Do Not Forget

God does not forgive, much less forget.
At least not in the way we most often think about it.
Just saying.

He never makes our sins just go 'poof!' and disappear. 
He does, however, move them.
I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist.--Isaiah 44:22
...as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.--Psalm 103:12
But He does not make sin disappear until somebody dies.

When we know we are guilty, He does not forgive.
When we repent, He does not forgive.
Only after somebody dies does God forgive and, for us, God wants that person to be Jesus.

When we repent and believe, our sins are moved to Jesus' back, and He died for them, all of them. 
If we don't repent and believe, we are stuck with our own sins, forever, all the way into eternity, where we must do the dying for them.

Imagine that, every time we lie, a soldier drives another nail through Jesus' hand into the cross.
Every time we cheat or betray or love the world,--another nail, and another and another.
Don't kid yourself.
If you expect forgiveness, this must happen. It must. Either that, or you hang on to your sins right into hell.
The only way out is to stop sinning, which we should probably give serious consideration.
But forgetting may not be such a good idea.

Jew for a Day

I am trying to imagine myself a Jew today.
Or a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan, or a Muslim.
I know that God exists.  
He made me. His power drives the world.
Somewhere, from up high and far away, He influences my life.

I try to serve Him. I try to obey Him. I reach out to love Him, to draw near to Him, but He is too terrible, too far.
He speaks to men sometimes, but they don't benefit much from the conversation.  They are too flawed themselves.
Such men have stood so near God as to hear His voice in thunder and whisper, to feel the heat of His fire, to witness His blinding brightness, but even then, they fail.
They smash His personally engraved tablets in a fit of anger.
They fear their king so deeply that they tell him their wife is their sister.
They sleep with their captain's wife, then kill him to cover it up.
No, these men, though they have spoken with God, do not help much at all.

And, because I am a Jew, there is no Jesus.
God shows no gentleness, little mercy, no offered fellowship, no shared humanity.
I long for God, but know that He will not share His heaven with the likes of me.
I can never know my God.

Then I remember Simeon:
Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for the face of all people; a light to  lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of your people Israel.--Luke 2:29-32

He saw Jesus on the day of His presentation in the Temple.
One look.  That's all it took to change an impossible contradiction into hope and a future.
One look.
Not a God far away, but God in my own skin.
Simeon, a faithful Jew, but as sad and impatient as the rest, had waited for the promise.
And it came.
It came to him in the same way that it comes to everyone--in one moment.

I look up and He is there.
My Savior lives.

Waaaaa!

What do you cry about?
Be honest.
Sadness, loneliness, loss, physical pain, emotional hurt?
More often then not, this is the audio to that:  "Me. Me. Me."
Even empathy for someone else transfers from our own remembered pain.
Our tears are almost always all about us.
I do it, too.

We begin at birth with a cry of outrage when life smacks us with cold and discomfort, and we wail at its first assaults.
And they keep coming.
And, when they seem too much, we cry.

Did Jesus cry at birth?
He felt the pain and cold, too, but did He cry?
He wept later, but in very specific circumstances--over the sins of His people, and again at Lazarus' grave.  He wept for the death of people he loved. In no recorded instance did He cry over personal loneliness, insult, betrayal, or desertion.
Not like we do.
Jesus' flesh felt every body blow as deeply as our does, but He did not cry over them.
Why not?

Think about Him at His weakest moment--in the garden, sweating blood in an agony of anticipated suffering.
"Let this cup pass", He begged, but it would not.
He had come to the end of His human resources, but He did not cry.
I cry because I do not master my flesh.
Jesus, Master of all things, did.

He felt every pain, every hurt, as deeply as I do, but He did not give in to them.
Why not?  What was the difference?
He knew Himself.
He knew His Father.
He had already won.
I am supposed to know this, too, and in this knowledge, self-pity has no place.

Can I hold His kind of mastery over myself all the time?  No.
But in this, like in all things, Christ says,
"Follow Me."
"Be holy."
"My yoke is easy."

From the very first ones, all of my tears have been selfish.
Yes, tears sometimes come as a release, too, and I will still shed these, but I have no real reason to cry. Not ever.  Not really.
My Savior lives. He loves and cares for me.
What could I possibly cry about in the face of that?

Forget the Pool

Thinking today about the lame man sitting beside the pool at Bethesda, waiting 38 years to be healed.  Jesus, knowing everything about him, asks the man,
Do you want to be healed?--John 5:6

Obviously, waiting at the pool was not getting the job done.
Jesus wanted the man to reconsider his position.
Jesus did not just want to heal him.  He wanted to show him something wonderful.
He not only wanted the man to walk, He wanted him to see.

When Jesus told the man to pick up his mat and walk, restoring his mobility was not the point.
Jesus did not want to give him only legs that worked.
He wanted the man not to walk, but by walking to see real power.

The man had waited vainly for so long because he looked for the wrong thing in the wrong place.  He looked to get well, not to find God.

Where do I look? 
Do I look for relief?  Do I look for a spot of water to bring it?  Do I look to someplace else on the planet or to something of flesh and blood?  Do I think these can enact rescue, provide comfort?

Or do I look always into the eyes of my Savior?  Do I see His extended hand, offering more than the world, more than legs that work, more, more, more?

Forget the pool.  I want the power.

Sorry, Ma'am, You're Not On The List.

We have a lot of nerve thinking we can get into heaven.
When I think about it, I see only two choices in this heaven thing.  Either heaven is open to everybody because God loves us, or nobody because though He loves us, we are sinners and don't belong. I tend toward the second.  After all, if heaven were my party, I probably wouldn't want any gate crashers, so I figure that God doesn't, either.

A good thing I'm not in charge.  God sees it quite differently.  Jesus said so.

Let the world know that You have loved them as You have loved Me.  I want those You have given Me to be where I am, to see My glory, the glory you gave Me before the creation of the world.--John 17:23-24

But getting in is another matter.
I know I don't belong in heaven.  If left on my own, I would stand forever out on the sidewalk, facing whatever angels guard heaven's gates.  I do not, nor will I ever, make God's "A" list for anything I have done. 

I love God, but that won't get me into heaven.
I try to do right, but that won't get me into heaven.
People pray for me, but that won't get me into heaven.
I go to church, but that won't get me into heaven.
I read my Bible, but that won't get me into heaven.

I have only one hope for heaven.
God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.--John 3:16

That's it.  My one ticket.  Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice.
You see, I don't have to try to get into heaven by myself.
Jesus walks me up the sidewalk and when we get to the door, tells the guards, "She's with me."

How Good People Lie

The Bible says that Abraham was righteous, but describes how he lied about his wife.  It says Moses was righteous, too, then relates that he killed a man and ran away.  Then it says that the Pharisees, who revered and followed God's law to the letter, were not righteous, but vile, stinking, empty tombs.  What?

No one will be declared righteous in His sight by observing the law--rather through the law we become conscious of sin...Righteousness from God comes through faith...--Romans 3:20-22

Over and over, God's Word tells us that only faith justifies, only faith saves.  But that is not enough for us.  We want to DO something.  And doing good is healthy and pleasing to God...until the doing takes on more importance than the believing. 

The tipping point comes when we equate doing good with being good, when we believe that our ability to follow the rules makes us right in God's eyes.  This is where the Pharisees went wrong, and so do we.

The Jews had their law, but we have ours, too.  Every time we say or hear "But he's a good person!" to justify salvation, we witness a lie.  No one who tries to follow good behavior into God's lap of forgiveness will reach his goal.  Neither Pharisaical law nor a pretty, shined up life lead to heaven.

God does not change.  He does not flinch.  He saved by faith then, and saves by faith now.  Moses and Abraham believed, and were made righteous.  We believe, and He does the same for us.

And because believing includes recognizing God's supremacy and perfection, faith leads to repentance, and all the pieces come together.  The very last--the last--is the doing. 

We can't change a faithless, but proper, life into a saved one any more than a broken vase can be made into a perfectly new one.  We can only present our broken pieces to the Lord of all by faith, and let Him do what we cannot.

Reaching In

God's most frequent admonition for us is to believe.  "Come to me," He says.  "Know me."  "Trust me."  And we do for a little while, but then the days come when we do not.  Heavy, dark days.  Lonely days.  Days when we know He has died and been buried and we don't know what to do next.  We heard that He had risen from the grave, but we haven't seen Him.

He has instructions for these times:
Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.--John 14:27
Do not worry about your life--Matthew 6:25
Cast your cares on the Lord.--Psalm 55:22

We try, but the sadness persists.

That is when our sweet Lord offers us His side.
Put your finger here.  Reach out your hand and put it into my side.  Stop doubting and believe.--John 20:27

He is real.  He had died and risen.  He has rescued us from death.  No matter how we feel, we must know that His wound  has bled real blood so that we can know peace, so that we can be free.  And when, on some days, the knowledge of these is not enough, we can reach our hand into His side, feel His pulse, and know, really know.

 He does not shrink back from our touch.  We cannot shrink from His.
I am with you always, to the very end of the age.--Matthew 28:20

How He Finishes It

The cross.  The lamb.  The blood.  There are levels of knowing. How can this horrible act remove my sin?  And where, then, does that forgiven sin go?

Every year I watch Jesus struggle His weary way up the hill, listen to the hammers, wait for the words, 'My God, My God..."  I know the reason for all this.  This horror, this terrifying travesty happened because I sinned, because we all sinned, and because God could not tolerate that.  He could not leave it alone.

God made the Jews kill sweet young lambs to repair this sin.  He made them cast out goats into the wilderness to die because of it.  He told His people that these innocent animals bore the sins of  men.  He made those same men sentence to death what would otherwise nourish them.

Then He sent Jesus.

Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.  He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit.--1Peter 3:18.

So, by God's act and decree, what He did to Himself He also does in me.  Jesus Christ died, and so must I.  My corrupt body, my sin, what I am in this world must be put to death so that, like Christ, my Spirit can be raised up.


I must die to the world.  I must die to finish in me what Christ did for all.  As I recognize, confess, and repent of each sin, Christ takes them from me with hands both tender and bleeding, and absorbs them into His own wounds, carries them in His own flesh and blood, and they die there.

On the cross, my sins are carried as far as the east is from the west because Christ moves them from earth to Himself.  By this single act, He gathers sins daily from all confessing believers and transports them to the instant of His own death, a cataclysm shaking heaven and earth, and pronounces, "It is finished."

Life in the Pigpen

This week, a friend of mine is going to wrestle a pig. In some circles, this might be considered perfectly normal, but those usually have something to do with a farm and an eventual meal. Not so in this case. My friend plans to do this for fun. Frankly, I don't understand it, especially because she intends to do this in a mud puddle, a BIG mud puddle.

The pig is bad enough--I've had to catch one before. They are strong and agile and kick like the dickens. They struggle and squeal and run away much faster than you could ever guess their short little legs could carry them. Even so, the mud part baffles me the most. Under controlled circumstances, mud squishing between one's toes can be quite pleasant, but, in order to catch this pig, my friend will accumulate mud in places that mud just should never enter. Nose, eyes, ears, scalp, underarms, and more. She will find new mud in hidden places for days afterward. Yuck.

In order to catch the pig, she will have to get dirty, very dirty. In preparing to do this, however, she made me think about something. In order to catch the pig, she has to go into the pigpen. Once there and covered in mud, she will look a lot like the pig. You did the same thing.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us.--John 1:14
...but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.--Philippians 2:7

You had a job to do. Man needed saving, so you became man.

For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so He condemned sin in sinful man.--Romans 8:3

If there is work to do in the pigpen, that's where the workman must go to do it. If men need saving, then the Savior must become a man and get it done. If a pig needs catching, then a woman who wants to catch it must get in there with the pigs.

Thought for today: To what pigpen is God pointing you in order to get your work done?

The Skull that Sings

My son Bryan recently gave away his bone collection. This old boxful of treasures, saved carefully for almost two decades, became the precious property of another little boy in exactly the same state of messy adventure as Bryan had been when he first accumulated it. As the new owner pondered an appropriate place to display the collection, Bryan told him that its crown, a nearly perfect cow skull, must not languish. He must hang it somewhere prominent, as Bryan had, to render its full due.

Compliantly, the young man's dad hung it high on a post in their driveway, a greeting of mixed messages to postmen and visitors alike. Then something unexpected happened. An ambitious family of wrens, looking to find a hospitable home, began carrying twigs into it. Eventually, they laid eggs and hatched little wrens there. Now, feathered parents transport food in and out of the skull, flying through the gaping eye holes, an ironic picture in their juxtaposition of old death and new life.

Today, however, I realized they also provide a metaphor for God's life in us. We are as dead in sin as that old cow skull: dry and barren of useful flesh. What pulsed constructively through us died with Adam and Eve's rebellion in Eden. As a result, we rub into eventual dust like Ezekiel's dry bones. When God breathes His Spirit into us, though, He brings life back into the husk. Like the flaps and chirps of baby wrens, He brings sound and warmth into a dead place.

Now, this is not a perfect metaphor--the skull did not rise up and speak and the wrens will eventually move out and the skull will empty again. But when I imagine how a merciful Savior filled my own sad life with a song of hope, well, the skull dwellers make the perfect picture of grace.

If Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.--Romans 8:10