This Is A Fire Door Never Leave Open - Psalm 31

Honesty and transparency is hard some come by. We can really hardly ever find it in others much less ourselves. We are so unwilling to open up and say we are at a deficit and are hurting; that we are struggling to move on forward. I even stutter when I know I need to be and reluctantly relent to the truth. David says:

9 Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and body with grief.
10 My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,
and my bones grow weak.

Prayer is powerful. It helps us to understand ourselves in relation to God and pushes us to be honest. I find it harder to lie to myself when I'm praying than any other time. I really think it isn't possible to worship the Lord, to reach to grasp the master, until we have let go of ourselves. Pain and struggles have a tendency to show us ourselves. It shakes our foundations of self confidence. I believe it is there to wake us to conscientiousness, to wake us from our selfish slumber, in order for us to seek out something (really someONE) that is trustworthy to hold onto. Unfortunately in a society of defiant self-reliance, we are told to scream our uniqueness and toughness over the proverbial affliction. We wear shirts that say "I beat cancer" or post things about "proudly being an introvert" that subtly (or not so subtly) imply "I will gladly sacrifice my brothers and sisters in Christ on the alter of my self comfort." Is it awesome that you have recovered from a disease? Yes! Did you really beat it? Is it cool that you know something about yourself? I think it is. But is it really something to be celebrated? No. It has a set of strengths and a set of weaknesses that need to be overcome same as being an extrovert. When we celebrate impediments, or suffering we've "overcome" we really defeat the Divine purpose of it. I want to admit my failings and my need, thereby freeing my hands of myself to grasp on to Him. Think about this line of thinking looking at the concluding verses of this psalm.

21 Praise be to the Lord,
for he showed me the wonders of his love
when I was in a city under siege.
22 In my alarm I said,
“I am cut off from your sight!”
Yet you heard my cry for mercy
when I called to you for help.
23 Love the Lord, all his faithful people! (the call)
The Lord preserves those who are true to him, (the promise)
but the proud he pays back in full. (the warning)
24 Be strong and take heart (in Him),
all you who hope in the Lord

Let us abandon ourselves and grasp on to Him. Confess, repent and praise Him for He loves us and has forgiven us!

In Christ,
paul



music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

Last Call - Psalm 30

I think probably the single greatest praises we have come as a result of answered prayer. And particularly the prayer of helpless surrender brings salvation; starting the road that is narrow. It is almost the easiest time to sing His praise. Often we call back to our conversion to fuel our song.

1I will exalt you, Lord,

for you lifted me out of the depths...

2 Lord my God, I called to you for help,

and you healed me.

3You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead;

you spared me from going down to the pit.

I think that is good but I think that is a bit shallow when it comes to singing to Him. I mean look at it, only singing about things we have received by prayer is the short end of the stick so to speak, because what happens when they aren't answered or they aren't answered with a comfortable response? Our worship subtly becomes about us and it takes more and more just to get us singing. Greater heights, more lights and eventually herecy. Manufacturing gold dust and feathers to be "moves of the Spirit" become the norm and claiming nonsense as our own. To appeal to ourselves is truly the lowest common denominator. It feeds our pride in order to do what we ought. Lewis puts this well in Mere Christianity:

"Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity—that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride—just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

It may be a more satisfying and subtle devil but it is still the devil none the less. I definitely lean more to our freedoms in Christ but knowing how sadistic pride is, even the music of those churches, divorced from their pastor's heretical teaching, still makes me uneasy. I'm not going to say people can't worship the Lord correctly by singing a Bethal or Hillsong song but it definitely makes me weary. My pride loves to be fed no matter where it comes from.

The best way to ensure we sing and we sing rightly is to sing of the works of the Lord. Not what we get, but rather what He has done. Making Him the focus of most of our worship songs fuels and reorients our hearts. So whether what comes is hard or easy, painful or pain relieving, it is all His work. We can get to the point where we can say as Job did, "though You slay me, yet I will praise you." Look for the work of the Lord in the psalms, and the songs we sing.

4Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people;

praise his holy name.

5For his anger lasts only a moment,

but his favor lasts a lifetime;

weeping may stay for the night,

but rejoicing comes in the morning.

In Christ,
paul





music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

Just Give Up - Psalm 28

I often times think about the Christian life, salvation, and my life, trying to distill it down to it's most basic forms. I do this to try find a pin point; a place of motivation from my beginning to go to my end. It really involves being honest about myself and not trying to b.s. my way into an ever stipulated world where I feel better about myself, but a place where I cut the crap about where I am in order to move on. I think, it is important to strip away our excuses to get us down to the bedrock. We excuse ourselves with every identity label in the book. "I don't do that because I'm an introvert," "I avoid my neighbor because I'm busy," "I don't talk to that person because they have a habit of talking down to me," "I grumble about that person because they always 'look at me that way'," and on and on and on. In a society of ever increasing "identity culture" it's easy to forget our place before Christ and where we are and what we are commanded to do now that we are in Him. Now pretty much anyone who knows me and has had any discussion around this knows I am generally adamant about abandoning self reflection and introspection, but I don't really see this as the same. I look to see where I am excusing myself to elevate how I feel about myself for the express purpose of getting back to ground zero. I am full of pride, that is the root of all my sin, and that made me deserving of death. Others commend me to do that to find out the intricacies of myself; to find out more of myself or with the foolish thought that I have any ability to purge sin from my heart. It really ends, in my opinion, in a place where I am, whether directly or indirectly, feeding the root. That root is the extent of the power in my being, and it really just has the power to make death. Humility and Christian charity (love), is inherently outward focused. Even in 1 Peter 2, Peter even examples this perfectly in verse 21

...Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.

Christ gave up Himself for us. Zacchaeus gave up his pride and status to see the Lord, and so did the blind man in Luke 18. It's quintessentially a letting go of ourselves to cry out for mercy to the Lord of all creation. It is an outright abandonment of ourselves to be near Him. All my excuses for my sin are just impediments to seeing Him. I would say that if we can't let go of ourselves, seeing our real state (our identity which is really that root of pride), to give Him all we have, we will never let go of "the sin that so easily besets us" to seek out others; to love them and serve them as Christ's example has shown us. What do we think "die to yourself daily" and "pick up your cross and follow me" means? The call of the Lord is always to do that. It is really, in my opinion, the distillation of the work of the Spirit: to call us to that by showing us the step above, and then empowering us to do that. It is like a force like gravity and we fight against it like a cartoon person hanging to a root on the side of a cliff. The call of the Lord is let go of the root of sin, and only with the power of the Spirit we can. We don't believe He will take care of us if we do....but the truth is He always does. So I'm left with the psalmists call:

1To you, Lord, I call;
you are my Rock,
do not turn a deaf ear to me.
For if you remain silent,
I will be like those who go down to the pit.
2Hear my cry for mercy
as I call to you for help,
as I lift up my hands
toward your Most Holy Place.

Lord I need your mercy now more than I ever have. Give me the strength to abandon myself on my cross, and to love and serve You, Your people and those who don't know you. Help me by your Spirit, and remind me by the time I spend with your people and by the songs we sing of You.

In Christ,
paul




music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

They Look Like Strong Hands: Psalm 25

Over and over I run my own self into the ground. I try and hold my own ground. I trust that somehow, strength is inside me. It's like every time you swear you won't eat so much or [insert self control issue here] and you just end up doing that. I think "that porn site," "those cookies," "that shopping site/store," "my phone," "that couch," "that guitar," "that book," "those Netflix marathon"...those are just things. Inanimate objects, date, furniture. They can't hurt me, and they can't make me do anything I don't want to do. I just have to say "no" just like Nancy Reagan taught me to. That is totally true. Those things cannot do a thing to you and they cannot do a thing to me...that we don't want them to. But when the chips are down on the table, what do we do? We place our trust in ourselves, don't we? We think we can have strong bodies, strong minds, or strong hands and nothing or nobody can push us around!!! THAT, my friend was never the real problem. When the old testement and particularly the Psalms, talks about shame it means this: to be found to have placed your trust in something that failed you because it was not trustworthy.

Oh, and God forbid we ACTUALLY restrain. Say you say no to that extra helping; say you say no to those sweats that will for sure lead you to a minimum 5 hour Law and Order marathon. What then? How do you feel about that? What swells up within you? Your pride. The chief, numero uno, the big bad daddy that is at the root of all sin, and kicked off our fallen condition. You lay that beside the Cross. See Jesus in pain, and look that in the face. See what that puffy feeling feels like and that trust in yourself did. It should make you and me meek. Often enough, it does not, but when it does, truly does, it looks a little like this:

16Turn to me and be gracious to me,

for I am lonely and afflicted.

17Relieve the troubles of my heart

and free me from my anguish.

18Look on my affliction and my distress

and take away all my sins.

20Guard my life and rescue me;

do not let me be put to shame,

for I take refuge in you.

21May [the] integrity [of Christ] and [His] uprightness protect me,

because my [fruitful] hope, Lord, is in You

If and when we place our trust in Him, we place it in the only thing in the whole of creation that is trust worthy to save us....Jesus. The one who was not of creation but what all creation is from. Sing to Him your thanksgiving because:

"...no one who hopes in you

will ever be put to shame"

in Christ,

paul

music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive"):