matter the struggle, the Holy Spirit’s counsel in our lives is an invaluable resource that we need to utilize. We know how hard it is to suffer depression, heartbreak, or loss. Watching people we care about experience these things is also hard. We feel compelled to help in some way, but powerless or unequipped to do so. By acknowledging someone’s pain, showing genuine love and seeking God’s wisdom through it all, we can build positive, supportive relationships. Our actions can go a long way toward restoring hope. May we always be ready, able and willing to offer a helping hand to the hurting people around us. Sam Harris is continuously striving to follow Jesus Christ more closely and to love others more fully. He is currently pursuing an M.A. in English at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he also works as a teaching assistant for English classes. He enjoys writing nonfiction accounts of his life experiences, as well as science-fiction and fantasy stories and the occasional poem. He would like to be either a teacher, a writer, or a superhero when he grows up. You can find his blog at www.sirrahleumas. wordpress.com, or like “Samuel N. Harris” on Facebook.
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May God Bless by
the
Hell Out
Erik Guzman
of
You
kin bags. That’s what I kept thinking as I looked around at the people crammed into the subway. My wife and I traveled some this summer. At home we see the same people all the time. From
the discomfort of seeing my wife’s face in that guy’s armpit already has my memory redrawing him in a tank top. We couldn’t move. There were so many unattractive people pressed up against each other… so many. The subway car’s doors opened. Nobody got out. More got in. One lady had what I hope were just bug bites. The doors closed and we took off, a mass of flesh jiggling along in a dark, underground tunnel. Hairy skin bags, I thought. We’re all hairy skin bags full of fat, meat and bone… and we’re all slowly rotting. I like to think of myself as a generally cheery fellow, but that’s kinda creepy, don’t you think?
work to the kids’ school to family and friends, we experience a comfortable trickle of humanity. We drive everywhere we go. We sit next to people we know. It wasn’t that way on vacation. We spent most of our time in cities, traveling by train and subway. The variety and volume of people nearly knocked me over. There are so many people in the world, and most of them really aren’t that good looking. Put enough of them in the same place and they throw off some nasty smells, too. Walking down the street in the afternoons, warm whiffs of sickeningly sweet mystery stank often crossed our path. Our pace quickened while we wondered out loud, “Is it rotting garbage?” A few times going down into the subway we had to sidestep a puddle and it was clear what the smell was. The guy next to my wife in the subway car was holding a strap attached to the bar above his head. He was an average height. My wife’s face is armpit level to guys of average height. He probably had a shirt on, but
The Image of God Later during our trip, I sat next to my wife on a bus. I stared out the window and watched the countryside roll by. I remembered the skin bags on the subway and had one of those thoughts that was so strangely clear it seemed to come from outside of me. That mass of flesh is the image of God. That’s crazy... isn’t it? Why would God create a bunch of dirty skin bags to represent him? “Look at that mess,” God says. “That sweaty, bloody mess is what I look like.” Ha! Ridiculous. But then there’s the Fall of Mankind. We aren’t what we were created to be. With our God-given freedom, we twisted and bent ourselves, distorting His image and hurting each other in the process. God had something else in mind. We were supposed to be glorious skin bags filled with the Spirit of God himself. Life is hard. The clear thinking continued. Take care of one another.
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I remembered a quote from Charles Bukowski: “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t.” Love. That’s what I’ve always thought of as the essence of the image of God. The scripture says that God is love. When we see someone love selfsacrificially, isn’t that what God looks like? It has to be love in action, though. Love has to be incarnated... imaged by skin bags. Love Incarnate That’s what Jesus showed us… a sweaty, bloody mess. He said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”
(John 14:9). The image of God suffered on the cross to love all the other skin bags, to give up His Spirit that we might breathe in His original vision for humanity: Jesus, love incarnate, God and man as one. The countryside continued to roll by, and I continued to think about love in action as the incarnation of God, His image. Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 32:37-40). The second commandment is like the first because we accomplish the first by doing the second. We love God by loving His image. 1 John 4:20 says, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” It was all coming together and then I thought of a friend of mine who doesn’t believe in God. He’s
an amazing guy who is studying to be an RN. He’s obsessed with helping people, a truly compassionate person. He’s also a very vocal critic of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Why? Why does my friend who doesn’t believe in God, and who thinks we’re all just walking accidental chemistry experiments, care so much about skin bags? I had to know. When I got back from vacation, I went to my friend and asked him why one cosmic accident should give a crap about the suffering of another cosmic accident. You know what he said? He said, “I’ve been there and know what it feels like to suffer.” He simply doesn’t
want people to go through what he’s been through. There you have it, the image of God again-- a skin bag who doesn’t even believe in God walking around looking a lot like Jesus. I told him my thoughts about compassion coming from seeing people as the image of God and manifesting love and divinity by caring for skin bags. He said he didn’t get the idea. I told him about 1 John 4:20 and he just laughed and said, “4:20, huh?” I guess he thought I’d been smoking something. I wished I were more like my friend, but I go traveling around contemplating the nature of God
and skin bags while he simply helps them.
Just as we were about to wrap up our conversation, my friend said to me, “One more thing. Go easy on yourself, man. You’re doing the best you can.” There he goes again, looking like God. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). Maybe today I’ll go love a skin bag and enjoy being the image of God.
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