Dulles Family Life Church

 In the book of Ruth, there’s a kind of obscure scripture that I’ve underlined.  First some background to it. A man named Elimelech, his wife Naomi and their sons had chosen to leave the land of Judah during a severe famine and move to the foreign land of Moab.  While there, their two sons married Moabite women, one of whom was Ruth.  Over time, not only Elimelech, but both sons died, leaving Naomi and the daughters-in-law widows, a very hopeless situation for any woman of the ancient world.  Now the scripture that I’ve underlined is verse 7, where it says of Naomi and the women, “With her two daughters-in-law, she set out from the place where she had been living, and they took the road that would lead them back to Judah.”

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Waiting is not something our flesh finds easy.  Waiting in hope seems even more difficult, likely even impossible.  Yet, this is exactly what the Father, in all situations of need, calls us to do.  Why?  How?  Even more, just what does it mean to “wait in hope?”
     Psalm 130:5 reads, “I wait for the Lord, my soul does wait.  And in His Word I do hope.”  Maybe the first thing we need to do is come to a real understanding of what God means by calling upon us to wait on Him.  In this Psalm, the Hebrew word used for wait means “To wrap ourselves around Him.”  This isn’t some passive, helpless response but one of action.  As we wait upon Him, we entwine ourselves with Him, literally, become “wrapped up in Him.”  I think the common thought concerning waiting upon God is that He is someplace far away from us, doing “Godthings” while we stand by, helpless, waiting for HIm to do something, and subject to anxiety, stress, and frustration all the while.  We wait, unsure that He will help, and maybe even unsure that He even desires to.  Having hope in those kind of conditions is very hard, even impossible.  It may be that we also need to understand more clearly what He means when He tells us to not only wait on Him, but to hope in Him as we wait.
    Pastor and writer Dutch Sheets says in his book, “Tell Your Heart To Beat Again,” says, “The OT word for hope means “cord.”  The root of the word means to ‘bind together by twisting.  Hope connects.  It braid us together with God.”  Are we getting a picture here?  I think most of our ideas about waiting upon Him and hoping in Him have as a picture, God standing in one place, and we in another, with a huge gap in between.  We don’t seem a part of His life, and for certain He seems to have little part in ours.  We wait and hope in our own strength, and the result is a total lack of peace and assurance.  We feel we have to plead with the Father for help that He seems determined to hold back.  That will always be the case when we live with a great divide between ourselves and our daily reality, and the reality of Who He is.
    His Word tells us that in Christ, He has freely given all we need to have life, so why do continue to approach Him as if He is constantly holding something back from us?  As anyone who has ever been a part of a longdistance relationship knows, it is very hard to really come to know someone that way.  We can come to a surface knowledge, but to truly have and know intimacy, there needs to be a daily intertwining of lives, which can never take place from a distance.  It’s no different as concerns we and the Father.  We cannot know Him as long as that gap exists between us.  Christ is the bridge between us, and the means to be able to not only come to Him, but to be able to wrap ourselves around Him, bind ourselves together in Him, to truly become one with Him.  When that happens, we discover the true beauty of what it means to wait in hope.  He’s no longer a cold, distant diety who must be begged for favors, but a loving Father Who, because we have become such a part of Him, and He of us, instills such a deep peace and rest in us, that we are able to wait and hope not in the expectation of what He will give or do, but in the wonder of Who He is.
   I think there’s little doubt that you, like me, find yourself waiting upon Him in some area of your life today.  How will you do that?  From a distance, across a great divide, all the while seeing Him as a kind of blur, or up close, in intimacy, as you, we, respond to His call to wait upon Him in hope, and wrap ourselves up in Him, binding ourselves together in and with Him?  No force or power can break the cord that comes about from such a joining.

Blessings,
Pastor O

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 I heard a writer named Lynn Terkeurst recently ask the question, “Why is it Jesus works so well inside the church building on Sunday, but not outside it the rest of the week?  What happens when the “ugly” comes out, when God hurts our feelings.”  She was talking about the collision between the reality of our lives, our faith, as they come into direct contact with the reality of the Father as He really is.
    What does happen in and with you and I when the ugly does come out?  Not only when our lives get ugly, but we become aware of the ugliness that can come out of us in response to it all?  Especially when we feel He could have stopped it, or made it go away, or worked some wonderful miracle in the midst of it….but He didn’t….He hasn’t.  What do we do when He doesn’t act like we want Him to, and He has indeed, “hurt our feelings?”
    In Psalm 77, verse 3, the psalmist writes, “I think of God and I moan.”  He’s crying out to a God whose help he desperately seeks, but Who has yet to respond.  Ever been there?  If you have, then you know the moans can be very real.  We need Him, and it seems He doesn’t care.  Yet, what is it we really seek, His Help, or Himself.  In the realities of our lives, I believe He is seeking, maybe more than He ever has before, for us to come and know the reality of Who He is.  Not Who we want Him to be.
   Does this mean He’s indifferent to our pain and suffering?  Not at all, but I think one of the hard realities we have to learn is that His foremost concern is not that we are comfortable and happy, but that we truly know Him, and in a level of intimacy  that a life of comfort, happiness, and unending outward blessings will never allow us to experience.  Jesus didn’t come to give us heaven on earth.  He came to make us His, and to make us holy.  Facing the realities of our lives secure in the reality of Who He is is the only pathway to that state.  Elsewhere in the Psalms we’re invited to “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” to know that He is good whether our lives are going well or not.  All this brings us to the question that in the end, we all must answer.  Are our lives in Him more appearance than reality?  How we answer that determines how we answer the question Lynn Terkeurst posed in the beginning of this writing.  If our life in Him is mere appearance, it only works within the false security of the “worship” service on Sunday morning, but not once we leave the building. 
   As I thought on all this the other day, I wrote this down in my notes.  “What does God want to do with our reality?  Show us our deepest reality.  He is with us, and He loves us.”  That’s the great reality, and it has nothing to do with what He is, or isn’t doing in our lives.  I think this is true faith.  It doesn’t demand the desired outcome, but rests in the heart of the Father, knowing He is good, and even in the midst of the tears life’s realites can bring, tastes and sees that that is true.

Blessings,
Pastor O

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Psalm 90, verses 1 and 2 read, “Lord, through all the generations You have been our home!  Before the mountains were created before you made the earth and the world, You are God, without beginning or end.”  My Bible tells me that this Psalm is a “Prayer of Moses, the man of God.”  Moses was a man who never really had a home in this world.  In the midst of all the changes, challenges, and dangers of his life, he had come to know His God not only as His protector, His help, even His hope, but also as His home.  His true home.  His words say, “Before the mountains were created…..You are God….”  For me, that says that BEFORE any of these challenges, changes, dangers…..mountains, ever came about or would come about, His God WAS, IS, God.  This fact can’t be changed by any mountain of difficulty or need that might stand before us, no matter how overwhelming or intimidating it may be to us. 

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 Cancer.  No one has a neutral response to that word.  I never have, and I certainly didn’t when I was told that I had it in my body.  That was just a week ago, and in the last two weeks, I have spent more time in Doctor’s offices, examination rooms, and the hospital, than I have over the past 40 years combined.

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Power.  It’s a word that has meaning for everyone, and particularly so for those who are His.  We see it’s demonstration all through His Word, whether directly through the actions of the Father in creation, as He led His people out of Egypt, and throughout the lives of the Old Testament prophets.  We see it in the life and miracles of Christ, where He made the crippled walk, gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead.  We observe it in the life of the early church and through the lives of the apostles, Paul, Peter, and John.  The Bible connects such power with the right hand of God, it being the symbol of this kind of power, and a truly wondrous power it is.  We who follow Him long to see such displays of power, and pray much for Him to move in it.  This is not wrong, yet the great Reformer, Martin Luther spoke of another kind of power, one that is much less exciting, and I think, much less sought.  He called it “lefthanded power.”
    Luther called this lefthanded power, “The quiet demonstration of power in people to stir up an appetite for God in another, no matter what was happening in the life of the one who possessed it.”  I think this is the kind of power John was speaking of in I John 1, where he writes, “This One Who was life from God was shown to us, and we have seen Him, and now we testify and announce to you that He is the One Who is eternal life.”
   John goes on to invite his readers into fellowship not only with himself and his fellow believers, but with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as well.  The invitation comes not only in words, but in the power of a resurrected life, that dwelt in the presence of and with all three.  For me, I think perhaps the clearest demonstration of this is found in Acts 7, when Stephen, after preaching to his Jewish listeners, is stoned to death.  In the midst of their hatred and anger, verse 55 reads, “But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed steadily upward into heaven and saw the glory of God, and he saw Jesus standing in the place of honor at God’s right hand,”  His listeners killed him for his message, yet among them was a young man named Saul of Taursus, and there can be no doubt that what he saw in the life and death of Stephen had much to do with preparing his heart to encounter Christ on the Damascus road.  Saul, who became Paul, did not see a mightly deliverance for Stephen, nor was Stephen raised up after he’d been killed.  Yet, what he did see stirred his heart, and through the “lefthanded power” of Stephen’s life, God’s grace pierced his hard heart, and I believe it was there, that the Damascus road journey truly began.  A journey that one day would take him into the third heaven, where he would see wonders no man had ever seen.
   We, you and I, may long for a great demonstration of God’s power today, and maybe He’ll bring us just that, but I think, more and more, I’m longing to walk in the kind of lefthanded power Luther spoke of.  Power that is able to impact the stoniest heart, awaken it to the beauty of Christ, and draw it to Him.  A power that, even in the midst of all the stones of hell being hurled at it, is able to gaze upward, and see the glory of God.  A life that quietly, but steadily, draws someone else to Him. 

Blessings,
Pastor O

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When you read the book of Exodus, one of the things that truly stands out is the difference between how Moses knew God, and how the people “knew” Him.  I think the clearest example of that is found in Exodus 21:20, where the people, terrified of the Lord’s appearance among them with thunder, lightening, and darkness.  Moses tried to tell them to have no fear, that the Lord was displaying His awesome power to them, but they would not listen.  They tell him in verse 19, “You tell us what God says, and we will listen.  But don’t let God speak directly to us.  If He does, we will die.”  Then, in verse 20, it reads, “As the people stood in the distance, Moses entered into the deep darkness, where God was.”
    To our very human, and fleshly way of seeing things, it doesn’t make sense that the Lord should appear to us in the midst of darkness.  After all, He’s the God of light.  He should always be making things clear to us, and in ways that we can understand.  All that He does should make sense to us, and there should be little, if any, mystery involved.  Yet, His Word tells us that the Lord Himself is a mystery, one that He invites us to enter into, and discover in ever greater ways.  Yet, in our day to living, if He should approach through life events that look like what the Israelites were seeing here, our reaction is very much like theirs.  We don’t want to enter into the darkness.  We’re afraid it will kill us.  If there is mystery here, we want someone else, our pastor, our more ”spiritual” friends, to tell us what’s happening.  We look for a “word” from Him, something prophetic.  We certainly don’t want to enter any darkness, and we really have a difficult time believing He would be there.  So, when the blows of life come about, sickness, divorce, grievous happenings with our children, job losses, costly financial setbacks, death, in effect, darkness, we draw away, not near.
    Yet, it is in the midst of these things that we will find Him.  Chinese Christian Brother Yun wrote while int he midst of some of His deepest sufferings for Christ, that the Lord spoke from the Psalms into his darkness, “In the hidden place, your Father shall protect you.”  In a place where there seemed to be no light at all, He discovered His presence in a way he’d never known.  Larry Crabb, in his book, “66 Love Letters,” writes, “Suffering without explanation creates the opportunity for faith in Him, the kind of faith that sees His heart……..It’s the road of trusting Him in darkness so dark that all reason for trust is obscured.”  He then quotes Soren Kierkegaard, “As long as their are many springs from which to draw water, anxiety about possible water failure does not arise.”
   The great tragedy in the lives of those who followed Him in Exodus was that in all those years, they never came to really know Him.  They expected from Him a life that He’d never promised.  When their lives and experiences failed to match their expectations, they became angry, disillusioned, defeated, and they drew away, grew away, from Him.  Moses, whom the Bible tells us the Father ”Spoke to face to face,” had come to know Him is such deep, intimate ways, that he didn’t fear to any enter into the deep darkness.  He knew who he’d find there.  The very God he’d known in the light, except that in the darkness, He came to know Him even more deeply, and trust Him more completely.

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In Luke 14, Jesus tells the story of the man who had prepared a great feast, and had sent out many invitations, yet all who had been invited, found, for one reason or another, an excuse, to not come to it.  Now, I think many of us may be familiar with the story, and even think we understand it’s full meaning, but I’m not so sure that’s true.
       If you see this as a parable describing the invitation the Father gives through Christ to enter into His salvation and Kingdom, you’d be right, but I think, only partly so.  I think that so many of us see the “feast” He invites us to as a life that is filled with blessing.  God’s good things in this life.  Certainly, eternity enters into it as well, but I think, because our minds and thinking tend to be so anchored in the here and now, that we’re missing the greatest beauty of the invitation.  I’ve come to more and more connect this invitation to the prayer of Jesus in John 17.
      In His prayer, Jesus prays so many beautiful things, but the central theme is one of you and I entering into the joy of the relationship that is realized between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  He prays in verse 21, “My prayer for all of them is that they will be one, just as You and I are One, Father, that just as You are in Me, and I am in You, so they will be in us, and the world will believe You sent Me.”  We’ve always tended to understand this as Jesus’ prayer for unity in His church, and that is part of it, but even more, I think He is praying that you and I will fully enter into the unity, wholeness, completeness, that can only be found in what author Larry Crabb calls, “the dance of the Trinity,” the richness and joy of the relationship that the Father, Son, and Spirit have with each other.  This is something much more than a “good life.”  It is entering into their life, partaking of it, reveling in the joy of it.  It’s not a feast of the blessings of this world.  It’s the ultimate of blessing of themselves.  It’s the fullness of Their lives in our life, now.

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I love the way the New Living Translation renders I Peter 2:16.  ‘You are not slaves; you are free.  But your freedom is not an excuse to do evil.  You are free to live as God’s slaves.”  Now, I don’t think our flesh particularly likes that concept, and if that’s the case with any of us, we’re going to miss the beauty of what Peter is saying here.  However, if we’ll meditate on just what it means “to be free to live as God’s slaves,” and what such a life might look like, we’ll enter into a level of living we didn’t know possible.
    First off, this verse sounds like a total contradiction.  Free to live as slaves.  How could any slave be free.  In the worldly context, they can’t.  They serve at the whim of their master, and those whims more often than not will lead to much pain for the slave.  This is true whether the master be flesh and blood, or something much less tangible, be it a desire that controls us, fear that crushes us, anger, bitterness, and unforgiveness that chains us, and a seeeming unending array of other “things.”  We may be free to pursue or indulge these things, but always, they hold us captive in a prison cell that grows darker by the day.  It’s the way of all earth masters rooted in spiritual darkness.  We are free to pursue them, but in doing so, our freedom is lost in our captivity to them.  Not so with the Father.  The world offers freedom that leads to total enslavement.  The Father offers, in Christ, slavery that leads to total freedom, and total life.  How can this be?
   Could you dare to allow that statement, “You are free to live as God’s slaves” simmer in your mind, heart, and spirit?  Would you, would I, allow the Holy Spirit to open all three to the wonder of what that really means?  The New American Standard uses the word “bondslaves.”  This means the person has sold themselves over to ownership of their Master.  This is what happened when the Father purchased us from the hold of the devil with the blood of Christ.  We’ve left the tyranny of the master of darkness and death for the freedom of the Master of light and life.  Yet, so many seem to remain trapped in their old slavery, their graveclothes, when something so much more awaits them. 
   We are now living in a culture of fear, anxiety, anger, and hatred, and so many who are His seem to be caught up in it.  It’s the spirit of the day, yet it is not to be the spirit of those who are His.  If we are free to live as His slaves, then we are free to live as slaves to hope, to peace, to joy, to eternal life.  An eternal life that doesn’t start when we die, but right now, when we begin to truly live in Him.  We embrace His Mastery over us, the dark dungeons we’ve been trapped in, now flame with His light, and we can rise and follow Him out of them.  Our slavery to Him, makes us free of all in this world that is not Him.  We are free, finally, to live.
   With this wonderful news and life before us, why do so many of us miss it?  I think a great part of it is that so many think that coming to Him is a matter of making a number of minor life adjustments.  We’re willing to make outward, cosmetic changes, but inside, we cling to what really matters to us.  We expect the major adjustments to be made by Him to us.  Yet, He doesn’t call us to these “minor adjustments,” but to a total death to self.  It’s the only pathway to freedom and life.

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Last evening I was part of a prayer group led by my good brother, Bob Yarbrough.  One of the scriptures he shared on was from Revelations 2, where the Lord speaks to the church at Ephesus.

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