Sleeping In and Waking Up

You know you have an active family life as a married couple when it's a blessing to sleep in until 07:30.  We had that blessing this morning.  I found myself chuckling while I poured our coffee, remembering wistfully those pre-children days when the kids didn't jump in the bed at 06:00 or the dog didn't reach up on the bedside and put her 5lb paw on your arm to remind you she needs outside time - LIKE RIGHT NOW DADDY! - as her 2lb tail thumps the wall.  I chuckled a little more realizing I rarely worked hard enough Monday through Friday to justify sleeping 'til 10 or 11 on a Saturday back then compared to now.  Maybe those days were given us to store up rest for these years, funny how God works that out in the grander scheme of things.  Reminds me of Sam Elliott saying in the movie Road House something like "I'll get all the sleep I need when I'm dead sweetheart..."

Lately I've found myself with too much to blog about and too little time.  I've also found myself wrestling with the deep Spiritual realization that we need positive words of affirmation, encouragement, exhortation that leaves us positively motivated.  I am, at times, good at those things as I catch that vision and pour out Spiritual teachings that people message me and say really opened their eyes and encouraged them to see something from a different perspective or that they didn't realize Scripture actually spoke to that issue.  Lately I've felt tired facing topics that need to be heard but won't be.  I've felt frustration at my inability to frame the words around the issue I so clearly see.  I can't speak to some of those things without righteous anger, and that is something few will receive constructively.  Above all I've felt no release from the Lord to speak or write publicly more than a snippet in a Facebook post lately, and that above all governs my blog posts.

This morning I sat with my coffee and opened my Bible to Psalms and stopped to look at a highlighted verse, the tail end of a highlighted verse broken by page break actually.  "Seek Your servant, for I do not forget Your commandments"  The last phrase of Psalm 119.  The tail end of a highlight I made of verses 175 and 176:

Let my soul live, and it shall praise You; and let your judgments help me.  I have gone astray like a lost sheep; Seek Your servant, for I do not forget Your commandments.

What an image which Jesus elaborates in the NT Gospels of the Shepherd seeking one lost sheep.  Wow, the God of the Universes seeking for one... boggles the mind that those of us who have been down this road a few decades have seen example after example of just that.  Some Churches roll in that stream all the time while outsiders stand and raise objections and questions and shoot arrows of critique while they sit around and do nothing with no one but themselves and their saved friends.  We often argue about the miracles of God because we have no miracles in our own life, or at least we refuse to acknowledge them as such.

This morning as I looked down from that highlighted verse I wondered what the 'broom tree' is in Psalm 120 and my heart landed on Psalm 121:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help? (KJV)
My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. (NIV)
He will not allow your foot to be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper; The LORD is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.
The LORD shall preserve your soul.
The LORD shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore.

As I read that a second time and again a third I felt that release and urge to post what has been the underlying theme in all the things I wanted to say about all the topics I've refrained from addressing.

Let me note an important Pauline tangent here before I proceed further, we are grafted into the vine of Israel, we are the 'new Israel' as believers in Christ if you will... so it is important for us to understand the mystery I phrase as "as it goes with Israel so it goes with us."  I can't elaborate beyond that right now, but it's an important thing that needs to be tucked in your brain somewhere back there friends.  You'll find that root both encouraging and enlightening as it blooms.

One of my friends recently commented on a Facebook post I snagged of a Billy Graham quote, and it's stuck with me for weeks now.  She said "I don't think you are getting through to people".  She may be right, and then again, God only knows.  Many of us never admit to another how profoundly a word they spoke was used to change us, because we are bound in shame that we had to be changed in the first place.  Either way I hold to the command of God to speak when I am spoken to and share what I'm given to share.  Ezekiel recorded those instructions this way:

Moreover He said to me: "Son of man, receive into your heart all My words that I speak to you, and hear with your ears.  And go, get to the captives, to the children of your people, and speak to them and tell them, "Thus says the Lord GOD," whether they hear or refuse. 

Ezekiel 3:10-11

I know I'm not alone in hearing those words and instructions, and the truth is I'm nothing special.  Many close friends think I am and have told me so - and that encourages me, but I hold that all the glory belongs to God alone.  I hold that more of us should be heeding those same guidances by the Holy Spirit and realizing that God is the same yesterday today and forever and seeks to use those who will surrender themselves to His revealed will.  You are meant to reach people with His love that I will never meet.  It is Him working through me that makes me of any substance whatsoever.  I have eternal worth and significance only because it is His breath of life moving in me, animating my soul and all that we consider life.  That is where dignity of life and humanity comes from, and that is why it is possible and imperative to 'love the sinner and hate the sin'.  Anything we might label self-esteem must be rooted in God alone as our Creator, because if it isn't then we've placed self on a throne meant only for God.  I show forth His glory only as I allow His Holy Spirit to dwell in me and move through me.  He pours out His love through us and wherever we flow in His Spirit trees grow rooted in that water that provides nurture and sustenance for the feeding and healing of the nations.  Another image shared at the end of the book bearing Ezekiel's name, 47:9-12.

I digress.

Here's the theme shared so well in Psalm 121:  My help comes from the LORD, maker of heaven and earth.

He chooses to allow us to participate in His workings in this world.  We look unto God alone to provide our every need.  One traditional doxology or sung declaration that recently surged overwhelmingly into my mind was

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be
World without end, amen, amen.

I was distracted at the men's BSF study on Genesis chapter 1 as I heard that phrase play over in my mind with the anchoring swell of a pipe organ behind a singing congregation of anonymous voices lifted in confident affirmation of those words after reading verses 29-30 and realizing that Scripture teaches God is the same yesterday, today, and forever as stated in Hebrews 13:8 and in more subtly pointed verses in the OT writings or the direct prophetic word of Malachi:

For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed O sons of Jacob
Malachi 3:6

Therefore you are not consumed...  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Free will of bad people.  Why do good things happen to bad people?  Free will of good people, and beyond that God keeping His promises not to destroy all humanity again, but to allow them the opportunity to do so themselves.  Genesis 9:8-17 kind of sums it up.  God wants all of us to "Taste and see that the LORD is good" as it is written in Psalm 34:8.  For some of us that will lead to temporary relief in rough life situations, for others eternal Salvation in Christ Jesus.

We stand in an increasingly turbulent time throughout the world.  We stand on the edge of a precipice in our own country, with many who refuse to understand the foundations they have strategically undermined and encouraged others to destroy.  None of this is the least bit surprising to those who've studied Scripture beyond their Salvation.  Jesus is recorded in the synoptic Gospels in Mt 24, Mk 13, and Lk 21 as giving lengthy discourses about the end times events we will witness and be sustained through.  John chapters 14-17 are the best companion to those three synoptic chapters.  Though there are "don't worry's" in those three Gospel chapters John's three chapters read almost constantly like "don't worry, don't be troubled"  There is much more recorded elsewhere, but in all of those Scriptures we're encouraged to persevere, to keep our focus on God and trust Him to see us through.

God states He exists.  The Bible spends no time defending God's existence, it states it and proceeds as if that is THE foundational Truth to all that follows.  We spend far too much time having to recover and revisit the elementary principles of God to proceed far in our walk.  Roughly 4,100 years after Gen 1:1 the writer of Hebrews wrote 6:1 lamenting the progress and encouraging a young congregation to get on with it.

God states He exists.
God creates order out of chaos.
God gives us everything we need.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

He is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore.

He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and the hills they graze upon.  The whole earth and all the people in it are His.  (Ps 50:10; Ps 24:1)  We are but stewards of the manifold blessings of God.  He has given all the riches of God into your hands as a believer in Christ, so why is there suffering in this world and those who blatantly do without.  Why indeed.  Order cannot be seen without the background of chaos highlighting it's glory... where will you establish order as His instrument?  

This raises questions with which we all need to wrestle.  When you are finished wrestling you will find which answer you are meant to be a part of, you won't be the answer to every one of the questions, but you will at the very least be the instrument in at least part of one answer.  Some of you rest assured that you are already fully immersed in being that answer.  We all walk somewhere along the continuum.  Wrestle away my friends, my 'honey do' list awaits.

I guess in wrapping up my theme for this one I would say that I wish you all the blessings that a Sabbath rest was meant to provide, and to wake to newness of life that energizes your week as you go forward.

May the Lord bless your going out and coming in from this time and forevermore.  Thanks for stopping by...


If you want a few minutes of blessing while these questions settle into your soul I recommend this song which actually contains the opening line of Psalm 121.

Casting Crowns - Praise You in This Storm