No denying it

Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith. Remember that your family of believers all over the world is going through the same kind of suffering you are. In his kindness God called you to share in his eternal glory by means of Christ Jesus. So after you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation. All power to him forever! Amen. (I Peter 5:8-11)

At times, we believe we are the only ones under attack. It as though all the world goes on around us, busy with their business, and there we are right in the midst of the worst kind of attack. We feel alone, like nobody knows we are there, much less that we are struggling to just keep our heads above water. What is one of the greatest tactics in our enemy's arsenal? The feeling that we are alone - that we cannot share the burden we are bearing with anyone else. Our instruction today is quite clear - we will all experience suffering from time to time - but we are not alone in the battle. There are other believers, put alongside us expressly for the purpose of helping us stay alert and stand firm in the midst of what otherwise would be a losing battle. When we realize we are not experiencing these things alone, we might just see the advantage to forming a 'gang' to deal with the attack! We might call this 'gang warfare'. It is when we stand as united force against all the 'crap' our enemy is hurling our way. Our battles may not be identical, but we all have the same enemy! It could just be time for us to unite in our battles. 

God called us to be a 'body of believers' who stand firm against the enemy's attacks, but we oftentimes attempt to do this all on our own. What a foolish maneuver on our part. We won't avoid the suffering, but we might just find restoration coming quicker when we are battling together. If we are afraid, or too prideful to admit we are facing the battle of our lives, we may just find ourselves overwhelmed in the midst of the battle. No single soldier wins the battle - it takes a united front. Perhaps this is why God establishes us in community - so we can form a solid wall of resistance against our enemy. Support is important, but it seldom comes to those too proud to admit they need it. Oh, maybe that is the real issue at hand today. Maybe we find ourselves struggling with our pride - unwilling to allow others to see our flaws and failures. My flaws are out there, my friends - they are no longer hidden. I hide behind whatever I could for way too long. It did me no good - in fact, it actually did me more harm than good. How? The more I tried to deny my faults, the farther away I was from what I needed most for my rescue, restoration, and strength!

The attacks are real. The temptations are never-ending. The moments of weakness come, Words are spoken without thought, Frustrations are allowed to overtake the moment. Before long, we find what we had worked so hard on our own to avoid has come to a full head right there in front of us. Then we have to begin the 'mop-up' and we even attempt to do that on our own! Whatever made us think we'd resist alone, let alone be able to 'clean up' the mess left behind in our lives all in our own power? God gives us good, Bible-believing friendships for a reason. It is time we bring out the 'big guns' to fight the battle. The 'big guns'? Community! We need each other's strength when ours is wavering. We need one another's perspective when all we see is our own limited view. We need the combined learning of each other's experiences and God-given answers to help us sort out truth from our enemy's lies. We cannot, and should not, live without each other. We are not 'we' until we are open to living open lives before each other. Just sayin!

Suppose....

"Suppose" can be used as the setting up of an argument, or a belief or theory, as though you were prepared to defend it to the hilt.  Have you ever had one of those moments in time where you want to disprove someone and set up the arguments for your position with the statement, "Suppose that..."?  I think we all have at one time or another, because it is human nature to present what we believe or have perceived to see if it is really trustworthy.  In doing this, we present our side of the argument, then we await the rebuttal.  For example, we start our study of the earth with the statement, "Suppose that the earth is round, how do we keep from falling off as it rotates?"  The statement set forth is the perceived or believed fact, followed by the supposition or question.  We already are holding the truth to be true that the earth is round - now we just want to understand why we don't go flying off into space when it rotates on its axis!  Oftentimes, we find ourselves setting up various beliefs or perceptions in our conversations with God and find ourselves stuck with only half of the truth - the part we put out there as "believed fact" - then we have a whole bunch of questions or misconceptions we pose immediately after those "believed facts" because we want God to either dispel our "myths" or settle the truths we "think we believe" as fact.

Suppose I wanted to hide from you and said, “Surely the darkness will hide me. The day will change to night and cover me.” Even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are the same. You formed the way I think and feel. You put me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because you made me in such a wonderful way. I know how amazing that was! (Psalm 139:11-14 ERV)

Here is where we find David this morning - setting up what he knows to be fact and then setting the remaining "beliefs" or "ideas" out there on the table so God can either cement them as truth to be held onto or myths he must let go of. He begins with the statement, "Suppose I wanted to hide from you..."  Now, you might think this is a fact, since I said you could begin an argument with a set of facts and follow with the questions.  In this case, he begins with the questions and ends with the facts!  In so doing, he is actually talking to himself and reminding himself of what he already knows and believes - thereby settling his questions quickly.  The question of whether he can hide from God is set forth.  I think we may have all "tried" this at one time or another, but we probably have been less than successful, as David is soon to point out.  It is impossible to hide anything from him, so I think it is laughable that we would even want to try!

Many times we try to hide what we are a little uncomfortable with, or feeling some shame over.  It is not uncommon for us to do this, because we rarely want to put our failures "on display" in life.  I recently had a friend ask me why my marriage ended.  It is not one of those things I want out there on display in my life, so unless someone asks me directly, I don't usually speak about it. Why?  It causes me a little discomfort and I find myself reliving past hurts I may have wanted to really put behind me.  It isn't that I am hiding anything in this case, but I don't put these past hurts on display because they are now totally under the blood of Jesus - they are fading scars no longer to be remembered. I kind of liken them to the scar I can barely see from when I had surgery as an infant.  There is a tell-tale sign I went through something, but it no longer is a remembered thing!

There are things we attempt to hide which are not "healed" or even "healing" things, though.  This is where I feel David is connecting with us this morning - we cannot put into the darkness anything which God has not dealt with fully yet. It is impossible for us to hide these things from his probing finger, or discovering eye.  No darkness exists with him, so he is not going to allow us to attempt to squirrel away our hurts.  Herein is love in action - not letting us "fester" on our past hurts and failures.  It may seem like the "discovery" of our past hurts and failures is a little "probing" and kind of uncomfortable, but trust me on this - any "infected" part of our lives is worse when left to "fester" in the dark!  God knows this clearly because he put all our parts, including our emotions, into place in our lives - he created us.  The idea of thinking he wouldn't understand, or that he just couldn't make anything good out of the mess we have created somehow just flies in the face of the truth of his grace and love "out-doing" anything we have done ourselves.

Most of our past hurts and failures are linked very closely to the way we think and feel.  Understanding God is the one who "put together" the very actions of thinking and the plethora of emotions we experience is liberating, because we come to recognize none of these thoughts or emotions are "foreign" to God. They are all understood by him and he knows perfectly well how they interact with each other - one feeding off the other.  Truth is, we can trust him with the stuff we want to squirrel away into the dark places in our lives - because he is already intimately familiar with them - even the bad parts we don't want to admit to or remember!  Just sayin!

Well, that was a flop!

I like the social media site known as "Pinterest" because it gives me tons of ideas of things I can do to not only save money around the house, but plant my garden, organize my drawers, and even take better pictures with my camera.  It has such a wide variety of stuff posted there and I just love taking an hour here and there to peruse the content which has been uploaded.  Now, I don't take advantage of the full site, because I don't have little kids around anymore, so those crafts and "hacks" are not as helpful to me.  They are good, but they don't touch my life where it is I live life everyday.  I think this is why the Word of God is sometimes so rich for us in some respects and there are portions which just don't seem to touch us as deeply on occasion.  We find those portions which are very helpful for wherever it is we are living life at the moment and these become the tools by which we "do life".  Just as we have examples of good gardeners, crafters, and cooks to follow from the posts on Pinterest, we have great examples within God's Word which paint a picture for us of what it is like to live in a way which honors God.  We also have those examples of some "life projects" gone wrong!  I like how God doesn't just "post" the successes, but lets us see life sometimes has the failure points we can share, as well.  Those shared failure points are actually stepping stones which provide "dry ground" for others to pass over the things which caused us to get mired down in the mud of life.  We benefit from the passage of another, even if they didn't manage to do it with "flying colors"!

Follow the example of good people and live an honest life. If you are honest and innocent, you will keep your land; if you do wrong and can never be trusted, you will be rooted out. (Proverbs 2:20-22 CEV)

I think there are times in life when we don't want to admit we have impure thoughts, dreams which bother us, or struggles with certain habits.  Why?  They are kind of embarrassing and we don't want to put them out there on display for others because they aren't "perfect" examples of how to live life.  As those actors would say on those pesky insurance commercials: "News Flash....nobody's perfect"!  I have made some batches of cookies which just wouldn't hold their form - spreading out all over the cookie sheet as they cooked and connecting one with another.  When they were done, they didn't taste any different than the ones which stayed in perfect shape.  I still ate them!  I have made some fudge which never did set up quite as firm as it should, but I still enjoyed the richness of that chocolate flavor melting in my mouth!  I have made some mistakes in how I communicate with people, but I have worked to remedy those.  We still talk!  Here's the truth - we all make mistakes. We are not perfect.  This side of the grave, we will never reach that point of "perfect".  If we think we will, we probably better take that belief to God and let him root out that root of pride which exists!

Good people set not only "good examples" of the "right way" to do stuff, but they help us learn from the examples of the "wrong way" they have tried, as well.  Maybe this is why we need to connect with each other on a little deeper plane than just "posting" our successes for everyone to see.  We need the freedom to show our failures - not just our "pretty well done" life moments.  Honest people are not afraid to be honest about the hard stuff.  Yes, being open or transparent about the bad stuff we do is hard, but oh so worth it.  In our relationships with each other, we might just grow on a deeper plane if we were to be open and honest about the stuff we struggle with.  When we don't get "perfect" right every time, we need their encouragement to try again, but maybe in a different way.  When we are honest with each other, it allows us to find those "different ways" to live out the experience we have been struggling with on our own.

Trying to cover up wrong in our lives is kind of futile because the evidence of wrong actions will eventually come to light.  You cannot hide forever what gives you the worst of your nightmares and becomes the toughest of your struggles.  Eventually it comes out in other ways, even if you try to hide it at the place you think it is.  It is kind of like my sprinkler system and the roots from my trees.  For a long time, little leaks can go undetected, because the tree puts pressure on the pipes buried underground.  As that pressure is applied, micro-fine cracks can begin to occur, or joints can be stretched until their glue begins to loosen.  At first, the micro-fine crack just provides a little extra water to the tree's roots and the tree is all the happier it caused the crack.  The failure of my pipes is not noticed and the tree thinks it has successfully kept that from me.  When I get my water bill next month, I may think I just watered the grass a little more, or that we took a few longer showers.  I may not be too alarmed.  When this continues to spike for another couple of months, I become a little more concerned there must be a leak somewhere.

The leak may not be evident to me at first - concealed well because the tree "covers it up" by producing new growth.  That new growth is costing me something, though.  It isn't really "planned" growth, it is just deeper roots which are causing more damage to an already weakened pipe system.  Our failures can be like that root from the tree.  Failures do some damage, small at first, and sometimes undetected by the "public eye".  Yet, in the course of time, the "micro-fine cracks" will become larger fissures and the "failure" will become evident. I would absolutely love it if the tree would just confess it broke my pipes and I could be quickly on the repair of that weakened area!  The tree doesn't want to confess it failed to avoid the pipe because it knows it will cost him that particular root!  Maybe we are a little like that - we don't want to admit our failures because we know it means someone will get a view of our roots and there might even be some "root removal" work necessary!  Just sayin!