Obtaining Fruit

“...so that I may obtain some fruit among you also...” (Rom. 1:13) I have read this phrase a number of times with a feeling of uneasiness. It raises a question in my mind each time but I have not taken the time to confront God with it until today. As usual, my question is based on false assumptions and it is my assumptions that need to be flushed out in the open and exposed, not a problem with the Word of God. But the very process of bringing my question and irritation to God without fear of censure is an improvement over my past. I am learning that God is not afraid or even bothered by questions and emotions. He is much more interested in the relationship that can grow through the interaction experienced in the dialog and the revelations about Himself that He is given opportunity to share with me.

So this morning I asked Him about this phrase and my discomfort with it. Why did Paul want to obtain fruit among the Romans? It seems a little bit selfish for Paul to go around picking fruit from other people. The picture that my mind formed was one who was walking into someone else's vineyard or orchard and just picking the best of the fruit for himself without owning the property. There seemed to be selfish overtones of pride involved as well but all of these things so subtle that I could not even ask the questions. But today I decided to confront them, so I challenged God why Paul said this.

At first I didn't hear anything in response, but that is not unusual either. I have to give Him time to talk and develop His answer and most often it is in observing the context. So I lay out the question and then leave it open while I poke around and see what the Spirit might bring up in the process.

It was not very long at all before clues began popping up and my own assumptions began to be challenged. The first clue was “I am under obligation”. Whatever it was that Paul was thinking when he spoke of obtaining fruit it involved a feeling of obligation, not exploitation as my first feelings assumed. The following verse added more, “I am eager to preach the gospel to you also”. Whatever this is about obtaining fruit meant it involved putting something into them as well as getting something from them.

Then the real definition of gospel came to mind and even more sense began to develop in this analogy. The gospel is a revelation of the sweetness of God that flavors whatever fruit Paul is looking to obtain from them. Now the idea of Paul bringing to them the sweetness that is needed by them changes my first assumptions and I see that Paul is focused much more on what he is bringing to them than on what he is trying to get for himself from them. In fact, he is most likely not even thinking much about fruit for himself as much as fruit for the glory of God's reputation. Paul is living in the passion of God that possesses his whole life making him feel under obligation to everyone else to ignite the same passion of God in their souls as that that burns in his own heart. Paul is eagerly going from place to place under the compulsion of his personal experience of grace passionately looking to inject the sweetness of the gospel into anyone who is open and ripe to transform them into fruit for God to enjoy.

So, contrary to my initial assumptions (no surprise here, but a healthy growing event), Paul is not operating from a base of selfishness looking for accumulating credits for "successful evangelism", but is burning with the passion of God to restore the souls and capture the affections of as many people as possible for God's sake. He is being a true friend of the Bridegroom, drawing others into an intimacy with God much more than looking out for his own interests.

As I look back over the surrounding verses I notice more clearly that the fruit that Paul is looking to obtain and enhance is most likely faith itself. In verse 8 he declares that their fruit of faith is already being proclaimed throughout the whole world. But apparently he wants to come to them so he can increase their fruit. Whether he wants to increase it in the lives of the existing believers or produce more by adding to the number of believers is not made clear. But knowing Paul he likely wants to do all the above.

Paul's attitude is revealed in a number of phrases that show up throughout this section. “I thank God for you all”, “I serve (God) in my spirit”, “unceasingly I make mention of you always in my prayers”, “I long to see you so that I may impart”, “I may be encouraged together with you”, “often I have planned to come to you”, and “I am under obligation”. These phrases betray a passion of love in sympathy with the heart of God that Paul shares for His children. This is a revelation of the very fruit, the relationship of faith inspired by God's faith, already being produced in the life of Paul that he wants to see produced in the lives of more believers as they become ignited with the passion of God through intimacy with Him themselves.

Someone once told me, and I have found it to be very true, that hidden underneath the difficult passages of Scripture that seem so say something contrary to what we know about the gospel, there usually lies a profound revelation about God that is waiting to surprise us if we are willing to dig deeper and keep an open mind to what the Spirit of God is waiting to reveal to us. In this case it was only a slight confusion on my part that God was ready to correct with much better understanding. There are other passages much more difficult to reconcile on the surface that have far richer and deeper revelations waiting to be brought to the surface if the searcher is willing to use the correct lenses to examine them carefully. No wonder Paul was not ashamed of the gospel, for it really is the power of God that saves, restores, returns us to our original purpose and destiny and design.

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More on Faith to Faith

I still find myself wanting to dig deeper into this “faith to faith” idea. Today a came across some more clues.

Rom. 1:12 ...that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine.

Rom. 1:17 ...in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.

I have begun to see a connection between these verses that adds meaning to the phrase “faith to faith”. The first verse seems to be describing faith and encouragement being generated at the human level interactively. Paul says that he longs to be with them, to see them. That is a description of the experience of joy – being glad to be together. The second verse is a step up from that in experience describing how we can have faith generated interactively with God by seeing His faith. The intervening verses talk about possible causes of anti-faith – reasons to doubt – toward Paul.

It appears that maybe they had reason to doubt his words due to repeated promises to come to see them without results. Paul is trying to explain the reasons behind these apparent discrepancies and restore their faith in his good intentions and his good will toward them. This came to my mind because of the experience of my daughter who has experienced something similar recently. Her husband is on the road training as a truck driver and had promised several times that he might be able to come home but was prevented each time. After awhile she became very cautious, even disbelieving about his promises because of the pain of disappointment and so became very skeptical about any time he said he would come. This is very understandable and was similar to how these Romans must have felt toward Paul.

It is interesting that he then addresses the issue of shame implying that this is an element, an issue that has become a problem in their relationship, or at least an issue in their thinking associated with him. There must have been some presumption of shame associated with his reputation because he is emphatically debunking any idea that he is influenced by shame. The original words in Greek are much stronger than the English translation. They actually say, “Ashamed?! You think I feel ashamed? Absolutely, positively NOT in the least!!! I am not ashamed at all of the gospel...”

Paul appears to be trying to lift their field of vision above the earthly context of the shame attached to the presentation of the gospel by its opposers, to the reality in which Paul lives and operates from the view of heaven and eternity and true reality. He is leading them through a transition, moving them from increasing their faith in him interactively to increasing their faith in God interactively.

There is nothing so effective to produce faith as faith. We have sometimes heard amazing stories of what can happen when a “loser” is transformed by someone who sees something in them that they cannot see themselves and really believes in them with passion. Something happens in their heart and the faith placed in them inspires faith within them and they begin to be able to do things and think bigger than they ever dreamed possible. Faith inspires faith. We are wired that way but seldom treat people that way because this involves seeing with the heart instead of the externals and most people are not doing that. That is what Paul is doing here. He is expressing faith in the Romans and inviting them to be inspired with more faith in him. In so doing he wants to lead them to enter into the same, yet more powerful, relationship with God. As the gospel, the good news about God's faith in them, becomes more clear to them, faith will spring up spontaneously within them and they will become fired with the same passion that motivates Paul. As they learn to trust Paul more they will also learn they can trust God even more. “The just shall live by His faith.”

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Overcomer

Overcomer – another word that has had a trigger effect from my past. It is usually associated with the idealism of perfectionism and has strong connections to the compulsive idea of eliminating every tiny little sin from your life so you can be perfect enough to get to heaven. Because of this my mind has to do a double-take and rethink the implications and context whenever I hear this word.

I just looked up this word and its variations in the New Testament and I noticed that it appears five times just in the book of 1 John. Then I counted seven times that it appears just in the messages to the churches in the beginning of Revelation. It is obviously very important to God so I really should find out the truth about this word and maybe unlink it from whatever is triggering a misunderstanding in my own mind.

Blessed is he that overcomes that he... This is the message from heaven that links blessing and overcoming. But a new thought came to my mind recently from another verse that talks about overcoming. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Rom. 12:21) This took me back to another revelation that I received while listening to some of Jim Wilder's Munchies. It really made sense to me and gave me a good context that helped explain a lot of other things about salvation history.

He explained that in the Old Testament the authority over the earth was under the control of Satan who had usurped it from Adam. Under those conditions basically God's instructions to His people could be summarized as containment and defense against further spread of evil. Many of the Old Testament laws and proscriptions we designed primarily to defend against the continuing spread of the effects of sin in the world.

But when Jesus came and regained authority over this world through His perfect life and death and replaced Adam as the head of the human race, the basic rules of operation dramatically changed. After the resurrection, instead of containment of evil, a new method of operation went into effect. Now extravagant amounts of grace flooded the world and evil was to be overwhelmed with good, not just defended against. God opened the floodgates of heaven to pour grace and love through anyone willing to be used as channels so that the whole earth could be flooded with the glory of God. Blessing was available in abundance through Jesus Christ and His followers were to be witnesses of the incredible, transforming power of God's love as Satan's power no longer had the monopoly on earth. His authority was lost and he could only operate as he could trick humans into relinquishing their God-endowed authority to him on an individual level through temptations.

With this condition in mind, it can now be seen that the idea of overcoming takes on a whole new light. Instead of thinking with Old Testament style reasoning of trying to contain and eliminate sin through meticulous observances of rules and performances, overcoming is an attitude of opening our lives as growing channels of grace to flow through us from God to overwhelm the sin and despair all around us. It is a whole new dimension that we are not yet very familiar with or think about. But that is what the New Covenant is all about – filling the earth with the glory of God through His people.

The New Covenant is still a covenant however, with all of the implications of how a covenant operates. I found an interesting connection to this when I took a look at 1 Cor. 13 viewing it as a description of God Himself as well as the fruit that will be seen in the lives of His followers.

Since God is love it is not a stretch to put in God's name in place of love in this chapter and then see what the results reveal about Him. God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails...

I looked up the word translated “bears” because I wanted to see better what it really might mean. I was surprised at the strong connection that it has to the principles of covenant. The word “bears” in the original means, to roof over, i.e. to cover with silence (endure patiently):--(for-)bear, suffer. This is covenant language that is also found in Psalm 91. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” (Psalms 91:1) This is a direct statement of protection obvious to those who live in a culture that understands covenants. While it is very unfamiliar to western thinkers, covenant arrangements are stronger than life itself to people who live in those societies. There is even something called a threshold covenant that means that even if a stranger or an enemy steps across your threshold into your house you are obligated to protect them with your own life and treat them hospitably until they leave your dwelling.

Given this understanding of covenants, 1 Cor. 13:7 and Ps. 91:1 are both talking about a covenant protection arrangement that God has for His people who enter into covenant with Him. As long as they are under His roof they can rest completely assured of His protection for them in whatever way He chooses to express it.

Psalm 91 continues to expand on our understanding of the fabulous benefits of covenant relationship when the key words are carefully examined. But I will leave that for another day.

Just by Faith

I started out in Romans 1 this morning but ended up spending much more time in Habakkuk 2 uncovering a number of revelations for me. I went there following the thread of faith that I picked up in Rom. 1:5 and linked to verse 17 which quotes Hab. 2:4. Then to better understand this verse I ended up perusing the whole chapter of Hab. 2 and found several more themes, some of which interestingly weave together several threads that I have written about over the past few days. I find it affirming when God does things like this – not affirming in the sense of flattering my wisdom but affirming in the sense that He is so kind to share His thoughts with me. Sometimes He causes me to start thinking about them ahead of the time that I read about them so that I will know they were not stimulated from what I read but from the Source that provided them to both minds. I love how God weaves things and people together to reveal Himself to us. In fact, that is some of what I find in this chapter.

As I often like to do, I opened up the interlinear feature on my computer for Hab. 2 so I could ponder over some of the original words to see what varied implications might be hidden from sight by the English translation. While I am certainly not an expert in Hebrew or any other language, I feel that God is able to share a lot of insights and inferences of His original intention in a passage if I take the time to expose myself to a little more research and keep my mind open to the influence of the Holy Spirit at the same time.

I started out wanting to flush out more meaning behind the phrase, “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith”. That phrase has completely baffled me all of my life and I have not spent much time trying to unpack it until recently. I am not willing to accept stock answers for this but would like to uncover more clearly what God had in mind when this was conveyed to us through Paul. If this is the means by which “the righteousness of God is revealed”, then to understand better what the “righteousness” of God means I need to understand what “faith” means and even farther, what “faith to faith” means. Because Paul bases what he is trying to convey on the passage from Hab. 2:4, then to take a good look at that passage and its surrounding context would likely be of great help.

“I will stand on my guard post and station myself on the rampart; and I will keep watch to see what He will speak to me, and how I may reply when I am reproved.” (Habakkuk 2:1 NAS95) This is the beginning, the setup for the context of the faith passage. Some of the original language implies that I am peering intently into the distance to see what He will speak to me. This is a strong focus, an intentional and conscious focus of my mind, a hunger and an attitude of expectation to wait for what God wants to communicate with me. It is involves an awareness or analysis of how I may or should respond the I am reproved by God. That could take a lot of time to unpack just by itself, but I want to go on to the next verse that I feel picks up some of the things I have been thinking about over the past week.

“Then the Lord answered me and said, 'Record the vision and inscribe it on tablets, that the one who reads it may run.'” (Habakkuk 2:2 NAS95) The word for “tablets” means to to make it glisten, polished stone. Inscribe actually means to explain, to make it more clear. What this verse seems to be saying is that “the vision” needs not only to be put into written form (recorded), but it also needs to be made plain, more understandable and attractive. This brings together two things I have been pondering, writing and vision. Evidently, according to this passage, there is very good reasons to write things. Writing is a very useful tool for communicating and God wants us to do it. He also wants the vision that He conveys to us to be explained or translated through us in such a way so that others can understand it better, in a such a way that others are inspired and excited and enabled to run with it without so much hindrance. Hopefully that is what I am being trained to do.

Verse 3 has been widely applied to prophecy and particularly the great movement during the mid-eighteen hundreds. I am not going to spend time on this verse but would like to examine closely the next verse in which is found the famous phrase, “the just shall live by faith” made popular by Martin Luther.

“Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith.” (Habakkuk 2:4 NAS95)

As for the man of pride, my soul has no pleasure in him; but the upright man will have life through his good faith. (Habakkuk 2:4 BBE)

Gen. 2:7 gives the formula for the creation of a soul. You form dust into the image of God and then add the breath of life from God and lo, a human soul comes into existence. The soul is a balanced combination of these two ingredients. What I see in verse 4 in Habakkuk is an imbalance exposed in a soul due to pride. Then this imbalance is contrasted with God's solution for it – living by His faith.

With careful research some have come to the conclusion that this text is pointing primarily to the faith of God more than the faith of the just person. After thinking about this for awhile it became obvious to me why that should be the way to view this. God is the only source of life. If a person who is to be considered “just” is to have life it only makes sense that the life must come from God, not from his own faith in God. This exposes one of the more subtle problems in the teachings about faith popular in Christianity today. We are often in danger of putting more emphasis on our faith than we are on God Himself. This has the effect of depending on our ability to “work up” faith and makes God beholden to how much faith we can produce. I spent much of my life in this kind of thinking and still am working to undo the “hard-wiring” instilled in me by the deceiver. Just in the past few days I have been listening to some talks that explain this concept much more clearly which has helped greatly in unpacking this idea of “faith to faith”. The core of this issue is God's faithfulness far more that our faith in Him.

We cannot work up faith, contrary to what I and many around me assumed most of my life. Faith is spontaneous and reactive. This even ties back into verse 1 where my response to God's reproofs is considered. My ability to have a healthy, responsive, living faith in God is intrinsically linked to my beliefs about what God is like and how I perceive His attitude toward me. If I allow pride (self-dependence) to unbalance my soul, then I will not find pleasure in God or He in me. By extension I will not be found to be just (synchronized with God) because real faith that makes me right with God (justified) is totally a response to the faithfulness of God Himself.

Faith inspires faith just as love elicits love. This is possibly one of the most important yet most misunderstood foundations of real Christianity in personal life and the church. We hear very little about God's faith in us. Yet this is the reason that He has invested all of heaven and poured out His heart and His Son to save us – because He had faith that we would respond to His offers and attractions and cease our resistance to His love. This is what is meant by God's faithfulness. It is not just that He is consistent and always keeps His word, although that is part of it. It is the amazing and almost unbelievable idea that God actually has faith in sinners that they will sooner or later relinquish their rebellion and allow Him to transform them back into His own image. It is God's faith that we must live by to be just. It is God's faith that inspires all other faith. If we want more faith we must learn that it does not come by trying harder to work it up but by focusing on the greatest example of faith, God Himself. It is in beholding that we become changed. When we fill our mind with the reality of His faithfulness, His being full of faith in us, we will find faith awakening in response, even when we are reproved by Him because we will know in our heart that these reproofs are only from a heart full of love and designed to bring our hearts into harmony with His.

I know I need to spend a lot more time pondering this and allowing it's reality to awaken faith in my own soul. I want pride to be replaced with faith inspired by His faith in me. That still boggles my mind just to start thinking about it.

There is a lot more to be seen in Habakkuk 2 but I should stop for now and leave them for another day.

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Jacob's Blessing

My thoughts were mulling over the concept of blessing today and I began thinking about Jacob's experience with blessing. Of course, he is known for his escapade along with his mother of deceiving his father Isaac to gain the blessing of the firstborn that rightfully was supposed to go to Esau. It gets rather complicated when more factors are considered such as God's prophecy about their future when the twins were born and Esau's manipulated agreement under duress to relinquish the birthright when he was very hungry.

At any rate, as the story unfolded, Jacob ended up running for his life in fear after Esau threatened to kill him for “stealing” the blessing from his father. So did Jacob really get the blessing? This could generate a great deal of discussion especially with our western ignorance of what a blessing really is anyway. Typically we think of blessing as associated with material wealth. At first glance in this story it appears that Jacob lost all of the wealth that should have come from his father with the blessing since he left home for a long period of time. But further on in the story we see that Jacob indeed became very wealthy through the apparent benefits of being blessed supernaturally. He ended up with a large family and a great deal of livestock which in that day was the currency of riches. So in light of this and from our viewpoint it might seem that Jacob would finally feel like he had indeed received the blessing that had been pronounced on him from his father.

But if this was true then why is it that we find him in such a desperate state of mind while he spends all night body-wrestling and unknown “assailant” in the dark that he had no idea of their identity? The key moment comes when he realizes who he has been wrestling with and instantly wraps himself around the body of the heavenly messenger in a death-grip of emotional intensity begging for the blessing that his heart had craved for all of his life. To me this looks like a symptom of intense soul-hunger that was never satisfied with what we would consider external blessings in abundance. He had wives, he had children, he had wealth, he had freedom. But the fear that had haunted him all of his life had not disappeared and now he was back face to face with it. He was forced to face his past; he could no longer hide from it. Now his real heart came gushing to the surface and the crisis of his brother's threats only triggered the deeper crisis of the emptiness that he had been attempting to fill repeatedly but had failed to diminish.

This night of sharp focus in the life of Jacob is referred to in the book of Daniel as the time of Jacob's trouble and is prophecied to be repeated in the lives of God's people very near the end of this world's history. Many people believe we are about to enter that time in the very near future. I was raised in a culture where a great deal of emphasis was put on teaching this in a spirit of fear and dread. We were taught that we must prepare for this time of testing by putting away every sin from our life and developing a perfect character so that no sin will be discovered in our life during that time.

Associated with this future event was also a great deal of external violence and world-wide disasters culminating in the second coming of Jesus to bring and end to all the mess and pick up His perfected saints who survive this time of trouble without any sin being found in them. Again, I remember a great deal of fear and foreboding associated with this frequent teaching and was not too keen about suffering through such an ordeal especially given the near impossibility of getting myself to such a level of perfection that was demanded to survive it.

I have begun to realize that there is something wrong with this teaching for a number of years now primarily due to the over-emphasis of fear as the key ingredient. It is becoming very clear to me that teachings based on fear are very suspect at best and present a very distorting picture of God at worst. While many of the facts surrounding a teaching may indeed be accurate, presenting a teaching or doctrine based on fear is attempting to present truth using the methods of the enemy of truth. And when truth is presented in the wrong spirit it ceases to have the power of truth no matter how accurate the facts may be or how many proof-texts are lined up to reinforce it. This is a major problem that has prevented the gospel from spreading to the world and keeps Christianity locked in internal struggles and arguments that profanes the name of the One they claim to represent.

What became startlingly clear to me today is that this fear-oriented teaching has turned away hundreds of thousands of people from growing further in their Christian experience because of the terrors of the “time of trouble” repeatedly kept before them by religious people seeking to motivate them into perfection of character through fear. This is a classic scheme of the Devil who is determined to steal the incredible blessing that God has in store for us. We have missed the most important part of Jacob's story in our teaching about the “time of Jacob's trouble”.

Jacob went into this experience because of the fear that was tormenting him so mercilessly. He had divided up his large family and livestock and had sent them in different directions in another attempt to protect his assets and then retired to a solitary place to seek God earnestly for relief of the greatest cry of his own heart. It was now unavoidable that his heart still craved blessing and now he wanted it more than life itself. He longed to be free of the ever-present feeling of guilt that had tormented him and increased over his lifetime. He desperately wanted peace with God and decided to spend the night in prayer not only for protection but for real satisfaction that only the genuine blessing could bring him.

Ironically, when God showed up in person to answer his prayer and embraced him to fulfill the longing of his heart, Jacob's fear-based mind reacted in alarm and violence in resistance to the very thing his heart longed for the most without realizing it. The original language conveys that the “angel” acutally embraced Jacob, not just touched him. God came to give him a hug but it erupted into a fight instead. How often do we find ourselves in the same situation, reacting in terror against the very things that God brings into our lives to be our greatest source of blessing and fulfillment because we have not known the real truth about what God is really like.

The main point of this story is that Jacob really did receive the blessing he had longed for all of his life, the blessing that everyone of us longs for from the very deepest, misunderstood recesses of our being. It was at the climax of this “time of trouble” that Jacob received this blessing, and the same will be true for those who pass through the future time of “Jacob's trouble”.

So what is this blessing that he received and that we need so badly? I cannot explain that, partly because I do not know and partly because I suspect it cannot be condensed into words easily even by those who have received it. However, I believe that one of the most important aspects of that blessing was a radical shift in paradigms that occurred in Jacob's thinking and perception about how God wanted to relate with him. Because of this new relationship with God and the amazing experience of grace that Jacob experienced when his name was changed to Israel – one who strove with God and overcame – he afterward demonstrated a bold and peaceful confidence and trust in God's protection and abilities never before seen in his life. He had experienced the truth about God on a very personal and intimate level and he was a totally changed man. That is the opportunity that lies embedded in the future “time of trouble” for those who understand enough of the true nature of God to enter into it in anticipation of the blessing waiting for them there.

Promoting fear in association with the time of trouble is to work in concert with the enemies scheme to trick us out of our blessing. Fear is not God's method for motivation. He has made it very clear all throughout scripture that He does not want us operating from a base of fear. “For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7)