Agreeing with God

I believe that the main reason why Jonah

was so offended by the mercy of God

towards people was his self-centredness.

He looked at the work of God from his own

small world and got frustrated.

Maybe this was one of the main goals of his mission.

God wanted him to step out from his own

subjective interpretations and be carried

by the plan of God. God knows what he is doing.

The only problem with that is one’s

disagreement with it.

Fast And Fluent

Some people are so good in speaking that it’s impossible

to find out who they really are and what they think.

If you attach an unlimited amount of money to an extremely

sophisticated and fast vocabulary you end up approving

things that you never even dreamed to talk about.

When the dust settles down you are sitting there with

no arms nor legs left and you wonder what just happened.

This is called deception.

Missions

As advanced as computers are they are not spiritual.

Even though they can be programmed with the right

vocabulary and sure patterns based on spiritual principles,

they can never share our pain  nor give us a hug.

The orthodox idea of the church service being a divine

play has some truth to it. It’s the momentum of God’s

work that is manifested in flesh and blood.

Moses could not just sent a message to the Pharaoh

when asking  him to let his people go. He had to

physically go into his presence.

Paul didn’t just send church planting epistles. He had to

take the inconveniences and pains of travelling in

order to reach Rome and other centers on civilizations.

God didn’t send just an influence from heaven to save

the world. He had to come himself.

This is called missions.

From Sacrifice to Surrender

Last night we heard an amazing message and an invitation

not to be fooled by that what seems to be genuine and deep.

P.Brown described the difference between  sacrifice and

surrender. When someone is giving a sacrifice they give up

something to give over. They still have control over the

action. Surrender demands more distance. You give up your

control and give in.

Only God can move me from sacrifice to surrender.

This is something that will never be announced publicly.

Only God knows if you really have surrendered to him.

God’s plan will always lead us to places where we cannot

manage everything.

The only reasonable choice is to surrender in trust. 

That’s a good geography to study.

Anybody will do.

Anyone who has ever been used by God in any capacity

knows very well that God can use anybody.

He can make stones to speak, donkeys, snakes, angels, bananas…

In the midst of all these multiple choices man continues to be

his best choice. Why is that?

It’s our freedom. No other creature is as free as we are.

Pastor Schaller has been speaking a lot about the story of Jonah.

We can learn so many things about the work of God from it.

For me it looks like God needed Jonah to preach in Nineveh.

He insisted using Jonah.

Somehow he could not save the city without a preacher.

And it almost didn’t matter what kind of preacher it would be,

as long as he was one with a free will.

God can use anybody but will he find somebody whom he could use?

There seems to be so many anybodies, but only a few somebodies.

Anybody will become somebody when they agree to be available for God.

Just shake it off !

Projections are the uninvited thoughts, ideas, feelings and attitudes

that pop up in our minds arrogantly, demanding all our attention.

They are lies that are sent to distract us

away from the presence of God.

They don’t just happen.  They are a part of Satan’s systematic

attack on people.

In the midst of one of the greatest blessings

for your spiritual welfare (read GGWO Convention),

you all the sudden feel that you should be somewhere else,

alone, far from these truthful friends.

Truth is not a spontaneous, surprising feeling.

It’s a solid rock that cannot be easily kicked out from our lives.

Projections are more like a sandstorm that comes and goes.

Just shake it off.

Out of The Squirrel Wheel

Out of The Squirrel Wheel

According to some Christian theologies

 “man has to merit the merit of Christ”.

This puts people into a squirrel wheel,

where there seems to be a lot of activity

but no achievement.

Unresolved guilt continues to motivate

their absurd pursuit.

After running for a while inside this wheel a person

sees nothing but himself and himself only.

That’s one of the main reasons why people withdraw

from fellowship. They get tired of pretending that

everything is all right, when they actually are

at the brink of collapsing.

Healthy faith always leads us to see

more of God and His graciousness. 

God is a rich giver.

God doesn’t agree to work like a vending machine.

He is a rich giver.

He continues to give generously. You don’t have to deserve his gifts

and you cannot pay it back later.

This is a hard lesson for us to learn as in our own system every

reward is based on our performance.
Every favor has a price.

Cain understood in Gen. 4:6 that God doesn’t receive a face.

He cannot be influenced by human manipulation. Yet, he hears

our prayers and encourages us to speak to him.

Zacharias and Elisabeth were said to be “righteous before God,

walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord

blameless, but they had no child…” Luke 1:6

They were given a child, John the Baptist, and he was given

disregard of her barrenness or their blamelessness.

Ask and it shall be given to you or ... not.

The more you know him, the better you know what to ask.

Almost perfect is not perfect at all.

“ Perfection is like the North Pole. Once

you reach it, you understand that life is actually somewhere else.”

I saw this comment in the classical music station’s

chat box in Finland.

Aiming perfection can be a devastating experience.

Demanding perfection from others is not less disastrous.

However, any other standard would justify sin.

God doesn’t want us to fight sin with a perfect performance,

but with perfect dependency.

The emphasis is not in what we do, but in who we are.

We are perfectly saved, perfectly accepted and perfectly covered.

This perfection is not a condition, but a consequence
of God's own work..

“It is finished” could also be translated as “It is perfected.”

Matthew 5:48

Is it the Finished Work or a denial ?

When we speak about the finished work we understand that

God is not just trying to fix our fallen nature, but has given us

a new nature that is worth to be discovered and expressed.

If we dig deep into the psychology of our sinful old man we 

often end up opening a bag of worms that will occupy all our

time and energy the rest of our lives.

When we refuge to do that we simply recognize it's existence,

but deprave it from our attention.

We proclaim that the purpose of life is found in another realm,

in the life of faith.

Faith gives us the permission to worship God in all times, in

all circumstances.

We are not closing our eyes. We are seeing further.

We are not closing our minds. We think bigger.

We become more careful with our steps as they slip so easy

to the darker side of our person and rob all our joy and purpose.

You are the air I breathe.

A Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer speaks about

nature eating up grace.

In his philosophical analysis he points out that by the

end of the Renaissance man had managed to promote

his natural thinking to a level where no holiness nor

heavenly existed in his daily life.

Hiding from God is impossible. Running from his

presence is ridiculous. The further man thinks he is

getting the closer to God he is coming.

The attempt to set our culture free from God

is the greatest tragedy of our heritage. God is not the problem.

Leaving God out is like trying to stamp the air we breathe.

Move on!

Moving on keeps our heart beating.

Horizontal dead ends are just a gentle reminder that God’s

life is multi-dimensional. It’s not an end at all.

The life of God is often compared to a river that moves on

unhindered, always finding the way.

The river of God is full of water.

Running the race in this flow is not really that difficult

as long as you don’t resist and try to change the direction.

Hebrews 12:1

No More Pain

There is no shadow in His presence.

There are no questions, no stress, no misunderstandings.

There will never be failures, ever again.

He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live

and move and have our being.

James 1:17, Acts 17:27-28

Life is not what it looks like.

In life we meet a lot of uninvited people in unexpected situations.

It looks like all problems

are caused by wrong people who are saying wrong things

in wrong places in wrong times.

It’s a miracle of grace that anything good can come out of these situations.

Jesus invited his disciples to follow him. I’m sure they had their

expectations and interpretations of what was going on.

Time after time they heard things that they had never heard before.

They saw everything change when Jesus walked into people’s lives.

Mountains turned into roads. Water became wine.

Murderers became preachers.

No wonder they wanted to be like him.

When Only Patience Works

Situations where only patience works are a challenge to our

fast performing life-style. When we would like to fast forward

our lives, some things just refuse to move on.

Patience is strongly connected with obedience.

Obedience is not a natural response to us. It must be learned.
And you cannot learn it fast.

We need patience to do the will of God.  Hebrews 10:36

The Bible is full of examples of God training people for a long

time for a specific task, Moses, Joseph, Abraham, Esther, Paul.

Jesus is said to have learned obedience,

by the things that he suffered.

It wasn’t a big Rambo mission for him.

It was a slow, invisible but powerful work that took place on

this planet, when most of the people were just eating

and drinking and worrying about their appearances.

Never ending Seeking and Finding

Some people are eternal seekers. They like the process of seeking,

but are not so excited about finding something.

Their honesty disappears when their findings start getting more personal

and uncomfortable.

A spiritual man is actively seeking the will of God.

Loving the truth, even to his own hurt, is an amazing quality in

a seeker’s soul.

I love this thought, that God is invisible, yet he invites us to seek him.

That kind of seeking always takes us to a higher ground.

Help me with the thought for this picture.

It's not a failure to start again.

To start something new is so much fun and exciting.

To continue doing it amid all obstacles and unexpected costs,

is always a test for our true character.

All the unfinished projects become like never disappearing

waste in our soul. Undefined guilt can often be traced back

to these forgotten dreams and visions.

To take things all the way unto completion is in God’s character.

Those are the times when we, together with God, enjoy glory.

Continuing new beginnings of the old projects is much fun, too.

Man cares about not caring.

I heard this in the Science class in Baltimore last night.

“ People who say that they don’t care what others 

think about them, always make sure that others know it.”

No communication is bad communication.

People think that it’s a great idea to punish friends by not

talking to them anymore.

Didn’t you know that this is the most dangerous kind of silence.

It has the power to destroy nations.

But , you are not punishing anyone else, but yourself.

The silence is cutting wings from your soul and

destroying the future of your own ministry.

If you don’t want to speak with someone anymore,

maybe you could listen.

This is not your own business. We all others are robbed the joy

of fellowship in the light  because of your stubborn, selfish attitude.

Give up your rights to reason in the flesh

and come and laugh with us all again.

It’s a numeric inflation!

   a painting by Twombly, the price measured by millions

The days when billions impressed us are gone.

Now even quadrillions or terabytes are not enough

to measure man’s achievements and debts.

God called Abraham out from his own tents and

invited him to count the stars and the sand in the ground.

Are you mocking me , God?

No, I’m trying to give you something that you cannot pay for.

There will always be a greater grace available to

your failure. There will always be more love.
It's amazing to be lost in God's greatness daily.

Have you laughed about it, yet?

This laughter thing, it’s one of those “beyond our control”

phenomenas. It often has a heavy baggage of guilt and shame

attached to it. I think laughter is a charisma, a grace gift from God.

Not the hysterical, weird, falling down, slain by the spirits giggling,

but genuine healthy laughter.

God has given us the right to laugh at things as a simple way to

deal with the hordes of depression and apathy demons that try

to claim their territory in our wounded souls.

When did I laugh last?

“Where can I flee from your presence?”

Psalm139:7

So many things don’t depend on us, but the claim that nothing

depends on us sounds like one of those most common excuses

to escape responsibility for our personal decisions.

If man doesn’t believe God to be a person, he will not be

morally concerned for the consequences of his behavior.

Man’s philosophy in life will define his integrity.

It’s so much more difficult to lie to a person with a face

than to an impersonal  machine or

 to an always changing system of rules and regulations.

No wonder the Old Testament blessing says,

“The Lord make His face to shine upon you”.

 Numbers 6:25

Can God make mistakes?

I’m often tempted to think that God made a big mistake by giving

so much autonomy to man. The more I think about it,

the more it amazes me and motivates me to know him .

In a way He had nothing to loose,

 but being faithful to his own character

He ended up on the cross.

Wasn't that a loss?

 We have no idea what the cross really meant for Him.

Besides the fall of Adam and Eve the cross could

have been another reasonable moment to dump man

 and try something else.

They mocked Him

 and challenged him to step down from the cross,

but His genuine love kept him there. The work was finished,

but that’s just a new beginning of His eternal plan,

with no other beginning and end but Himself.

There is so much more to come.

Listening is a spiritual skill.

Man has, in his social evolution, developed an ability

to speak a lot without saying anything.

This is manifested, not only in political debates, but

also in the all filling world of entertainment.

As if everybody was afraid that all the sudden they’ll

have nothing left to say and they will be forced to

listen to God.

Remember the poor.

Gal. 3:10

Don’t just explain their state with

 political and sociological terms.

Most of the poor in the world are

 not themselves responsible for their poverty.

Building a higher fence and hiding the poor

 from our daily life doesn’t stop their cry.

 Emotional money giving will not satisfy their hunger.

They need to be given the right to meet with you,

yes, even to touch you.

Do you know anyone who is poor?

“Who is like the Lord our God,

who dwells on high…

He raises the poor out of the dust,

and lifts the needy out of the ash heap

that He may seat him with princes-

with the princes of his people.”

Psalm 113:5,7

Not seeing the forest for the trees

General statements are often an escape from an inconvenient truth

or just a cry of a helpless man who has too much on his own plate,

too many trees around him,

and understands that he has no power to help others.