The Door of Goodness

The Lord revealed a picture of your life. Behind a doorway and standing in line are answers to forgotten prayers, unexpected blessings, new relationships, and fresh opportunities.

As I continued to watch the developing image, all of these deliveries of God's goodness were pressing against each other in joyful anticipation like a crowd waiting in line to enter a long-anticipated concert event. When the door finally opens a rush of fulfillment will flood your life. You will be overwhelmed, mobbed and blessed beyond comprehension as each good thing sent from God enters your life and vies for your attention.

Something wonderful is about to take place. Believe, trust and expect the goodness of God.

Keeping Belief in the Mix

A wide variety of ideas about how someone gets “saved” are floating across our computer screens and working their way into our conversations. 

I have never felt comfortable with a definition of personal salvation that did not include the exercise of personal belief. Belief is that place of traction where we choose to receive what is being offered. The words believe, believed or believer appears over 100 times in the New Testament in a post-Pentecost, New Covenant context. The choice to believe was a threshold a person had to cross in order to receive what Jesus promised. 

A basic study of the word believe carries the definition, “to have faith, in or upon a person or thing.” It also means, “to entrust” as in entrusting yourself to a person, not a method. The word "believe" comes from a root word that means, “persuasion.” We will only entrust ourselves to someone who has persuaded us that they are speaking the truth. Many times I actually exchange the word entrust for the word believe. Entrust carries a more personal tone. Jesus is so much easier to entrust your life to than a list of church doctrines or denominational preferences.

It is important to remember, Jesus had no single method of evangelism or a scripted prayer for salvation. Jesus never gave invitations or had His followers pray a sinner’s prayer. A group of disciples simply began to follow Jesus and at some point, they chose to believe and became a believer.

As you consider hitching your theological wagon to someone’s interpretation of what constitutes salvation, make sure somewhere in the mix an individual response of belief is present. None of this just happens. The Cross wasn’t an accident - it was a choice, and so is it with our individual response to the offer of salvation. At some point, the message of Jesus has to be believed in order to be received. How we approach Jesus and engage Him in our moment of belief is both creative and personal for each person. In whatever way you help people connect with God through Jesus Christ make sure you leave belief somewhere in the process. Without belief none of this glorious salvation is possible.

The Smell of Life and Death

This morning, a story buried deep within my memory surfaced. It took place almost 40 years ago when I worked as a police detective. I was handed the lead on a homicide investigation. Attached to the investigation was a reporter from the Eugene-Register Guard newspaper in Eugene, Oregon. The reporter was assigned to write a multi-page article on the murder.

The crime had taken place in a run down apartment located on the lowest and saddest rung of social strata.  Soon after the patrol units had secured the scene, I arrived along with other detectives to have our first look. Murder scenes are grisly but even more impactful, is the lifeless stare of the victim as you walk around their remains trying to piece together what happened. It felt like the victim was watching us with the blank eyes of death as we conducted our investigation.

The reporter met me at the scene. I instructed him where to step and what not to touch. I gave him one final instruction. I said, “Record the smells.” He looked at me a bit confused but would later come to understand what I meant.

The apartment had an odor that was a combination of body waste, sweat, stale cigarette smoke, rotting foods and the blood of the victim. As the reporter walked into the apartment the smells overwhelmed his sensory perception. Later, he would write his article and part of the title was something like, “The Smell of Murder.” Later that night when I wrapped up my investigation and finally booked the suspect, I returned home. When I walked in the door, I smelled the sweet fragrance of a home filled with love, honor, and forgiveness. Before I got into bed after being up for almost an entire day, I took a shower to wash away the stench of death that followed me home.

The results of sin and human failure are strong forces that can produce a smell that will actually invade the physical realm like it did at the murder scene. There are also spiritual smells – the kind of smell that remains hidden until revealed. These indicators do not manifest through our natural sensory perception, they are revealed by the Spirit. I have been around the spirit of mammon and “smelled” the greed before I knew it was present. Lust does the same thing and so does hatred. Each one has a trigger that alerts me to its presence. These indicators always tell me Death is afoot. Death is the by-product of all forms of sin.

If you are a follower of Jesus, you have been assigned as a spiritual detective of sorts. Many believers walk through life knowing something doesn’t smell right, but don’t take their questioning any further. You need to know why things don’t smell right because in those indicators of darkness a work of God is waiting to be released and you need to know what to release. As you walk through your day ask God to help you discover where hell is at work so you can interrupt that work of darkness with the wisdom and spiritual insight of the Spirit. When you are finished with your investigation the stench of death will be replaced with the fragrance of Christ. 

A Dangerous Itch to Scratch

(A posting note: The following article has nothing to do with the The Shack, a movie, and book both Jan and I enjoyed immensely for its ability to communicate the heart of God.)

In every period of Church history, there will be seasons in which people move away from sound doctrine. We are in such a season.

Paul wrote about this to Timothy, “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” II Timothy 4:3

I have always been curious about the words, “itching ears“. My Greek lexicon defines this itching as, “a desire to hear something pleasant.” An unhealthy “itching” is produced when our ears get tickled with a pleasant sounding error that is not the product of sound doctrine.

There is nothing wrong with looking at truth from a different angle. I have been greatly blessed to see truth from another person’s perspective. In all the looking, the truth remained and was not defined away by the tickle of human reasoning. What I believe Paul was saying to Timothy and what is taking place in certain segments of the Church today is the abandonment of doctrines held true throughout the millennia, but are now being abandoned for the pleasant sounds of delusion.

A nervous church is never a healthy church. I write this not to produce insecurity or fear, but as a gentle warning to not discard foundational and historical truth for the latest version of someone’s personal interpretation. A lot of Scripture is unpleasant but true. Be careful about allowing your ears to be tickled to such a degree that you begin to scratch pleasant sounding error thinking it is truth. The itch you feel the need to scratch may be an indicator that you have allowed someone to tickle your ears with something far more dangerous than just a personal opinion or a “fresh new way” of looking at Scripture.

Filled and Ready

Whenever I drive to a distant city for pleasure or ministry, I do one thing before I check into my hotel. I fill up my car with gas. I do this in case an emergency comes during the night that would require me to depart immediately at an hour when an open gas station may be hard to find.

My kids teased me about this while on our family trips when they were growing up. They wanted to check into our destination hotel and jump in the pool, but dad always made the gas stop first. Just the other day, I was talking to my daughter, Anna, about one of her recent ministry trips. She had just checked into the hotel provided by her host pastor, but before she checked in she gassed up. She smiled at me and said, “I was taught well.”

Too many people enter a dark season of life without a fresh infilling of the Spirit. When a spiritual emergency takes place in the darkness of an unfamiliar place they try to find their way home on an empty tank. When daylight finally comes their empty life is found abandoned on the roadside unable to finish the journey.

Every believer carries the Spirit, but Paul did say to the Ephesians to be filled with the Spirit. I am told the original language in Paul’s exhortation could read, “Be being filled with the Spirit.” That “be being filled” is an on-going work of the Spirit in the life of a healthy follower of Christ. In other words, we need a repeated work of Pentecost taking place each and every day of our lives to equip us for the unique assignments each of us carries.

Have you stopped for a season of your life in a strange and unfamiliar destination? Does it look like night is coming? Before you do anything, ask God for a fresh infilling of His Spirit. Do this because you never know when you will be awakened in the night and need to find your way back home. If you are already filled with the Spirit, when fear comes calling, it will not find a place of influence in your life because you carry the fullness of God’s presence.

The Greatest Deliverance

The greatest deliverance you will ever experience is not from demons, but from an unhealthy image of God. If you know God as a loving Father who will never leave you or forsake you, you will make hell tremble because you will have found the secret to living a life of overwhelming peace. No challenge you face will be able to overcome that revelation.

Thrown from the Throne

Recently, I noticed someone was writing on social media about the Throne Room of Heaven. They spelled Throne Room as “Thrown Room.” I am sure it was an example of spell-check-gone-wild. I smiled at the implications.

The Throne of Heaven is not a static place. The affairs of the Church are directed from this place of ultimate authority where each believer now sits in Christ at the right hand of the Father. There are heavenly declarations and decrees being released at this moment from the heart of God literally thrown into the midst of desperate situations.

Some of these thrown revelations will be received by those of you who need an immediate answer or divine intervention. God never releases anything from heaven to earth out of frustration or impatience. Those emotions are not His nature. His act of “throwing” is the precise and focused release of revelation that is weaponized and has the capacity to knock over every opposing force that stands in the way of what has been promised.

Today, God has thrown from the Throne supernatural missiles of revelation and intervention that will soon be arriving in the difficult situations of your life. They will produce amazing outcomes – outcomes that will throw the enemy off course and remove the obstacles that stood in your way.