Trust It To Emerge

Emerging Through The Veil

I read this from The Inner Sanctum and thought it was something that I wanted to share here, the thoughts dealing with the religious involvement of “worship” I have omitted, if you would care to read it in its entirety, just click on the link above.

Rich


Later, as I pondered, I marvelled at the lesson that I gleaned--the same lesson that all of life seems to be wrapping around me these days--a Kingdom lesson that I wish I could shout from the rooftops! We so often waste time and energy trying to fulfill expectations--especially our own--when in fact there is a fully equipped expectation-exceeding "machine" inside us! The Kingdom of God is swirling inside us Christians, fully resourced with Christmas words and music--or anything else desirable--accessible precisely at the time needed! The Kingdom wants to emerge with more power and force than we could ever muster in our own initiative--we just need to participate in its incarnation! The Scripture in Hebrews that urges us to come boldly to the throne to find grace to help in time of need not only mean a desperate approach in a desperate situation. That comfort is only a slice of a much broader pattern of living to which God is calling us: there is always empowerment for life and action to be experienced in our contact with God--He is always wanting to demonstrate Himself by showing up in the moments of our lives with surprising displays of Presence. The throne of grace is a throne of participation and partnering between heaven and earth. This God truly wants to live Himself out among us still and gladly does so--much to our enjoyment--when we refuse to nervously over plan his arrival!

And that really is, now that I think of it, the message of Christmas. The obvious answer to the popular Christmas song of a few years ago, Mary, Did You Know? is a resounding NO! Mary did not know that the pivotal Person of all time, eternity and spiritual substance was residing inside her young womb. How could anyone "know" that and bear up under it? She did not know, but she was willing to "let it emerge". She carried the Kingdom of God the way we all should--with the sense that she was participating in a mystery that her mental capacities could never fully master, yet remaining open to all the possibilities. The good news of Christmas is vast, but one very real aspect of it is this: This spiritual Kingdom to which we Christians now belong requires none of the effort, strain and fevered pursuit that we bring to it. This Kingdom, like the Savior that instituted it, wants--more than we know--to emerge. It wants to leap into being and fill every time and space around us, making things whole and right, hopeful and holy.

When we actually resist the pressures of do-it-yourself professional Christianity, we give the Kingdom a chance to show its overwhelming orchestrational ability and take our very breath away. Whether it is one Sunday morning's worship experience, or deliverance in the midst of an impossible situation, or the transformation of the nations--it's really all the same. God help us, as we hurl headlong into 2010, to learn the rhythm of Kingdom participation. Give us the incredible grace to, like Jesus, refuse to run to the dying Lazaurs, because we have already observed the power of resurrection and its ability to EMERGE! I'm looking for--and hoping to be a part of--an army of strangely sane Christians with eyes fixed on another realm. I'm looking to fully lose the religious performance frenzy and march forward with bold confidence minus the need to push or prove. Sign up now and leave the pressure behind...I think the call is clear.

Simply The Best

In coming back to work after three weeks of holidays on Monday of this week, I was greeted with many warm expressions of welcome back, and how were the holidays, to which I replied, simply the best I’ve had in many years.
Wow, where did you go, what did you do they asked?
In explaining that I really didn’t go anywhere or do what they might have considered to be something really important, I could see this quizzical looks on their faces, huh, that does not compute!

Isn’t it a mind bender to think that we can discover pleasure in the One whose pleasure in us makes the Seven Wonders of the World seem like yesterdays news? I am becoming more convinced than ever that if I could travel to the hottest of hot spots on this planet and not know what it means to be loved so unconditionally right where I am, then that so called paradise place would be nothing more than stale bread.

Without the reality of the Father’s love for us reaching deep inside and totally altering the death and fear that keeps our minds filled with smog, we will be nothing more than caged lab rats keeping the spinning wheel turning in our relentless pursuit of happiness.
I remember the first time I read how Joseph’s (of the Bible) life turned a 180 when he discovered that his prison became a palace in discovering His presence, I thought yeah right, but lets be real, we live in a real world buddy.
Well although that didn’t make a dent in me then so I thought, today is another day of discovering that there is no place where he isn’t working in secret to bring into my consciousness the unfathomable knowing of His intense delight and pleasure in me his son! When this becomes much more than a sterile and distant theology, life and its abundance erupts from within, spilling out all over everything I do and where I go.

The wide open door to His heart is there right in front of you, simply step through the portal of grace and right before your eyes, all that you have ever longed for will BE yours!
In Him we live, move and discover our purpose in life is to be fully alive expressions of being desired.

Rich

Blessed Are You

In not knowing the truth of God the Father and his love for us, we merely exist, some might even call it, “dead men walking.”
Those who have ears to hear, and eyes to see said Jesus, let them feast upon the hidden manna the fertile and fruitful one, Christ in us.

There is a story in the Old Testament 1Samuel 1, where it talks about a man who had two wives, one bore him children and the other Hannah could not, because the Lord had shut up her womb.
It goes on to say, “And her rival (the other wife) used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the LORD had closed her womb. So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the LORD, she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat. And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, "Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?"

There is such wonderful liberating truth in this, at least for me. What I see so clearly is as follows. What all of us are not discerning except for those who have had it revealed to them, is that everything that we assume is God working through many that we look upon or up to, as being vibrant, fruitful leader types, are in fact if it is NOT His life in them as them, are merely a cheap and bewitching mirage.

We like Hannah despise our bareness, but the kicker is that it is the Lord God himself who has like wise closed our womb, why, so that we don’t have to resort to fleshly means to see His life, fruitfulness realized in us.
There is NO one who jumps up and down ecstatically when they hear Him say, “Blessed are you who are poor, barren, fruitless, mourn etc, why, being weak, lifeless, unfruitful apart from Him is not very attractive, so, the alternative is to succumb to becoming bewitched. When we no longer measure ourselves by His unconditional love for us, we resort to looking in the mirror of performing all over again. We compare ourselves with one another and see how we fail, fall short according to the lies we have once gain become ensnared in, and start competing.

There are NO short cuts to knowing Him, it is either going to Be a living walking talking miracle of His grace bringing forth His life inwardly and outwardly in us, or we’re going to shop at the nearest boutique of vogue stick and past forms of godliness!

Rich

Religious Mirage

Mirage: something illusory, without substance or reality.

"But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world" (Galatians 6:14).

Crucified To The Religious World

It is interesting to notice the particular way in which the Apostle speaks of the world here. That term is a very comprehensive term and includes a very great deal. Here Paul gets right down to the spirit of the thing. You notice the context; it is well for us to take account of it:

"For neither they themselves who are circumcised keep the law; but desire to have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh" (Galatians 6:13).

What does the Apostle mean? They want to say, "See how many proselytes we are making! See how many followers and disciples we are getting! See how successful our movement is! See what a power we are becoming in the world! See all the marks of Divine blessing resting upon us!" The Apostle says that is worldliness in principle and spirit; that is the world. He sets over against this his own clear spiritual position. Do I seek glory of men? Do I seek to be well-pleasing to men? No! The world is crucified to me, and I to the world.

All that sort of thing does not weigh with me. What weighs with me is not whether my movement is successful, whether I am getting a lot of followers, whether there are all the manifestations outwardly of success; what weighs with me is the measure of Christ in those with whom I have to do: "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you" (Galatians 4:19). Christ formed in you — that is my concern, he says that is what weighs with me... not extensiveness, not bigness, not popularity, not keeping in with the world, so that it is said that this is a successful ministry and a successful movement. That is worldliness. I am dead to all that; I am crucified with Christ to all that. The thing that matters is Christ — the measure of Christ in you.

You see how the world can creep in... and how worldly we can become almost imperceptibly by taking account of things outwardly — of how men will think and talk, what they will say, the attitude they will take; of the measure of our popularity, the talk of our success. That is all the world, says the Apostle, the spirit of the world; that is how the world talks. Those are the values in the eyes of the world, but not in the eyes of the risen Christ. In the new creation, on the resurrection side of the Cross, one thing alone determines value... and that is the measure of Christ in everything. Nothing else is of value at all, however big the thing may be, however popular it may be, however men talk favorably of it; on the resurrection side that does not count a little bit. What counts is how much of Christ there is.

You and I in the Cross of the Lord Jesus must come to the place where we are crucified to all those other elements. Ah, you may be unpopular, and the work be very small; there may be no applause, and the world may despise; but in it all there may be something which is of Christ, and that is the thing upon which our hearts must be set. The Lord gives us grace for that crucifixion. There are few things more difficult to bear than being despised; but He was despised and rejected of men. What a thing is in God’s sight must be our standard. That is a resurrection standard. Now that is the victory of the Cross: "But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world".

The above article was written by T. Austin-Sparks