Tag Archives: christianity

I AM home at last…

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Frost on the window pane. Inside. 

Turning the hottest room in the house frigid by dawn’s first light.

So I snuggle down deep, burrowing next to him, hand resting lightly on his belly.  Chest rising and falling, rising and falling.

Slowly.

And my breaths sync with his own.

We are one.

Becoming more one each moment, with only seven months behind us.

Pillow talking our way into morning as the sun, one eye still shut, yawns and stretches towards day.  Then boldly mounts the distant hillside, proclaiming in no uncertain terms…

I AM here.

And He is. For this is the day the Lord has made.  I will rejoice and be glad in it.

Easy words to say lying wrapped up in Dearest Husband’s arms.  Safe. Secure. Happy. Peaceful.

Perfectly content in our little corner of the universe.

Then feet hit the floor. The wood is cold beneath my toes. A sharp reminder that I must will.

Choices to be made. Each day. Even before being fully awake.

Even when I don’t want to.  Even when the current circumstance is less than.

Dearest Husband agrees and we pray for change. Believing we are one day closer. Living our dream, our second half chapter, after the darkness of nights better forgotten.

A brand new day, in the making.

Yet life is measured in moments and moments are meant to be savored. All the moments from Him. But only by Grace.

By Grace are ye saved. And by Grace we will learn the lessons of the moments.

If not, they will be squandered. They will fall away and the door will shut and they will be lost forever. And one day we will wake up, look around and ask, where did they all go?

So savor the moments, I remind myself.

How?

I AM. In every moment.

Is He?

Like a constant drip, the question nags me as I go through the morning routine, gearing up for the grind.

Yet He is.  Always there.  Arms outstretched.

But one day I forgot.  Somewhere I got lost a little. Tangled up in what my eyes only could see. Choosing to ignore the spiritual joys that are just beyond the veil, to squeeze tight the bird in hand. Which flew away and died. Better off dead.

Something best was within grasp if only I would stretch out my withered hand.

And so I did. With palms upraised, lifted high, like a four year old longing for Daddy’s arms.

I need Him to pick me up.

Do you?

Then seek Him.  And I will too.  For all He is.  Just because.

He loves us.

And this is the only place we will find life.  Where our dreams, that are really His ancient plans all new, can come true.

I steal but a few moments with Him before the hustle and bustle sucks me in. Suffocating hope again. Churning despair in the deep parts.

I hear Him say, in barely a whisper, I AM.

I AM here and I have not moved.  But, where have you wandered, Little Girl, Little Boy?

I long to be there. To live there.  In His arms. Always.

Years ago, I was.  Much more closely.  Before a spell of sinful choices knocked me off course for a while.

Until God, in His great mercy, said enough.  And tenderly took hold of my heart again.  Set my feet on Holy Ground.  Dried my tears.

Rescued.

Then He sent me a very godly husband.

A man who inhales Jesus with each breath, bringing life and love to every fiber of his fabric, so warm and cozy, making every exhale an Alleluia…

I am wearied from traveling in a land far from home. So I keep seeking.  Holding my partner’s hand. My life’s love who helps me see Him better. Who spurs me on with his prayers when I am tired. Whose shepherd’s crook nudges me when I get a little out of line.

Are you weary, too?  Do you need to catch your breath? Do you need to return to the safety of His embrace?

Seek, wearied traveler.  Seek Jesus, the One who loved you so much He gave His life.

Seek with us.  And we with you.  All of us together.  The way it was always meant to be.  Loving. Longing for what is yet to be…while living fully in every moment of the here and now.

And one day we will arrive at the celestial city, all gold and gleaming, and the gates will fling wide open and we will walk through…Welcomed.

At last…I AM. Home…

No condemnation…

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From time to time I’ve come across someone who has put their faith in God by trusting in his Son, Jesus, for their righteousness, yet they are assailed with fear and condemnation by a passage of scripture found in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

 For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain terrifying expectation of judgment, and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace? (Hebrews 10:26-29)

The faith of these dear ones strikes me as sincere as evidenced by the conduct of their life. Far from perfect, they nevertheless go about life quite differently than they used to, the Master’s words taken to heart and his Spirit quickening their conscience towards both their heavenly Father as well as their earth-bound brothers and sisters. Even so, they fear this passage applies to them because they either remember or are in the very midst of stumbling—sometimes badly! They have done wrong even in the face of knowing it to be so.

Welcome to the Church, the body of Christ…

I don’t say this to be trite or glib. It is simply a fact. Even the most ardent believer stumbles and sins. Remember David? It wasn’t enough that David committed adultery with Bathsheba. Upon learning she was pregnant he went so far as to have her husband murdered in a vain attempt to keep the whole thing quiet and have Bathsheba all to himself.

God called David his friend.

Then there is Peter, the disciple who denied he even knew Jesus because he was scared of the possible consequences. So he lied. Even after Christ’s resurrection from the dead, facing peer pressure, Peter took the low ground and decided for appearance sake it was better for him not to take his meals with non-Jews. That is, until Paul corrected him publicly.

The Bible is full of examples of folks who screwed up even though they loved God and proved it by lives markedly different from those of mainline society. They had “knowledge of the truth” but, on occasion, made some bad choices.

Being a follower of Christ doesn’t mean we aren’t going to sin—even willfully sometimes. What it does mean is that we aren’t going to be able to live the same sort of life we did prior to the time we believed God, repented of our self-directed life, and put our trust in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit’s ability to clean us up and set us free from a life of continuously willful sinning, the sort where we could care less what God has to say or what claims he makes on us, his beloved children.

Happily, the same book of the Bible does have something to say to my troubled friends (and me!) about those situations where we make the poor choice to deliberately sin.

For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, And He scourges every son whom He receives.”  It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. (Hebrews 12:6-13)

And in the book of 1 John, Chapter 1:

If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. (vv 8-10)

Again I say, to be a Christian is to battle with sin!

So, who is this dire warning from the Bible directed to?

The verb found in the phrase, “sinning willfully” is in the present tense denoting someone whose very lifestyle is a constant stream of willful sinning. (The sort of lifestyle that was once mine until Jesus changed everything.) And there is a qualifier that we need to pay attention to as well: “after receiving the knowledge of the truth”.

It is an ominous warning! As to whom it applies, I leave this to God, who alone knows the intimacies of every human heart.

What I do know is that it doesn’t apply to anyone who is trusting Jesus to help them overcome the sin in their lives. Such a charge doesn’t have God as its source. Of this I have no doubt! Trade your fear in, dear ones, for the truth. Jesus, our Elder Brother and Savior will bring us safely home!

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus! (Romans 8:1)

~michael

Rewind: Families

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The following post was published some ten months ago. It was written long before that, back in 1990. I wrote it, in no small part, to myself: good counsel learned the hard way that I thought might prove helpful to share with others.

Although within the body of the writing I speak of lessons I’ve learned, I find I was overly optimistic. There are times when I must relearn the same lesson. Again.

And so I offer the writing to myself and you once more, asking God’s blessings upon it anew…

~michael

It has taken several years of scourging at the hand of my Lord to lead me to the place where I might write these words, for they are not representative of my own philosophy – not even of my “Christian” philosophy, if you know what I mean.  For there is sometimes a great difference between what a man perceives as Christian and what is truly Christ.  I liken this to the effect one experiences when swimming in a cold lake.  Now and then he finds, to his delight, a warm spot in the lake that offers great comfort.  The warm spot, like the vast cold, are part of one and the same lake.  There are similarities with the word of God (as taken by frail men like me).  There can be occasions in which you find yourself scripturally “accurate” but at the same time swimming in the cold waters of the Law.  It is by grace, indeed, through being led by the Spirit, that we can overcome our miserable state and bask in the true Law of the warm and gentle places.

The first thing that I have learned about families is that they need to choose one another.  As demonstrated by the widespread plague of divorce not even the natural links of kindred blood are strong enough to assure a steadfast bond.  God chose to love us and through all the ages demonstrates his unswerving faithfulness to this decision of his will.  The choosing was independent of our response.  If I glance backwards, I am awed and overwhelmed by the impact of God’s chosen love to me.  It came to me against the tide of my own rejection and in the end I was undone, and by my undoing, saved by the act of God in choosing to love me in Jesus Christ.  The members of families must choose each other in the deepest reaches of their will.  Natural affection is too fleeting in the face of trials.

The second lesson I have learned is that the principles of forgiveness will know no harder proving ground than in the home.  Jesus was betrayed by a kiss from one of his “family”.  We shall fare no better: the deepest wounds will come from those who are closest to our hearts. Yet forgive we must!  Sincerely.  From the heart.  For the answer to pain is not always in distancing ourselves from its source.  God chose to forgive each one of us through a terrible cost to himself.  Our Savior, Jesus, was hung on a cross: nail-pierced hands, a crown of thorns.  A back ripped open by the lash.  His spirit weighed heavy to death by the weight of our sin.  A debt we can never, ever repay.  All God asks is that we echo his own great heart in ours by forgiving those who owe us so little by comparison.  Families must remain committed to forgiving each other without limit.  True forgiveness carries with it the terrifying prospect of being vulnerable to the same injustice again and again.  So it may sometimes need to be for Christ’s sake.

The third part of my education dealt with anger and the absolute need to give it up as quickly as it comes.  The sun cannot go down on anger for this emotion is too deadly a foe to feed and still control.  When the Lord reminds us that we are petting the dragon of anger we must let it go.  I cannot hope to forgive whom I am still angry at.  Families can ill afford to shelter anger as a household pet.

My fourth lesson dealt with words and their power upon the lives of others.  The Bible tells us to limit our speech to that which is proper and good for the moment and that benefits and builds up those who hear it.  Elsewhere in God’s word we are warned of the prospect of our tongues being used to further the aims of hell.  A family must always be prepared to build each other up through sincere and gracious speech.  Criticism has its place but we must be terribly cautious in its use.  Truly, we ourselves must be in such kindred fellowship with the Spirit that we can be entrusted to criticize in the positive slant that the Lord intends.

My final lesson is not yet complete.  (Nor do I think that any shall be fully completed until I am with my Lord!) Families must love one another.  If we do everything else perfectly, if we forgive, honor, cast off our anger the moment it comes and if we speak only that which blesses the hearer yet we do not love with the love supplied us by God, we miss the mark and abide still in the cold waters of the lake.  Joy will escape us.

I am often uncomfortably reminded in the words of the hymn we sing that “they will know we are Christians by our love”.  Many is the time I have asked myself after reflecting on my relationships with the members of my own family, am I really abiding in Christ?

If the corporate Church are the members of Christ’s body than a family is like the fingers on a single hand.  If the fingers cannot get along with the hand it will falter all the more when connected to the rest of the body!  We do not always see it that way because we are usually so successful at keeping our distance, one Christian from another.  Seldom, oh how very seldom, do we live in the intimacy and fellowship with the brethren that was intended.  We are a lonely people.  It is in the family that we see how we fare in intimacy.  If we fail here it is foolish for us to claim that we do better loving the Church as a whole.  We do not!  For if we were in as intimate a union with our Christian neighbors as we experience in a family the result would be the same.  Let us not be deceived about this in the least.

I have witnessed divorce many times.  I have seen couples wed, trade vows and speak of their intentions with the high hopes of our feeble race.  God takes us from ceremony to life and places us deep in the fire of his furnace – a terrible act of mercy and grace – to burn off the dross.  In his furnace you can hear our screams and see us writhe; the pure gold separates grudgingly.  In the suffering that must take place in being conformed to the image of Christ we at times falter, even stagger.

I am convinced by belief in the character of God and the lessons of the Cross that what can often be taken as the final curtain of defeat is, by purpose and design, the setting for the dawn of triumph.  Certainly, I have not seen clearly over the years.  My attention to God’s law (I am such a legal man at times!) for the government of families, the correction of sin, the duties of the various members within the family – all have been tainted by my lack of understanding and my own selfishness.  (This is not to say that there is nothing in our Lord’s commands to each member of a household as to their respective roles.  Plentiful enough are the hardships such a family will face until, from love of Christ, they obey him and diligently persevere in the family position He has placed them in.) I have sought to correct the sin of others by force-feeding them Scripture and demanding obedience.  Angry words have burst the boundaries of my lips.  And lovelessness, that ultimate agony lovelessness, has been too often my companion.

For all who find themselves in such a crucible known as the family be greatly encouraged if you experience some of the same things as I have seen and learned.  (May we be given full grace to apply them!) God does not break to destroy but to heal.  Even if your family is apart be heartened by what Paul wrote: “For perhaps he was for this reason [his salvation] parted from you for a while, that you should have him back forever”.  (Philemon v15)

© Michael Kimball 1990 (This writing may be freely copied in its entirety without prior permission from the author.)