Archive for May, 2010
Why You Must Not Go Back
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Last week I posted some thoughts about why you must go back.
There are times when we must deal with our past issues because our past issues are still having a current effect on our lives.We do need to go back emotionally when we need to grieve our sins, our mistakes, our losses. We need to go back and experience the fullness of moments we have ignored, avoided, or pushed to the back of our consciousness.
But at other times, it is unfruitful and even unhealthy to go back.
There are two ways that we can choose to live in the past. One is by idealizing the past, and the other is by allowing the past to freeze us in our pain. Let’s look at these two ways and see if we find ourselves in either unhealthy pattern.
The Perfect Past
“If things could just be like they used to be!”
How often I have heard this expression of a deep longing in someone’s heart! Things have changed and we just want to go back to the way things used to be.
We long to turn back the hands of time. We wish we could wave a magic wand over our lives and restore things to the way they used to be. Although it is legitimate to grieve when we have experienced loss and it is right to be thankful for a wonderful event or season, may I suggest that the answer is not in going back?
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Why You Must Go Back
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God’s ways are mysterious, beyond my understanding and often seem downright contradictory. While in my humanity, I prefer to think in straight lines which lend themselves to defining a goal as completed, a task marked off, I find that God’s ways are usually not pictured best by straight lines. They are paths which appear, at times, intertwined, difficult to map out, going forward, then backward, orbiting around a center, and often perplexing my human mind. The longer I walk with God, the more clearly I see that He is truly not confined to my limited understanding. He is working, often His deepest purposes in me, when I am clueless.
This week, I was meditating on two of the seemingly contradictory ways of God. In the next few days, I want to explore these two thoughts:
1. You must go back.
2. You can never go back.
Huh? Sounds confusing? I hope you are intrigued sufficiently to continue reading for both statements are true and I am not being ambivalent. There are times in life when you must absolutely go back. You must go back, as it were, in your mind, your emotions, your relationships, to moments of the past and experience the moments again. There are some very important reasons for us to go back. And in other ways, we must never go back and in fact, cannot do so, but that is for another day this week.
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Jesus, the Healer of Broken Hearts
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If we believe that God is purposeful in His actions, then how significant is the fact that the first words of the first message Jesus preached were, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because … He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted…”? (Luke 4:18-19)
Jesus came to heal broken hearts and not only as a side benefit; it’s one of his life purposes! That’s good news because all of us who are in this world have experienced the pain of having our hearts broken in one way or another. If we look at the life of Jesus in the Gospels, we find that he moves throughout his days interacting with humanity and healing broken hearts. That healing takes many expressions. Today I want to look at how Jesus healed the heart of a woman as recorded in John 4 and what that healing means for us now.
Let’s take a look at the story.
Jesus was exhausted from his long trip. He had gone to the city well to get a drink of water. However, what followed was not a chance happening at all because we are told that Jesus “needed” to go through the region of Samaria; he was compelled to do so.
Jews did not have anything to do with Samaritans in those days. Samaritans were considered half-breeds and unclean by Jewish tradition. Yet Jesus, a Jew, chose to go through the middle of Samaria instead of making the usual trip around the area as most Jews did in order to avoid the Samaritans.
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When Jesus Offers You More
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This morning I am contemplating the passage in Luke 17 which records the story of ten men who had leprosy being healed by Jesus. I am arrested by the response of the one … “and one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice, glorified God, and fell down on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.”
And my heart is drawn to this idea… “When he saw that he was healed…”
Sometimes our healing comes just this obviously. We look and we see. We are healed. At other times, our healing is a process; it comes piece by piece, particularly when Jesus is healing our hearts.
Today I am asking myself, and I hope you will ask yourself, how do I respond to God’s healing in my life? Can I see what He is doing in me?
All ten lepers could physically see that they were healed. Yet this one, he saw more. He saw the person of Christ. He saw His redeemer. The others were doing just what Jesus told them. They were going to the priests in order to be declared ceremonially cleansed which would allow them to reconnect with their world and their God. Yet this one…
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5 Ways to Keep Ministry from Sucking the Life Out of You
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My husband and I have been in ministry for 27 years now. We have lived through great mountain top highs and successful seasons, and we have lived through some low valleys and seasons of failure. There have been moments when we both have had to ask ourselves if we would choose the path of ministry again if we had it all to do over. My heart always finds the answer to that question is yes, although I humbly acknowledge that I don’t always feel that way. There are days and weeks and months when living in the ministry fishbowl and living a life dedicated to the service of others costs more than I wish to pay. But yet, deep from my innermost being the call of God still speaks and I know there is no other path that I would choose.
This morning, I pause to think of the many of you who live a life of ministry. I breathe a prayer for you even now as I write, and I offer these five ways that I have found to be anchors for true ministry. I am not offering this list as an all-inclusive; just a list of things that were on my heart today.
1. 1. Check your balance.
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