THIS BLOG IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
A Chaldean heathen sat alone by his campfire in a star lit night. Pain was eating him up inside. Having left a rich city called Ur he now sat alone with nothing but intense desert heat. He was vexed, trying to find some manner of life other than his sorroundings. His heart toiled with regret, existence, human desire and despair. “Who am I? What is my purpose?
This era was about 5000 yrs. ago, just after Noah and Sodom and Gommorah. The world had just exploded into a hell-hole of ravage rage against God. Satan had won mankind by seducing Adam and Eve. A perfect “Garden” had been plundered and obliterated by filth, peversion and every sort of depravity, insanity and madness. Every single person had become like an animal and wild beast. There was not one human soul that had NOT given himself over. God was “astonished” all mankind (Is.63:5)}
Onto this stage struts one unique dude; ‘starman’. Who can explain how an individual thinker can possibly emerge out of such a depraved backdrop and peer pressure? I completely identify. It is my story amidst a raucous and raunchy championship football team on which I played. When black is pitch black any speck of light stands out and in my case all all my “friends” tried to snuff it out. Jesus, that is.
I had two options: shut up and conform or be persecuted. and isolated. I chose as Abraham, the 2nd. I was elated to discover the Scriptures and how Abraham also was like a Wyatt Earp, fed up with the vile ways of Dodge City. “Enough already. I get it. You all love evil. Whopee. Next?” Society is just so evil and pat. Who can conform to such a obvious rebellion?
Abraham figured there had to be another option to life than just constant obsession with darkness. Today, it is get a job, make a buck, get ahead live for yourself. Abraham had some light in his heart and felt a depth of God’s blessing in his nightly habit of staring up at the stars. So he pursued it. In the middle of his dark ‘nowhere’, a million miles from nowhere, a different sense of ‘fire’ arrived at the campfire, not from the outside but from inside Abraham. Let’s say Abraham brought about his own individual Nomad Fire.
In 1913 a player at Notre Damed named Knute Rockne revolutionized the forward pass to totally transform the game of football. Abraham was thinking how to transform the game of life. It didn’t have to be wicked, wicked, wicked, wicked. God saw Abrahams thinking and pulled up along side this camel jockey to create a rap and maybe drop a beat to Abraham to use him to bring His love and blessing back to mankind.
At this some time Abraham was thinking to himself “What if I could fill the earth with a multitude of people like the stars who think about God like I do? Like maybe God is not primarily a demander but a giver of blessings” He’d be like an OG orginator and GOAT of a new race (after Adam and Noah). He contemplated “his own body as good as dead”. Sarah, his wife, laughed at having a child. They were both a 100 yrs. old. How could they ever have a kid? And what does any of this have to do with you there in your cell? Stay tuned.
In one star lit night, like so many others, as he gazed into the skies, Abraham got lit by putting 2+2 together. He connected the dots of the stars to his many questions within and it created a picture in his mind of a spectacular God. More than a son, Abraham was captivated by the Character of a God Who took a personal interest in helping him. All creation had a sense of magnificent majesty relfecting a forever Creator Whose Presence eased His inner pain brought him into sense of belonging, and came together by a substance Abraham forged was formulating within himself. Suddenly, amidst a world in hatred against God, Abraham became a man of faith in God.
This deep sense of God was God. Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.This one statement is repeated throughout the Bible as the foundation of new life. In a moment of time, Abraham made a budge to believe God. He did something never before done before. {It may not sound like much because today a guy says “I already know it all.” What he doesn’t realize is this statement makes him lose any chance of knowing what he doesn’t know.}
The most profound thing about the faith Abraham created is that it is born “out of nothing” but humiliation and a heathen mind set. No Bible sermons or ‘better than thou’ religiosity. You could call it a ‘namads fire’. Abraham had no affinity to The First Church of Babylon. He was a ‘thoroughbred’ heathen who created this phenomenal “mixture” out of his true desperation to connect with God. It ended up being the perfect ‘formula’ for everyone in the world. It was not evangelical hodge podge. Abraham revealed the essential elements by his statement. They were gut transparent HUMILITY.
The beginning to any man who wills to become and individual is a broken state of realization and desperation before God. It is the how and why God sent Jesus. It was the Suffering Servant Who came for “the wicked” not the righteous. For those who had come to their end to find His new beginning.
THAW LEADS TO REALITY
“I am but dust and ashes” he whispered, maybe as he stared thoughtfully into the dying embers of his campfire. It was in this broken attitude Abraham drew upon his heart, experience and calculation of thousand issues to create faith.
Again, I think of guys who created or shaped the game of football. Abraham was the George Halas or Vince Lambardi of faith. He created an upgrade option for existence. He is the OG and GOAT of this one “substance” that would now generate a new “human” race that did not operate according to the norms of wicked society. Abraham actually sensed the gospel. It is written “Gal.3:6ff).
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen…those who come to God must believe He is and a rewarder of those who seek Him by faith” (Heb.11:1ff). This entire chapter shows how God wanted exactly what Abraham created.
Faith engages the very individual heart of a believer with God. Abraham “found” ‘star power’ (rm.4). God was so pleased He promises blessings to anyone who responds as Abraham: ‘Way to go my man Abraham. I’m going to use what you just came up with, to give folks around the world the way to access Me and share in My eternity.”
When you admit you are nothing it is a thaw into reality. It is the beginning of finding the living Jesus. God’s Spirit begins to heal and replace all the devastating memories and emphasis on melodrama and psychological devastation of the past. By His stripes we are healed. We come in our brokenness and find where He Himself dwells. It is in our dark abyss of nothingness that is the perfect time to create the everything of beginning to believe God and being reckoned righteous by faith. This is what Abraham did. Paul says that Abraham actually had the gospel preached to him.
Ever feel like the lead actor in a movie called Disaster? Every day is another scene of grief unfolding in slow motion. Ever notice how most popular songs are about dark times? The Ray Charles hit “Born to Lose” was my theme. We gravitate to human failure because it is the most real to the existence of our human nature. Everyone knows it so well. 7 billion folks ‘going through hell’.
My brother and sister this is gold. The world runs and hides from brokeness cuz it doesn’t feel good. But if we can accept this reality is the beginning to the end of our misery. I ask you, if failure is so familiar, in your case an entire prison resounds with this reality, why is humility is so foreign? Why is ‘Joe Prison’ so into Mr. Ego? Pride hides so well inside.
The statement “I just can’t get over my grief of shame and regret” sounds sincere but is actually pride resisting faith in the finished work of Christ. Humility is the pivotal turning point in resolving our storm. If we will believe and let go we will not recover. A humble heart brings us faith in the living Jesus.
THE HOLE LEADING TO WHOLE
God made Abraham father” of a million sons by the faith he created that one night at the campsight. In the impossibility to have one he had many. This one is named Michael. I can smell that campfire of the Nomad. Can you? I so relate. A bar fight landed me in a jail cell in Baldwin, MI. (Expunged by my coach) Overcrowding put me on the floor with my face on top of a filthy sewer drain. Raised Catholic, I was a stray, felt my true mission was to prove I am NOT “a basically good person”. Mission Accomplished. But the repulsive stench of that sewage drain pulled me deep inside as if I were jolted into a coma of fear of being trapped in my own stench and that this would become my future.
I made a desperate budge (Is there any other kind?) to reach out of the dark hole of my soul to believe God. My budge began my thaw into His predestined love. My dear brother and sister, I beg you, let us contemplate our end abyss. It is profitable. Let us sit togehter as two soon to be skeletons when the only thing that will matter is what we did in the aftermath of our shattered lives on earth If there were a hole into hell where you could go look inside and come out again would you do so? Is that to be your future? Imagine multitudes and multitudes in every direction as far as your eyes could see in utter agony.
We are trapped in a nightmare of something we don’t understand. Sin is a three letter word that controls all men everywhere. It doesn’t have any spooky Halloween costume but rather appears just like us. But it is not our personality. It is in our anatomy. When you stand in The Yard, the cafeteria, basketball court, or your cell believe God to bring you to Himself. Hell has no regard for your self-pity or backstory. The enemiy is not from overseas with battle armor and M16s’. It is not drugs or alcohol. It is this deep irritation of our depravity and insecurity, that plundered this world. It is not put there by any crime or act you have done but by what Adam allowed all of us to inherit in our sinful human nature.
Have you ever heard the story of The Silence of the Lambs? A woman hears the slaughter of lambs and associates it with an inner trauma. She wants to silence the bleating. It symbolizes an inner wound she so wants to silence. It is like countless events of trauma to individuals throughout the human race. The actual culprit of all pain is sin but Satan uses it to to get us chasing and linking specific events to our pain. The source of all our torment is not a specific event or time, which we can never resolve, but the emotional and mental irritation of being separated from God.
Let’s put our mouth in the dust like Abraham, and dial-direct into the REAL estate of our own brokenness. Real is the only hope to escape ourselves. Abrahams faith is not the superficial byproduct sold in the market places of American Christianity. It is created out of our won individual pain and will to believe in the living Person of God. Jesus used Abrahams faith to build His endurance to the agony of the cross.
Faith is a process of our deepest reponse to Who God is. A broken and contrite silences our rebellion and puts an end to the world within ourselves, to begin again. It is to defy collectism (group think) and give way to the dawning of God’s destiny for us as an individual.
I’m guessin you thought about changing a time or two but it never clicked cuz it wasn’t YOU. It’s them telling you how to be and do “them” and you can’t do them. You must do YOU. The Thaw begins by a budge to be real not in a Frank Sinatra “MY way” or a religious conformist “OUR way” but to go down deep into the subway of your heart.
Satan is no dumbass, guys. He seeks to ‘gut’ us of any personal heart for God He knows heart is our only hope to escape the storm. Satan is no lame actor. In the fracture of a disaster, he can steal away the heart factor. He whispers“Be a pretender. Repeat the prayer but never surrender. Repeat the line, ‘Oh me? I’m fine, a contender.’ It’s a sham and a shame because 24/7 they then complain ‘Why did I crumble and falter? How could I wander and squander? How did I? What did I? Why did I?’
My dear friend, it sounds sincere but a denial of everything Jesus rendered on the cross. Any evil we’ve done is not new under the sun. God rescued you from ‘a near-death-experience’ to show you He is serious about you. Don’t punch me for saying this, but what if this time could become your greatest reward not a punishment? Could you see outside your cellf? What if every single day is God’s “silent” love trying to get you to awaken faith? Abraham proved our only purpose for existence in this life is to find God for eternal life.
I have no problem with the label “loser”. Nothing can hurt you when you’re already dead to everything. The Ray Charles “Born to lose” is true to the T of Truth. We are born to fail because we are born in sin. David explains “in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps.51:). Mom never intended to decieve us. She had her own storm of stress. But we fell apart from the start of our own doing. Now my sin is ever before me and the term “sinner” makes loser sound like a winner so being broken is easy for me.
“In hope against hope Abraham believed God Who gives life to the dead (losers) and calls into being things that do not exist” (Rm.4:17). It is a one-up of hope from the ‘Shawshank Redemption” because it is backed by an oath of God that any pagan who believes will live forever despite anything done in the past. I am a son working for my Father to thaw the cold ‘hard ass’ mess in the mindset of my brothers and sisters. As He melted and mended mine He will do so for you.