Unfortunately, when I returned home, I discovered I had left my jacket, with my wallet, behind, and I didn’t recognize it until I returned home, an hour’s drive away.
Thursday
A Personal History with Unchurched Believers
Unfortunately, when I returned home, I discovered I had left my jacket, with my wallet, behind, and I didn’t recognize it until I returned home, an hour’s drive away.
Father & Sons Development Co.
Did I tell you I’m working in the family business? The day I was adopted, I started working with my Dad. My Dad’s awesome like that.
When I was really little, he’d carry me in his arms as he walked through the factory floor. He’d stop and visit with machinists and foremen and janitors, pretty much everybody
Once when I was a bit older, I was building stuff with Legos™ in his office, while he worked on something. His desk overlooked the factory floor, and he saw something that caught his attention.
“Son,” he says. “You know Mr. Davidson? Tall guy. Red shirt. Big mustache?”
“I know him, Pop.”
“Son, would you go find Mr. Davidson and ask him to come up to see me? I’ve got something I want him to see.” And I toddled down the stairs to find Mr. Davidson. Soon he and Dad were talking seriously about something on Dad’s desk, and I added a new wheel to the thing I was building.
There was a time after I’d discovered books! Books are wonderful things! I was sitting in a chair in Dad’s office, sounding out a word, when he interrupted me. “Son, Miz Thompson works on the far side of the factory. Would you find her and give her this note?” He handed me the note, and I ran off to find Sally Thompson. She had a wonderful smile, and she used it on me sometimes.
I never did go to normal school. I would say that Dad homeschooled me, except it mostly happened in his office. Is there such a thing as officeschool? We had the best times together in his factory office.
He’d given me an arithmetic assignment that made me think pretty hard. If Mr. Jacobi needs to build this many boxes by the end of the month, how many does he need to build every day? Eventually I puzzled it out right (Dad showed me where I’d forgotten to carry the one, the first time), and he smiled this great big smile! “Son, would you please take this down to Marty Jacobi – he should be in the lunchroom right now – and show him how well you did this.” He wrote his initials on my math paper.
I found Marty. He gave me a cookie while he looked at my work. I munched, and then he smiled, and said, “You’ve got a real smart Dad, you know!” He was right, of course, but I already knew that!
One day he was reading letters. He had a lot of letters, and he read ’em all. One of them made him smile extra big, and he called me to himself. “Son, would you please go tell Bob Davidson that he’s got a new worker coming in the morning. He’ll want to put Cindy on the Quality Control team right away.” I delivered the message. Bob winked at me and nodded. “Sure thing!” he said.
One Thursday morning, Dad pushed my math books out of the way again, and set down his computer in their place. “Son, do you see this? What do you think that means?” and he pointed to a detail on the screen. This was a math test test, I felt sure. I was ready.
“That looks like trouble, Dad. Not big trouble, but trouble. Especially for the QC department. Um… Is that right?”
“That’s right, Son,” and he printed that page. “Would you explain this to Cindy in QC? And maybe talk with her about what to do with it, and bring me your favorite few suggestions.” Later, he picked one of our ideas, and implemented it. That was cool.
So I wasn’t altogether surprised when he set his computer on my desk some time later. He didn’t point to anything, but asked me, “What do you see here, Son?” I studied it a bit, and talked with him about the three or four things I saw. “What about this one?” “Hmm. I saw that, but didn’t think it was all that important,” I answered. “It’s all important, Son. Especially when this is trending,” and he pointed to the first detail I’d seen. “What happens when these happen on the same day?” I hadn’t thought of that! We talked about it and how to help the folks in the factory when that happened. I learn so much from my Dad.
And a few months later, those two things did happen on the same day. “Well, it happened, Dad.” “Yep, it surely did. Well, you know what to do.” I picked up my notes from our planning, headed down the stairs, and called the supervisors together. I explained the problem, and listened to their concerns. One of the guys had already figured it out, so I let him describe the adjustments we needed, filling in details when he needed help. We had the solution in place before the problem was big enough to slow production down.
Eventually we got to the point where I was really running the factory. Dad spent most of his time talking to individuals, or scheduling contractors for the expansion, and he spent a lot of time training some of the other kids, too. If I ran into a problem, he was always right there to help, and there wasn’t anything that he couldn’t figure out.
Figuring things out comes easy when you’re omniscient like my Dad is.
The OTHER Benefit of the New Covenant
Why Believers are Questioning Belief Traditional Views of Hell
It's actually OK to not have all the answers yet.
Why Does God Speak Cryptically
Homosexuals And the Move of God
Prayer From a Poverty Spirit
Sometimes we feel the need to ask in advance because we don’t trust that Father will provide for us IN the process. We ask BEFORE we need because we don’t trust Father to provide IN our need.
Functionally, this is the expression of a poverty spirit: a lack of confidence that Father will be a good father to us; a lack of confidence in our place as favored son or daughter.
When we’re asking for God to give us NOW what we don’t yet need, we are not walking in faith, in trust. Or rather, we’re not trusting in him; we’re trusting in what we have, what we know, our own strength. That is a prayer that Father, because of his great love for us, cannot answer.
I believe that a good part of the solution to this is to change our trust from trusting the provision, to trusting our Provider. In application, this means more time in prayer knowing Him, and less time asking him for stuff; more time on the couch next to Him, and less time across the desk from him; more time in relational prayer, less time in business prayer.
Walking in Authority
One day, the young men had delivered everybody of their demons except one old cuss, whose demon obdurately refused to leave. They tried everything they knew, prayed every prayer they ever heard, quoted every scripture, and still the demon mocked them.
They’d been at it for hours, determined to see this man set free. The main meetings finished, and people left, and still the demon resisted them. They determined to keep at it – all night if need be – until this poor man was free.
Finally, the last car leaving the parking lot stopped by the deliverance tent, and out stepped AA Allen himself. In a glance, he saw what was happening, and walked over to the demoniac. He bent over, and whispered a sentence, and the demon fled, screaming. Allen stood up, and walked back to his car.
The young men were astounded, and one ran up to him. “What did you say? What authority did you use? How did you do that? Why couldn’t we?”
Allen paused. “I said, ‘My name is AA Allen. Now get out!’” and he stepped into the car and drove off.
There’s a reason that we’re told to walk in the authority Father has given us. Some of us handle Father’s authority like it’s precious china, or like it’s an expensive and complicated tool: we must be careful and we must use it exactly right!
And Father is calling us to just walk in the authority: we’re his kids, so of course we carry his authority. It’s not something we do, it’s not about the right words, the right prayers, as if they were incantations.
It’s about us being his beloved children: we speak and we don’t even need to mention his name: all of heaven and all of hell already knows that when we speak, we’re speaking in his name.
Monday
The Judgment of God on His Children
In the book of Exodus, when the Hebrew children chickened out, rebelled against God, when they steadfastly refused to go into the Promised Land, God had to judge them for that rebellion!
And this is how he judged them: He supernaturally fed them miraculous meals that nobody else on the planet got to taste, for more than 14,500 consecutive days, because they were helpless to feed themselves in a desert.
He led them safely through the most dangerous desert in the region, continually keeping his presence in the middle of them, in a pillar of cloud guiding them by day, and a pillar of fire warming their feet and scaring off both mosquitoes and desert marauders by night.
Sure, people died. Over the course of a generation's time, a generation of people died and were buried, and life went on. That would have happened even if they had followed him into the promised land, so we certainly can't call that judgment!
But as part of his judgment, "They lacked nothing; their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell." (Nehemiah 9:21) That'll show em!
Wow. This is my Father. This is the family I'm adopted into.
Romans says that we should "Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God." If this is his severity, then what on earth is his kindness like?
The Father's Love
How often did their meanness make you want to get to know them? How many times did you want to spend time with your attacker after he punched your teeth in and shouted drunken insults at your mother? I don't remember my history books reporting a large influx of black Americans into the Ku Klux Klan after the massacre of black men, women and children just for their skin color. Maybe I missed that lesson.
Here's a really radical thought: God doesn't use those practices to get to know the precious children for whom he personally was beaten, accused, mocked and killed. The God who was murdered for their sins probably won't be judging people for the very sins that he just paid for, won't be hating the men and women he loved enough to die for, won't be killing your daughter with cancer and then demanding, "Love me, trust me, or burn in hell for eternity."
We've believed some pretty stupid things over the years. Let's not do that any more.
Whose Limits? Whose Understanding?
Learning How to Learn
I haven’t left the analytical skills behind, idle, as much as I have downgraded their importance, as Jesus Himself taught (in Mark 12:24), “Jesus answered and said to them, “Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God?”
Wednesday
Learning From the Book and Beyond
I’ve been talking with a bunch of very cool people about the Gospel of John recently. It’s important to me to be fresh with what I’m talking about, so I’ve been burying myself in the first part of the book recently, more listening than reading this time, just for a new perspective. And indeed, I’ve heard things I’ve never seen in there.
The real issue with Nicodemus was that the Spirit alone can unlock scripture; Nick’s head knowledge could never reveal mysteries of the Spirit. You know, I really don’t want Jesus saying to me, “You’re my child, and you still don’t get it?”
Tuesday
Testing in the Waters
Friday
Ministry Flows From Relationship
This God that you and I follow is an interesting fellow.
Some time back, he went through a lot of work, starting with, “Let there be light,” and then using that light to make the sun and the moon, to make planets and stars, then to make plants and fish and antelopes and woodpeckers, and finally to make a species of beings – we call them “human beings” – in his own image. “And,” he said, “It’s really good!”
And God worked hard enough during those six days of creation, that when he was done, he – God – had to rest, for a whole day.
And when he had finished this amazing work of creation, what did he do? What did he do with this thing that took six days of God working to create?
Why, he went for walks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, of course.
That was the
And God said, “It’s really good.”
And that’s been a priority for God ever since: that we’d be close friends with him, and we’d be close friends with each other.
And you know the story: Adam & Eve sinned, and our race fell out of close relationship with God, but God had a plan to deal with that – a good plan, but it was an expensive plan. And through Jesus, we have a way back to close friendship with God.
And God still says, “It’s really good!”
For thousands of years, humanity related to God through Moses’ Tabernacle, and later through a
Both tabernacles fell into disuse over the centuries. And God has not chosen Moses’ Tabernacle, the place with tradition and history, as the model for New Testament worship. He chose to restore David’s Tabernacle, the place of informal intimacy, and he specifically emphasized that this was the way we relate to him: intimately, personally.
In these New Covenant days, God has completely affirmed this value. When the Son of God stepped into space and time as a human, he called a some human beings and “He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons.”
Clearly, their efficacy at preaching, healing the sick and casting out demons came from being with him.
I love how Jesus described our relationship from his point of view. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”
Jesus considers you and me to be so precious, so alluring, that he sold everything – in Bible terms, “He laid aside the prerogatives of his deity,” and became one of us: God became human – so that he could have that intimate relationship with us again. We are his treasure!
And that’s been our foundation for doing anything worthwhile ever since. We’ve been saying it this way: “Ministry flows out of relationship.” Relationship with God. Relationship between us.
Without that, the best we have to give, is just us. Without an intimacy with God, there’s nothing supernatural to give.