Your Expanding Future

How do you process life when you come to realize your future is now shorter than your history?  This obviously applies to those growing older, but it can also apply to a 20-something who sees the end of a relationship or a 50 year old who is the middle of an unanticipated career change.  How we process what appears to be a diminishing future will determine the quality of life we choose to live in the days that remain.

As you process your future don’t forget an important reality – you serve a God who can make a day like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day.  He is the one who is in charge of the dimensions of time. You are the one responsible for how you choose to live within the remaining time God has given you.

Life is a gift. Never waste a single moment of its beauty. The remaining days of your life are not less than what you have already lived. Your future may seem small with tightening borders and limited options.  Don’t succumb to these constraints of fear and doubt.  You have been called to embrace life and to believe for more.

Live like an explorer who is always looking for a new place of passage within the journey. This is how the ancients lived and in our hurried existence we have somehow forgotten. In all of this, when you think you are running out of time and options, remember that you are connected to Someone and something eternal and in reality you will never have an ending to anything God calls you to engage.

When Love Requires That You Move On

Don’t allow another person’s bewilderment to become your reality.  Just because someone cannot understand your choices doesn’t mean you can allow their misunderstanding to hinder you from moving forward.

There are times when love requires that you leave some people behind.  This can seem cruel and uncaring, but it is an expression of love.  Some people wanted Jesus to stay and not go to the cross, but He chose to keep moving forward because of love.

You must first make sure in your heart that God has asked you to move on.  His word will become your only comfort when the questions and the doubt come to visit.  When God speaks this kind of instruction He will be faithful to empower and direct your steps as you move forward in obedience.  At some point the protests of those who disagree with your choice will become only distant and indiscernible sounds of a past to which you are no longer connected.

Hanging Out Together On Purpose

During the last several decades the Church in Western culture has become over-programmed.  I think we educated ourselves into this predicament. There now exists a program for almost everything including discipleship.  But that is changing.  A new generation loves God and the rest of us so much they are unwilling to settle for anything less than a return to something simple and less complicated.

I have been a pastor for almost 35 years.  I became a believer when I was a young boy. I have never attended a single class on discipleship.  Frankly, because of my understanding of relational discipleship, I wouldn’t even know how to teach on the subject.  When discipleship becomes an academic topic transmitted through an educational process, I think it loses some of its original intent.

My initial imprint on the subject came years ago when a wise leader said, “Discipleship is never taught – it is caught. Discipleship is hanging out together on purpose.”  This sounds like something Jesus would say.  For three years He walked, lived, ate and shared life with 12 people.  This relationship was not accomplished with programs, but with His presence.  It was in the presence of Jesus where the first disciples experienced life together that the miracle of becoming a disciple took place.  It is a miracle because it is a Spirit-generated process of transformation.

As I look at a new generation within the Church, I believe they share the same heart for discipleship that Jesus shared with His disciples – they want presence over programs. They know that more true discipleship can take place in a Starbucks or on a long walk with a friend having a troubled moment of life than in a cold classroom setting in a building dedicated to religious use on Sunday morning.

A Tempered Passion

As a young man, I trained in several forms of martial arts.  My last sensei (teacher) was a man we respectfully called, “Sensei Montero”. He was a humble man who carried advanced black belt degrees in several different fighting styles.  He was what some would call a senior citizen.  He carried a lethality few would dare to challenge.  I never forgot a conversation I had with Sensei Montero.  I asked him about people who stopped training, “Will they lose it?” Sensei Montero said, “No, they never completely lose it. It is like a pot of tea.  The tea may grow cold, but it will still pour.”

While this wise man shared a natural truth with me He unknowingly shared a spiritual truth.  Some of us can spiritually cool over time.  We begin to settle for a life of tempered passion.  One way this cooling takes place is in the expression of God’s power through our lives. The Spirit’s presence still remains within us, but the release of its potential and power cools over time through a lack of belief and use. 

God wants to make you hot with His presence.  He wants to pour His power on culture through your life with signs, wonders and miracles.  2,000 years ago on the Day of Pentecost Peter said it was these three elements that endorsed the life of Jesus. That same endorsement of signs wonders and miracles awaits the Church today that bears His name.

If you have grown cool and predictable in your life of faith ask God for a fresh anointing of His power.  Ask Him to endorse your presence on earth with things that can only happen if God shows up in power. Don’t settle for a tepid response to the needs of a broken world when only the hot power of God’s Spirit is capable of burning through the lies that hold people captive.  What God is about to do on the earth will require a Church on fire with His presence. You can still pour, but God wants to give you more.

Turning Your Sunset Into A Sunrise

The sunset you are experiencing is about to become a sunrise.  What you thought was ending will become a beginning.  God is the one in charge of the finality of all things.  He alone has the final say – not you, your doubters or your circumstances.

God is asking you to not give up.  All the natural indicators are telling you this should be a time of resignation to an inevitable conclusion. You are not called to live in subjection to what appears to be the natural outcome of any circumstance or relationship. You are called to see and live with faith and hope.

The situation before you seems to be emitting the last rays of its existence.  You are beginning to wonder why the promise you have been contending for seems to be disappearing over the horizon line.  You have been called to keep looking.  This is your act of faith.  Just when you think the last ray of hope is gone God will reverse this entire situation and resurrect it into something new.  God is about to change your sunset into a sunrise and you will see a new day birthed with a promise of hope you never thought possible.