Take it to the bank

32 "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Luke 12:32-34 (ESV)

Fear not. What does the absence of fear look like? Selling and giving. I didn't say it. I certainly don't live it. The church today doesn't teach it (as long as we think about things differently from the world, we can still keep all our stuff).

Freedom. That's what I'm reading here. This is nothing earth shattering, but to get beyond the hardness of my heart and the lies I tell myself, I've got to keep repeating it to myself (I've got a two-year-old at home who learns faster). One day, maybe I'll acknowledge that my life is the sham that I know it is - of minimal kingdom use. I don't like the lies. I know I'm a slave. I feel it this week especially.

Will I change? Will I move toward freedom? Will I get out of the pig slop and run back to the Father?

It isn't all that greasy

The things going on in study and meditation these days revolve around the conditionality of God's love and his promises. His love, despite what we may have heard, isn't unconditional. In fact, the price paid for it is unimaginable. God really didn't simply sweep sin under the rug - His justice demanded and exacted a terrible penalty.

Obedience isn't an additional price added to what was accomplished on the cross. Obedience is humility - even to death. Obedience is an acknowledgement that God is worthy and just and letting that reality inform every action. His worthiness didn't change at Calvary. He is as holy as ever. Why, then, do I refuse to be humbled?

I think he gets it...

http://joel.mawhorter.org/loveyourneighbor.html

Read those - please!...both of them

Is that real freedom I see?

Application Redux

I've now rewritten the article on application at least five times (keeping many of the main themes, but trying to "flesh it out" differently). Each day it seems that things can be said differently. Application isn't a quick-fix kind of answer. It's a daily enlarging of esteem for God and reduction in esteem of self apart from the cross. It can't be going to the Bible for answers - that turns scripture into a tool. It has to be going to the Bible for questions. It's we who are dead apart from the gospel, not vice versa. Yes, application means obedience...but who are we obeying?

Application, it seems, isn't something that will require a huge answer. Application is, after all, a work of the Spirit. Application is what happens when we participate in our sanctification by daily, contemplative prayer and reading. That's it. It's not less than obedience. It's not less than perspective shifting. It's all of that and more. It's a deepening relationship. It's a foundation for moving through life.

Application is accepting God's reality and accurately labelling ours as a lie. Application then means to cease pouring so much energy into maintaining a lie. Application, then, is rest. It's moving into sacrificial living because we see have accepted the reality that we're strangers in this world. It's moving into prayer because we have accepted the reality that God really is who he says he is and we really are nothing apart from the meaning he supplied us on the cross.

You can say all of this in 1000 words or you can say it in 10. You can say it all, but I don't think you can really define it. Any definition falls short.