I am unashamedly reblogging this post from a great friend and brother of mine, you can check out his blog directly Here
But having neglected my own blog for ages, I had also missed this post from him back in feb 2013, and having read it today, I wanted to share. So here it is: -
Somewhere along the path I lost my way
Well. I’m back here after nearly a year and why? I’m a smart guy, I understand a lot of things in very sophisticated ways. I’m a talented musician and song writer. I can argue anything and have a damn good chance at winning the argument. But my life is, relatively speaking, a train wreck of disjointed relationships and loneliness. I can justify any action, any deed, any choice, I can take responsibility or everything or I can admit the truth that I am utterly powerless in the face of the crap life throws at me. I’m lying in bed, really not feeling great, I been sick all day. I’ve been through two marriages, two family homes, jobs I’ve hated and persevered with cause it was the right thing to do, I tried waiting on God to answer my prayers and fix the pain and the disasters, both those I have inflicted and those I have suffered from. When really he’s been waiting on me. My gift is knowing and understanding the truth of the bible, and I know that sounds arrogant. I’ve been waiting for some crazy intervention, looking for it so hard that I refused to see it when it slapped me in the face.
It’s been months since I wrote my last blog, I’ve not been reading or deciding what to say, I knew what I had to say, what I was meant to say but I really didn’t want to hear it. So here I am sick, in bed, writing what I should have written months ago because, and bless him, my beloved brother and dearest friend slammed me with a rock. Well a Rocky, a Rocky Balboa. I just didn’t want to listen because I knew the answers… Apparently. The teaching I am about to throw, somewhat heavy handedly I image, is the teaching that I was meant to receive and poetically, give, and the gift was in me to give it to myself, but there are consequences, and I was not ready to face them, I may not be now, but I’m going to see what happens.
Normally I would have my concordance, my bible, my dictionaries and my books to hide behind, but I’m not at my house right now, I have none of those things. So all you’ll get here is me in tears and a truth that was burned into my heart years ago. And it is scarier and asks more of us than many of us, including myself, may never be prepared to face. But that doesn’t stop it being true.
So lets get rid of clever words, and not using “and” at the start of sentences. Lets talk about life and truth with a passion from the core of being, not from the mind.
“Being great is not about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep mocking forward.” Ok. Thank you mr Stallone. Time to move forward.
“Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Colossians 5:1 Came across this years ago. What on earth does it mean. Well, Christ – easy one this – God’s chosen one, the anointed. In you. Again, easy that mean in me.
The hope. Ah, now we start using words we don’t understand. Hope. I hope to go to the moon. I hope to play a rock gig at a stadium. I hope that I am forgiven for all the rubbish I have done. Our western, comfy culture understands hope as whimsy, wishful thinking, airy dreams.
You read hope in the bible it means something totally different. ” Now faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see.” Hebrews 11. Faith is certainty built on hope. If hope is whimsy, then why do “these three remain, faith, hope and love” take away everything else . It is certainty, it is concrete. It is perseverance. If you have faith in something then you have a hope, and hope leads to enduring all things.
Lets revise our initial quote.
“Christ in you, the Perseverance of glory.” Even that sounds more challenging, more of a punch to keep moving forward from. But we have one more word that is wishy washy and not part of our biblical vocabulary. Glory.
Thanks chiefly to Solomon and the temple we hear glory, and we see images of heavily flame, radiant light, choruses of angels, and a thousand other things. And it is because of this that the church today misses out, I have missed out, we all have missed out. If “Christ in me is the hope of some supernatural fire blanketing the earth” then boy are we in for a long wait. The longest wait, cause that is not, has not, and never will be what glory means. The presence of The Lord filled the temple and in that his glory, but it was not bright lights and fuzzy feelings it was the tangible presence of God. By the time it was translated into English, or by the time our ears heard it for the first time the meaning of the word glory was lost.
We’re going to go Greek for a bit. The word glory comes from the Greek word DOXA from which we get the word Doxology. (Philippians 2: 5-11 is the most famous one of these and we’ll come back to that.) but DOXA is not the root of the word. Words evolve over time, they change and you can go on for a lifetime exploring where the words we use to day come from, interesting, but a tangent right now. The Greek language was the same, words came out of other words. DOXA came out of the word DYKUNEO, which means “to reveal in its true nature.” So when Paul says “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” What he actually says is:
“CHRIST IN YOU, THE PERSEVERANCE OF REVEALING TRUE NATURE.” Whose true nature? Christ’s true nature. Which means that Christ dwelling in you, me, every Christian you know is who God is certain will be the ones who reveal his true nature.
Pause a moment, think on this, how well does this fit with the great commission? How well does this fit with that blog on grace I wrote ages ago. Our gift is salvation through Christ. Our response is to show his nature in the world we live it. Imagine the nations of the world being covered in holy fire, now imagine the nations of the world being filled with people revealing the true nature of God. It’s already summarised what that looks like. You don’t have to figure it out, or carve through a forest of ambiguity with your trusty sword of the Spirit. Just go to Philippians.
“Your attitude should be the same of that of Christ. (The one who is in you) who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. But made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a slave made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself, and became obedient to God, to the point of death on a cross.”
That’s the Christ who lives inside you.
“Therefore God exalted him to the highest place, and gave him the name above every name. That at the name of Jesus, every knee, in heaven, on earth and under the earth, should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. To THE GLORY OF GOD THE FATHER.”
To the revelation of the true nature of God the Father. The same Jesus dwelling in you is God’s certainty of the world seeing his true nature.
This is why I have avoided writing this blog for so long. The gift has been given to me to show Gods nature to the world, and I have failed, abysmally. I have not done this. More often than not I have done totally the opposite. Because I was trying to say “Me, with all my gifts is the hope of glory. Use my gifts god! So that I can be exalted to the highest place.”
Go back to grace, God gave us a gift he knew we could never repay.
So he gets his Son living inside us to do it.
The great evangelist DL Moody was once challenged. A preacher said “the world has yet to see what God can do with a totally consecrated man”
To which Moody replied “God willing I will be that man.”
Gods hope of being revealed in this world is Christ dwelling in you. And me. The question is what do we do with that? Right this second I don’t know what I can answer because I am broken and hurting. What’s your excuse?
It’s not how hard you hit, it’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
