In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will…
Ephesians 1:11 NIV
Before we can work God’s plan in our lives, we have to know who we are in Him. Chapter 1 of Ephesians is written with that in mind. Paul explains that being a follower of Christ means that we are chosen by God, blameless, full of grace, and redeemed and forgiven.
God brought each one of us into existence so that He could bestow upon us “inexhaustible riches” (Rom 11:33) that were gifted to us by Grace. There is no limit to how much value and quantity God brings into our lives. These riches, according to Paul, are forgiveness of sins, redemption through the blood of Christ, the knowledge of His will, the message of Christ’s will, and the sealing of the Holy Spirit. Here, Paul also says that we have a guarantee of an inheritance.
The flashing truth of this is that being connected to God gives us the privilege of being able to really know ourselves. If we don’t know who we are in Him, we will never think that we are included in Christ. We will spend our time chasing an identity that God wishes to bestow freely in our lives. We will live frustrated with forgiveness. We will live knotted up in the mystery of God’s will. We will waste our inheritance and misapply spiritual truths.
It is amazing that we can live for such a long time and still not know who we are. When that happens, many of us disqualify ourselves from things that God intends because we did not feed our identity with our connection to Him. It is glaringly obvious that many of us have not accepted our identity as formed by Christ. Instead, we have accepted an identity that has been formed by cultural values, life experiences, and the perceptions of those around us.
But none of this reflects who we really are in Jesus. It is of paramount importance in this fast, labelling culture that we live in that we know who we are. We cannot be Christians and keep identifying ourselves with labels that identify what Jesus has delivered us from. Either Jesus sets us free completely or He doesn’t set us free at all. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation (2 Cor 5:17), and that includes old labels and old ways of seeing ourselves.
If the Lord has set us free, then we are free to describe our history, but we can’t describe that history as a part of our identity.
I thank God, whom I serve, as my ancestors did, with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers.
2 Timothy 1:3 NIV
Paul insisted that his life as an apostle had been pure joy. He said this in spite of the fact that he had faced many challenges and uphill battles. However, he had found fulfillment in his work, pouring Christ into the culture that had been drinking from the well of spiritual syncretism.
The source of Paul’s joy was his commitment to Christ and spreading the gospel, but he also said that it was the cause of his pain. It is a strange, but familiar, juxtaposition. Paul was honest about his struggle to hold tight the twin tensions of joy and pressure.
Faith doesn’t eliminate these tensions in life, but it does stabilize us if we believe that God purposed this tension and strengthens us in spite of it. Like Paul, we must manage this tension. We must be faithful to our call and manage our fatigue.
How do we handle honoring God when that means that we have to manage things that we don’t deserve? How do we pray a prayer of surrender when the One that we are praying to is offering us up to things that make us suffer?
Paul teaches Timothy that he should handle this tension by offering God a pure conscience. In the Greek, Timothy would have understood conscience to mean the capacity that God gives us to balance moral and spiritual discernment. It is the place where we judge between right and wrong.
Paul says that he offers God the purity of his conscience because it was tough to live between being faithful and living under attack. When he offers God this kind of conscience, Paul can say, right before he is going to death, “I am ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.”
This is how we can live every day with stress on our backs and still wake up every day grateful. We know that no weapon formed against us shall prosper. This is how we handle walking through tumultuous times. We know that what sustains our life is Jesus living inside of us. When Jesus lives inside of us, there is purpose, even to our pain.
Do not let your heart be troubled (afraid, cowardly). Believe [confidently] in God and trust in Him, [have faith, hold on to it, rely on it, keep going and] believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, I would have told you, because I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and I will take you to Myself, so that where I am you may be also. And [to the place] where I am going, you know the way.” Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going; so how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the [only] Way [to God] and the [real] Truth and the [real] Life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.
John 14:1-6 AMP
Thomas’ question to Jesus comes after a long farewell speech. Jesus wanted the disciples to remember everything that had happened over His three years of ministry, but He doesn’t have time to repeat everything that was said. So, Jesus simply said: Keep my commandments and love others.
Jesus was asking the disciples a question: Can they love enough to embrace and to sacrifice or will they hide in the upper room in search of anonymity and obscurity? Jesus didn’t want them to just swap stories and hide from public view after He died. He wanted them to witness and preach to communities so they might come to know Jesus Christ.
Jesus let them know that they were transitioning, but this transition was necessary. He would see them on the other side of the resurrection, and they knew the way there.
When Jesus tells them that He is the way, He is telling them that not only is He a person, but He is also a process. How He lived His life and how He lived it matters. Not only is Jesus the way to life, He is also the process by which it should be lived.
We need a relationship with Jesus, but part of that relationship is learning to live by the process by which He lived. He is the way that we are to walk. He is the divine pattern by which we arrive at life’s purpose. Often, we spend our days searching for our life’s purpose, but Christ says it plainly: He is our life’s purpose.
They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”
Numbers 21:4-5 NIV
Moses didn’t want to do battle with Edom, so he had the Israelites travel around. However, after recent victories against the Canaanites, Israel didn’t want to backpedal around Edom en route to the promised land. The Israelites were so overly confident that they gave into arrogance.
Not knowing how to conquer impatience, the Israelites set out from Mount Hor to go around Edom. The people grew irritable as they traveled and grumbled, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”
Israel believed that backtracking was unbearable. Their ethic was that they could never move forward going backwards. They believed that their victory over the Canaanites gave them momentum and energy to conquer their way to the promised land. They had forgotten that God was the one who had done all of the fighting. They had forgotten that their strength was in their faith.
They had tasted the sweetness of victory and the sweetness of the promised land.
But, when we start complaining, the complaints just keep on coming. We tell God that we don’t like the path that He has sent us on, and then we start to think that we don’t like the mana that God gives us to sustain us every day.
This text begs us to consider whether our faith has room to listen when God tells us not to move. Faith can call for immediate action and radical obedience, but more often, our faith calls for us to go against what we want to do. There are times when our faith makes us go backwards over territory that we have already covered or reengage relationships that we had decided to sever. Faith will sometimes ask us to hold our tongues when speaking seems more natural.
Faith is easy when it calls for an immediate action. But it is hard when it makes us stand still.
Israel is not at all confused about God’s will. They know what they heard. God said, “Go around.” The path through Edom was blocked by God, but impatience can frustrate our interpretation of God’s will. Impatience can make us complain about God as if we had completely forgotten that the whole reason we are where we are is because God came and got us and freed us from bondage.
It is almost incredulous to suggest that we are complaining about our struggles in the wilderness when God rescued us from bondage. We all have impatience, but our faith in God has to be stronger than our impatience.
Luke 14:25-33
German pastor, theologian, and Nazi dissident, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote in The Cost of Discipleship: "The followers of Jesus for His sake renounce every personal right…. If after giving up everything else for His sake they still wanted to cling to their own rights, they would then have ceased to follow Him.” The life of discipleship can only be maintained as long as nothing is allowed to come between Christ and ourselves.
In Luke 14, Jesus has been addressing the multitudes and has given them an invitation to sit at the table of God. He invites those that He is dining with to follow Him to deeper levels of sacrifice and spiritual surrender. However, He tells them that they may not want to accept this invitation if they are only accepting it on emotional enthusiasm. Jesus does not at all mind sharing how unapologetic He is about the kind of loyalty that He demands from those who would follow Him.
He makes it clear that anyone who comes to follow Him but refuses to let go of everything and everyone else, cannot be His disciple. If we are not willing to surrender whatever is dearest to us, we cannot be Christ’s disciple.
We often talk about Jesus being loving and caring and nurturing, but we must also remember that, sometimes, He will put us at risk to show us our gifts and our calling. He will make us lose in order to gain. He will let us fall in order to prove that He is a protector. He demands that we anchor our loyalty to Him alone.
If Jesus were invited today to preach to you, and told you that He is willing to offer you salvation, but you have to be willing to put your relationship with Him first, before your family, before yourself, and before anything you hold dear, would you jump up and run down the aisle, knowing how badly we know we need Jesus? Or, would you choose not to do so because you have other priorities?
This is a hard extension of divine invitation. Many in the crowd that day missed the hook that framed the invitation that Jesus was extending. Jesus was fellowshipping with them so that He could invite them to become a disciple rather than a guest. Guests have no demands made of them. Guests do nothing more than whet their appetites. There are no chores, duties, or sacrifices required to be a guest.
We can’t love Jesus and stay a guest. And, we can’t walk with Jesus and continue to have priorities that we place before Him in our lives. When we make the decision to follow Jesus, we are entering into a covenant to become more than a guest, and we must be prepared for the sacrifice and spiritual surrender that this decision requires.
