The Hidden Truth

The Hidden Truth

1Corinthians 4:5 Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.

 From the time Adam and Eve attempted to hide themselves from God in the Garden of Eden, there has been a natural tendency for humanity to treasure away our true selves. We are taught to be polite, to say nothing unless it is positive, to have different personas for different venues. Honesty in this age demands a rare and enviable courage to make one's self vulnerable to criticism and ridicule. Social forces, combined  with insecurities for most of us, make sure that we stay in our lanes and don't rock the boat. Just fit in and all will be fine. Stay silent in areas of controversy and there will be no attention drawn to ourselves. And no attention means no criticism. And that means we never have to face our true selves, only living as mental caricatures of what we wish we were.

There is a reason that truth is described as "light". Light exposes things that darkness covers. It shows direction when one is lost in the oppressive shadows of life. It makes clear what otherwise is obscured. 

John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

At the time of Jesus' birth, there was a long standing prophecy from the Torah regarding a deliverer,a Messiah, that would one day appear and set Israel free. Most everyone knew this who had ever been raised in the culture. And scholars were dedicated to studying what was written in order to recognize this promised holy man when he arrived. Yet, these same followers of prophecy were the very people whom, when placed before them, cried out for the death of the One sent by God. Why? How? After centuries of expectation and innumerable hours of reading and deciphering and reckoning they had missed it entirely. Chalking up the claims of Jesus as simply another in a long line of quasi-Messianic wannabes who came around every few decades. Only worse, this man had laid claim to being equal to God, and therefore deserved not just dismissal and scourging....but death. The very Light of Humanity was hated by those who claimed to seek it.

John 1:4-5 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

 The lesson to learn is that, while God is truth, truth is often hidden to those who hide themselves. Our default instinct is usually to cover up our faults. To make our character flaws and wrong actions unrecoverable. Because we want to maintain appearances and regard our social masks as essential to survival, we refuse to uncover our true selves to God or man. 

 John 3:19-21 "And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. "For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. "But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God."

What we often do not realize is what we cannot grasp while we are holding our cloaks tightly around us: truth. While covering ourselves from the world, we also cover ourselves from seeing God's Light. His Mercy to forgive. His Grace to empower. His Love to restore. These are unknown if we continually cower in fear of being "found out". Only through the bravery and faith of confession can we find the freedom of forgiveness. Only through the light can our darkness be solved. 

Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.

To truly find God, we must first be willing to allow Him to "find" us. The faith required to believe that we will not be met with condemnation and anger (but rather we will be rewarded as Sons of God like prodigals returning to their ancestral home) is the first and foremost step in understanding that Truth is the pathway to the Father. We are victorious through Him that loved us. Mercy rejoices against judgment. These are more than platitudes to make us feel better. These are God's Truths that must lead us to a willingness to have our true selves exposed so that God's true nature can be revealed. 

If you're having trouble believing in God's Mercy, try giving Him a chance to show it to you. You may find that the hidden truth was right in front of you all along.

 

Holy is as Holy does

Holiness......

The word itself conjures up images and ideas without any further provocation. For some, it manifests in an old blue-haired woman with a beehive hairdo and a dress from one of Laura Ingles' books. For others, it is a disheveled looking man with a scraggly beard and a three day-old hangover weeping with hands lifted high in adoration of the One who has set him free. Both have their merits, and both their demerits.

But defining Holiness is much simpler than arguing about a particular standard or set of convictions. It is best defined as "Christ-likeness". We can point to those of extreme conservativism and select men and women who made a mockery of their clothing choices by committing heinous perversions of trust and confidence. Likewise, we can discover those who mistook liberty for licentiousness and soiled the name of Grace with misconduct that would and should be condemned. At the end of all of our looking, we can merely say, as Solomon pronounced, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!"

Our best efforts to be recognized by our peers or admirers as Holy are, in fact, counterproductive. Holy lifestyles become unholy whenever they are a source of pride when comparing ourselves among ourselves. That means we also cannot compare others to ourselves and deem them unrighteous or unholy. The sole standard for holiness always has been and always will be the Messiah Himself. Pointing to others and exposing their unholiness is a pretty easy task. Look hard enough, and even the most pious of all saints is a filthy mongrel of ill repute when all of their flaws are illuminated.

I have journeyed through many circles in search of where my view fits in. Unfortunately, in most cases, I am too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives. This has left me with an odd choice. I can either change to fit, or allow myself to be left out of the mainstream processes that most ministers crave. But, I have also found that holiness isn't at all about what others see in you. It is about what Jesus has done in you. That's why when I hear of great names who fall into great sins, I simply shrug and say to myself, "Another one bites the dust". Eventually, we will all bow down and admit that we are unworthy. The question is, will we do it by choice out of a revelation of Jesus, or will we do it by force, out of a revelation of our sins?

First Love and a Lost Cause

"We have now taken on a 'mixed multitude', and the seeds of apostasy have had time to work. 'First love' has been largely lost. The dog had 'returned to its vomit' in many cases - i.e., to Babylonian doctrines and practices. An enfeebled mother can hardly be expected to bring forth healthy children." - Frank Bartleman, "Azusa Street"

The church is not ready. There, I said it. As much as I love the things of God, as much as I am indebted to the institution which God uses to bring people into a greater relationship with Him, and as much as I enjoy the company of Christians (especially those who desire to go the extra mile and live their faith in every way possible), I must admit that I am not in love with the system and practices we use. There was something profound about the early 20th century revivals in Los Angeles, Wales, India, and other parts only God knows fully. There was almost a mystery about them, when we compare their experiences to the norms. Today, I am sure that many of our leaders would reject the methods and mayhem which accompanied those experiences, much the same way the leadership of their day did. Among the hyperbole and rhetoric about revival and apostolic restoration that is so common among us, there is little recognition of precisely what that looks like.

It is a lost cause. Not a hopeless cause, mind you, but a lost sense of identity. A missing personal conception of who we are, what we are, and how we are designed. The very first key to becoming the CHURCH (versus the church) is to rediscover the "first love" that the pioneers had. We are not to be doctrine-wielding, bible-thumping, hate-mongering control freaks who demand others conform to a rigid system of rules. That is the descriptive of the religious zealots Jesus dealt with and was punished by. He came to love. To release captives. To heal the wounded. To impoverish the rich with an understanding of their own shortcomings. What we have become in large part is nothing but a substitute for the Roman institutions of priest-class royalty and rule over a laity that hears more about regulations than relationship.

Oh that we could see ourselves through the lens of God's Wisdom!

That "God so loved the World" is not just some opposite form of doctrine that we must disprove in order to establish the need for discipleship. It is THE cause. The FIRST LOVE is that we love the people we are trying to reach. But also that we love God so fully, so uninhibitedly, that we shun our own prejudices and preconceptions about how He is able to move and whom He uses and approves. The early Church and the pioneers of the modern pentecostal movement had something in common that we are lacking in large degree: Unity.

Unity is not just a by-word for doctrinal agreement. It is not just possible where we agree. I have heard it said "submission isn't submission until we disagree". That is true. And the Scripture also admonishes us to "submit ye one to another". That means that in the areas in which we disagree, we ought to have enough love to stay united in the First Love and the Cause of Christ. It is this unity which leads to an empowering Presence of the Holy Ghost among us. Where we no longer contend for our views and opinions, but authentically and sincerely allow the Lord to be the King of all.

For us to be ready for the days ahead, we must (MUST!) become more of an organism than many organizations. When we get wounded, disappointed, disgusted and rejected by others, it causes us to recoil and be hesitant and reclusive. But the greatest love and cause of all is to forgive. To treat others as though they never hurt us. To make ourselves vulnerable again to those same emotions, all for the sake of unifying the Body and defeating the enemy who uses divisive tactics.

Love and Cause, they are intertwined. Find the First Love, and we will find our Lost Cause!

Mourning

There is a hole. A void. A gap. A very present lacking, now.
I try hard to keep it in the back of my mind.
I pretend that I am the same as I was before that night.
I saw the call, who it was, and I knew something was wrong.
I didn't think you would be gone. Disappeared. Vanished.
I always thought there would be more time.
Now, I wish I had held you closer, hugged you more, told you I love you more often, reached out better.
My dreams of what could be are nothing now. My hopes that what should be, would be, are as empty as my heart.
I lean on my Lord, thankful for the lessons you taught. The laughs we shared. The tears we shed.
But no amount of time can heal this wound. A part of me died, too.
I can't change it. I am helpless. This is permanent, when everything and everyone else is temporary.
You were too young, too alive, too full of promise, to go away when you did.
Your life was a light, more than I knew. And when that light departed, I lost more than I expected.
Love endures. I don't know what awaited you upon your rest. I can only think that an ever merciful God will be a just and righteous judge.
I wish I knew I would see you again. I will never let go of your memory.
But oh, what I would trade for just a last embrace. One last conversation. One last goodbye.
You are and always will be the only one that could fill the space.
Rest now. For I will not burden you with my grief. Death is no villain. He is your reward for a hard life.
I hope, and I cope with the thought, that one day we shall see each other again.
Until then, my tears are for my wound that only your return could heal.
I love you Dad.

The Individual Collective

"No one ever won a war by dying for their country....they won it by making the other poor soul die for his!" - Gen. George S. Patton

The original sin was described by the phrase "I will be like the Most High"(Is. 14:14). There is a caution we must all take in our lives regarding this. The danger is that we fail to accept any direction from any source, becoming our own god and doing what is right in our own eyes. But that being said, I want to share what I feel is a revelation of sorts that I took away from my father's death.

When he began sharing with me his experiences and told of his mistakes and regrets, I gained an insight into him (and by extension myself). He told of men who were drunk with their own positional power. They refused to accept that another man could make a decision if it was not first filtered through their judgment. They could not allow a man to be a leader of his own home. The opinion was that the pastor was "the voice of God in your life' and that if God spoke it would be through them. This was contrary to not only what my father read in  Scripture, but also his training and performance in a leadership role in the military. A good leader does not make his soldiers impotent. A good leader teaches them how to think for themselves, so that if the leader is not accessible, the soldiers can survive on their own merits.


The individuality of a Christian is paramount in our faith. The Body is comprised of many individual members. Collectively, we are a functioning army of love. My dad ministered to many people in his life. He did things for others who could not do for themselves. He gave land away, vehicles away, time to those whom he could. He sang and played his guitar in the solitude of his own home unto the Lord. He was no longer interested in being a "superstar" or a paragon of spirituality by other men's standards. He wanted Jesus. Pure an unfiltered. But to get that, he had to leave the confines of modern circles of religious practice. He never gave up on God. He just stopped worrying about being accepted by others. He realized it would never be good enough. He was too big of a presence. Too strong of a man and leader in his own right (as evidenced by his Air Medal for combat excellence) to allow someone who did not have the same qualities to dictate how he ought to conduct his personal decisions. That may sound rebellious to some. To me it sounds like freedom.

Freedom is not the right to do what we want. But the ability to do what we should. If freedoms are impugned, then there are only three choices: lead a revolt, change your location, or subjugate your own conscience. The only one of those three that is acceptable is the second. And my father's life reflects that endless journey. He finally found his rest on December 19. But his voyage shows his son that being an individual is not a popular choice. Men fear what they cannot control.  And whenever men are afraid, they cling to power and use position to manipulate what threatens their authority.

I have spent the greater part of my life without self respect. I have cowered at the prospect of being rejected. But fifteen years ago my father showed me that things are not always as they seem. The last conversation I had with my dad, I was having to borrow money from him because I couldn't find work. I told him how I was trying and how frustrated I was. He knew that I had also felt very wounded by the apathy that church people exhibited towards us. But I did not begin to cry until he said "I'm proud of you son. I love you." Tearfully, I told him I loved him back. I didn't know those would be his last words to me on this earth. But how grateful i am for them.

My dad was a man who commanded respect, even if you didn't like him. At his funeral a friend said that all the women loved him and all the men wanted to be him. I went to northern Idaho to bury my father, but what I actually did was find myself. He WAS proud of me. Those weren't idle words. And if a man of his quality and strength respected who I am and what I stand for, then maybe I should start respecting myself.

The gift of God is that we no longer have to be beaten down by life. There is a hope. But another aspect of our salvation is that we are free. Free to use the gifts God has placed within us. And free to follow after Him without a fear of men's opinions.Great men help others become great. I hope that I can prove just how great a man Roger Davis was.

I am the son of my natural father. I am the son of my Spiritual Father. My life's goal is to honor them both if I can.

It's been a minute, but I'm still here

"It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you...without a dope rhyme to step to." - EricB and Rakim circa 1985

I took a break since my grumpy little diatribe about Christmas. Five days after I wrote that post, I was awakened by a phone call in the middle of the night informing me of my father's sudden passing. Along with the emotions and hectic nature a death brings, this was especially difficult. Perhaps I will write about it sometime. For today, I want to share with you something that his life and death have brought to light.

My mother and father quit attending church on a regular basis back in the 70s. By the time I was born, in 1978, it was a major occasion for my dad to darken the doorway of a religious establishment. And a oneness apostolic church had a better chance of seeing farm animals at the altar than my dad. Growing up (after the inevitable divorce) in a single parent home, and then with an atheist/agnostic step-father, I knew about Jesus and went to churches sporadically. But admittedly I was unimpressed. I would feel the urge to go to the front and accept Jesus (usually we went to denominal churches or Assembly of God), but never felt the desire to become a part of the group of people present. I did feel a sure difference in the atmosphere of the churches my aunts and uncles took me to (UPCI), but were no more impressed to be involved with them than any others. I always found religious people (and preachers in particular) to be haughty and pretentious.

When I was 18 years old, I was reunited with my father after a seven year hiatus. We drank beer, smoked pot, and lived in the wilderness with only a generator to run lights and a stereo. We worked hard and played harder. But one thing that happened has forever changed me. We had a lot of conversations about why the family split up. We would sit under the stars of northern Idaho and have God talks. That was truly where the seeds that had been planted by my church experiences were watered by my father's love for God.

I had never thought of him as a religious man, but he was adamant about his love for Jesus. I had been told about his "calling" and how he had wasted his talents by living a life away from the church. But what I found out from him was a different story. He and my mother had been faithful saints, very involved in church and did their best to live up to the demands of pastors. The reason that is a plural and not a singular is that time and time again, when someone felt threatened by the force of my parents' influence (due to undeniable talent, intellect and personality), the demands from the leader would ramp up so as to bring them under condemnation. This was done by family members. This was done by men of stature. It was enough to drive them away. Eventually, the monotonous and persistent defeat at the hands of power hungry Napoleons caused my parents (and my father in particular) to surrender to the voice of exclusion.

Call it backsliding. Call it a survival instinct of a man who was a decorated Vietnam War veteran. What I call it is typical. My dad lived his life with a personal and passionate relationship with the God whom he had known in those jungles of warfare. He was not allowed to fit into the "church" because he was unwilling to relent his own good conscience into the hands of men whom he did not trust (due to character flaws he knew of both intimately and publicly).

The tale is not one of woe or bitterness. My dad did not tell me these things as an angry man. He told me them to help me understand him and his God. He told me, a young wild teenager without any direction, that the only thing worth anything in this world is to know Jesus. To know Him and to know His love, mercy and grace. It began my search in earnest for an answer to the question of who God is. I see, in retrospect of his life, the never ending anguish of having to sift through mistakes and failures and bad decisions. He probably could have handled the situation better and kept his family together. He could have been a better father figure. But one thing he left as a legacy is that no man can teach you who Jesus is. You must find Him for yourself.

Working out our own salvation comes with a cost. Personal responsibility means making your own mistakes and owning up to them. This Freedom and Liberty is what the Constitution was intended to preserve for its citizens. It is what the blood of the Cross was intended to secure for those who had no righteous credential to allow them a relationship with a holy God.

I will make another installment to finish the thought soon. Until then, I pray you are blessed with knowing God for yourself...even if that means you make some mistakes along the way.

December doldrums

This time of year makes me pensive. I am usually pretty grumpy, too. It all generates from this "holiday" concept. The idea that suddenly, after Halloween (HALLOWEEN!), we start plotting a course for Thanksgiving so that the day after (and now the night of), we can spend a bunch of money we don't have on things we don't need. Then, inconceivably, it gets worse!.....THE MUSIC!!!! It gets really frustrating about the fiftieth time I hear "white Christmas" over a store speaker system.

"Jingle bells roasting over an open fire while we build a snowman in the meadow and the Grinch steals our presents".....It all just overwhelms the soul. And then I hit defcon 4 when I see the Christmas movies and commercialization start to ramp up. Really? walk past a movie theatre and look at the "Coming Attractions" posters and look at what kind of garbage is passed off as "Christmasy"....and worse yet, what kind of filth is opening on Christmas Day.

The nukes finally explode on the ringing bells that incessently and methodically grate on my conscience while walking into a Wal Mart. Truly, inexplicably, the vast majority of people become hearty philanthropists by clanking in three quarters in the little red bucket. These same buckets now have to have locks on them because some sleezeball stole what little was offered by the public. Unreal.

Alas, there is a shimmering sparkle of redeeming quality in this time of year: the reason for the celebration. I know, Jesus was probably born in September or October. I know, I know, the whole saturnalia thing and the pagan tree worship deal and the idolatry of "saint nick". But in the end, I usually sit back, sip some cider or hot chocolate, and remember that the greatest gift of all time was born in a humble manger. And contemplate His glorious splendor.........while watching my neighbors plastic reindeer melt in a raging blaze started by their holiday light fixture falling over into their bushes.

"Tis the Season!