The Spirit and The Wind

The wind is blowing, and I can't help but think about the Holy Spirit.  He is so like the wind.  It's neat that Jesus compared Him and His work to the wind. 

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sounds, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.  So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."  --John 3:8

We are called to be spiritual and not carnal.  The word "spiritual" means "supernatural, an origin with God and in harmony with His character, another dimension, a breath".  I might add "a wind". 

1 Corinthians 2:13-16 expresses that the Spirit of God speaks to our spirits.  He doesn't speak by human wisdom.  The man without the Spirit would only perceive it as foolishness.  It is our spirit that rises up and agrees with the Spirit of God--for we have the mind of Christ.  It is our spirit that has been redeemed.  Our soul is in the process of sanctification, and our bodies, well, those have to wait for total transformation! 

To spiritually discern something, as Paul speaks of in this passage, one must be led by the Holy Spirit.  He helps us to examine, to test, to weigh, to appraise and to judge. 

Paul says in verses 15-16, "The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment: 'For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?'  But we have the mind of Christ."

How exciting is that?  We stand under NO MAN'S judgment.  God alone is our judge, and because He has given us His Spirit and the mind of Christ, we too can judge those things that are spiritual.  When we are faced with a lie, we can confront it in the spirit.  For example, when I watch the Oprah videos where she explains this New Age belief system she's ascribed to, my spirit rises up in protest!  It is the same way when the shoe is on the other foot.  When someone says, "Jesus is the only way," my spirit rises up in agreement.  It is fully regenerated and cannot help but align itself with the truth. 

Why am I writing about this?  Humans are easily deceived.  We forget what God has said, and we tend to listen to those words that make us feel good.  We like to have our ears tickled.  How do we combat this carnality that we so frequently fall into?  We listen to the Spirit.  He testifies with our spirit to convince us of truth.

Consider the following Scriptures:

1 John 5:6, "This is the one who came by water and blood--Jesus Christ.  He did not come by water only, but by water and blood.  And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth."

Romans 8:16-17, "The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.  Now if we are children, then we are heirs--heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory."

John 4:23-24, "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

John 14:16-17, "And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever--the Spirit of truth.  The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him.  But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you."

John 15:26, "When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me."

John 16:13, "But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.  He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come."

1 John 4:6, "We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us.  This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood."

Let us take heed and get quiet before the Lord.  The Holy Spirit is there to guide us into all truth.  I don't mean to sound like a doomsday prophet, but we were born for this time period--a period rampant with false teaching and false doctrines, a period filled with people who only want to hear what makes them feel good. 

You may relate to this in feeling that a particular presidential candidate has all the answers for our problems, or a particular religious figure, or even a worldview that you've adopted that seems to answer all your questions. 

Please take time to ask the Spirit to lead you into all truth, so that you can distinguish the truth from the lie.  Do not shut him out to rely on your own understanding (Prov. 3:5-6).  Put your trust in Him.

The End

Well, I had a good run, but I have crossed the finish line.  Hopefully, I did what I was supposed to with this site!  I'm not going to shut it down unless Xanga shuts it down for inactivity.  I haven't been able to make the time as of late...as you may have noticed.  I also just haven't had anything really spiritual to talk about.  It is a dry spell, I suppose.  Maybe I will come back to it from time to time, so for those of you who are subscribed, you may get a post now and again.  I couldn't really tell how many people were into it, ya know?  I don't want to waste my breath, but I also realize most people don't have time to craft a comment in order to discuss what I've written. 

It's been nice and enlightening to hear your thoughts.  But, for now, I am quitting, and I'm not the least bit disappointed in myself.  Until next time....if there is one...buh-bye.

He Loves Me.

My friend, Laura B., has a sweet little girl named Nina.  Nina is so energetic and happy and full of love.  She really likes Maryn.  She calls her "Baby Maryn".  Every time we see her, she comes to see Maryn, who is usually in her carseat, and she says, "She's pretty." or "She likes me."  or "She loves me."  I was thinking the other day about Nina's belief that Maryn likes her and loves her.  The reason she thinks that doesn't come from the fact that Maryn does in fact like and love her because Maryn is 4 months old--incapable of expressing to Nina how much she likes or loves her. 

After much thought, I concluded that the reason Nina believes that Maryn likes her and loves her is because her parents do like and love her.  They are really the only major people (I know other people do love her, but I'm just saying her parents are the most involved in her life) in her life to tell her that she is liked and loved.  I've often admired the way Laura and Chris B. interact with both of their kids.  It is apparent that they not only love their kids, but they like them too.  What a great blessing for Nina (and Noah, her brother) to know that they are liked and loved.  This led me to think about my relationship with God.

I should be so much more secure in who I am in Christ because I know that He likes me and loves me.  I am so blessed to have a Father in heaven who cares for me and makes it known to me.  It is when I begin to believe the enemy's lies about God that I begin to feel bad about myself.  If I listen to him telling me that God doesn't care about me or like me, then that is reflected in how I think others feel about me too. 

Praise God for absolute truth.  I thank Him that I know for a fact that He loves me, He likes me, and He wants to be close to me.  This, in turn, should cause us to love others to show them His love for them. 

1 John 4:19-21,"We love, because He first loved us.  If someone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.  And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also."

In Spirit and In Truth

John 4:24, "God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

This verse has always confused me.  I've never known for sure what it was talking about.  What brings this up is that I was reading this same passage in The Message paraphrase by Eugene Peterson earlier today.  Check out the verse put into his own words (I realize that it is not a word-for-word translation):

John 4:23-24, "It's who you are and the way you live that count before God.  Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth.  That's the kind of people the Father is out looking for:  those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship.  God is sheer being itself--Spirit.  Those who worship must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration."

The context of the passage to start with is that Jesus is conversing with this Samaritan woman at a well.  She is alone which indicates she is rejected by the other women for some reason.  I looked at several Bible commentaries, and they all agreed that it was way out of character for a Jew to associate with a Samaritan because they were "half-breeds"--half-Jewish, half-Gentile which occurred during the Assyrian captivity around 700 something B.C. 

Therefore, the Samaritans, though they worshiped God, they did not worship Him in the temple at Jerusalem where He told the Jews to worship Him.  Instead, they worshiped Him at Mt. Gerazim, supposedly the mountain where Abraham built an altar before God.  The woman was emphasizing the importance of where one should worship God.  Jesus tells her that the Samaritans are wrong, and that the Jews were right for worshiping God in Jerusalem.  But then Jesus says that an hour is coming when God will be worshiped neither in Jerusalem or on Mt. Gerazim.  He is making the point that it isn't where you worship that is important but rather how you worship.  He says:

John 4:23-24, "But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.  God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

I really liked the way Peterson worded these verses.  What I've always struggled with is what it actually means to worship God in spirit and in truth.  If that is the kind of worshiper He wants me to be, I want to be it!  I thought what was so insightful about Peterson's paraphrase was the idea of our spirits pursuing God's truth and being honest before Him--being ourselves, truly. 

This woman had been with many husbands and at the time was living with a man who wasn't her husband.  She was an outcast.  Jesus explained that He could offer her living water to quench her thirst.  Donald Miller says,

The woman had assumed the living water Christ talked about was like the liquid in the well, but instead, Christ redirects her immediately to a thirst of a different sort:  this desire to be known and loved anyway.  In no way does Jesus judge this woman, stand over her and condemn her, or even mention the idea of sin; rather, He appeals to the desire of her heart, pointing out the dehumanizing cycle of her life that has driven her through relationship after relationship, none of which gave her lasting fulfillment.  In a sense, this woman was looking for importance and love through a man, and Jesus walks up and says what you really need is God, what I have is living water; and if you drink of it, you will never thirst again.     (Searching for God Knows What, 134-5)

Jesus finally told her that He was the Messiah.  She ran and told the people in the town, and many of them believed in Him.  It is assumed that she did as well.  What she found in Jesus was acceptance, not of her sin, but of herself.  Could it be that when he said God wants people to worship Him in spirit and in truth that Peterson's paraphrase is correct-we must be true and honest before God, bringing Him all our junk, and accepting His living water?  We must unite our spirits with Him by dying with Him and rising with Him?  God must engage us and fill us with His Spirit if we are to truly worship Him.

I know this may seem wacko to some of you out there.  I'm up for discussion.  I realize this may be way off, but I'm beginning to think it isn't...talk to me...

Strongest Dad in the World
[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.  But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.  Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life. This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life."  Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an institution."   But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told.   "There's nothing going on in his brain."  " Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!"

And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that."   Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped," Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks."

That day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!"  And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could.

He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.  "No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway.

Then they found a way to get into the race officially - in 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?"   How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own?   "No way," he says.  Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe-sized smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time - Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

"No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century."  And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape," one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago."   So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.  That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

"The thing I'd most like," Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."

Here's the video....Click the link or copy this URL into your browser

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjPrL3n63yg

What a great story!  An even greater story is our Father's love for us.  Paul says,

"For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would even dare to die.  BUT God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." ~Romans 5:6-8