This week's thoughts' come to you from two different devotional books: Devotions for the God Guy - A 365 Day Journey," by Michael DiMarco,
and "Simply Sacred" by Gary Thomas.
The first has to do with "Being poured out like
wine," and the second with "The need for confession."
I trust both will speak truth into your heart. Enjoy.
"But
even if I am being poured out like a drink offering on the sacrifice and service
coming from your faith, I am glad to rejoice with all of you." Philippians
2:17
"When
God uses you, he pours you out like wine and he breaks you like bread.
But what does all that mean? How can you become wine? How are you broken? Well,
it's really an amazing analogy. Wine is made from grapes. But before
grapes can be drunk, they have to be crushed, smushed, turned to nothing but
juice. Their former shape is destroyed and their very being translated from one
essence to another.
Have
you ever felt crushed, squeezed, out of all your energy -- even to the core of
your being? Don't be so quick to complain. It's very normal for the God guy to
be crushed. But it's for a very good purpose: so that you can be poured out as
part of the sacrifice of service.
Okay,
you can almost handle the idea of being broken by God. But what about when you
are crushed by someone else? What then? Can you look at the crushing and still
say, "Thank you for pouring me out, dear God." Or do you buck
against the torment and turn away from the strain? When you are being
crushed by someone other than God, don't start to wonder what you're doing
wrong but think about how wine gets made. You can't be poured out as a
drink offering until you've been squeezed.
So
if you want to be turned from bitter grapes into beautiful wine, then you've
got to accept the fingers that are squeezing you even when they aren't
God's. If God chooses to break you by letting you be squeezed and smushed
by life, then don't start to worry that you've been forgotten or abandoned by
God -- quite the opposite is true. When the pressure comes, don't sin because
of it, but stand in the face of it -- and then you will be ready to be poured
out as a part of the sacrifice."
-----------------------------------------------------------
The
Need For Confession
"Dietrich
Bonhoeffer shocked the [Protestant] theological world when, as a Lutheran
theologian in the early part of the twentieth century, he began advocating that
Protestants reinstate the practice of confession. He did so not because
he felt confession to a fellow human being was necessary in order to gain
forgiveness from God [the point the first Protestants initially rebelled
against], but because human confession has a practical purpose -- it makes our
sin seem more real to us.
If
you question this, ask yourself: "Why is it much easier to confess sins to
God than to your pastor? Why is there more shame when another sinful human
being observes my weakness than when I pronounce them before an all-holy
God?" Could it be because God's presence is so weak in our
lives? If we truly understood and cherished the beauty and holiness of
God, we would shake a bit more when we approaching him. But his
invisibility often creates a buffer, thereby softening the impact of his
presence.
In
and through another person God becomes real to us in human form. There is a
flesh-and-blood person sitting next to me who flinches when they hear or see
what should make me flinch, but doesn't -- and I see my hard heart exposed by
their soft one."
We might say that
when it came to the Catholic sacrament of confession the Protestant Reformers,
"threw the baby out with the bath-water." It is one
thing to reject confession to a priest as a sacrament that earns us salvific
merit; it is another thing altogether to see confession as a helpful and
healing practice for our spiritual growth and well-being.
After all, if we take
James 5:16 to heart, and realize it is spoken in the imperative or command
form, we will see that it's really not optional for our growth in godliness.
The thought that I can keep all my struggles secret, or worse yet should,
simply stunts my spiritual growth, impoverishes me spiritually, keeps me in
bondage to the sins I hide, and leads to self-deception regarding my true
desire to move beyond that sin as well as my need for others in the body to
hear me, love me, encourage me, offer me godly counsel, be firm with me, help
me see past my blind spots, and hold me accountable.
As Bonhoeffer also
said (and I'll paraphrase): "Sin is
like mold in a dark, damp basement. Keep it hidden in the dark and away
from the light and it grows and festers. But open the windows, and expose it to
the direct sunlight, and it will soon shrivel up and die." Too
many believers feed their sin by keeping it hidden from the brothers and
sisters they should be confessing it to as part of the sin-killing process of
sanctification.
Just a little food
for thought! In His Service, Pastor Jeff
