What did Lazarus think?

I was thinking about Lazarus this morning. I wonder how grateful he was to Jesus for raising him from the dead. We know he was around Jesus after that.

John 12:2 So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table.


I wonder how sacrificially he gave his all to Jesus after Jesus raised him from the dead. I wonder how many people were drawn to Jesus through the testimony and witness of Lazarus' new life.

John 12:9-11 When the large crowd of the Jews learned that Jesus was there, they came, not only on account of him but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.

I wonder if there is anything Lazarus would have held back from Jesus after that, or considered too great a price to pay to love and follow Jesus.

Then I thought about:

Colossians 2:13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,

Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.


Romans 6:13b . . . but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

 I was dead in my sin. Cut off from God, Who is Himself life. And He raised me from the dead. And so I wonder . . . I wonder how grateful I am to Jesus for raising me from the dead. I wonder how sacrificially I give my all to Jesus after Jesus raised me from the dead. I wonder how many people are drawn to Jesus through the testimony and witness of my new life. I wonder if there is anything I would have held back from Jesus after that, or consider too great a price to pay to love and follow Jesus.

What is the proper response when someone has raised you from the dead?

Romans 12:1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

The Grain of Wheat . . . Wow!

In John's Palm Sunday account Jesus talks about what is ahead for Him. One of the telling verses is John 12:24 in which He says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

Prior to the cross God and man were separated. They could not fellowship, they could not be in relationship. Jesus was alive, but cut off from man, and man from God. But when Jesus died He paid our price for sin and it was established that He could come to dwell in everyone who, by faith, accepted His death in their place as the redemption, or payment, for their sin. After the cross every person who put their faith in Christ's work for them would be born again, a new creation, with God Himself living in them. The church, the body of Christ, was born and each new believer became an extension of the body and a dwelling place of God! The grain of wheat died, but then He rose again, and when He did He brought in a New Covenant in which He and man could dwell, us in Christ and Christ in us. It is a stunning truth!

Prior to the cross and resurrection man operated on self effort. Take Peter, "I will not deny You," who then failed miserably. Take all of man's attempts at righteousness that fail miserably. But after the cross it becomes:

Phil 2:13   for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure

Gal 2:20   I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Before the cross and resurrection and Pentecost—I, me, my effort, my miserable failures.After the cross and resurrection and Pentecost—God in me, living through me, putting His desires in me and working them out through me.

These days ahead celebrate the most magnificent moments in all of history—the fullness of time in which the mystery and secret of the ages was revealed. It was foreshadowed through all the Old Testament, and ordained before the foundation of the earth, but not revealed until after the cross—To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27).

Christ in you . . . the grain of wheat died that it did not remain alone. And by dying He removed the separation between Him and us, and was freed to come to dwell in and with each who chose, by faith, to trust in Him. And because of He who willingly laid down His life and said to the Father, "Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42), you and I can live our life, filled by the indwelling of the Creator of the universe, with Him living through us, bringing His will to pass for His good pleasure. Has there ever been an offer made like that? Has there ever been a truth so astounding? You. You who have placed your faith in Christ's death on your behalf. You are the temple and dwelling place of the God of Moses and Abraham and Elijah. He lives in you. He lives through you. You are His child, and no created thing can separate you from His love. You will never be alone again. You will never need to operate in futile self effort again. Greater is He in you than the enemy who paces the earth seeking to steal, kill, and destroy.

God bless you this Easter as you reflect that God is not dead, but He is alive, and He's living inside of you, and you are completely in Him, and you are eternally alive because He died. Because the grain of wheat fell to the ground and died . . . Thank You, Jesus. You are amazing!

Easter Teaching

Many people said that they were blessed and encouraged by the teaching I gave yesterday (Easter) at our fellowship. I offer it to you in case you feel led to listen. (Below is a link to the 35 minute mp3 file. You can click on it to listen if your browser is set up for that, or right click on it and select the option "Save Link As" to save it to your hard drive). I used very few notes when giving the teaching as I felt the Lord directing me to simply share an overflow of the last two posts about the Saturday between the cross and the resurrection, and how the work was already done but not yet realized. God bless you all, and thanks so much for reading, listening, and most of all for sharing my life with me.

Easter Teaching

The Heart of Stone Rolled Away . . .

Luke 24:1-12   But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee,  that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise." And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went home marveling at what had happened.

Q: When did Jesus say, “It is finished?”
A: On the cross.

Q: When did the disciples “get it”?
A: The verse above, as well as some other verses (try John 12:16 and John 2:22), plus what the Bible records about the disciples hiding in fear of the Jews, would seem to indicate that it wasn’t until after the resurrection and glorification of Jesus.

The work was done on the cross, but it wasn’t received by them and made their own until after they met the risen Christ—until after the Spirit rolled away the stone of their heart, and the veil that masked their understanding was torn. It was then, it seems, that they realized what was done, and who He really was. The work was done on the cross, and made their own on Easter Sunday, but that Saturday in between those days (“The Darkest Day” which I speculated about in yesterday’s post), seems to me like such a picture of the lost world (and of each believer before they realized who He was and gave their life to Him)—the work is already done for us, but we live in the darkness not realizing it.

Sometimes this is, I fear, a picture of the Christian’s life as well. There are too many things I am anxious about, or afraid about, or in doubt about, when, in fact, the work is already done by Him, and the promise is already given by Him, and it is just mine to make my own through faith. Too often, it seems, I live in “Saturday.” Like Sarah and Abraham, I don’t have the faith to trust God at His promises and take Him at His word. But, I am so encouraged by Sarah and Abraham’s story as well, because Hebrews 11 assures us that even if we begin without faith in one of His promises or aspects of His character, we can turn to Him and consider Him faithful who has promised. Like Sarah, then, that faith will become the power to bring forth the life that is dormant in the seed of His promise, just waiting for the water and light of our faith to bring it forth.

This morning I plan to teach at our fellowship on many of the different emotions and fears and “confusions” that might have been swirling in the disciples on Saturday, that were swept away or answered on Sunday. The cry, “He’s Alive!” truly makes all the difference in the world, and I hope that each and every one of you have a joyous and wonderful day today celebrating that victory, and the hope and purpose it brings! And, remember—even when our faith falters, and our step stumbles, and the cry of “He’s Alive!” maybe doesn’t seem to carry the power it should to us, we have the cross of Friday towering over us, covering us in the shadow of its mercy and grace, and testifying of His amazing love. Wow! Words truly do fall short of describing what this whole period of time in our Lord’s life means for us . . .

The Darkest Day . . .

You wake up and, for a moment, feel like you’ve had the worst dream of your life . . . and then you realize it wasn’t a dream. You lie there and hope, and go over the day before, but then you realize, that hope as you might, yesterday really happened. Yesterday you watched them beat and mutilate and mock and kill the One you had thought was God’s Son, the One you had left everything to follow, the One you had endured hostility and persecution to walk behind, the One who had maybe cast seven demons out of you, or had healed you of a crippling disease . . . the One who had offered you love and hope and peace with God when others condemned you and judged you and looked at you with contempt and cast you out.

Yesterday, after the earthquake and the darkened sky and the rumors of dead people walking around Jerusalem, you had hoped, waited, for something to change. You’d seen Him die, there was no doubt about it, but didn’t the signs in the sky mean something? Weren’t the Heavens displaying their anger—and He was going to awaken on the cross, or right after Joseph took Him down, and display your justification, and destroy your enemies, and prove He was God?

You’d waited, and waited, and hope had begun to die, and slowly fear, and numbness, and uncertainty, and hopelessness had crept in. You had watched evil win, and goodness die . . . but was He even good if He had lied and deceived so many of you? Yesterday, every secret knock on the door as you hid from the Jews, every rushing person past the window, awakened a hope. You sat up, crying in your heart for someone to tell you it had changed. But, eventually, somehow, exhausted and drained and broken and racked with sorrow, you’d fallen asleep and awoken this Saturday morning, hoping it had all been a bad dream, but the dirt on your clothes from last night where you’d fallen to the ground sobbing shatters even that hope and testifies that yesterday really happened. Jesus is dead—and He didn’t even defend Himself! He didn’t even DO anything to stop them! Anger at Him mixes with your sadness in a horrible soup in your soul. Two days ago you life had purpose and meaning and direction—you were a follower of Jesus! Today He is dead, and you have . . . nothing! Even worse, you have nowhere to go back to—you are alienated from all that you left, and there is no place for you any longer. Two days ago you had dared to believe that even your life might be redeemable before God . . . but today, you realize you are without hope of redemption at all.

Today is the darkest of days. The Jews continue their celebrations and feasts, and the One who offered you freedom from the law and religion and guilt and fear of God continues to lie in the grave. All of the ones who warned you about Him, and who threw you out for following Him, were right and you were wrong. Now what? You’ve left everything, for what? For a lie? Now, each footstep outside the window brings fear. Are you the next one to be arrested and crucified? Are all the promises and hope and love and acceptance He offered you now a mocking memory that laughs in your face? Clearly the Jews and your family and neighbors were right—and it only rips open the wounds His love and acceptance had begun to heal, and pours salt into them.

What about the power He displayed, the authority He spoke with, the way your religious leaders had backed down before Him, the healings He performed? What about them? Were they a show? No! You don’t want to believe that! You know what you were before He touched you, and how different you are now! But . . . what about the miracles? Was He a necromancer or sorcerer? He clearly had power, but your religious leaders had condemned Him. You’d thought He was good. You’d thought He was from God—but maybe they were right. Maybe you laughed with, and believed in, and ate with, and helped, a man working miracles by the power of Beelzebub as the religious teachers claimed. While He was beside you as they accused Him there was no way you could believe it—He was so good! You felt such pure love, for the first time ever! But now, He’s dead, and they’re still alive and in charge. Could you have been wrong? How could something so good have been so deceiving . . . and what now? What was next?

You thought yesterday, watching Jesus be beaten, mocked, “tried,” and crucified, was the worst day of your life . . . but today promises to be even worse—the darkest day of your life—because at least yesterday, up to the end, you’d clung to hope . . . but today there is no more, and without hope we perish. Yesterday you kept hoping that He’d finally say, “Enough!” and defend Himself. Yesterday you’d hoped that maybe He’d just fainted . . . but, seeing His mutilated body, and the blood and water pour from the spear hole, you knew deep down inside that He was really dead. Yesterday you’d hoped the Heavens would open and He would open His eyes and wrong would be made right. But today . . . He really is dead. It’s not a dream. And He is now wrapped in burial clothes and in a tomb with a massive stone in front of it, guarded by soldiers. If anything was going to happen it would have been yesterday, or last night, but today it is too late. Any hope that you had clung to is gone, and your life lies around you—shattered, impossible to fix. Yesterday you saw evil win, you saw evil have its greatest victory . . . but now you don’t even know what is evil and what is good anymore. Today is going to be a very long and dark day—if you even live through it . . .

Little do you know that tomorrow morning the knock will come, and the words will fly to your ears, “He’s Alive!” Little do you know that within a few days all the Scriptures you’ve known for years, and all the mysterious things He said, will suddenly make sense, and that you will realize that while you thought evil was working its greatest victory, and the wicked were going to prosper, God was in fact turning evil against itself and He was working His greatest victory! Little do you know that, within a few weeks, you will have touched the risen Jesus, been taught by the risen Jesus, watched the risen Jesus ascend into Heaven, and been filled with a fire, and the Spirit of God, and a sense of purpose and destiny that will carry you around the region declaring His truth, demonstrating His power, and proclaiming His name until you, too, joyously go to join Him!

“Today,” may look like the darkest of days, upwelling with hopelessness, doubt, fear, or frustration; seeming to scream out that darkness reigns, and that God must be either dead or uncaring or not real—but “tomorrow’s” cry of, “He’s Alive!” reminds us that, even when we don’t see it or understand how, God is always at work and on our side—and hope, peace, joy, eternal life are ours today, because He lives!

Easter Thoughts and "What Would Jesus Do?"

I find that it is so easy to replace Jesus with the idea of Jesus—to substitute stuff for Jesus, and about Jesus, in place of Jesus. Does anyone else relate, or fall into that trap?

I try, in this blog, in my pastoring/teaching/counseling, and in my life, to avoid the trap of theology for knowledge’s sake, but to take theology and study to its end . . . to our relationship with Jesus and how that translates into daily living. Easter, in which we celebrate the risen Christ, is the perfect time to talk about a living, vibrant, daily, interactive faith—to explore a living relationship with a living God.

For so many religions and “ways” one follows the teaching’s of another—be it a religious leader, a parent, etc. That person can be alive, or long dead, and it doesn’t matter. But, in our faith, we follow a person . . . and for that person to be followed, they must be alive. While Jesus gave us many teachings and things we can look back on for wisdom in areas He addressed, He ultimately invites us to a living relationship with Him where we follow Him.

It is good to ask the question so popular among Christians, “What would Jesus do?”—and there are clear cut things that this is sufficient for—but if we are not careful we can subtly fuel a problem in the Christian walk of replacing ideas about Jesus with the living reality of Jesus. Asking, “What would Jesus do?” almost leaves an unsaid, but still real feeling at the end in which one might add, “. . . if He were here?”—and we can often arrive at that answer, or what we think that answer would be, without any interaction with Jesus Himself. He is here, with us, present—and that makes all the difference in the world!

The reality is that, if you have given the Lordship of your life to Jesus, He is here, with you, and it is so much better to ask, “What is Jesus doing?” (present tense). It is not easy to be so intimate with Him that we can always sense that, but it is critical that it is our goal. He is alive! He died, but He rose again! That is the core of our relationship with Him, that it is not following a dead man’s teachings, but following a living God. To follow we must be aware of, and in relationship with . . . but that is what Jesus modeled for us when He did only what the Father was doing, and said only what the Father was saying. Later the Apostles modeled that by seeking to follow the teaching of God to make disciples in the world, but allowing the Holy Spirit to give them “real time” leading and guidance in the moment, and about which region to go to.

When we walk down the streets, stand in the breakroom, sit in the classroom, hang out at the sewing group or sporting event, etc., Jesus is there with us, in us, waiting to be allowed to lead. We are His hands, his feet, his mouth, and when we can move in that relationship with Him where we are surrendered to Him He can direct us to the one in the crowd His eyes are on, where He is working, and we can follow Him in that moment, where He would go.

God bless, and be encouraged—we have a great and mighty and living God!
Erick

Adoration Night, Easter, and Some Pictures . . .

Note: These pictures have nothing to do with Adoration Night, but they were too wonderful not to share. They come from our homeschool field trip to Carrizo Plains (near California Valley) a couple of weeks ago. Mary Ann and I absolutely love the picture of Bethany and Abigail running in the field of flowers . . . of course we are both big "Little House on the Prairie" fans so that may have something to do with it!

Last night—Good Friday—we had "Adoration Night" in our home. We had done a similar thing in the week before Christmas in which we set a night aside and invited anyone in the fellowship who wanted to come to join us for a time of simply "adoring" Him. It wasn't a time to focus on us, or our own needs, but simply on Him. For the Christmas one our living room was full. Last night, about 7:15, we realized it would be just us. We poured some coffee and gathered our two girls and sat on the floor in front of the fire in our wood stove. It was a wonderful, beautiful, precious evening.

We began with talking about the love Jesus showed us on the cross—a love that was given when we didn't return or receive it. We talked about how that applies in loving others for Christ—how He gives us the example of loving when it isn't returned, and then asks us to love others that same way. It is the love He showed us, and the love He calls us to model in our lives to others. Over and over I am stumbling on to the amazing fact that everything He calls us to do in our life, He has already done in His. We love others the way He loved us. We take up our cross the way He took up His. We serve others the way He served us. Maybe that is why we are called to imitate Him . . . because He has already done Himself everything He asks us to do.

We then read from my Bible the account of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. About half way through it Abigail gets out of my lap and goes over to their play area and gets her own child's Bible. She turns to the page with Jesus before Pilate and asks me to read from hers, too. There was something very precious and tender in that.

We talked about the trial, we talked about Satan and God, we talked about God's plan, about how Jesus gave His life (it wasn't taken from Him), and then we read Jesus' words, "It is finished." I asked the girls, "What is finished?" and both replied with their own wording of Jesus' paying for our sins. We then talked about how complete that is and how God's love for us, and our security in that love, can never be doubted because of the cross and the finality of those words, "It is finished."

When we were done we brought the communion elements over by the fire and remembered His body, broken and lashed and beaten and pierced for our sins, for our peace, and for our healing. We talked about His blood poured out for a New Covenant, one in which our relationship with God is based on what Jesus did and not on what we do, and how wonderfully secure that is. We then took communion.

Intermixed in all of the evening were spontaneous songs of worship and praise, sung clumsily but with love and gratitude—as well as prayers of thankfulness. By the time we tucked our two little precious ones in to bed about 8:45 we both knew that it had been a sweet, wonderful, special evening, and we thanked God for it.

Happy Easter: Many of you readers who have signed up for email notifications of new posts will not receive this until tomorrow morning—Easter. I wish you a most blessed of all days as you focus on His resurrection. I posted the following on my Facebook page today, and I wanted to repeat it here for you, "Have you ever thought how, if Jesus hadn't risen from the grave, we could only sing ABOUT Jesus, we couldn't sing TO Jesus? The resurrection not only gave life back to Jesus, but it gives life to our faith as well. I can't imagine my life without that truth . . ."

The other night at a "revival" in town I found myself in the middle of some very refreshing and exuberant worship and I suddenly, for a moment, had a glimpse of how very empty and dead the same words of the song would be if His bones were in a grave people visited, and He was not a living God. It is such a simple, but stunning thought . . . I could only sing about Him, I couldn't sing to Him. The ramifications and extensions of that are enough to reflect on for a lifetime—and it makes all the difference in the world . . .