Month: June 2022
Calling Fire from Heaven
By Linda Rex
June 26, 2022, PROPER 8—As I was preparing to write this blog, I began to hear a noise outside my window. The fury of a thunderstorm was being unleashed, dropping heavy raindrops and tiny pellets of hail on the concrete. The thunder growling from the sky caused the cat napping nearby to raise her head and stare at the sheets of rain flying sideways by my window.
This was a timely event because I had just been reading the gospel account in Luke 9:51–62 where Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, was passing through Samaria. He had sent some disciples ahead of him to prepare a place for them to stay, but they were rejected by the people in that city. James and John, attempting to be helpful, were indignant and asked Jesus if he wanted them to call down fire from heaven and consume the errant ones. It’s understandable where James and John got their nickname “Sons of Thunder”!
Jesus’ response to their request isn’t in the earliest manuscripts, but it coincides with the apostle Paul’s message in our New Testament reading for this Sunday, Galatians 5:1, 13–25. Paul contrasted the works of our flesh—things like outbursts of anger, strife, dissensions, and factions, with the things of the Spirit—things like kindness, peace, patience, and self-control. The apostle reminded his readers that we live by the Spirit—our true life is in Christ by the Spirit, but we are meant to walk by the Spirit—our daily existence is meant to be walked out moment by moment in every situation in the Spirit, not in our flesh.
Our automatic human response to things like rejection, abuse, or disrespect may resemble that of John and James—we may ignite with passionate fury, seeking the harm of the responsible party. But Jesus’ response is different. Here, he just moved on to another town, recognizing that he could not do the job which he had been given by his Father in that particular town. And he began to talk with his followers about the cost of discipleship.
In the gospel passage for today, Luke described three separate responses to Jesus’ call to follow him. The first person gave an emphatic commitment to Jesus, that he would follow the Messiah wherever he went. But Jesus pointed out that, unlike the foxes and birds, the Messiah didn’t have a place to stay at night. His disciples had requested a place to stay but had been rejected—would this person be willing to accept such rejection and continue to follow Jesus, especially if it meant doing without the basics of life?
Bring this forward to today: As the cost of filling our gas tanks here in America begins to double or triple and the prices of our groceries skyrocket, we are faced anew with the question, will we trust God to care and provide for us? Will we continue to follow Christ when it seems that he isn’t going to make our life easier or more comfortable? What price are we willing to pay in order to follow Christ?
The second person who was asked by Jesus to follow him requested that Jesus allow him to bury his father before he did so. Though Jesus would not want us to harm or neglect our families, the reality is that we often make elaborate excuses for not simply obeying Jesus’ command to follow him. We find reasons that we cannot do as he asks, and we excuse ourselves by reasonable arguments as to why we should be able to continue on our way, unhampered by Jesus’ calling upon our lives.
In essence, Christ was saying to the man, “Let the spiritually dead take care of the physically dead. You go and proclaim the good news. That is the more urgent task.” We can care for and love our families, and still share the good news with the world while we are doing it. Jesus was reminding his disciples that there is an all-encompassing priority about the gospel. As he said elsewhere, seek his kingdom first, and all those things we’re concerned about will be provided.
The third person Luke described in this passage asked if he could first say goodbye to his family before he followed Christ. The disciples would have remembered that Elisha had asked Elijah this very thing when he was asked to follow the prophet, and Elijah had permitted it. But Jesus was describing an even more radical commitment to himself, one in which all took second place, including the customary expectations of society and family.
Jesus told this person that someone who begins to plow needs to keep looking forward, and not look back. Today most people in our nation plow using large equipment. Back then though, there was a single plow, possibly pulled by animals. Unless the person guiding the plow kept their eyes on where they were going, they would not create a straight row, thus ruining the possibilities of a good harvest. If they turned to look back from where they came, the row would end up horribly crooked and their efforts would be fruitless—a good picture of what happens when we take our eyes off of Jesus.
Keeping our eyes on Jesus in many ways is like walking by the Spirit and not by our flesh. The spiritual reality is that true life has come in the sending of the fire of the Spirit. The Spirit’s indwelling is the life the Christ in us, bringing us into fellowship with the Father. We live our lives in moment-by-moment dependency upon and in relationship with God by the Spirit. We follow the lead of the Spirit and in doing so, we follow Christ. We listen to and heed the living Word of God, Jesus, as we, by the Spirit, drink in of the written Word, allowing God to speak deep into our souls, moving us to obey.
We don’t turn back to gaze upon the spiritual death we once were living in, but keep our eyes focused forward on the living Word Jesus. He has set us free—so we live free, abandoning our past associations, plans, and deeds, and we embrace the new life he has given us by the Spirit. Jesus has moved us in his life, death, resurrection and ascension from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. We have no desire to go back to our slavery to evil, sin, and death. So we keep our eyes on him, our mind and heart fixed upon his, trusting him to finish what he has begun in us, no matter the cost to ourselves.
This is a challenging passage for us today. Our world is changing. Times for many are getting more and more difficult. It is a struggle for some to simply find something to eat or a place to live. The good news is we are not doing any of this on our own. We have a Savior who dwells in us and with us, who knows what it means to be homeless and hungry, to be despised and rejected, and yet be held in the midst of the Father’s love. In the midst of the fury of the evil one’s efforts to kill, steal, and destroy, he holds us in his care and will lead us safely home. As we follow him in faith, he will finish what he has begun in our lives. Praise God!
Heavenly Father, as things get harder and harder for us, continue to keep us in your tender loving care. Thank you, Jesus, for understanding us so well and for holding us steadfastly in the Father’s arms. Grant us the grace by your Spirit to pay the cost of discipleship you ask of us, faithfully enduring to the end. Amen.
“When the days were approaching for His ascension, He was determined to go to Jerusalem; and He sent messengers on ahead of Him, and they went and entered a village of the Samaritans to make arrangements for Him. But they did not receive Him, because He was traveling toward Jerusalem. When His disciples James and John saw this, they said, ‘Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’ But He turned and rebuked them, …. And they went on to another village. As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, ‘I will follow You wherever You go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.’ And He said to another, ‘Follow Me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.’ But He said to him, ‘Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.’ Another also said, ‘I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’ ” Luke 9:51–62 NASB
[Printable copy: https://lifeinthetrinity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/calling-fire-from-heaven.pdf ]
Stop Living in the Tombs
By Linda Rex
June 19, 2022, PROPER 7—I remember years ago receiving a phone call from a nurse who had helped in the delivery of my child. She lived down the road, and had seen me out walking, along with my newborn child in a stroller. She had called to tell me that my doctor wanted to see me.
The reason she had called was a good one. She was concerned that my postpartum depression had turned into clinical depression, and she wanted me to get the help I needed. What I had not known back then was that my mother had struggled with this same difficulty, and this was a genetic predisposition that could be passed down from one generation to the next.
I am, in a way, thankful that the recent pandemic has brought to the attention of many the importance of good mental health. Within churches, there has been a tendency to shun any discussion of mental health issues, or to lump them all under the heading of Satan’s work or demonic affliction. In my birth family, we discovered the painful consequences of being ignorant with regards to mental health issues—it’s important to be honest and upfront about our human brokenness and frailty, and to get the appropriate help when we need it.
If we look at the scriptures, we can see that struggles with depression and mental health related issues are addressed in the same way as many other of the struggles we have as human beings. Take, for example, the story of Elijah the prophet. Just after he had experienced a major triumph against the pagan prophets championed by Queen Jezebel and King Ahab, Elijah was threatened with the loss of his life. He ran to hide, ending up in a lonely place in the wilderness. There, he simply asked God to take his life. He didn’t feel he had anything else to offer—he was all alone and broken in soul, and done with the battle he had been fighting.
What is interesting about that story is that God didn’t magically take his depression away. Rather, he met him in the midst of it. He didn’t meet him in the great wind, nor in the tremendous earthquake, nor did he meet him in the massive fire. The way God engaged Elijah was through his still, small voice—meeting him right where he was and asking, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Then, having been present with him in the midst of his despair and distress, God gave him a new purpose, and sent him out with a firm, “Go, return on your way… (1 Kings 19:1–15a).”
I was reading Psalm 42 and 43 which are readings for this Sunday, and was reminded of how helpful the psalms were when I was in my darkest days. The writers of the psalms (or songs) captured many powerful emotions and our common human response to crises, tragedies, and affliction. Pondering these poetic expressions of the inner soul, allowing them to resonate with what is going on within our own soul, and even using them as prayers, can awaken us to the reality that God understands our difficulties and is present with us in the midst of them.
Listen to what the “sons of Korah” wrote in this excerpt:
“As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him? Day and night I have only tears for food, while my enemies continually taunt me, saying, ‘Where is this God of yours?’ My heart is breaking as I remember how it used to be: … But each day the Lord pours his unfailing love upon me, and through each night I sing his songs, praying to God who gives me life. … Send out your light and your truth; let them guide me. Let them lead me to your holy mountain, to the place where you live. There I will go to the altar of God, to God—the source of all my joy. I will praise you with my harp, O God, my God! Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God! I will praise him again—my Savior and my God!” (Psalm 42:1-3, 8; 43:3-5 NLT)
If you read the entirety of these two psalms together, you will see that the psalmist is wrestling with deep, passionate feelings of isolation and discouragement. He rightly interprets this longing of his soul as a need for God’s presence in his circumstances. He needs to know he is not going through this all by himself. He needs to have some glimmer of hope in the midst of the darkness.
In verse 3 of Psalm 43, the cry of the psalmist is, “Send out your light and your truth.” There, right there, is where we see a glimmer of the answer to our struggles with depression, despair and discouragement. God did send out his light and his truth. We find in the person of Jesus Christ himself, the One who is the Light and the Truth, what we are longing for. We find that God himself has taken on our human flesh, to live our life and die our death, to experience the worst that humans could inflict upon him, even to the point of suffering and death. He knows the pain of losing people dear to him. He knows the grief of being rejected, insulted, and falsely accused. And he knows what it is like to be betrayed and abandoned by his friends.
What God did was to enter into the midst of our human experience and bear it all upon himself. He went all the way into death itself, to bring our human flesh up into the presence of God, to be there in Christ forever. He sent the Spirit from the Father so that our human flesh becomes the temple of God’s presence, the place where we are able to worship him in Spirit and in truth. That means, in the midst of our darkest inner gloom, God’s Light is present and available. When it seems we have no hope, our heavenly Hope is present and able to lift us once more into a new place. We can seek the Lord, and when it feels as though our prayers never penetrate the ceiling, we may suddenly discover he has been right with us the whole time.
Jesus knows what it feels like when it seems we are all alone in the dark night of our soul, wandering about the tombs of our dreams. He knows what it feels like to barely be able to take another step. He knows the agony of one more moment of painful life. On the cross, he drove out the Satanic spirits of despair, desolation, and despondency—let them go. He clothed us with his righteousness—put it on. And he offers to you and to me his endurance, his forbearance, his hope, and his peace. He holds us and is faithful to us even when we are ready to give up.
Yes, there are times when we need to ask others for help. If we need to take medication to balance out our body chemistry, then we need to take it faithfully and consistently. If we need to talk with a therapist, then we need to have those conversations. But in every case, we always have Christ present in us and with us by the Spirit, giving us hope and strength. He will not abandon us, no matter how much in the moment it may feel like he has. Choose to ignore the lies that tell us God doesn’t love us or that he has abandoned us. Choose, by God’s grace, to believe Christ is still there, beneath all that mess, holding us steadfastly by the Spirit in the Father’s embrace. Let Jesus be who he is—the Light and the Truth at the bottom of the deep well of our darkness.
Thank you, Father, for never abandoning us or leaving us alone in our dark places, but coming to be with us and in us by your Spirit. Thank you, Jesus, for being the Light and the Truth who holds us safely in the Father’s embrace, filling us with the hope to go on. Grant us the grace to take one more step, to find the strength for one more day, even if that is all we can manage right now, through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
“For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from him; but when he cried to Him for help, He heard.” Psalm 22:24 NASB
“So they arrived in the region of the Gerasenes, across the lake from Galilee. As Jesus was climbing out of the boat, a man who was possessed by demons came out to meet him. For a long time he had been homeless and naked, living in the tombs outside the town. … A crowd soon gathered around Jesus, and they saw the man who had been freed from the demons. He was sitting at Jesus’ feet, fully clothed and perfectly sane, and they were all afraid. … The man who had been freed from the demons begged to go with him. But Jesus sent him home, saying, ‘No, go back to your family, and tell them everything God has done for you.’ So he went all through the town proclaiming the great things Jesus had done for him.” Luke 8:26–27, 35b, 37–39 NLT
[Printable copy: https://lifeinthetrinity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/stop-living-in-the-tombs.pdf ]
Receiving the Things of Jesus
By Linda Rex
June 12, 2022, HOLY TRINITY—Last week we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit, sent by Jesus from the Father, following Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. During our journey through the days on the Christian calendar, we have come to see the love of the Father expressed to all humanity as the Word of God, the Son of the Father, took on our humanity in the incarnation, lived our life, died our death and rose again, bringing all humanity in his glorified human flesh into the presence of the Father.
There at the Father’s side Jesus reigns supreme, and death, evil, and sin have lost their power over us. We are free now, in Christ, to love God and man, to be who God designed us to be as image-bearers of the divine One who is Father, Son, and Spirit, living as unique but equal persons in unity and perichoretic love. We celebrate the ascension and the coming of the Spirit, for now we find ourselves included in the midst of the intimate union and communion of the Father and the Son in the Spirit—included by faith in God’s very life and love.
During the season following Pentecost, we begin to look at what it means that Christ and the Father are present now in human flesh in the Person and presence of the Holy Spirit. What does it mean that God dwells with man even now in and through the Spirit? What difference does this make in our lives?
For many of my younger years, I believed that God was made up of the Father and the Son but that the Spirit was merely their power and essence, that he was not a personal being. I had missed all the scriptural references that quite clearly showed that the Spirit was a Person—the other Helper like Jesus—who made decisions, who gave gifts, who spoke and who listened. The biblical evidence was that what the disciples experienced and what Jesus taught about the Spirit, indicated that the Spirit was of the same essence as the Father and the Son, and was equal with them and yet uniquely related to them in that the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father.
The unique role that the Spirit plays in our lives is to take what is Jesus’ and to reveal it to us. Jesus forged within us the capacity to be temples of the living God—the dwelling place of God himself by the Spirit. What we find in the coming of the Spirit is that we can, by faith, participate in all that Christ did for us in his life, death, resurrection and ascension. His life as the beloved Son of the Father becomes our very own as we by faith are adopted as the Father’s beloved children. The perfected humanity of Christ becomes our very own as we trust in Christ’s finished work. What we discover when we turn away from ourselves and turn to Christ in faith is that God himself dwells in us.
The beginning of the human story was in God’s heart, as he determined to share life with his creatures in a unique and special way. We, as human beings, were designed from the beginning to reflect the nature of God and were given the capacity to make choices and to reject or accept God and his love. Our true way of being is to live in loving relationship with God and others. But we human beings have so often chosen instead to turn away from God and to determine for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, and to try to run this universe in a way which so often ends in death.
God knew, though, before he ever created us our capacity to reject him and to choose the ways of death. And he planned even then to come himself and do whatever it took to bring us home to himself. And so, we see that even before he created us, God had planned through the coming of his Son to include every human being in his life and to give them his Spirit so that they could live in union and communion with him forever.
Whatever we do as human beings, we need to realize that the truth of our being is found in the person of Jesus Christ and is present within us by the Holy Spirit. God wants us to awaken to the reality of what Christ has done in offering himself freely in his life, death and resurrection—by the Spirit we participate in his loving relationship with his Father. All of our life then becomes an expression of that loving relationship—we begin by the Spirit to reflect the qualities of Christ and begin to look like our loving heavenly Father, as we trust in Christ.
The Spirit is, as Jesus said, another Helper just like himself. When you see the Spirit, you see Jesus. When you see Jesus, you see the Father. The oneness of the Triune God is evident in their relationship with you through Jesus in the Spirit. How amazing it is that we each now live swept up into the life of the Triune God! But it is by faith in Jesus that we participate in and experience this reality. It is the Spirit who makes our experience of Christ’s intimate relationship with the Father and with us, real.
The Holy Spirit in you and me speaks to us the words of Jesus. Jesus said while on earth that he spoke only what he heard the Father say. This is why the apostle Paul said that when we walk in the Spirit, we won’t walk in our flesh. If Jesus is the truth of our being, then we want to walk in him, right? So, we follow the lead of the Spirit, who speaks to our hearts the truth about who Jesus is and how Jesus lives, and we won’t live in a way that is contrary to the truth of who we are in Christ.
The Spirit in us gives us guidance. When we read the Scriptures and ask for God’s inspiration and guidance, the Spirit enables us to discern the truth about Jesus and about ourselves. When we listen to inspired speakers who preach the Word of God in accordance with the truth, the Spirit enables us to understand it and moves us to live in obedience.
The Spirit places within us Jesus’ own heart and mind, and we discover we don’t want to do the wrong thing, but desire to do what is right in the Father’s sight. We find when temptation is strong and we turn to Jesus, that we are able to resist the temptation and make the God-honoring choice because Jesus’ choice is given to us by the Spirit. And when we don’t do what is loving and we experience the guilt that comes with failure to be true to who we are as image-bearers of God, the Spirit reminds us of the grace of God, enabling us to see that God knows all things and he does not condemn us—he forgives us.
On this Holy Trinity Sunday, we pause to ponder, in awe and wonder and gratitude, our amazing God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit, and who has included each of us in his life and love. How blessed we are, that we are never alone, but are always and ever held in God’s love, cared for and cherished, now and forever, as God’s beloved adopted children, in Jesus by the Spirit.
Heavenly Father, thank you for making us your very own, beloved and cherished, and for including us in your life. Thank you for the gift of your Spirit, who enables us to know you and live in relationship with you, all through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
“I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.” John 16:12–15 NASB
[Printable copy of this blog https://lifeinthetrinity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/receiving-the-things-of-jesus.pdf ]
Our Life in the Trinity 