Fw: January 2008 Been Thinking About Column

Greetings from RBC Ministries BEEN THINKING ABOUT: FATHER ISSUES Some of us have a hard time relating to God the Father. We sing to the Son, pray to the Son, and ask ourselves, "What would Jesus do?" But when Jesus talks about His Father, He touches issues that may be affecting us more than we realize. Maybe our problem is that His Father doesn't answer our prayers as we want Him to. Or we think of Him in terms of the human fathers we have known. Many of us have never even heard our biological father say, "I love you." Some have inherited a legacy of abandonment, addiction, and even abuse. Even the best of fathers fail us in life and leave us in death. In one way or another, all of us have been affected by what the Bible calls "the sins of the fathers." Sins of the Fathers The same Bible that tells us to honor our fathers also documents the moral failures of patriarchs like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon. Even the New Testament acknowledges the tendency of fathers to provoke their children to anger (Ephesians 6:4). Another passage makes a distinction between the fathers who discipline us as they see best and the Father in heaven who always knows how to correct us for our own good (Hebrews 12:9-10). In a day when so many of us long for a return to family values, it is disappointing to discover that a good dad is hard to find in the Bible. But maybe this is a disappointment that can work in our favor. A Different Kind of Father A woman I know told me that she turned to the Father in heaven looking for a parent who was different from her biological father. She echoed the hope of the songwriter David, who wrote, "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me" (Psalm 27:10). David repeated the idea that God is a "Father to the fatherless" in another song (Psalm 68:5), but it was Jesus who gave us the most personal understanding of the Father in heaven. The Father of Jesus Scripture doesn't tell us much about the relationship between Jesus and Joseph, the man who married Jesus' mother and raised Jesus as his son. Instead, even at the age of 12, Jesus is found relating to His eternal Father. After staying behind in Jerusalem following the Feast of the Passover, Jesus said to Mary and Joseph, "Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?" (Luke 2:49). Years later when Jesus went public at about the age of 30, He talked a lot about the Father. He told His disciples that He had come to bring them to His Father who was speaking and working through Him (John 14:8-11). When one of them asked Him to show them the Father, He said, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (v.9). Then, as He was about to complete the work that He said His Father had given Him to do, Jesus told His friends that He was leaving to prepare a place for them in His Father's house (John 14:2). He said, "I am going to the Father, for My Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). From all that Jesus says about His Father, it's clear that He wants us to love and trust His Father as He does. A Father of Biblical Proportions Many of us, however, have not found the help we are looking for in an invisible Father. We are troubled when our Father in heaven doesn't answer our prayers in the time and ways we hoped He would. We're quite sure that if our own dads, imperfect as they are, had 10,000 angels to help them, they would give us help that our Father in heaven has withheld. Too often we find ourselves echoing the familiar words of the psalmist and Jesus, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46). But where did we get the idea that our Father in heaven should follow the script we write for Him? If Jesus was like His Father, then both are as unpredictable in action as They are unchanging in character. Jesus didn't tell His disciples what they wanted to hear. He didn't use His strength to do everything they wanted Him to do. He had plans they couldn't understand. Yet, in the end, in spite of all of this unpredictability, Jesus revealed a Father who gave them more than they could have hoped for. In hindsight, Jesus' friends could see how faithful He had been to them. When they thought they were going to die in a storm (Mark 4:37-38), when it seemed as if He didn't care (John 11:1-6, 32), and when all hope seemed lost, Jesus had surprised them by showing them His Father's ability to still a storm, raise the dead, and replace despair with hope. This Father who revealed Himself through Jesus is not like the dads who let us feel their biceps, lifted us to their shoulders, and showed up to support us at school events. But He is also not the problem and mystery some of us think He is. Jesus is just like Him, and He is just like Jesus. In heart and personality, Jesus is exactly like the Father, who "so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son" for us (John 3:16). This is different than thinking that Jesus came to protect us from His Father. When we see Jesus dying for us, interceding for us, and allowing us to use His name to approach the Father, it's not because the Son is more merciful than the Father. It is because the Father and Son are in perfect agreement about Their love for us. And so we pray: Father in heaven, we need to get past the issues with our own fathers that have clouded our trust in You. While there is so much about You that we don't understand, please help us to see all that You want us to see about Yourself in the walk and in the words of Your Son. –Mart De Haan

God restores

What follows is a beautiful testimony of one woman's restoration after a life filled with hurt,hardship and betrayal:

It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But what kind of story does a scar tell?
Vicki Duffy's scars tell quite a story. Her story begins after she was raped by her mother's boyfriend.

"He came into my room," Duffy says. "I was scared. I remember crying, and he raped me."

Vicki was only 5 years old.

"He followed it up with, 'You tell anyone, I'm going to kill your mother. I'm going to kill your dog, and your brother.' So he went for all three," Duffy says.

Months went by before Vicki ever said a word.

"I felt I must have done something to cause him to do this," Vicki says. "I thought, 'I need to be nicer or kinder.' I had all those feelings at that moment."

But no matter how "good" Vicki tried to be, her life just got worse. Her older brother, who was once her best friend, suddenly turned into her arch enemy. He threw words like weapons and punches laced with hate.

'You're stupid. You're ugly. You're an idiot,' her brother would tell her.

"After hearing that for weeks, months, and days on end, getting the brunt of someone's anger, you start to believe it," Vicki says.

Then the verbal and physical abuse from her brother turned into something else.

"Just one night out of the blue he raped me," Vicki says. "It happened. He raped me, and I didn't even see it coming."

Vicki was 11-years old, her brother was 13.

"The themes of, 'You're never going to amount to anything.' 'It's your fault.' 'If you tell, it's your fault anyway.' I started believing that so much so that when he actually raped me, he kept to his threats," Vicki says.

'I felt like I was this atrocity," she says. "I felt like I didn't look good. I felt like I was huge and fat. I was incredibly insecure with massively low self-esteem. "

And Vicki felt confused. She began to fantasize about being a boy, even dressing like one. By her early 20's she was actively living a gay lifestyle, and was, in her words, "promiscuous. "

By the age of 24, she had been in half a dozen mental hospitals for a litany of mental illnesses: depression, anorexia, bulimia, and drug and alcohol addiction. But one compulsion consumed her.

"It was like doing something that you like so much, whatever it is," she says. "Fill in the blank: sex, a great chocolate cake, gambling, this was it for me. I could taste it. I couldn't wait for the next moment."

Vicki is talking about 'cutting,' an act where someone uses sharp objects like knives, scissors, and razors to cut their bodies. What made her do it?

"It was something that I could control and nobody else could," she says.

Vicki still has the scars. On one arm there are over 200 cuts. On both forearms she required a skin graph from self inflicted cigarette and lighter burns.

"I needed the scar on the outside of me to match the horrible scars on the inside that no one could see," she says. "And the pain and turmoil I wanted to come out on my own body."

"I was cutting and burning with anything I could get my hands on. I was an alcoholic. I dabbled in drugs. I was in promiscuous relationships. I was on 17 pills a day, on psychiatric medication," she says.

Then one day something happened.

"Nothing could compare to the day that I was in the presence of God," Vicki remembers.

"As soon as I walked in there was such peace. I really don't know how to explain it other than a 'who' feeling."

"The urges and desires for a few hours left. And that might sound like nothing," she says, "but it's something, because the fact that they weren't there was enough for me to go hmmm, maybe there is something to this God thing."

So she went back to church, and after a couple of visits someone gave her a Bible.

"I picked it up and it opened right up to the book of Mark, chapter 5, and I started reading it. I read about how this man was tormented night and day and cut his body with stones and how he wasn't in his right mind. The short and the long of it was how Jesus healed him," Vicki says.

"I was so angry and so agitated. I felt like, 'How dare you? You did it for this guy, but you can't do it for me?' So I just start going into this fit."

In her desperation, Vicki gave God an ultimatum.

"I said to God, 'I'm going to give you 30 days to prove yourself real,'" Vicki says. "I gave him 30 days and proceeded to really plead with Him. I said, 'If you did it for that guy, do it for me.' I didn't know how to pray. I didn't realize, I was praying right then. I was swearing. I was yelling. But I was having a conversation, and I believe God met me where I was at."

"I said, 'Change me. Help. Take anything that is not of you from me, in Jesus name, amen.' That was my prayer."

"Within the next few weeks, the desire to cut and burn started to go," Vicki says. "By June of 1995 I took all my medication and flushed it down the toilet. I started going to church on Wednesdays to mid-week service."

"Within a year and a half I hadn't cut. I hadn't burned. I hadn't had any kind of thoughts. I was getting control on the eating," Vicki says. "The thing is during that year and a half, I forgave. I made the choice, 'I'm going to move on and move forward in my life.'"

"It's all about making choices," she says. "We can't make a choice in what happens to us, whether we're harmed or raped, but we can choose how we deal and how we react to it, and I was making the wrong choice."

Once I forgave. I was just like, 'Wow, life is good. I can change me, and I can change how I act and react to them.' It's a choice, and I chose to spend those two years seeking God and getting healed and set free completely."

Today, over a decade later, Vicki is happily married with a beautiful son. She's even written a book, No More Pain.

She has a message for people who see themselves as bad and beyond God's love. What does she want to tell them?

"There's hope. As long as there's breath in their life, there's hope," Vicki says. "It doesn't matter whether you believe in God, He believes in you. And He can make it work. You give everything else a chance, the cutting, the burning, the alcohol, the drugs, the gambling, and the sex. We give that a chance, let's give God a chance."
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~DO LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS~

Fw: December 2007 Been Thinking About Column

 

Greetings from RBC Ministries BEEN THINKING ABOUT: ENLIGHTENMENT What does it take to be wise? In a television commercial for online yellow pages, actor David Carradine plays a guru to a young seeker. When the student asks, "How do I find enlightenment?" the master says, "Yellowbook.com . . . . Everyone is searching for something. . . . After all, it is a material world, and with yellowbook.com, you just type in what and where." The ad is insightful. Wisdom does involve the practical use of knowledge to get what we are looking for. The commercial is also right in suggesting that wisdom is more accessible than many of us might have thought. Could it be that easy? A New Testament writer by the name of James says followers of Christ can have wisdom for the asking. With a promise that sounds too good to be true, he writes, "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him" (James 1:5). James adds only one condition. He says we need to want to know how to trust God in the middle of our problems (vv.6-8). Why would we need it? James wrote to people who were struggling with problems that tested their faith (James 1:2-3). As first-century followers of Christ, they probably had counted the cost of religious and social persecution. But they might not have foreseen all of the ways they would disappoint and disillusion one another. From the beginning, Jesus had taught His disciples to love one another (John 15:17). Yet, just a few years later, His followers were at war with one another (James 4:1-2). With prejudice, hurtful words, and outright hypocrisy, family and friends were acting like enemies. It is in this conflict-filled setting that James assures his readers that wisdom is closer than they might have thought. But he does more than tell them how to find it. He also shows them how to recognize a wisdom that comes from "above" rather than from "below." What does it look like? James writes that the wisdom from "above" is first: Pure—James shows that the wisdom from "above" doesn't mix faith in Christ with the motives of greed, envy, and selfish ambition (James 3:14-17; 4:1-3). This can be an eye-opener for those of us who are inclined to blame one another for our problems without looking at our own hearts. When good relationships go bad, thoughtful people often ask one another, "What do you want me to do?" James, however, gives us reason to first ask ourselves, "Why am I so upset? Where is my heart? What motives am I bringing to this conflict? Is my intent really to show the presence of Christ in me?" Only when we honestly want to be in line with the pure intent and heart of God can we respond to conflict in a way that is genuinely: Peaceable—When our hearts resonate with the heart of God, we long for peace rather than conflict. Even when circumstances can never be the same again, "the wisdom that is from above" helps us to see the foolishness of a bitter or vengeful spirit. Enlightenment that enables us to value peace over conflict (James 1:5) is a gift from God. It is a new goal that gives birth to: Gentleness—In the ancient world, this word was used of kings who wore their power with dignity, forbearance, and appropriate leniency toward their subjects. Today, in the middle of mutual disappointments and hurts, this is the kind of wisdom that enables citizens of King Jesus to represent His authority with a royal spirit of kindness. A listening ear and a gentle voice can lower the temperature of a difficult moment. Such strong and purposeful gentleness becomes a basis for wisdom that is: Willing to yield—Because it takes two to tangle, one person who is willing to give up the urge to get even can make a difference. Instead of repaying wrong for wrong, a willingness to return good for evil is an expression of strength rather than weakness. Surrendering to God, instead of merely focusing on the one who has hurt us, enables us to work patiently for an outcome that is: Full of mercy and good fruit—When our heart is yielded to the wisdom of Christ, we see the value of planting seeds of undeserved kindness while waiting for the fruit of peace. With the insight that comes from above (James 3:15-17), we are willing to give others the space they need to think for themselves. In the grace of patience, we give them time to experience the growing influence of Christ in their own lives. Rather than responding to others in a near-sighted and superficial way, we show a wisdom that is: Without partiality—Earlier in his letter, James wrote about followers of Christ who were inclined to treat people of wealth and influence better than the poor and needy (James 2:1-10). Now he shows that responding to others without partiality is a way of showing the wisdom and heart of God. Rising above the influence of wealth, social standing, or appearance enables us to live with a wisdom that is: Without hypocrisy—This seventh identifying mark of wisdom caps the rest. James uses it to celebrate the integrity of the enlightenment God wants to give us. He knows that in our better moments none of us wants to talk the language of faith while practicing the goals and politics of envy and ambition. What can we expect? James is honest with us from the beginning of his letter. He wants us to know that God doesn't make wisdom easily accessible to help us get what we want and when we want it (James 1:2-5; 4:1-3). His insight is offered to enable us to develop patience and a maturity that is full of the spirit of Christ. It is this patience, the "wisdom that is from above," which is like seeds of peace that, in season, will give all of us what we really are searching for (James 3:18). Father in heaven, thank You for promising us the enlightenment we need to patiently trust You. Help us to recognize the seeds of peace You value more than the material desires that divide us. –Mart De Haan Click here to share your thoughts on Mart's article or visit us online. We value your feedback. Feel free to pass along this newsletter to your family and friends. © 2007 RBC Ministries

The One Thing - Daily Devotional From New Creation Church

It Shall Not Come Near You!     Psalm 91:7 7A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you. Your doctor or insurance agent may ask you, “Do you have a family history of cancer?” If you say “yes”, they will tell you that you will probably get some form of cancer too. Now, if you are without God, you would probably agree with them and start worrying about your health. But you are not without God! In fact, His Word tells you, “A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you.” Therefore, even if you have a family history of cancer, and your family members have died of cancer, you can have the confidence to say that it will not come near you! My mother had this attitude. After a thorough medical check-up, the doctor was surprised and told her that she did not have high blood pressure or heart disease, although these two conditions have plagued her father and siblings. You see, my mother had already firmly declared that no deadly family related disease would come near her. Praise God for my mother’s trust in God’s Word because I am the generation after her! In fact, after my mother told me about the results of her check-up, I randomly opened my Bible only to read about Rahab the harlot who by faith, “… did not perish with those who did not believe”. (Hebrews 11:31) Beloved, God wants you to know that even though you are in this world, you are not of this world. You belong to Him. You don’t have to get caught in dire situations along with the people of the world. Because God is on your side, “Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the perilous pestilence”. (Psalm 91:3) Even when it comes to generational diseases, you can boldly declare, “That disease stops here!” because you have God and His Word. And when you believe God and His Word, you will see His promises come to pass for you — “A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you!” © Copyright Joseph Prince, 2006. All rights reserved. All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version ®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2006–2007 New Creation Church