Shattered Dreams

Greetings All,

     Today I would like to begin by asking you all to remember the families of those who lost loved ones on 9/11 - as tomorrow marks the 12th anniversary of that tragic and world changing event. I even read yesterday that over 1400 of the rescue workers and emergency crews who helped right after the collapse of the towers (and others I'm sure) have come down with some form of cancer from inhaling the dust, etc.  I would ask you to pray for them.
     Now, as far as our 'thought' for this week, it comes from Dr. Larry Crabb, and is taken from his book, "Shattered Dreams."
     In some ways it even relates to what I've just mentioned regarding 9/11, but I must warn you that it takes some readjusting of our minds, and a reorientation of our accepted presuppositions to comprehend what he's saying!  In a culture like ours where the "quality of life" paradigm under-girds everything we think, feel and believe, we must consider what he says lest certain portions of Scripture continue to remain a mysterious enigma to us. Are you up for the challenge?  Enjoy.

     "Shattered dreams are never random. They are always a piece in a larger puzzle, a chapter in a larger story. The Holy Spirit uses the pain of shattered dreams to help us discover our desire for God, to help us begin dreaming the highest dream. They are ordained opportunities for the Spirit to awaken, then to satisfy our highest dream... God is always working to make His children aware of a dream that remains alive beneath the rubble of every shattered dream, a new dream that when realized will release a new song, sung with tears, till God wipes them away and we sing with nothing but joy in our hearts.

     It’s hard to hear, but it is important to know, that God is not committed to supporting our ministries, to preventing our divorces, to preserving our health, to straightening out our kids, to providing a livable income, to ending famine, or to protecting us from agonizing problems that generate in our souls an experience that feels like death. We cannot count on God to arrange what happens in our lives in ways that will make us feel good. Yet we can count on God to patiently remove all the obstacles to our enjoyment of Him. He is committed to our joy, and we can depend on Him to give us enough of a taste of that joy, and enough hope that the best is still ahead, to keep us going in spite of how much pain continues to plague our hearts...

     The battle is not to improve our circumstances, to supply us with money, to protect us from suffering, to keep us safe from pain and struggle, or to quickly fix whatever problems develop in our bodies. We are encouraged to pray for all these things, but we must always finish our prayer with that wonderful caveat that in our immaturity we find so annoying: if it be Thy will be so.

     The illusion that life in a fallen world is really not all that bad must be shattered. When even the best parts of life are exposed as pathetic counterfeits of how things should be, the reality drives us to a level of distress that threatens to utterly undo us. But it’s when we’re on the brink of personal collapse that we’re best able to shift the direction of our soul from self-protection to trusting love. The more deeply we enter into the reality that life without God is sheer desolation, the more fully we can turn toward Him…

     The richest love grows in the soil of an unbearable disappointment with life. When we realize life can’t give us what we want, we can better give up our foolish demand that it do so and get on with the noble task of loving as we should. We will no longer need to demand protection from further disappointment. The deepest change will occur in the life of a bold realist who clings to God with a passion only his realistic appraisal of life can generate.

     

     Until we recognize with tears how determined we are to move away from pain and how that determination reflects our blasphemous decision to preserve our own life, we will not be able to identify the subtle ways in which our relational style violates love for others by keeping us safe… We repent by radically shifting our motivation and direction from self-preservation to trust on the basis of the belief that Christ has both given, and is preserving, our life. The fruit of repentance is a changed style of relating that replaces self-protective maneuvering with loving involvement."

     It may take a few glances to fully comprehend what he's saying since we are so convinced that God's primary purpose in our lives is, "to support our ministries, to prevent our divorces, to preserve our health, to straighten out our kids, to provide a livable income, to end famine, or to protect us from agonizing problems that generate in our souls an experience that feels like death."  We're not used to hearing that God is instead committed to, "removing all the obstacles to our enjoyment of Him." Especially When the "obstacles" He's committed to removing are those very things we have convinced ourselves He's supposed to be supplying us with (like good health, a livable income, teens that behave, a wonderful marriage, etc.).

     This is one of the reasons so many Christians in our day simply cannot grasp how James could say (and Paul with him - Romans 5:1-5) that we need to, "count it all joy when we face all kinds of trials."  One can only do that when they realize (as James did) that the purpose in our trails and difficulties is meant by God to increase our reliance or dependence upon Him, strip away our trust in false sources of joy (and thus expose idols of the heart), wean our hearts away from their fixation on earthly things, and cause us to see that He Himself is the treasure that far exceeds all that this world has to offer.  Sometimes its only though trials and hardships that the things of this earth begin to pale in comparison to God and the eternal joys He has stored up for us.

     With prayers that you might see your shattered dreams and earthly disappointments as divinely ordained ways of bringing about your enjoyment of Him -- Pastor Jeff

Finding God in times of trial

Greetings All,

   This week's 'thought' comes to you from Larry Crabb's book, "Finding God."  I have turned to this book often when I get tired of the light-weight help offered by many other more popular books which often attain their popularity by evading the issue of sin, completely bypassing God's call to holiness, and approaching Christian spirituality from a pop-psychology standpoint, rather than a biblical standpoint.
   Therefore, if you are going through a difficult time, Larry Crabb, who is a trained psychologist, can offer you a refreshing perspective -- Using your trials to find God, rather than trying to use God to get out of your trials. 

   He is compassionate yet firm, and helpful precisely because he, as any good doctor, follows the example of God in Is. 19:22 and 30:26, who strikes or wounds in order to heal.  If you want someone to tip-toe around the issue of sin, and be very indirect, and sympathize with you while failing to call you to take responsibility for your part in things, Dr. Crabb is not  the one to read.  But if you really want to be helped and healed -- to have your motivations exposed and your soul wounded that it might be made whole -- he is a very effective doctor!  Enjoy.
 
                                Enoch, the Man who Walked with God

    The prophet Amos asked the question, 'Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so? (Amos 3:3). [The question demands a 'no' answer.] If I am to walk with God, one thing is immediately clear: we must go in the same direction.  And God doesn't negotiate.  He invites me to join him, but He will not go with me on side trips. God's course is clear. He has committed himself to bringing 'all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ' (Eph. 1:10).  If I want to walk with him, I have no option but to join him on that path.  Agreeing to join him requires that every other ambition in my heart become secondary to promoting Christ. Anything that contradicts this purpose must be abandoned. Those terms are demanding.  Following Christ requires something of us -- more than rejoicing in our new identity. Sometimes it feels like we have to give up our only hope for life.
   I once spoke with a woman whose husband regularly struck their teenage son. The boy was terrified of his father and had given up on his faith because God was doing nothing to protect him from his father's wrath. The mother was heartbroken, confused and angry... She told me that her mother had died when she was ten years old, and four years later her father had taken his own life.  The care of her three younger siblings fell entirely on her fourteen-year-old shoulders. Over the years, she had become an intensely responsible woman, determined to solve everyone's problems, including her own...
   At one point I suggested that she had cast herself in the role of survivor.  She saw herself

as the leader of a camping expedition lost in the wilderness with a blizzard raging.  Everything depended on her.  Her one goal was to gather together her considerable resources -- she was an extremely capable woman -- and see to it that everybody got out safely. With that resolution locked deeply in her soul, her questions, 'How can I help my son?' and 'What can I do with my husband?' reflected a clenched-fist determination to make life work better.... Her agenda was to fix her world until it could properly take care of her. God's agenda is to bring all things together in Christ until every knee bows before him. These two persons -- this woman and God -- were not walking together.  They were moving in different directions.  She came to God not to walk with him, but to persuade him to supply the energy and power she needed to fulfill her purposes.  Until she changed direction, she would know neither peace in the situation nor wisdom for dealing with it.

                   Our agenda is to fix the world until it can properly take care of us.

                   God's agenda is to bring all things together in Christ until every knee
                   bows before him.
  
                   When I am not convinced that God is good, I will quietly -- but with
                   tight-lipped resolve -- take over responsibility for my own well-being...
                 
    In our day we treat personal discomfort (self-hatred, low self-esteem, insomnia, money pressures, loneliness) as the central evil from which we need to be saved.  When we blend the pursuit of comfort with Christianity, Jesus becomes a divine masseur whose demands we heed only after we are properly relaxed. But that is not the Christianity of the Bible.  Christ offers hope, not relief, in the middle of suffering, and commands us to pursue him hotly even when we'd rather stop and look after our own well-being... Our mistake is to think that peace means having a satisfying sense of our own value and worth.  Neither definition gets to the heart of the matter.  God's peace belongs to those who have confidence in his goodness even when life is tough and their self-esteem is low.  And it should be noted[contrary to the opinion of many] that we can experience God's peace and a poor self-image at the same time."      Our goal in difficult circumstances should not primarily be to feel better, but to trust the God who uses our wounds to make us more whole. When God (as the Divine Surgeon) takes the the knife to cut out some lingering or spreading infection, my primary concern should not be to stop the cutting and feel relief, but endure the cutting and its attending pain knowing and trusting that God's promise is true (Rom. 8:28-29) and thus His purpose is my growth in holiness, and the restoration of the divine image in my soul.  
     We often fail to realize that sin is an infection that must be dealt with frequently, and sometimes painfully. Like the soldier wounded in battle and laying on the ground biting down hard on the rag in his mouth while the medic works his miracle with the knife (knowing it must be done to save his life), we also

must do the same on occasion.  We must refuse to stop the Surgeon while he's cutting on us, knowing and trusting that His purpose in doing so is our temporal and eternal good. "The Lord will bandage his people's injuries, and heal the wounds He has inflicted" (Isaiah 30:26).

 

 

With the hope that you may agree, like Enoch, to walk with God,  Pastor Jeff

Joyfully Broken

Greetings All,

This weeks "thought" comes from Larry Crabb in his book: "Shattered Dreams - God's Unexpected Pathway to Joy." It will not appeal to everyone -- especially the happy or content! It may even confuse you if you fit in that category. But that's ok. It is sent out for the struggling one's who have, or are, as the book's title notes, wrestling with "shattered dreams."

It's a thought that speaks of joy, and as the author mentions, "Happy people rarely look for joy. They're quite content with what they have. The foundation of their life consists in the blessings they enjoy... Those satisfied with good health, responsible children, enjoyable marriages, close friendships, interesting jobs and successful ministries, never hunger for God's best."

Happy people are rarely freed to enjoy what he calls the "greater dream" of true joy, because "happiness (the pleasant feelings that pleasant circumstances generate) must be taken away in order to be replaced by joy," and people who cling to things as they are never pass from "happiness through despair to joy;" a cycle that occurs repeatedly throughout the Christian's life.

That cycle and the six lessons that attend it (from Naomi's story in the Old Testament Book of Ruth) are what he speaks of in this thought. Enjoy.

"From the story of Naomi I learned six lessons... They are necessary lessons if we are to develop into people with peace and power and unspeakable joy no matter what our circumstances may be. If we are to become the community of the joyfully broken who reveal by our lives that the gospel is true.

Lesson 1 - Our fondest dreams for this life, the ones we naturally believe are essential to our happiness, must be fully abandoned if we are to know God well. But we cannot abandon them without help. The help we need, most often, is suffering the pain of seeing at least a few of our fondest dreams shattered. Shattered dreams are necessary for spiritual growth. That's the first lesson.

Lesson 2 - Shattered dreams produce excruciating pain, sometimes so extreme that we fear we cannot survive. And that is true. The person we are before the pain cannot survive. We emerge from the experience of shattered dreams as changed people... The pain is not evidence of weak faith. It is evidence we are normal. It's part of a necessary process. The pain is necessary if we're to discover within us an appetite for better dreams, which before, we neither noticed nor appreciated. Something wonderful survives everything terrible, and it surfaces most clearly when we hurt. That's the second lesson.

Lesson 3 - Some cherished dream will crumble in your life. That's inevitable. It happens to all of us before we're through living down here. No one makes it unscathed to the end. Whether we believe that God caused the trial (as Naomi did) or that God merely allowed the trial, one thing is clear: He could have prevented the trial. He could have given us a good time, at least a better time than we had. That fact creates within us a tension with God. Some dreams important to us will shatter, and the realization that God could have fulfilled that dream pushes us into a terrible battle with Him. That's the third lesson.

Lesson 4 - A child always given candy will never learn to like vegetables. A student never required to read Shakespeare or to listen to Beethoven never develops a taste for more than sensational fiction and noisy music. Similarly, when lesser dreams reliably come true, we have a hard time appreciating greater dreams. We neither envision or pursue them. Only an experience of deep pain develops our capacity for recognizing and enjoying true life. That's lesson four.

Lesson 5 - Most people never discover true life. Unbelievers don't possess it. Believers, all of them, do possess it, but not many experience it. Not many Christians drink deeply from the well of living water. As a result, our worship, our community, and our witness are weak. I learn that as the fifth lesson.

Lesson 6 - The past is irreparable; the future is always available. In every case, when good dreams shatter, better ones are there to newly value and pursue. These better dreams are indestructible; they will not be taken away from us either by God (because He is good) or by the forces of evil (because evil has no power to thwart God's highest purposes). No matter what happens in life, a wonderful dream is available, always, that if pursued will generate an unfamiliar, radically new internal experience. That experience, strange at first, will eventually be recognized as joy. That's the sixth lesson...

From happiness through despair to joy - that's the cycle. Then, since joy is never fully settled, that cycle repeats itself. Our lives move again from feeling pretty good, to hurting terribly, to deeper hope, different and richer...

Only a few in any generation believe that the weight of knowing God is a blessing more wonderful than every other. And those who believe it appear to have developed that conviction only through suffering. Happiness must be stripped away, forcibly, before joy can surface, before we will value and pursue dreams whose fulfillment produces true joy. It's a great tragedy when Christian people make it through life without ever discovering that their happiness is no different from the happiness of circumstantially well-off pagans... I doubt whether anyone makes that discovery without enduring the pain of shattered dreams. The experience of despair is the initial movement in the rhythm of hope. That proved true in Naomi's life."

Dr. Crabb's book is well worth the read - especially if you are there.

In Him, Pastor Jeff

Are we merely living, or are we walking with God?

Greetings All,

This week's "thought" comes to you as a result of my being out of town this past Sunday visiting my brother Jon who pastor's the Summit Presbyterian Church just north of Pittsburgh, PA. Randy (my associate here at Christ Community Bible Church) filled in for me while I was away and in his message quoted this section from Larry Crabb's book, "Finding God." It's a good reminder (in our self-absorbed society) that we must be careful not to get caught up in the prevailing cultural sense that everything in life is about us and for us.

As a Christian psychologist Larry Crabb is one of the few who has been able to retain a very Godward focus. We must also strive to do so, lest our own focus and the priorities that flow from it come to be dictated more by the world than by the Word.

The premise of his book is stated in the first quote, where he tells us not to waste our pain. It is then spelled out in greater detail in the others that follow. Enjoy!

"We have become committed to relieving the pain behind our problems rather than using our pain to wrestle more passionately with the character and purposes of God. Feeling better has become more important than finding God."

What does he mean?

"Helping people to feel loved and worthwhile has become the central mission of the church. We are learning not to worship God in self-denial and costly service, but to embrace our inner child, heal our memories, overcome addictions, lift our depressions, improve our self-images, establish self-preserving boundaries, substitute self-love for self-hatred, and replace shame with an affirming acceptance of who we are....

Although the gospel does bless us with a new identity that was meant to be enjoyed, it calls us to higher values than self-acceptance -- values like turning the other cheek, esteeming others as greater than ourselves, going the second mile, enduring rejection and persecution, living not for the pleasures of this life but for those of the next one, and clinging to the promises of God when we don't feel His goodness. But these higher values, the kind that make 'people of whom the world is not worthy,' have fallen upon hard times...

We treat personal discomfort (self-hatred, low self-esteem, insomnia, money pressures, loneliness) as the central evil from which we need to be saved (instead of sin, idolatry, rebellion against God, and so forth).* When we blend the pursuit of comfort with Christianity, Jesus becomes a divine massuer whose demands we heed only after we are properly relaxed. Our agenda is to fix the world until it can properly take care of us. God's agenda is to bring all things together in Christ until every knee bows before him...

The question we need to ask is this: Are we merely living, or are we walking with God? I must surrender my fascination with myself to a more worthy preoccupation with the character and purposes of God. I am not the point. He is. I exist for him; he does not exist for me."

When my focus becomes earth-bound, and the joy of my relationship with God becomes obscured by constant irritations in regard to "not-as-I'd-like-it-to-be" quality-of-life issues, then its time to step back and see if I can't use my pain and irritations "to wrestle more passionately with the character and purposes of God." For as Crabb reminds us (and previous generations seem to have grasped better than us), in the ultimate sense it is more important that people find God than that they simply feel better.

In His Service, Pastor Jeff