Exposing Sin - part 2

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:23-24 NRSV)

“Why do people say that babies are sinners? They have not done anything wrong so why would God punish them for being sinners when they are so innocent?”

The root of the word sin means “to miss the mark”. In the style of writing used by many of the Bible writers they would many times say the same thing twice in a row but slightly differently. This can be seen in the above text where sin (missing the mark) and falling short of the glory of God are presented as basically the same thing, just said a little differently. If we put ourselves mentally into the context of the Roman culture of Paul's day it would become obvious that one of the scenes a person might be very familiar with in that day would be people target practicing with bows and arrows or with spears. A great deal of target practice had to take place before a person was ready to serve in the armed forces just as it is still true today. A person's ability to hit a target accurately and solidly determined to a great extent the value they had to the armed forces as well as for many other applications.

Most of the world for many centuries lived in this kind of context. Think how different the story of David and Goliath would have been if David had not spent a great deal of time practicing marksmanship with his sling and stones. The scene would have had quite a different storyline if David's stone had fallen short of reaching the giant.

Since sin simply means missing the mark, what is the mark that is being missed by sinners? Well, according to this text it is the glory of God. Glory is another of those very confusing and sometimes nebulous words that means very different things to different people, some of which are very far from its main meaning. Often the first thing that comes to our mind about this word is a bright, glowing light around a person or object. This is due to our external orientation about what we think is important, one of the key hallmarks of sin. I think this has been a major distraction from understanding the real implications of this term. Without launching into a study of this word too far, I will simply say that as I have come to understand it so far, the glory of God is primarily the essence of who He is, His personality, characteristics and relational attributes. Of course these are the very things most understood by us because of the flood of lies that has filled our minds and hearts about what God is like received from the father of lies. Being immersed in so many of these false ideas, both inherited and learned, is precisely the description of what being a sinner means.

But then one would logically ask, “How does that apply to babies and young children? They haven't even had a chance to learn any lies.”

While it is true that babies don't have any learned and accepted lies about God consciously, particularly in the intellectual arena, they have depraved natures that are filled to some degree or another with natural selfishness just because they are born to sinful human parents. Given over to growing up with these natural tendencies and propensities to selfishness and all sorts of other less than God-like attributes, they will grow up to reflect more of the spirit of Satan than the Spirit of God. In short, they simply do not have within them the wherewithal to live and think and grow naturally into a perfect reflection of God. In very many ways it has to be admitted that it is really true - “all fall short of the glory of God”.

However, this is where the pain and distortions of our already present lies about God and sin cause many of us to react with revulsion and anger, protesting that it is not fair that God should punish babies and little children for being sinners when they are far too young to be held accountable for their condition. That is absolutely true! However I would like to point out that there are a great deal of false assumptions behind that statement that have to be addressed before we can see the real truths about God masked by our many distortions. This is very similar to the problem imposed when an innocent man is asked how long it has been since he quite beating his wife. The problem is not with the man but with the assumptions embedded within the question.

Let me simply expose a few of the assumptions that can be found within this kind of question. There is a flash of anger and an unspoken accusation that God is not fair and cannot be trusted to always be fair. Then there is an assumption that God arbitrarily punishes (inflicts pain and suffering) anyone and everyone found to have sin in them. Behind that assumption there are potentially hundreds of other more serious problems and distortions depending on what you believe about the “punishment of the wicked”. That is such a deep reservoir of lies about God that it would take books to unpack them all. But all of those ideas are potentially behind the anguished emotions evoked by this simple question.

The very fact that we are upset and asking these kinds of questions betrays the presence of the true image of God still resident in our hearts even with all our misunderstandings about Him. Our hearts demand fairness and we get upset when innocent people are threatened or punished unfairly. We sense that arbitrary determinations without consideration of circumstances and unbiased evaluation is somehow wrong. If we are completely honest with our souls we also have to admit that the typical beliefs about the punishment of lost sinners is dramatically out of proportion to anything we feel they should deserve and leaves a deep but suppressed feeling of resentment hiding in our minds and emotions. Then to add insult to injury, we are often saddled with a fear of even expressing those feelings in case we too will increase our own punishment for challenging the sovereign determinations of the Almighty who many believe must never be questioned.

All of these ideas add quite a bit more complexity to the simple answering of the question about babies and sin. They are very serious issues and must be faced squarely and resolved or the simple answers to the question are cast into doubt because of all the other assumptions not yet resolved. But since I don't have the time or space to address all of those things right here I will take the risky choice to venture a simpler answer and trust God to bring more light where it is needed.

I find it very helpful to remember what the original definition of sin is – falling short of the glory of God – missing the mark. Without insinuating all sorts of other definitions and ideas into it right away, it is much easier to admit that not only babies but any human being is not just like God, especially when the real truth about Him begins to dawn on our hearts. None of us are naturally 100% unselfish, kind, compassionate, full of faith and joy and love every minute of every day. But when the truth is uncovered we will find that God is all of those things and much more. We all fall short of the glory of God when looked at from that perspective.

But then we start feeling defensive and insist, “But its not my fault that I found myself with this brain and set of emotions. My parents..., my friends and teachers and abusers..., Adam and Eve got us into this mess.”

Every bit of that is true. And its also true that its not fair that we have been imposed with all these problems. But it is also still true that we are what we are right now. But is this state of unfairness because God is not fair or is there much more that we are not looking at when we accuse God of not considering all the facts and circumstances? Is it really God that is not fair or are we the ones that ultimately are found to not be fair in our evaluation of God? Are we willing to consider a lot more truth about God before launching our tirades against Him? Are we willing to honestly challenge our own beliefs about Him and expose our lies with His own testimony about Himself in place of Satan's?

Here is the bottom line issue inherent in the question of how God relates to “sinner-babies” – “How does God treat sinners of any kind?” That is the question behind the question that we must really face and not accept our assumptions as unquestionable facts. We get angry when other people judge us harshly without trying to find out our real motives and try to understand who we are and what we are really like. But yet we are doing that to God all the time. We judge God severely and accuse Him in our hearts of atrocities that we will not tolerate in those around us, much less would be willing to do ourselves – at least we hope not. We must face squarely the things we think and say and feel about God in the light of fairness and allow the truth about Him to emerge while we suspend our judging assumptions against Him. The real issue in the Great War is the accusations against God and every one of us participate in these accusations whether we are conscious of it or not.

So what is the truth about how God treats and relates to sinners? Here is what Paul says right after he declares that everyone is a sinner. “They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” That includes babies, unborn children, teen-agers, tottering, senile old folks and everyone in between. Even more shocking, it includes good, kind, generous, lovable people and revolting despots like Stalin and Hitler – and the people who have abused you and me the most severely. That becomes much more difficult for many to accept, but God is not limited in His grace. He sent Jesus to Redeem absolutely every human being who ever has or will exist on this planet – no restrictions. Jesus took upon Himself the results of every sin that every human being ever commits and justifies every sinner who ever exists so that there is nothing that can “separate us from the love God, which is in Christ Jesus.” (Rom. 8:39)

So where does that leave the baby who is born a sinner with a selfish disposition – or even a sweet disposition? It puts them exactly where every other human is found – under the justifying atonement of Jesus Christ who has redeemed every sinner on earth. Does that mean that every sinner will end up in heaven? That is a very interesting question and the answer will likely surprise many. But that is another topic that would get me going far too long as well. If you would like to think more about that you can spend some time on another blog site linked on the sidebar called surprise ending. There are also some other sites that I ran across very recently that have a lot of wonderful material about these things that I want to spend more time perusing myself. I have added links to them on this site as well for those who wish to explore deeper like I want to.

I want to make one more distinction about the definition of sin that has been very problematic and troubling for many people including myself for many years. I was raised, as most people are, to believe that sin was primarily something people do – you know, wrong actions, bad things that hurt others or ourselves or “offend” God. What I have been learning more and more clearly from the Bible and other good sources is that external acts that we generally label as sin are really symptoms of the presence of sin, not the real essence of sin. By the time we commit open acts of “sin” we are way past the point of initiating the choices that put us into a state of sin. Most people misunderstand the true nature of temptation and where temptation actually occurs. What most people label as temptation is simply an opportunity to indulge in outward activities that express the sinful desires produced by the state we have already fallen into inside our hearts some time before. By that time we are already victims of succumbing to temptation and are entrapped by sin in our heart before we express it outwardly.

Sin is really the state of being out of synchronization with God's perfect ways of living and the natural laws He designed for us to operate within that cause us to thrive and grow. Sin is being disconnected in some way from the only Source of life in the whole universe. Sin deceives us into believing that we can extract life from any other sources than from God and can live life successfully without Him. The natural consequences of living disconnected from power is an eventual loss of power and finally death – the absence of all life.

Jesus came to instate an arrangement whereby those who were disconnected from life could continue to have life even while they were rebelling against the very Source of life. He arranged a period of probation – grace – during which we could accept the truth about God and discard our lies and animosity toward the One who loves us passionately and wants us to live joyfully in His presence forever. This arrangement is called the Atonement and Redemption. Every person has the option to participate in this free gift and be transformed by it if they choose to accept it. If they do they can be permanently and inextricably absorbed into a unified body which will literally ultimately become part of God's own being. This arrangement is so stunning and seemingly bizarre that even the angel's of God cannot hardly believe it. But it is true, and you and I have the option to accept this arrangement based on God's faith in us. He supplies all the power, the love, and even the faith. What we bring is our choice to accept and be transformed by allowing our minds and hearts to be filled and captured by His loveliness.

God, I have to worship You because of these things You are showing me. Thank-you for salvation and Redemption that You give me as a free gift. Make me Your experiment of grace and transformation. Live in my heart today and make me Your dwelling place here on earth. Pour Your blessings through me to others today and fill me with Your Spirit of grace and love. Attract others to Yourself by the work You accomplish in me, in spite of me even. Glorify Your name in my life today and help me to bring honor to Your reputation.

(next in series)

Exposing Sin - part 1

Therefore did that which is good (the Law) become a cause of death for me? May it never be! Rather it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful. (Romans 7:13 NAS95)

Did that (the Law) which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful. (Romans 7:13 NIV)

A few days back there was discussion, both in person and in the comments on this blog, about the issue and identity of sin and how it affects our perceptions about how God relates to and thinks about us. I promised to explore this issue in a post which I have been thinking about ever since then but, as yet, was still waiting for the ideas to come clearer in my mind and heart. I am very reluctant to rush into expounding ideas when I sense that my heart has not yet had enough time to coalesce the thoughts that my left brain is all too eager to rush into. That is a recipe for trouble and I spend too much time back-tracking and repairing damage caused by such forays as it is.

At the same time I feel that I should honor my commitment to at least take a look at this issue since I promised that I would without letting too much more time pass. I have been praying for more wisdom and certainly do not feel that I have a comprehensive understanding of this problem. That would be the height of hypocrisy. But I believe that some of the answer can be found in a Spirit-guided exploration of the Word, and as I look at the passage where I am right now in Romans 7 I realize that the subject is front and center so it must be time to face it.

One of the questions put forward was, “Why do people say that babies are sinners? They have not done anything wrong so why would God punish them for being sinners when they are so innocent?”

This is a very relevant question and comes from deep within the hearts of many, many people whether they openly think about it or not. In my own experience I can remember having heated discussions with my own Dad about this topic that did not particularly change our minds but did cause me to think more carefully about it and look for answers better than what he proposed. In his case the issue was not so much about human babies as it was trying to shore up a deeply entrenched, hotly debated belief about the nature of Christ that was so tenuous that it needed constant rationalizing and evasive reasoning to keep it propped up.

The more serious problem implied in this question is the deep, underlying assumptions implicit behind the question. False assumptions in our minds (but assumed to be true from earlier training) are based on the false picture of God formed by lies that we find ourselves immersed in and forced on us by confused teachers, leaders, parents and life experiences. The question simply cannot be answered directly at first until the volatile baggage behind the assumptions are disarmed and dealt with effectively.

I have spent much of my life trying to uncover the real meaning of many religious words and concepts. Sin is one of the most difficult to unpack. I suppose that should not be surprising given the text above quoted from Romans 7. Sin by its very nature is deceptive and therefore is constantly trying to hide its true identity and intent and appear to be something different and more benign than it really is. Sin is sometimes like cancer cells that are very difficult to detect until they have grown out of control to such an extent that they have become obviously life-threatening. That does not mean that cancer cells are not life-threatening from the very beginning. Cancer has no proper place in the human body, but cancerous cells can likely be found in very many people who are not yet considered to be threatened by it yet. The weakness for getting cancer can even be transmitted from generation to generation, yet we do not usually say that the baby is a cancer patient just because they have a predisposition toward cancer passed on from their parents.

Sin is such a diabolical type of thing that it is difficult to clearly define, yet we must have a much clearer awareness of what it really is as well as what it is not. Because of its extremely deceptive nature sin presents itself as all sorts of things that appeal to our natural desires and needs. It promises to satisfy our heart and bring more life into our existence. It does everything to avoid detection or appear repulsive but at the same time it employs any amount of devious reasoning to fool us into believing that God is our problem and that our solution and satisfaction for life has to come from somewhere other than our Creator. When it is really exposed it will be seen that sin (and Satan who initiated it to begin with) is doing everything possible to paint God in our minds and hearts as being the one who has all the characteristics that really are the identifying elements of sin and Satan. It is no wonder we often find God so reprehensible – we are not reacting to the real God at all but are reacting to the false presentation of God by sin itself which is really the identity of the character of sin. We are continually being lied to about God and what He is like in a way that is so convincing that we sometimes see God as more reprehensible and more debased than even we ourselves are willing to be.

I could say a lot more about this part of the subject, and much more needs to be said about it to unmask the terrible lies and slander that is constantly being spread about God. But at this point I want to explore the real truth about sin. In the process along the way I will need to disarm some of the worst lies embedded in our beliefs about God that really belong to the identity of sin and its originator. I seriously doubt I will have time or space to address very much of it in this one post but I invite dialog, comments and interactive questions as I explore this.

A phrase in today's verse exposes something important about the deceptive nature of sin. “So that... sin would become utterly sinful.” The implication here is that we do not naturally believe that sin is really that bad. We are starting from a position of already being deceived by sin to some extent or another as we try to move toward seeing what it really is. In fact, many people do not believe there is any such thing as sin to start with. That too is a deception promoted by sin and its author identified in the first part of this verse, “...it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin...” The very presence of any idea that sin either does not exist or is not something totally reprehensible and destructive to us is evidence that we are already under the spell of its magical delusive powers to some extent.

The Bible with the Holy Spirit is the only completely reliable resource that is fully intent on exposing the real truth about sin as well as how we can be rescued from its vice-grip. It is God's communication to the world of not only the truth about sin but the real truth about God. However, sin has managed to distort God's words and twist them through various means to continue its all-out assault on the reputation of God. That is the core issue of the whole Great Controversy going on in the universe that we find ourselves embroiled in from the day we are conceived. Since our situation in this mess is unavoidable, all we can do is respond to the work for our Redemption accomplished by God for us and cooperate with His Spirit in transforming our minds back to a condition of reflecting our beautiful, loving Creator that we are designed for.

I will take more time to explore this question, but for now I need to fix some ruptured plumbing in the house that allows all the bath water to dump on top of the electric panel for the house. That is a kind of sin that can produce some very undesirable results if allowed to continue. Until then...

God, reveal Yourself to us today and show us more of the truth about You as well as the truth about sin. Thank-you for Your grace and Your amazing, loving plan of Redemption that You have already put into place for every one of us. Impress us with how much You value us and cherish us. Make us each an experiment of restoration that will return us to glorious reflections of Your perfect symmetry and beauty and loveliness – all for Your reputation's sake.

(next in series)

Weakness of External Law

There are two fundamental realms in which we live and operate – the external and the internal. The realm that we choose to give our priority to determines our view of what constitutes reality. God is a spirit, and though He created all of the external, physical things that exist everywhere, He was and existed before everything else as the Self-existent One who has always been first of all a spirit. To really understand true reality we must remember that the spirit realm is always to have priority over the external, physical realm, never the other way around. Sin developed when Lucifer began to focus on his externals, his position, his beauty, his wisdom and place more value on them than his internal, spirit condition. (see Isaiah 14) He went on to build his whole empire on the premise that the externals matter more than the condition of one's spirit. Salvation, God's response to sin, is the process of reversing that assumption and restoring us to life grounded in true reality with priority on the spirit realm more than the physical realm.

The external, physical aspects of our life are often reflective of the condition of our spirit and strongly influence the condition of our spirit. But that does not make it right for us to give them higher priority than our spirit, for in doing so we fall into the deceptive trap of sin which is reversing the natural order of creation. This is not to say that the external has no importance and can be ignored; that is foolish thinking. It simply means that external matters must always be kept in proper perspective, proper relationship to our spirit.

Jesus demonstrated in His life on earth the proper way to live in balance giving priority to the condition of His spirit above the externals. This caused a great deal of conflict with many around Him who insisted that He was doing it all wrong. But He never wavered from His life of giving higher priority to the things of the spirit, not only His own spirit but the spirits of everyone around Him. In doing so, and in total dependence on the Holy Spirit's power continuously received from outside of Himself, He demonstrated how we are to live the abundant life that He offers to implant into our spirits.

In studying Romans 7 I am beginning to realize that the Law is designed for the external manifestation or description of the internal, spirit attributes of God. Since we are created in the image of God and in His likeness, the Law is a description in the external realm of what we will look like when we are functioning perfectly as designed. But while the Law of God is an external description of the internal realities of God, it is still external. Because of that the law is powerless to change us except to trigger our sinful natures to rebel against it. Externals and a life prioritized around them is the description of what living in the flesh looks like. This is the main point of the whole book of Romans – a contrast between living in the flesh, the external realm, and living in the spirit, the internal priorities.

When this paradigm is used to look at Romans, even at life in general, there are a lot of things that begin to make much more sense and come into proper perspective. To me is seems apparent that the spirit part of our being utilizes our heart and our right brain much more than our left brain. Of course there is much more unknown about this part of us than there is known, but I wonder if other parts of our physical body are also more prominent in the spirit part of us than we may suspect. Many people believe that our spirit is not even a part of our body at all, but I think that to take such a position is to go too far in separating what God has joined together and gets us into trouble.

What Paul is striving to do in Romans is to address two groups of people who have both been living with emphasis on their externals in higher priority than living in proper relationship to their spirit. It is what he calls living in the flesh. That is not to say that they have been ignoring their spirit altogether. The first group apparently lives in abandoned indulgence to the desires of their perverted spirit. Their spirit has been hijacked by sin and is obsessed in its appetite for satisfying legitimate needs of the spirit and body through external, physical and emotional perversions that further distort and damage the heart that God implanted in them originally.

The second group have chosen the path of strict, external-oriented religious activities and voluminous head-knowledge about religious things in their attempt to satisfy the same deep longings of the soul. The needs and longings of the spirit can never be truly satisfied through any of these means but they try even harder to bring themselves into what they believe to be a right condition before God and men so they can experience the peace that their heart was designed to have. But because satisfaction in the spirit can never be achieved through external activities given priority over an internal relationship with God, they find themselves trapped in an endless loop of ever-increasing obsessive religion which poisons their spirit and hardens their heart against the very thing they need the most.

Because the Law is a left-brain explanation of the spirit-characteristics of God, it is incapable of possessing the power to change us like the Spirit of God can do. It was never designed to be the means of our transformation; that is the job of the Holy Spirit. But because of our penchant for prioritizing the externals above the internals, we look at the Law – the description of God and by extension our true blueprint – and feel compelled to obey it by any means we can devise. Because we are not designed to be led by our left-brain which primarily services the external part of our existence, we find ourselves constantly frustrated in our attempts to align ourselves with this description of what we know we are supposed to look like. The affect of focusing on the externals and the ideal of what our symptoms would look like if we were living as we are designed to live is that we live in constant failure to thrive and cannot truly enjoy life from our heart. As long as we give priority to the externals arena over the condition of our spirit and our relationship with God and others, we will continue to live in the flesh, for that is what living in the flesh is all about.

We were never designed to live in the flesh in the way that we find ourselves under the spell of sin. We were created to be led by our spirit in perfect synchronization with God's Spirit. Sin has caused us to attempt to live life completely backwards to how we are designed, and because we are living backwards we encounter endless complications and problems and symptoms that tend to drain us of life rather than energize us with more life. Salvation is the means whereby God desires to restore us to living in proper relationships, not only to Him but to our own design and proper function. Sin has overwhelming power that causes us to resist God's efforts to save us and restore us to life as we were created to live it. But it is only overwhelming in the sense that we cannot correct our condition by our own efforts. Sin and Satan's kingdom are far too strong and too wily to outmaneuver or escape without the surrender of our lives and hearts to the Spirit of God. Only the Godhead through the means of Redemption has the ability to lift us out of our hopeless condition of deception and backwards living.

This is the message that Paul launches into with great excitement in chapter 8. But for now I am focusing on the place of the Law and why it has the effect that it does in our attempts to get right with God. Because the Law is external-oriented it can never do the job of the Holy Spirit. But because sin causes us to give priority to externals over internals, we “naturally” tend to focus on the Law and all sorts of other externals over paying attention to the condition of our own spirit and turning to the Spirit of God to receive life and strength and satisfaction. As a result we have found ourselves “married” to the wrong husband and trapped in a very harsh marriage of rule-keeping when our hearts were designed and craving to be ravished by the love that can only come from being led by the Spirit.

God, I want this to not just be so much theory but for You to work in me to demonstrate this as reality in my life. I have lived all my life, like so many others, thinking that the externals are more important than the condition of my spirit. Forgive me and put a new spirit in me. Replace my heart of stone with a heart of tender flesh and breath Your Spirit into me as You promise in Ezekiel 36. Fill me with Your presence and joy and peace today for Your name's sake.

(next in series)

Why Can't I Thrive?

Romans 7 is starting to make more sense in the light of living from the heart vs. living from the intellect. I am seeking to understand what part of me “died” in verse 9. There seems to be a principle of mutual exclusivity about which can be alive within me – sin or “me”. The catalyst that creates this situation is the presence of the Law.

For many, the logical conclusion to assume is that we should remove the catalyst so we will not experience the problem. But that is never considered as an option by Paul or any other Biblical writers. Because of that I think it is safe to assume that it is not a viable option but a deception promoted by the enemy of God. Since the Law is simply a description of God's character, to get rid of the presence of the Law is to try to get rid of God from our lives which is exactly what Satan set out to do from the very beginning and what the whole War is all about. Satan wants to replace God on the throne of the universe and control everyone according to his own destructive, selfish ways. We can already see the results of that arrangement all through the world, so it makes no sense to purport that the solution to our problem with sin is to avoid the Law. To avoid the Law of God is to avoid God who is the only one who can save us.

I am still pondering and praying about the identity of the “I” that died when the commandment came in referred to in verse 9. He says that he was once alive until the Law showed up. I must remember that this is written in the context of addressing the group of people who “know the Law” in 7:1. The word translated “know” is used in many ways in the original and one of those ways is the “know” that a man and woman share in the deepest level of intimacy together. Paul, in the first part of this chapter talks about intimacy and even arousal with the results of producing offspring, both because of intimacy with our “flesh” or “intimacy” with the risen Christ.

What is it within me, what part of me is “alive” when intimacy is involved? I am starting to believe that Paul is referring to that part of me in my spirit at the heart level where I experience the liberating sense of freedom, joy and aliveness. If that is true, how does that apply when Paul says he “was once alive apart from the Law”? (v. 9) It seems that Paul may be thinking back to when he was younger and before he got heavily involved in the religious training that ended in him becoming a zealous Pharisee and vicious persecutor of the people who loved Jesus. He remembers when his spirit was more free and his heart felt more alive, maybe as a child. At that time his ignorance of “the Law”, due to simply being a younger and not yet trained in the Law, left him free to enjoy life and feel free and happy as a child should. But “when the commandment came, sin became alive” and he died – that is, his free spirit and relish for life were lost when he began to focus on keeping the Law in order to be right with God.

He goes on to emphasize very strongly that the problem in this situation (in which all of us legalistic types find ourselves) is not the Law itself.

I can easily imagine the natural reaction of a person who “knows the Law” would have upon reading this letter to them from Paul for the first time. They would have a natural defensiveness of their position on how to properly live the Christian life through emphasis on obedience and they would feel very suspicious of what Paul is trying to convey here. They would feel that Paul is trying to attack the idea of obedience and diminish its importance and thereby imply that the problem is coming from the Law. They would even go so far as to accuse him of implying that the Law is the cause of the struggle in their life. This is typical thinking for a person trained in legalism (typical religion) which a great many of us have been, even many who want nothing to do with the church anymore. The underlying problem is that we still have the false ideas about salvation embedded in our brains causing us to feel, like Paul, that the most important part of us has died.

Unfortunately, in pulling away from the church, from religion and from God, what we are really saying is that the problem is “the Law”. We assume that if we can get far enough away from the condemning presence of the Law that we will be able to feel alive again. But there is a very fundamental flaw in that thinking. Because the Law, though it makes us feel very condemned, is not our real problem even though it very much feels like it. And when we pull away from proximity to the Law by trying to disattach ourselves from everything that reminds us of it, we end up also pulling away from the only real Source of life itself. If one stops to think about it, pulling away from the Source of life is not a way to begin feeling more alive again.

But a real problem begins to emerge when I think about it in this way. If the Law makes me feel condemned but the Law is simply a description of God's character, then I will logically assume that God is the one condemning me. But that is not actually true at all. Jesus stated unequivocally that He did not come into the world to condemn but to save. (see John 3) And Jesus and the Father God are not different in any way as far as their attitude toward us. So it seems at first to be an irreconcilable dichotomy that I feel condemned by the Law which is a description of God but it is not true that God is the source of my condemnation.

This is exactly the deception that Paul refers to in verse 11. He is exposing the real source of our problem and unmasking the deception under which we have been held in legalism. Sin – whatever that is – is the culprit that caused me to feel like my spirit died, my sense of freedom and aliveness that God designed all of us to enjoy and that we sometimes had glimpses of when we were young. It is sin that hijacked my heart and replaced it with a hard heart and a contaminated, perverted spirit. It is sin, not the Law of God, that is doing all the damage in my soul. But because it deceptively did it through my intimacy with the Law (and through abusive people claiming to know the Law) I am led to believe that it was the Law doing all this to me.

This condition is called living in the flesh. (v. 14) When in this condition we find ourselves in slavery, in bondage to sin that is inescapable. We mistakenly believe that we can figure out a way to escape this slavery and try all sorts of schemes to revive our heart and feel alive again. But every attempt is doomed to failure because we simply do not have the wherewithal to save ourself. We are under a supernatural slave-master who never allows his slaves to escape and viciously punishes those who attempt to do so.

The rest of chapter 7 is a detailed description of what is looks like to try to save myself while my heart and spirit are hijacked by sin. I want to be alive, I want to feel good again, and those very desires demonstrate that I believe the Law is right and true. After all, the Law is simply a description of the underlying principles that must be in place to thrive and feel fully alive. But we cannot get there from here by trying to keep the Law directly because our heart is still hijacked. The only way to feel alive and free is to live from our heart as we are designed to live. But when our heart is under the control of selfishness (the core essence of sin) it is “dead”, and it is impossible to capture that sense of freedom and joy that are the only things that will satisfy the deepest cravings of our soul. We find ourselves hopelessly caught in this awful trap and, like Paul, if we are honest about our real feelings we are ready to exclaim with him, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (v. 24)

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Fixing the Train

(Capturing my thoughts before I forget them so I can organize them more)

• Being led by living from the heart instead of leading with the head.

• Living with synchronized passion fed by the passion of God.

• Sequence of train – Spirit of God leading man's spirit by filling it with God's passion. Man's spirit leading the imagination to express its unique creativity and personality using both the natural gifts and abilities and the supernatural gifts received by the baptism (immersion) of the Holy Ghost. Then all of this passion and fire is protected and reinforced (virus checker) by the logic and information filling the left brain from reliable resources like the Bible.

Analogies:

• Trying to push a chain instead of pulling it is like living from the head first.

• Trying to take an aircraft into outer space by depending only on propellers while suppressing all use of rocket fuel and engines.

• The familiar train analogy frequently used on us growing up may be one of our strongholds preventing us from thriving. The engine is our intellect and will based on logic and formulas derived from the Bible and other “chosen” sources. Our emotions were the caboose that had to be put at the end of the train. By

  implication (and now even in the real world of trains) the caboose is often apparently missing altogether. I wonder how much this instruction from our early years has caused us to suppress our heart and even resist the promptings of the Holy Spirit in our lives?

I met someone this weekend that I had known many years ago that, as I listened to their story I realized how persistent their heart is in its desperate struggles to stay alive in spite of unspeakable atrocities committed against them by countless people in their life from the day they were born. The abuse was diabolically designed to destroy their heart and permeate their mind with lies about their loving Creator. Yet in spite of all this damage,

both physically and emotionally, I can still recognize the unique characteristics of the beautiful heart that I had seen many years ago when I knew them somewhere else. At that time I was intrigued by the unique, captivating nature of their smile and the sense of “aliveness” that emanated from them, not knowing then how much damage and violation had already been perpetrated against them at that point. After many more years of damage the results have become much more obvious and debilitating, yet the special heart that Jesus created within this person still struggles to stay alive and grasps for hope. Their spirit is yearning for connection to the Spirit that created it and for which it was designed to connect to so it could thrives and feel satisfied.

My own heart has had stirrings lately that are impossible to formulate into words. At times I have unfamiliar moments of – well, how can words explain them adequately? It takes a lot of words to explain what seems so simple in the arena of the spirit. In those moments I have a combined sense of anticipation, peace, synchronization, assurance, hope, and even potential for living freely in genuine, selfless love while I stay connected to the obvious Source of this peace. These moments feel so refreshing and alive and I want to stay there to grow and thrive. These feeling are new and somewhat unfamiliar but make me feel really alive. I suspect that if I stayed very long in this state of being my face might begin to glow unnaturally (for me anyway) and people would wonder what happened to me. I have a strong sense that this is what life is supposed to be like all the time, but it doesn't fit well with the rigid paradigms and rules of the religion that has been superimposed on me for most of my life.

As I thought about this while waking up this morning I realized that maybe I need to reverse the power arrangement in my life in order to become efficient (or even truly functional) and be in alignment with how I was originally designed to live and thrive. Trying to lead my life with logic-based truth and keep my heart suppressed (as implied by typical religious instruction) has only resulted in great frustration, pain and too much dysfunction. Yes, I can spew out correct answers apparently, but I (the real me – my heart) cannot really thrive and experience the abundant life that Jesus promised I could have. Now I am beginning to sense that it may largely be due to my attempt to operate my “train” backwards according to the misleading instructions ingrained into me since childhood.

As many others might likely remember, I was taught that we must not let our emotions lead us. Emotions are like the caboose of the train that must always be kept behind everything else. In reality, they were often by implication to be disconnected from the train and left somewhere else. The engine was to be our intellect firmly rooted in the Word of God and the training of our leaders. We were never to allow our emotions to influence us in any way as far as the movement of the train (our life).

I know I can easily make myself an easy target by talking about such “settled truths” as this, but I am now beginning to seriously question the validity of the assumptions in this analogy. While I will agree that there is a lot of truth in this, I also see a great deal of potential for error and even abuse contained in this analogy. While I am not advocating

we follow every whim of our emotions wherever they may direct us, my growing understanding of the importance of living from the heart conflicts sharply with the way this instruction has been used to suffocate so many hearts over the years.

Our emotions, while not the engine that should drive our train, are symptoms of the condition of our spirit. As I have said before, emotions are like indicators on the dashboard that reveal what is going on inside in the spirit area of our lives. Emotions are not good or bad, they simply are. They can be allowed to incite us to do other things that may be good or bad, but emotions are just emotions and cannot be blamed as the cause for our condition. Choices, either ours or other people's, are the real cause of the condition we find ourselves in, and emotions are the “graphics” that show up on the screen telling us what is going on with our spirit.

What I am starting to realize much more is that our spirit is the part that we have ignored far too long and is the missing element in learning how to really live in right relationship to life and to God. Due to the obsession of “religion” to suppress or ignore emotions, we have at the same time disconnected from awareness of our spirit and thereby cut off from ourselves

the very connector that our train needs to be led by the real power – the Spirit of God.

Because we are so disconnected from our spirit, which is almost the same thing as our heart, we really cannot relate properly to God and experience the real power that He wants us to experience that will be the real engine that can successfully move our life.

The only real power source in the whole universe from which all other power is derived is the passionate love flowing from the heart of the Creator-God of heaven. To be truly alive, all other created beings in the universe need to be properly connected to that unfailing Source of life and love. For us humans that link to the unlimited Source of power is our spirit that is shaped to uniquely connect with the Spirit of God like the couplings that connect the train cars to the engine. If our spirit is so damaged or ignored or distorted by lies that we refuse to be connected to the Spirit of God, we cannot be led by the Spirit of God and experience the power we need to move the train of our life. Salvation is the plan by which God is repairing the damage to our spirit so we can once again become connected to His unlimited power and experience the thrill of passion that flows from His heart to all of His created beings. We are brought into synchronization with the passion of God and come to life as we begin to experience the life-giving flow of love, joy and peace surging through our nervous system and charging our emotions with real satisfaction.

To use another analogy, I usually find myself trying to push a chain and chains simple don't work effectively by pushing them. In fact, by doing so they only end up in a jumbled mess instead of becoming straight and tall and strong. That might be an accurate picture of how I feel at times – a jumbled pile of correct ideas, links of truth that are not being activated from the right end. Even though one might carefully lay out the links of the chain in the “right” order and arrange them in such a way as to appear correct, as long as I am trying to push them instead of pulling on them correctly it will not function as it was designed to. What is lacking seems to be the element of synchronization.

As I thought how this might relate to what I am unearthing from my immersion in the book of Romans I realized that this may be just what Paul was contrasting in chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 is a description of people who know lots of good information (the Law) and are trying to lead with their knowledge – their left brain logic – to achieve a “righteous” life. What they missed is that real righteousness displayed in a person's life cannot be self-generated but can only happen as a result of a dynamic, vital umbilical-cord type connection with the only Source of real righteousness. They have been trying to “push the chain” of righteousness in their lives while focusing on having all the correct links. But no matter how accurate or truthful their links are, if they are not being pulled by the power of the living Spirit of God connected to their own spirit then all they can achieve is a jumble of confusing truth and a great deal of frustration.

Romans 8 is an exciting description of what it looks like to get the train in the right order, to allow God to pull our chain (instead of the enemy yanking on the other end of our chain all the time). When I come into right relationship to God, led by His Spirit pulling on my spirit, then my spirit will pull on my life from my heart in harmony with my mind. My life will begin to reveal the results described in this chapter naturally and my heart will come alive and thrive. While chapter 7 describes the results of living from the head while chapter 8 describes the results of living from the heart connected to God's heart.

What does this all mean? Why do I feel compelled to ask that question anyway? It feels like pushing on the chain again so that I can bring this writing to a tidy ending to satisfy the rules of writing and public expression. I enjoy the fact that I can dialog with myself (and even with God) through this means without feeling the pressure to bring every post to a resolved ending like a successful one-hour television show. This is simply a window into the process of growing and exploring and query that is going on inside me that I allow others to peer into once in awhile. So I don't have to be confined to the “rules” of writing because I am not looking for a grade to measure how much or little I am worth. This is simply where I'm at right now.

God, grow my heart more today and teach me – both my heart and my head – how to really experience the abundant life that Jesus talked about and promised me. I also want to intercede for the people I connected with this weekend that You are pulling toward Your heart. I give you permission to do anything You want in their lives to heal and restore and re-create Your likeness in them. I do this based on the assurance of the authority that Jesus invested in all His followers when He left earth 2000 years ago. So in the name and authority of the One who now has taken away all the authority of Satan in this earth, I present before Your throne of grace these loved ones who are so damaged and hurting and grasping for hope and life. They have been terribly abused by the enemy of our souls and You have felt every pain with them. Allow them to see the truth about Your untainted beauty and loveliness and help them believe You never were the cause of the abuse heaped on them even though it was done using Your name. Allow them to taste a little of the intense passion in Your heart to connect with and heal their heart and restore them to better than their original design. Rescue their hearts from the cruel hands of the enemy and amaze the world with the success of Your experiments of grace in their lives.

Father, make me an instrument of Your grace and healing also. Help me to know Your ways, to wait for Your promptings and to respond more readily to Your Spirit. Melt away my fears and resistance to You and replace the many lies still within me with Your love and compassion and truth. This is a whole new way of thinking and living for me that is very unfamiliar. Revive my heart and fire me with Your own passion for Your reputation's sake.

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