Contending for the Presence of God

The Holy Spirit is speaking loudly and clearly these days through many voices from many different directions, summoning God’s people to pay attention to His agenda at this time in history. We have heard His voice clearly in our own personal times in prayer as well as through the urgings of prophetic declarations from many sources, literally around the world. 

His agenda? He desires to be present among His people in manifest power and authority, beyond what we’ve seen or heard about. There is a yearning in the heart of God to fully be Who He is among His people, fully released to bring His own kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy through the Holy Spirit.

One of the main ways He is capturing – even forcing our attention is by the presence among us of people who desperately need an encounter of the healing and restoring power of God. Because we have seen His hand at work in other times and in other places, we can no longer look past those in our own midst who, without an intervention of God’s healing and delivering power, face a future filled with pain, sorrow, and even death.

In those situations we are forced to admit that our current experience of God’s presence is lacking something. We need and want more, and so we make up our minds to sing a little louder, pray with more intensity, and contend with more seriousness for His manifest presence to come. It’s not sufficient to merely know the lyrics of a song like “When You Walk Into The Room, Everything Changes”. We need the lyrics of that song to become our norm, the reality of God’s Kingdom being manifest on earth as it is in Heaven.

Recently, in an early morning prayer meeting at SOZO Church in Belfair, Washington, I sensed the Holy Spirit say something to me that shifted my perspective on the matter of contending with God for His move among us. I sensed Him say that my emphasis had been on “CONTENDING with God”, as though He is an adversary that needs to be won over, and that I needed to shift that to “contending WITH God” as my Father and friend, partnering with Him in His desire. I sensed Him say to me that there were some realities He needed from me in order for Him to be present like He desires to be present, and I felt the weight of Heaven pressing down to earth, God’s yearning to be with His people in an unhindered way.

Isaiah 66:1 quotes the LORD saying, “Heaven is My throne, and earth is my footstool. What is the house that you will build for Me, and what is the place of My rest?” I believe that what is meant there is God asking, “Where is the place where My will can be carried out without resistance?” The reality He needs from me is to be in full agreement with HIS desire to come in power, with nothing in me that would stand in His way or resist the movements of His Spirit.

How about where you are? Is God contending with you so that you will contend WITH Him, that His will might be fully accomplished where you are? May it be so! Amen.

The Motivation of Seeking Righteousness

Why is this pursuit of righteousness so important in our lives? Because it simply means that we can become everything God intended us to be. I appreciate the Armed Forces of the United States, and it is with due respect that I say they cannot fulfill their promise to their recruits to “Become all that you can be.” The power to make us all that we can be rests with God alone, and is released only to those who find their craving for righteousness satisfied in God.

It really goes back to this most basic thing. God has a design for each of us that is perfect, and that will fit in perfect harmony with His design for the rest of His creation. Our happiness, the full realization of God’s blessing in our lives, is dependent upon that craving being satisfied. The release of power to bring healing, deliverance, and salvation to the people we love and to the nations of the earth depends upon His righteousness being formed in us. To try to find our fulfillment apart from that design is to live frustrated, empty, and unfulfilled.

There is a fascinating passage of Scripture recorded in Psalm 112 that speaks to the quality of life reserved for those who are found to be righteous. Consider these things that God says concerning this group of people (Psalm 112:6-12, taken from the New Living Translation):

·       Those who are righteous will be long remembered.

·       They do not fear bad news.

·       They confidently trust the Lord to take care of them.

·       They are confident and fearless, and can face their foes triumphantly.

·       They share freely and give generously to those in need.

·       Their good deeds will be remembered forever.

·       They will have influence and honor.

·       The wicked will see this and be infuriated. They will grind their teeth in anger; they will slink away, their hopes thwarted.

This amazing list of blessings is promised to those who hunger and thirst for all things to be conformed to reality. They will be fully satisfied, satiated with righteousness! They will see all things become as they should be, and that reality will literally last forever. We’ve decided that we want to be part of this group. Our hope is that you do as well.

Righteousness: The Source of Ultimate Gladness

Another dimension of Jesus’ commitment to righteousness is revealed in Psalm 45. The writer of this beautiful poem is singing a hymn of praise to the King, a love song that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the person of Jesus. Under the leading of the Holy Spirit, the writer makes this declaration about Jesus that points with boldness and clarity to the benefits of loving righteousness:

Your throne, O God, is forever and ever;

A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom. 

You love righteousness and hate wickedness;

Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You

With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.

(Psalm 45:6-7, NKJV)

The rulership of God through His Son Jesus is revealed here as eternal. His authority is rooted in righteousness, and every decision will be made in line with how things really are. Now here’s the wondrous point: because Jesus loves righteousness and hates wickedness, God has anointed Him with the anointing of gladness more than any other man.

Do we get this? There is a direct correlation between the passionate pursuit of righteousness and the realization of gladness in our lives! To the degree that righteousness becomes our passion, we will live in the experience of joy. Do we see that righteousness cannot mean a suffocating system of external practices that are superimposed upon an uncooperative human nature? Rather, righteousness can only mean a deep conformity to the reality of how things are in God’s heart. As we are transformed by the love of Jesus, and become like Him by the power of the Holy Spirit, loving and pursuing righteousness and hating the perversion of it, we will find ourselves being flooded with gladness “more than our companions.”

This is why Jesus says we must hunger and thirst after this condition. The pursuit of righteousness must become the fundamental passion of our lives if we truly desire to reach our power potential. In the Sermon on the Mount, just a few phrases after He has spoken the Beatitudes, Jesus uses language that speaks of the intensity of hungering and thirsting after righteousness:

If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30, NKJV)

Jesus is saying here that nothing matters as much as doing what it takes to be conformed to God’s character. So what if we lose something that seems really important now? In the end, we get it all back and more! Sometimes we count the cost of obedience and feel distress over what we will miss if we really get serious about God and His Kingdom. But Jesus is inviting us to consider what we will miss if we don’t get serious about what He is saying here. God is offering us full blessing and happiness, more power and authority than we will know what to do with, and we’re worried that we might miss out on some silly temporal pleasure. We forfeit an unimaginable and eternal inheritance of power and authority for the sake of something that is ultimately worthless! Oh, Beloved, we must get hold of this truth deep in our hearts!

Hunger and Thirst in the Life of Jesus

If we are to come into our full inheritance of authority on earth as it is in heaven, it is also essential that we perceive that Jesus is the model of each of these character traits. It is Jesus to whom we are joined in the true marriage covenant, and it is He who gives full expression to each of the Beatitudes. Therefore, to embrace the Beatitudes as our lifestyle is to cooperate with the process of conformity to His image, which is our destiny.

It is a compelling thing to consider that in the person of Jesus, God gave full expression of His desires for mankind through this one true Man. As a man full of the Holy Spirit, Jesus knew the heart of His Father, and lived His life in complete agreement with His Father’s will. This truth helps us to comprehend one of the more startling events in Jesus’ life, recorded for us in the Gospel of John:

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business. When He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. And He said to those who sold doves, “Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!” Then His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up.” (John 2:13-17, NKJV)

Jesus came into Jerusalem filled with understanding from His Father gained in the place of intimate communion and prayer. He was fully aligned with the Father’s character, and therefore saw all things from the Father’s perspective. He knew what the Father had in mind when He called the nation of Israel into existence. He knew that the true identity of this people could only be realized in conformity to the Father’s vision for them. Therefore, Jesus had chosen His disciples based on the Father’s leading, seeing in them the destiny of apostolic authority even while they were immature and carnal. Jesus understood that the Temple was intended to be a prophetic window into God’s desire to have a dwelling place with His people. It was to be a place of communion and intimacy, a place of full access to all who would come, a place of mercy and grace where people would be invited into the empowering presence of God.

The spiritual leaders of the day, however, had turned the Temple into a religious bastion, a stronghold of legalism and oppression that served more to separate the people from God than to open the way to Him. The presence of the money-changers in the courtyard revealed a pollution at the core of the system. When Jesus encountered the situation He was blasted with the discrepancy between what was in His Father’s heart and what was being expressed by those who were set in place to reveal the Father to the people. The Temple had been so overrun with empty ritual that God had long before withdrawn His presence from it.

The text in John 2 says that Jesus was consumed by zeal for His Father’s house. In other words, a deep passion burned in Jesus’ heart for God’s people to realize their destiny as kings and priests in the Kingdom of God.  He yearned to see intimacy between His Father and His people, to see the power of God released upon the nation in the way His Father had intended from the beginning. Therefore, when Jesus encountered a religious system that produced the very opposite thing, He was enraged. He experienced what can truly be called “righteous indignation,” where His anger was rooted in His passion to see everything conformed to His Father’s image.

In our day, most religious systems find themselves on the other side of the spectrum. Rather than being overly concerned with external behavior at the expense of heart reality, the religious systems of our day shy away from any call to righteousness. We prefer to speak about a sappy version of love that makes no demands, that issues no call to radical living, and leaves us in our unrighteous mess. The Christian church today is filled with all sorts of compromise, greed, broken marriages, and open resistance to the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures. For fear of scaring people away from the institution, we have dumbed down the Gospel to the point of impotence, and then we wonder why twenty-four million believers have left the institutional church to seek an encounter with God that will actually bring change to their lives.

But impotence is not only the scourge of the mainstream, seeker-oriented institution. The churches that claim the power of God are just as devoid of anything beyond bells, whistles, and the occasional testimony. Once again I want to quote Bob Sorge:

We live in an hour where there is a huge gap between the Gospel we preach and the level of our experience in the Kingdom. We preach a Gospel of power, of healing, of miracles, of signs and wonders, of the resurrection power of Jesus Christ; but what we actually experience falls woefully short of the fullness we proclaim. The demonized come to our meetings and leave with their demons; the handicapped come in their wheelchairs and leave in their wheelchairs; they come to the meeting blind and leave blind; they come deaf and leave deaf. The lack of power in the church, at least in America, has us living under a great shroud of reproach. 

This caricature of New Testament Christianity is appalling to Jesus in our day even as it was during His time on earth. He longs to come and encounter His people in power, to bring cleansing and purity, and to release the authority of His Kingdom to His people in unprecedented ways. When Jesus cleansed the Temple in the event recorded in Matthew 21, the result of the cleansing was that “the blind and the lame came to Him in the Temple, and He healed them.” Oh, how we need a breakthrough of the righteousness of Jesus in His Church today!

Gary Wiens

Confidence Before God is the Fruit of Righteousness

When righteousness is centrally established and becomes the goal and expression of our lives, there emerges a marvelous confidence that God Himself is our champion. We begin to realize that nothing can shake us from our place in His heart, and that He is the one watching over our every circumstance. King David was one who understood this principle to a wonderful degree. His writings reflect a deep confidence in the Lord his God who would protect him in the situations of life, and cause all things to be established in his favor. Meditate on this section of Psalm 7 that reveals the confidence of David’s heart before the Lord:

The LORD shall judge the peoples;

Judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness,

And according to my integrity within me. 

Oh, let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end,

But establish the just;

For the righteous God tests the hearts and minds. 

My defense is of God,

Who saves the upright in heart.

(Psalm 7:8-10, NJKV)

The confidence of David’s life was that he had made the righteousness of God the goal of his seeking. Therefore, because his life was in line with God’s righteousness, he could pray in an amazingly bold way – “Judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness, according to my integrity within me!” David comes to the solid place of trust where he can depend fully upon the judgments of God, because he knows that his own heart is upright – in other words, he is as fully aligned as possible with the righteousness of God.

By contrast, there also came a time in David’s life when he acted in profound contradiction to righteousness. The story is recorded in 2 Samuel 11, and concerns the situation in which David, as the King of the nation, should have been leading his troops in the war that they were fighting. However, he remained in his palace, where one evening he went for a walk on the roof of his house. From there he observed Bathsheba, the beautiful wife of Uriah, bathing in the open air of her balcony. David lusted after this woman, sent for her, and impregnated her. In order to cover up the situation, the King sent for Uriah, who was one of his military commanders. David tried to get Uriah to sleep with his wife, but the man was too honorable to enjoy the pleasures of home while his soldiers were fighting. So, in a fit of horribly wicked behavior, David arranged to have Uriah placed in the hottest battle zone, where he was killed. David then took Bathsheba to his palace, and claimed her for his wife.

This situation was deeply displeasing to God, and brought great displeasure upon the life of David and his descendants. God sent His prophet Nathan to confront David, who responded with deep repentance, and wrote Psalm 51 as his song of confession. In that Psalm is a profound phrase that grips me each time I read it. Verse six of that Psalm declares that God “desires truth in the inward parts.” This is the formation of righteousness in the interior of our souls – to have our inward parts, our thoughts, attitudes, and secret longings conformed to the desires and ways of God. It is this alignment that God is after so that He might pour out His blessing on His people.

The Importance of Agreeing with God’s Opinion

Since these things are true, the only thing that really ought to matter to me is the discovery of what God thinks about me. Once I begin to understand His definition of reality in general, and my life in particular, then I begin to have the hope of coming to some sense of fulfillment and power. Consider the words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones as he writes of the ultimate importance of God’s priorities being established in our hearts:

We are not meant to control our Christianity; our Christianity is meant to control us. I am to be dominated by the truth because I have been made a Christian by the operation of the Holy Spirit within. I quote that striking statement of the apostle Paul which surely puts it so perfectly – “I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” He is in control, not I; so that I must not think of myself as a natural man who is controlling his attitude and trying to be Christian in various ways. No; His Spirit controls me at the very center of my life, controls the very spring of my being, the source of my every activity.

You cannot read these Beatitudes without coming to that conclusion. The Christian faith is not something on the surface of a man’s life, it is not merely a kind of coating or veneer. No, it is something that has been happening in the very center of his personality. That is why the New Testament talks about rebirth and being born again, about a new creation and about receiving a new nature. It is something that happens to a man in the very center of his being; it controls all his thoughts, all his outlook, all his imagination, and, as a result, all his actions as well. All our activities, therefore, are the result of this new nature, this new disposition which we have received from God through the Holy Spirit. 

Again, Jesus’ point in Matthew 6:33 is that the pursuit of God’s rule and the conformity of all things to His character is the most important quest of the human heart. When righteousness is the goal of our seeking, then God becomes involved in a profound way to add “all these things” to our experience. The things spoken of here are the physical needs of life – food, clothing, provision – the things that fill our hearts with worry when righteousness is not the goal. But when righteousness is the goal of our seeking, and when in the power of the Holy Spirit we conform our expressions of life to that righteousness, then everything else that concerns us comes into place according to the purposes of God our Father.

Receiving the Gift of Righteousness

The biggest mistake we make is when we attempt to be righteous by our own energy and strength. Instead of focusing on falling in love with Jesus, and allowing His Spirit to transform us, we try to “behave ourselves.” We try to act like Jesus without being transformed by His power first. We want to be good enough to gain God’s approval. This will lead us to frustration with absolute certainty. The Scripture is clear that with the single exception of Jesus there is no one who is righteous, not even one person!  If that is true, then we have a huge dilemma! How can we live up to the demands of righteousness if no one can do it?

The answer the Bible gives us is that because Jesus lived as a righteous man, we too can anticipate living in His perfection as a fruit of relationship with Him. We are told in Philippians 3:9 that righteousness does not come by our own strength, but by faith in Christ as a gift from God. When we acknowledge our failure to live as humans were intended to live, and ask for His forgiveness, God’s power changes us inside. He makes righteousness available to us as a gift. We are granted a new nature, a new kind of life in which righteousness is possible. Because of His sacrifice on the cross, He can impart righteousness to us as a gift, and then give us the strength to grow up into that reality.

The Bible speaks of a reality that is called “righteousness,” and it is the truth of how things really are, rooted in the character of God who created all things. There actually is a standard, an perfect reference point from which every particular thing takes its meaning. That standard is God, whose character is made visible and accessible to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Consider this passage from the writings of Paul:

He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. (Colossians 1:15-18, NKJV)

Your life is part of the “all things” that Jesus created out of His own desire for relationship with human beings. God chose you before He created the universe,  and designed you from the very beginning to look like His Son Jesus, in whose image you were made. You were His idea! Therefore, since God thought you up, there is only one definition of your life that can possibly be right, and that is God’s idea of your life! He has a complete understanding of who you are, and Jesus is in full agreement with the Father about you! He means for you to look just like Jesus, and to the degree that you begin to look like Him in your attitudes and actions, you will begin to touch righteousness. God knows who you really are, and He is determined that you will receive everything you need to be just like He designed you!

Jesus said in Matthew 6:33 that the most important thing is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. If we will do that, then everything else that can possibly seem important will be added to us as well. Nothing is more important that to come into alignment with how God designed us to be.

Powerful People Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

One of the things that Marie and I enjoy is looking at cars and dreaming about what it would be like to tool down the motorway in a variety of luxury SUVs or sports models. Marie is captivated by the Porsche Cayenne, and fantasizes about the thrill of driving one. I particularly like BMW’s, and am intrigued by their motto: “The relentless pursuit of perfection.” The motto points to the elusive but conceivable goal of their company – to produce cars that touch perfection. What a wonder it would be to drive the ideal road machine, the perfect car! Now if there is a reality in the realm of automobiles that can be termed “perfection,” that means there is a standard, a norm that draws our thoughts and serves as a reference point for our dreams. That standard would be the objective reality against which every car would be measured.

You see, we tend to look at life this way. There is something inherent in us that longs for perfection, and we are exhilarated when our experience touches something that approaches it. When people or situations fall short of perfection, we are invariably disappointed even though we may have a cynical response that is resigned to accepting less than the ideal. The fascinating thing is that the teachings of Jesus in the Bible encourage this pursuit of perfection. As a matter of fact, Jesus indicates very clearly that perfection is there for us who will seek after it. He calls it “righteousness.”

The difficulty that we encounter when we think of perfection is that it makes us feel like we have to live up to something that is foreign to us. We think of ourselves as fundamentally flawed, and we have no hope that we could ever live up to a standard called “righteousness.” But God created us for glory, not for frustration. The human race was broken by sin, but Jesus made the way clear for everything that was in God’s heart to be restored to us. We long for perfection because it is our birthright, to be fully realized when we see Him face to face. But this perfection is not something merely to be attempted in an external, behavioral way. Our hearts were made to be captured by the perfection of Jesus, to fall in love with Him, and to be transformed in such a way that the actions of our lives would become like Him as well.

Essentially the term “righteousness” means to live in a way that is consistent with God’s perfect pattern for your life. This perfect pattern is the man Jesus. You were created to be like Him. To be righteous is to have our inner person – our hearts, our thoughts, our attitudes – aligned with the pattern of Jesus, with His thoughts and attitudes. From that internal alignment we can begin to live externally in line with the behavior of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. Righteousness means to be in perfect alignment with how God sees all things to be in the reality of His life, and He promises that those who seek after it with intensity will be fully satisfied. This line of thought may cause one to ask “How do I discover what God thinks and how He sees all things?” The answer to that question is that in a spirit of worship and prayer we begin to search the Scriptures and study the person of Jesus who perfectly reveals God’s character.

The Bible is full of thoughts and actions that are attributed to righteousness, and to the lifestyle of righteous people. Consider for example this list of character traits that are attributed to righteousness in the Book of Proverbs:

• The Outlook on Life
o They are hopeful (Proverbs 10:24)
o They are concerned about the welfare of God’s creation (Proverbs 12:10)
o They understand justice (Proverbs 28:5)
• The Response to Life
o They are covered with blessings (Proverbs 10:6)
o They give thought to their ways (Proverbs 21:29)
o They persevere against evil (Proverbs 24:15-16)
• How the Righteous are seen by Others
o They are appreciated (Proverbs 13:15)
o Their conduct is upright (Proverbs 21:8)
o They do not desire the company of godless people (Proverbs 24:1-2)
o Others are glad when they triumph (Proverbs 28:12)
o They care for the poor (Proverbs 29:7)
o They detest the dishonest (Proverbs 29:27)
• The Quality of Life
o They stand firm (Proverbs 10:25)
o They are delivered by righteousness (Proverbs 11:6)
o No real harm befalls them (Proverbs 12:21)
o Their income results in treasure (Proverbs 15:6)
o They avoid evil (Proverbs 16:17)
o They are bold as lions (Proverbs 28:1)
o They will be safe (Proverbs 28:18)
• Short-term Results of Righteousness
o They walk securely (Proverbs 10:9)
o They are rewarded with prosperity (Proverbs 13:21)
• Long-term Results of Righteousness
o God protects them (Proverbs 10:29)
o They are never uprooted (Proverbs 10:30)
• Eternal Expectations
o They will earn a sure reward (Proverbs 11:18)
o They will attain life (Proverbs 11:19)
o Their life will end only in good (Proverbs 11:23)
o They will stand firm (Proverbs 12:7)
o They will have a refuge when they die (Proverbs 14:32)
• God’s Opinion of the Righteous
o He delights in their good (Proverbs 11:20)
o He will cause evil people to bow to them (Proverbs 14:19)

This is an amazing list of character traits and promises, isn’t it? Those who pursue righteousness with all their hearts will indeed be a powerful group of people! We would encourage you to meditate on these things, asking the Holy Spirit to help you understand what it means to live in righteousness in such a way that these statements become true of your life.

Gary Wiens

How Meekness Is Formed In Us

The process of forming meekness in any of us usually involves a series of stages, with some of them almost inevitably traumatic. I have long been convinced that only God knows the true identity and destiny of any given individual. Only God (or those who speak with an understanding of His opinion) can communicate to a person with the necessary authority to establish them in settled truth concerning who they are. If it were our natural inclination to listen to Him and receive His opinions as real and true, the journey to meekness and power would be less troublesome.

However, for most of us the process of discovery is shot through with trouble. We have this inclination to try to make something of ourselves, to prove something to God and everyone else. We want to be great apart from relationship with Him, and the simple fact is that it does not work. The only way to lasting greatness is the way of Jesus, and sooner or later we must choose that way.

Someone might consider the options and decide that ruling their own life apart from God is still preferable to submitting to Him. A famous man once stated “I would rather rule in hell than serve in Heaven.” It is a stunning admission of the self-centered rebellion that characterizes the fallen human soul, but frankly that sentiment is not uncommon. The tragic deception is this: no one will be ruling in hell, not even Satan. The Biblical presentation is that hell is a lake of fire where there is nothing but eternal and excruciating torment for those who choose to go there.  Make no mistake: Satan and all those who choose his way will be in a literal place of eternal torment by their own choice. There is no life and no authority apart from God, only agony.

So, as I said, sooner or later we must choose God’s way. Most of us choose it later rather than sooner. And because God is the patient Father that He is, He allows us the choices that invariably leave Him out, at least at the beginning. So we try to become “Somebody” and often find ourselves hating what we’ve become. Or we succeed for a time, and then cannot figure out why everything crashes down around us. Or perhaps we reach the pinnacle of the mountain we were trying to climb, only to find that satisfaction has eluded us, and we are no more fulfilled than we were at the beginning of the journey.

You see, we can never genuinely serve people until we come into agreement with God’s way of doing things. We must become convinced that God will honor and reward those who are meek, who use their strength to serve and bless rather than to control. Until we believe that the meek will inherit the earth, we will either strive to gain control of our world by the exertion of our own strength, or we will give up and decide that power and authority are beyond our reach.

God’s purpose in these issues of life is that the frustration of our attempts to fulfill our goals should bring us to the place of calling out to Him for help. He knows that we can never reach our power potential without His input, because having designed us and made us, He holds the secrets of our identity and destiny. But He will never impose that knowledge on us. His desire is that we choose Him and seek for Him as a child would seek after their father, or as a lover would seek after their Beloved.

Some people, in the foolishness and stupidity of their own pride, keep banging their heads against the wall of self-discovery, thinking that they can keep doing the same old routine and maybe this time there will be a different result. It’s really insanity in action! Those folks will never know who they are, where they came from, where they’re going, and the authority that is theirs for the asking. They are stuck in their foolishness, and as long as they persist in it nothing will change. Others give up in hopelessness, tired of striving but too disappointed to trust God anymore. They roll over and die inside, convinced that God is powerless, or worse – cruel and uncaring. They say this: “He will use me, but He won’t answer my prayers.”

Still others, however, whom the Scriptures call wise, learn to call upon the Lord in their times of distress. Consider this representative list of steps that characterize those that are coming to the place of meekness:

• Having seen that apart from God they do not have what it takes to attain the greatness for which they were made, they begin to acknowledge their poverty.
• Having faced the rebellion in their own hearts toward God and His Son Jesus, they begin to grieve and mourn over their own sin and the pain it has caused Him.
• They begin to pray, to ask God’s forgiveness for their self-centered rebellion.
• They begin to search the Bible for clues about their existence.
• They begin to hang out with people who are discovering that identity and destiny are rooted in what God says about you, and that apart from that reality there can be no fulfillment in life.
• They begin to spend large amounts of time just thinking about the person of Jesus, reading about His life in the Bible, and asking the Holy Spirit to help them become like Him.
• They learn to worship God and thank Him for the way He has led them to Himself, and for the blessings that He has in store for them as they follow His ways.
• They begin to serve one another as Jesus served the people around Him.

The wondrous thing is that as we give ourselves to activities like these, God begins to reveal the truth concerning who we are and what we are about. Our sense of destiny begins to emerge, along with the authority we need to come into our full inheritance of power, both here and in the coming age. This change happens super-naturally from God.  Little by little, from one level of glory to the next, we begin to look and sound and act like Jesus. The more we become like Him – treating people like He did, serving instead of demanding to be served – the more we step into our own place of authority. The more we taste of this life, the more we hunger and thirst after it. Having become meek, we begin to inherit the earth.

Powerful People Are Meek

How does the idea of meekness fit in your mind with reaching your power potential? For most of us, the word “meekness” conjures up an image that would seem on the other end of the spectrum from the idea of power. So what do we do with the fact that Jesus puts the term “meekness” in the same breath with inheriting the earth!? Surely there are interesting and exciting things for us to discover as we look into this Beatitude.

The twelve men who were the closest followers of Jesus were in for a real shock as they came into the room that had been prepared for them to eat the Passover meal. They had become convinced (with the probable exception of Judas) that Jesus was indeed who He claimed to be – the Son of God in the flesh, the Messiah who would one day receive the authority written about through all the Hebrew Scriptures, and promised to Him by His Father.

As Jesus had done so consistently through His life, He was once again about to demonstrate His authority in a most unusual way. When the disciples entered what has been called “the Upper Room,” they were met at the door by one dressed in the garments of a servant, who began to wash their feet. It was a common courtesy in that day to have one of the servants wash the feet of guests. Though it was a gracious gesture on the host’s part that brought refreshment to the weary and communicated value to those on the receiving end, it was nevertheless a most menial task for the servant to whom it was assigned.

The startling thing about this encounter was that it was Jesus who had clothed Himself in the servant’s garb, and who proceeded to minister to them in that most basic way. The first teaching He gave them that evening wasn’t with eloquent words or profound thought; rather, it was a demonstration of tender love that showed them the power and authority of true leadership. Their comfort zones were shaken and the hidden motives of their hearts exposed as Jesus began His task. You see, there had been a long-standing dispute among the disciples about which of them was the greatest,  and which of them would get the privilege of being close to Jesus in the fullness of His coming Kingdom. None of them would have given the least thought to taking the role of foot-washer, and the idea of Jesus doing that task was simply incomprehensible. But there He was, and the shallow pettiness of their argument was being laid bare before them without a word being spoken.

The thing that captures me about this story, recorded for us in the 13th chapter of John’s Gospel, is the utterly unexpected foundation of Jesus’ act of servanthood that is given to us in verses two through five:

And supper being ended, the devil having already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray Him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded.

Try to get your mind around what we are being told in these few words. Jesus is already aware that one of His closest friends is going to sell Him out to the Jewish officials for the sake of personal gain. He is aware that every one of these men is going to abandon Him within just a few hours, as He is taken to His trial and crucifixion. Each of them, in their own way, is going to deny their love for Jesus and leave Him to die alone and abandoned.

But Jesus had a resource that enabled Him, the greatest and most powerful human being who ever lived, to take the low place of serving those who wanted to be great because He had created them to be great. Here’s how He did it: first, the text says that Jesus knew that “the Father had given all things into His hands.” Because of His intimacy with His Father, Jesus understood that by God’s own promise He had authority over everything, both in that moment and in the coming age of God’s Kingdom that will be established on the earth. Further, we’re told that Jesus knew “that He had come from God, and that He was going to God.” In other words, His sense of identity and His sense of destiny were fully established in His heart and mind. He knew who He was, He knew where He was going, and He knew His place of power. Therefore, He chose to exercise that power in the loving activity of serving His friends, even to the ultimate service of giving His life for their redemption. He would pour His own life out for them in anticipation of the day to come when His power and authority would be established in fact before all people.

It is this posture of serving others from a place of strength that the Bible calls “meekness.” The term literally means “gentleness,” but not in the way most of us think about being gentle. At best we think of meekness and gentleness as a quality of temperament that has more to with one’s natural personality than something that has been developed in one’s character over time. But frankly, we perceive meekness and gentleness to be associated more with weakness than with strength. We envision meekness in a person who is trying to make the best out of a hopeless situation, exercised by one who has no power options and is trying to get along by being nice.

The meekness that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 5:5 and models in John 13:1-5 is not primarily about being nice. It is a character quality that chooses humility because humility is God’s way. Meekness causes someone to do the right thing because it is right, but with a gentle style rooted in true strength. It is strength under discipline, a gentleness built upon the solid foundation of understanding one’s revealed identity and destiny rooted in the sovereign love of God. Meekness is not a trait that many are born with, but rather one that is developed through years of forming and shaping by the Spirit of God. It is not an optional character trait, but one that is essential in coming to possess true power, for Jesus promised that the earth itself will be given as an inheritance to the meek ones.

What we must come to understand in our journey to reach our power potential is that Jesus’ value system is really the way things are going to be established at the end of the day. All other strategies for power will fail, and only His methods will be found to be true. Therefore, to pursue power with wisdom and the certainty of attaining it is to pursue it in the way Jesus promises to give it. Power will be given as an inheritance to those who embrace His character and His methods, and that includes the character trait of meekness.

Gary Wiens

Mourning in the Experience of Jesus

Mourning in the Experience of Jesus

It is in the person of Jesus that the fullness of this prophetic picture comes into focus. Several times in the Old Testament God speaks of His desire to have a man who would join with His heart, feeling God’s pain, and standing with Him in the ministry of intercessory prayer.  If He could find such a man to share in His agony, He would relent from His judgments and release mercy instead.
Therefore, when the man Jesus – perfect in obedience, intimate in relationship with God – presented Himself to the Father as the ultimate intercessor, God poured out the fullness of wrath upon His own Son and the fullness of mercy upon all who would respond to His love.

It is a profound thing to consider that God desires to have human partners who will join Him in the expression of His emotions, whether positive or negative. We can scarcely imagine a God with such emotion, let alone one who desires to share that emotion with human beings. But if we can begin to see that this is where Jesus stood, and that God’s desire is to have the same kind of relationship with us, we can begin to be open to the touch of the Holy Spirit that communicates His emotions to us.
This is precisely what was in Jesus’ mind when He asked His three best friends – Peter, James, and John – to accompany Him to Gethsemane on the night of His trial and crucifixion. Jesus was headed to the dark night of desolation and sacrifice. The experience, borne entirely in His body as a human being, was going to be desperately difficult and painful. The sufferings of Jesus would involve mourning at the deepest level as He bore the sin of humanity. Here’s the amazing reality: Jesus was looking for friends with whom He could share this mournful experience, whose partnership with Him in this dark night would strengthen Him and enable them to have courage as well.

This dimension of mourning is called “blessed” by Jesus. Those who will come into identification with His sorrows are those who will receive the most profound recompense – being comforted and rewarded by God Himself. The promise of comfort to Jesus is articulated in Isaiah 53, where the prophet declares the blessing that will come to God’s suffering servant:

Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him;
He has put Him to grief.
When You make His soul an offering for sin,
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,
And the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. 
He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied.
By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many,
For He shall bear their iniquities. 
Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great,
And He shall divide the spoil with the strong,
Because He poured out His soul unto death,
And He was numbered with the transgressors,
And He bore the sin of many,
And made intercession for the transgressors.
(Isaiah 53:10-12, NKJV)

The mourning of Jesus was precisely a fulfillment of this passage. In His humanity, Jesus presented Himself to the Father as one who would willingly share the agony of God’s heart, as well as bear the punishment due to the human race for their sin. Jesus said in effect “Father, You sought for a man to stand in the gap with you. Here I am! I will join with You, I will obey You in this, that Your heart might be comforted and satisfied.”

Isaiah’s prophetic promise over the life of Jesus is that when His soul is made an offering for sin, the pleasure of the Lord will prosper in His hand, and He shall be satisfied with the labor of His soul. In other words, He will be comforted by receiving the full reward of His suffering. That reward is nothing less than human beings fully redeemed from sin who are made able to live in a relationship of intimacy and shared authority with Him forever.

What Does This Mean For Us?

When you and I begin to understand this, we will see that God invites us into an experience of mourning with Him. It will have these two dimensions to it: the awareness of our own brokenness and need for healing, and the awareness of God’s heart that is in anguish for the broken of the earth. As we draw closer to Him in prayer, desiring deeper intimacy with Him as our Father and with His Son as our Bridegroom, God will touch us with this essential dimension of His will for us. We will be invited to mourn over our own condition, and to experience His emotions over the condition of His people. As we give ourselves to mourning, we can be sure that the reward of real comfort will be ours.

Barriers To True Mourning That Prevent True Comfort

One of the great problems with our fallen human nature, however, is that we will do almost anything to avoid facing the reality of our situation so that we can mourn over it and move forward. In our contemporary culture we have grown to hate the thought of taking any kind of responsibility for the circumstances of our lives. We have cultivated a culture of blame-shifting, and would rather find fault with something outside ourselves than to reckon ourselves responsible. We would rather blame the food industry for filling their products with fat and chemicals than face the fact that we are gluttons, unwilling to discipline our appetites. As this is being written in the fall of 2005, the courts have just ruled that people who are obese can no longer bring lawsuits against fast-food restaurants! We would rather blame the government for taking prayer out of schools than acknowledge the fact that we are prayerless people. We want to put an interpretive “spin” on our situations so that we appear in the best possible light. Therefore we construct elaborate and devious schemes so that someone else – anyone else – will be forced to take the blame for our condition instead of us.

Another way that we avoid true mourning is by keeping our grief at a superficial level, feeling sorry for ourselves in the face of troublesome circumstances rather than allowing the situation to expose our deeper issues. An example of this is seen in a Biblical story found in Genesis 19 that speaks to this avoidance tendency in a powerful way. A man name Lot was the nephew of Abraham, and had taken up residence in the wicked city of Sodom. Over time, God became fed up with the evil practices of the citizens there, and He determined to bring judgment to the city by raining down fire from heaven to destroy it. Three angels came to Lot to warn him of the impending disaster, and urge him to take his family and leave town immediately. They were specifically warned not to look back upon the destruction of the city lest they be caught themselves in that judgment. Lot’s wife ignored the advice, looked back as they were leaving, and was turned into a pillar of salt!

You might say that the reason she looked back was that she was mourning the loss of her home and friends, but the mourning called for in the Beatitudes requires a deeper process. Lot’s wife had a more basic issue. Deep in her heart this woman had a love for the ethos of the city, an attraction to the lusty lifestyle that surrounded her. She had allowed her heart to become attached to a situation that was totally compromised. Instead of truly mourning the duplicity in her own heart and rejoicing in the true comfort of God’s deliverance, she felt sorry for herself, and gave herself to yearning after the lost pleasures of Sodom. She thus received judgment instead of real comfort and freedom.

What God desires is that when we are confronted with the reality of our own condition, we allow the Holy Spirit to impact our hearts with what our compromise costs us in our relationship with Jesus. To the degree that we see this and truly grieve over the cost of compromise, Jesus declares that we will be comforted by His presence as a result. 

Powerful People Are Those Who Mourn

Real mourning is a lost art in our medicated Western culture. Our extreme distaste for any experience of painful emotion drives us to all sorts of solutions trying to bring comfort to the situation in which real comfort stubbornly eludes you. We would rather do almost anything rather than endure a place of darkness. We drink alcohol, swallow pills, inject drugs, consume food, have affairs, spend money, leave town – anything to avoid an experience of real mourning. We desire comfort but seem unwilling to do the very thing that Jesus says is the root system of true comfort – experience deep mourning.

What is in view in this second Beatitude? The entry for “mourning” in Vincent’s Word Studies speaks of grieving that is too deep for concealment. To underscore this interpretation, the word for “mourning” in the New Testament is often used with the idea of weeping audibly. The implication is that something comes into focus, some issue or pain that is so dominating, so overwhelming that we can’t hide it any longer. All we can do in those times is mourn, crying out in agony over the situation in which we find ourselves.

Mourning Our Own Brokenness

This is especially necessary when the thing in focus is our own broken condition. When the reality of the effect of sin hits us in the face, the only right response is to face it fully, and allow its weight to have its maximum impact. The sinful condition of our lives involves the destructive things that have been done to us, as well as our destructive responses to those situations. Our sinfulness also directly involves owning our own damaging choices rooted in selfishness and rebellion against God and His ways. Real healing and restoration can only begin in my life is when I am willing to squarely face the responsibility that I have for my own situation – sinful responses to the acts of others, and the sinfulness that arises out of my own dark heart. I must allow the Holy Spirit to convict my heart of my own sin, feel the weight of it, and begin to mourn over the whole thing.

A powerful example of this mourning occurs in the New Testament example of Peter in the aftermath of his denial of Jesus during His trial and crucifixion. Luke’s gospel tells us that when Peter claimed for the third time that he did not know Jesus, a rooster crowed (just as Jesus had predicted) and Jesus’ eyes locked with Peter’s. He was immediately filled with agonizing conviction of his own failure, and his response was to mourn over his own sin. He went out and wept bitterly.

There is a point in our lives when we must come face to face with the fact that we have chosen again and again to follow our own agenda rather than the will of God. Peter denied relationship with Jesus because he was operating in fear and self-protection at the expense of his commitments to his Lord. When he realized what he had done, it grieved his spirit beyond measure, beyond his capacity to contain it. Each of us must come to that place as well. There must come a time when the reality of our failure and the gaze of Jesus are focused on us, when we feel the depth of our sin and can no longer excuse it or explain it away. At that point our only alternative is to mourn.

Next time: Barriers to Authentic Mourning

The Reward of Poverty of Spirit

The promise that Jesus makes to those who will come before the Father in poverty of spirit is fairly astonishing. He says “the Kingdom of Heaven will be yours.” In other words, those who embrace these character qualities will become participants in the life God intended for them here on earth now, and in the fullness of the Kingdom of God in the age to come. This is the life Jesus lived, a life fully established in a relationship of intimate friendship with God. It’s a life filled with His attitudes and expressed in His character. It’s a life characterized by the power and authority that Jesus had.

Let me share a story that illustrates the point. I have a friend who is a businessman in Madison, Wisconsin. Dave owns and operates two fitness centers in that city, and has been enormously successful over the past couple of decades. The key is that he began to cultivate with God a relationship of intimate submission and therefore intimate authority years ago before the business became what it is now.

Dave was a fledgling businessman in his middle twenties when the opportunity came to purchase the fitness center that became the Princeton Club. He put together an investment group, raised the necessary capital (somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million), and felt as though the Lord was going to bless this venture. On the morning that the deal was set to close escrow, the Holy Spirit spoke to Dave in the quietness of his heart and asked him to lay the deal down, to not do it. 

Dave was devastated. He knew it was the voice of the Lord, yet he had business partners to think of, and his own reputation as a credible businessman was on the line. He could have pressed past these very subjective feelings in his heart, and rationalized the purchase of the club. He had the backing of reputable partners, and the confidence of the men from whom he was buying the business. However, deep in his heart, Dave realized that to move forward with the purchase would be to trust his own judgment and value his own reputation more than the voice of God. He would move out of the place of intimacy and confidence in the Lord’s leading. He would save face in the short term, but lose that wonderful sense of partnership with God in his business ventures.

Dave went to the closing that day, and shut the deal down. It was painful and humiliating, and he bore the price of that decision over the next couple of years. No one really understood why he had done what he did, and as you can imagine, his mind was bombarded with thoughts of being ridiculous and hyper-spiritual.

A couple of years later, however, the Lord vindicated Dave’s willingness to live as one who is poor in spirit, who knows how much they need God. The men from whom Dave was going to buy the center called and asked to see him. When he walked into their offices, they declared their inability to find a suitable buyer, and their unwillingness to have anyone but him own the club. They then proceeded to give the fitness center to Dave – property, membership, machinery – everything! In one moment God vindicated the trust of His friend Dave, and since that time has given favor to Dave in the marketplace of Madison. In 2004 he opened the second center, a $15 million structure that is a wonder to behold. Within a year of opening, the membership at the clubs doubled, and a strong profit margin was realized. 

When God’s people dare to live a life of total dependence upon Him, the reward they get is God Himself, and the full authority of His Kingdom. It’s worth the risk!

Gary Wiens

Living Like Jesus in Poverty of Spirit

Jesus realized that He had come to fulfill God’s mysterious plan of bringing all heavenly things and all earthly things together in Himself. He was a man, but one who was full of the Spirit of God. In His merely fleshly existence, He could do nothing of power on His own initiative. Outside the intimate partnership with His Father He could not fulfill His destiny as the one who would bring together all things in heaven and earth. This realization that in our mere flesh we can do nothing is the essence of poverty of spirit. If Jesus could do nothing on His own initiative, how much can we do on our own?

But God designed us to participate in His life. So, Jesus models true humanity by cultivating His relationship with the Father, listening to Him, watching Him with the eyes of the Spirit, and doing whatever the Father is doing. The wonderful news here is that the Father loves the Son and shows Him everything He Himself does! Therefore, because the Father shows the Son what He is doing, Jesus is empowered to do those same things, and you have the reward that comes to those with poverty of spirit – the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them!

Every time Jesus did what the Father was doing, the earthly and the heavenly came together. The man operated in poverty of spirit, and the Father released signs and wonders. The one who was poor in spirit received the Kingdom, and modeled the life of true humanity for the rest of us.

It is important that we not confuse God’s motives here. He is not a controller, limiting our activity so that He can pull the strings of our lives like some sort of cosmic puppeteer. That image of God is a horrible caricature, and is true of Satan, not God. The God that Jesus knew as Father desires His children to live in the full reality of His power and liberty. Jesus walked in the freedom of that power because every moment, as a man, He recognized His need for God’s life to be lived through Him.

See, Beloved, we are created to live every day in the power of God. However, we don’t see that reality lived out much in our day. I believe the reason for this is that the vast majority of God’s children don’t even know that He desires for us to live like Jesus did, much less that He has made the power available for that kind of living. It is for this reason that the Holy Spirit is raising up the message of intimacy and affection between God and His people at this time in history, so that we might come to believe what He has in store for us if we will come in poverty of spirit.

Jesus and Poverty of Spirit

It is necessary for us to see that Jesus Himself lived in the constant awareness of how much He needed the help and strength of God, His own Father. This is shown to us clearly in His encounter with the Jewish religious leaders recorded in chapter five of the Gospel of John. Here’s the scenario: Jesus has just healed a crippled man in a wonderful way, and the Jews are upset because He did it on the Sabbath day. Jewish tradition and religious legalism had turned the day of rest into a spiritual and social prison by restricting activity instead of calling the people to a day of intimate communion with God designed to bring rest to their bodies, souls, and spirits. So, when Jesus revealed the tender mercy of God by healing this man on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders missed the whole point, and were furious.

When they questioned Him about the event, Jesus’ reason for healing him was a surprising one:

Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; 

for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner. (John 5:19)

Here’s the startling truth of this confession: Jesus, the Son of God, is declaring that He can do nothing on His own initiative! The most powerful man in the universe is admitting that He has no strength unless the Father gives it to Him! Then Jesus goes on in the next verse to reveal the delightful dimension of intimacy with His Father that releases this strength and authority in His life:

For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself does; 

and He will show Him greater works than these, that you may marvel. (John 5:20)

It is so important that we grasp what is being shown us here! Jesus, the ultimate man, is declaring that He has no ability to do anything on His own.  Jesus can’t do anything for God! All He can do is what God gives Him the strength to do in the context of their intimate friendship. He is completely dependent upon His love relationship with His Father to know what to do, and to have the ability to do it. This is poverty of spirit at its best, and the example is given to us that we might embrace the same reality in our lives.

A Deeper Look at Power through Poverty of Spirit

As we begin the process of reflecting on the Beatitudes as the measuring stick for those who are being qualified to have authority on earth as it is in heaven, the first thing to notice is the order in which they are given. There is a purpose to that order, a progressive encounter with God’s character requirements that must be embraced that we might fulfill that which is His desire for us.

Therefore it is significant that the first requirement for heaven’s authority to be released is poverty of spirit. There is no great mystery to what the words mean. Poverty is a condition of having no resources, of being totally dependent upon the resources of another. One who is poverty-stricken is one who is at the end of their means, who has no hope of changing their circumstance by their own strength. For most of us, living as we do in our affluent culture, poverty is something we see at a distance, something that rarely touches us except in a second-hand way.

However, once in awhile some circumstance emerges that allows us to touch poverty more personally. In the late summer of 2005, a massive hurricane named Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast of the United States, bringing great destruction to a huge region of the nation. We sympathized with those who were forced to leave everything and escape the storm’s fury. We watched with horror as people who had made the decision to stay in their homes rather than evacuate experienced the terrifying reality of nature’s strength. It was a gripping scenario, and for days the nation’s news agencies were riveted on this story.

In the midst of that event, one vignette that captured my attention involved a group of people who had been vacationing in New Orleans. They were people of means, but suddenly their wealth meant nothing as they were completely unable to make arrangements to get out of town. They had paid $25,000 to charter a bus to come into the city to take them away, only to find that the armed forces in the city commandeered the bus before it could get to these folks. In that circumstance, these people had no recourse, and though they eventually found a way out, the anger and frustration that is rooted in fear was obvious in their faces as they told their story.

Poverty of spirit is like that. It is the sometimes shocking awareness that when it comes to living up to the values and expectations of God’s heavenly kingdom, all of us are weighed in the scales and found to be too light. The statement of Paul the Apostle in Romans 3:23 is pointed and powerful: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Poverty of spirit is the realization that nothing I can do will set me straight with God, or produce the kind of powerful life I was created to live in and enjoy. (to be continued!)

Excerpt taken from "Reaching Your Power Potential: Authority on Earth as it is in Heaven"

By Gary & Marie Wiens, available in the Kindle Store, Amazon.com

The Blessing of Being Persecuted for Righteousness’ Sake

The final stage of being qualified to stand in the authority of heaven on earth is that of being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. The first thing to say here is that we must see the persecution come for the sake of righteousness, and not for any other reason. Persecution for the sake of any other issue is not what Jesus is speaking about here. This is not about being political activists, or doctrinal watchdogs, or adopting extreme positions on controversial issues. This is about being people who are consumed with God, passionate that all people and things become what they ought to be according to the design of God, and who have given their lives to that pursuit in the character of humility, meekness, and love.

The fact is that people like this will not be received well by the general population. At the same time that there is a longing and desire to be like Him, there is also a deep ambivalence rooted in our determination to be the god of our own little world. It’s a pathetic posture, really, a position polluted by megalomania. The assumption that we have what it takes to rule our world is so unrealistic and patently untrue. No matter how much we control, there are so many factors beyond our control that any human authority apart from God dangles by the most fragile of threads. History has proven this again and again, and we ignore the truth to our own detriment.

Having said this, it is an immensely unpopular stance to challenge the sovereignty of the individual and ask them to give up the right of self-direction for the sake of submitting to God. Though some people – prepared by the Holy Spirit and wooed by the heart of God – will hear that invitation and respond gladly, many will resist it to the point of persecuting those who stand with Jesus in the purposes of God.

Persecution has been the real experience of Godly people through the ages, and Jesus’ promise is that we will experience it as well. However, it is His desire that we see the real blessing behind the experience, and rejoice that we are numbered with the faithful through the centuries. We will be faced with trouble as we preach, teach, and live these principles. It is the way of the Kingdom of God, and it will be our way as well.

Gary Wiens

The Power of Peacemaking

The New Testament understanding of making peace goes far deeper than merely working for a compromise between two or more parties so that hostilities can diminish. Peacemaking is a costly, self-sacrificing reality that finds its fullest expression in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Then, in His kind desire to share His blessing and authority with us, He invites us into the same kind of sacrificial life. Consider this passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:

For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. (Ephesians 2:14-18, NKJV)

Jesus was the ultimate peacemaker, and therefore sets the definition for what that term can mean. In the first place, He gave Himself as a man to full and complete obedience to the Father, completely and perfectly living out the character of God in the flesh. He is the one man who did it right every time! Because He is the author of life, and all of life is contained in Him,  when He demonstrated His perfection through the course of His days on earth, He was given authority to be the prototype of a whole new race of men. If you can picture this, it is as though He gathered up into Himself all who would believe in Him and brought them to peace, reconciling them to His Father through His life.

Because we have been reconciled to the Father, we can now truly come into our own identity and destiny by His grace instead of by our energies. As we live in communion with God, we hear our Father’s voice telling us over and over who we are, how much we are loved, what our task is, and the destiny to which He has invited us. His love and power assure our hearts that these things will be fulfilled, and therefore we can be at rest, at peace. When we live at peace with God, we can come to peace with ourselves and our own journey toward the fullness of our destiny. And when we are at peace in those two arenas, we can come to peace with one another.

Those who make peace stand in the direct flow of the ministry of Jesus. We are called to live in Jesus’ dynamic of intimate obedience to God and His ways. As we do this, the Father reveals Himself through our lives in ways similar to how He revealed Himself through the life of Jesus. People are drawn to Him through us as they were through Jesus, and the opportunity presents itself to establish peace between those individuals and God as their Father. As the reality of peace with God is absorbed into their lives, it becomes possible to bring them to peace with others whose lives they touch.
Because this effect stands in such harmony with the ministry of Jesus, the reward that comes to peacemakers is at the level of fundamental identity: they are called “the sons of God.”

Gary Wiens

Purity of Heart and the Knowledge of God

Apart from Jesus Himself, King David was a man who understood authority perhaps as well as any man ever has. He ruled the nation of Israel during its ascent to the pinnacle of power among earthly kingdoms, and he gave much energy to contemplating authority and what is required of those who will exercise it. In Psalm 24 David gives us insight into the authority structure of heaven, and the requisites for receiving that heavenly authority here on the earth. Consider these words:

The earth is the LORD’S, and all its fullness,

The world and those who dwell therein. 

For He has founded it upon the seas,

And established it upon the waters. 

Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD?

Or who may stand in His holy place? 

He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol,

Nor sworn deceitfully. 

He shall receive blessing from the LORD,

And righteousness from the God of his salvation.

(Psalm 24:1-5, NKJV)

David’s first acknowledgement here is that all the fullness of the earth belongs to the Lord God. He is the supreme authority by right of creation and redemption, and all who dwell on the earth belong to Him. But then the Psalm gets focused on who will be qualified to share in the Lord’s authority. “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who may stand in His holy place?” In other words, who is the one who can stand before the Lord in confidence to share in His authority?

The answer is concise and pointed: “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully.” David takes the issue of qualification right past the question of behavior to the deeper matter – the condition of the heart. The one who may confidently stand in God’s presence is the one with a pure heart, who has no falseness or deceit in the foundations of their personality. Because the heart of God is absolutely pure, with no hint of improper motives or deceitful agendas, He is able to exercise His authority in such a way that brings maximum grace and fulfillment to all who come to Him. He doesn’t use people for His own glory at their expense. Rather, He shares His identity and authority with them that they may be exalted and glorified, thereby bringing even greater honor to Himself.

Therefore, those who will share His authority must be those who are conformed to His character. They will be the same on the inside as they are on the outside, those who know that God desires us to have “truth in the inward parts.”  But the greater reward that comes to those with pure hearts is that they will see God. As we grow in conformity to His character, there is a greater and greater revelation that comes to us. God allows us to see Himself. We can hardly imagine the depth of this reward. King David, in the context of his own magnificent earthly kingdom, said that his greatest desire was to be in the House of the Lord, gazing upon the beauty of God, and inquiring in His temple.  David knew that God’s self-revelation was the ultimate prize, worthy of the total focus of his own heart.

Becoming People of Mercy

As we begin to be conformed to the image of Jesus in our search for power, we also begin to realize how He exercised the authority that was given to Him. We begin to see things as He sees them, and to respond to people and situations with the mercy and compassion that characterizes the heart of God in His dealings with us. In another section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs us that as we give mercy to those around us, particularly those who are undeserving of it, we begin to demonstrate our intimate relationship with God as our Father, who is merciful and kind to those who are wicked and ungrateful.

Being merciful to evil and unthankful people does not seem like the way to greatness, at least to those who are accustomed to living in the me-first, cut-throat world of contemporary culture. But we must be reminded that mercy is the way of God, and He is the one who defines all things. It is He who gives power to those who wait upon Him and are conformed to His ways. His promise to those who become merciful is that they will receive mercy, both for their own situations, and as a resource to give away to those who need it.

The reason that mercy is such an essential dynamic in God’s Kingdom is that it provides a context in which people can truly be transparent about the condition of their hearts and lives. In the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, the writer provides a profound understanding for the context of mercy established by God on our behalf.  Citing the temptations that Jesus faced as a man on the earth, we are told that these pressures made Jesus to be compassionate and merciful toward the rest of us when we face such things. Because Jesus is sympathetic due to His own experience of testing, we can come into the presence of God in the confidence of full self-disclosure knowing that the first thing that awaits us is mercy, not condemnation. Therefore, as we experience mercy as the first result of encountering God, we become those who give mercy to those we encounter, thereby opening a way for them to be transparent about the things that concern them. The freedom to be real and transparent in a non-defensive way is integral to spiritual growth and lasting change, and the extending of mercy as the first response sets the context for that growth.

When God finds people who are becoming merciful, He extends even greater mercy to them. One of the great dynamics of the Kingdom of God is that whatever one gives away is returned to them in greater measure. In Luke 6:38, just a few lines after Jesus instructs us about mercy, He further teaches that what we give will be returned to us, compressed and increased in proportion to how we gave it. Though we have mostly applied that principle to the giving of finances, He is talking primarily there about mercy and forgiveness. As we become conformed to the character of His Kingdom, we become recipients of the graces of His Kingdom. We give mercy to those who need it, setting in motion the release of additional mercies to us, both in our areas of need and as a resource to share with others.

Gary Wiens