A
New Mission – Activate Ego Trip… Pizza Delivery Guy? - Purity 815
Purity 815 08/20/2022 Purity 815 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a pair of elephants under blue
skies comes to us from a friend who shared this scene from his family’s visit
to the Indianapolis Zoo during their epic road trip vacation earlier this
month. My friend’s road trip took his
family through Lancaster & Gettysburg Pennsylvania, through Indianapolis,
to Chicago and then back home with stops at Lake Erie, Niagara Falls, and to
Buffalo where his family went to a Buffalo Bills game! Just like these elephants seem to be headed
in the same direction, I have to admit that when I contemplate my friend’s path
and the photos of his family’s adventures, it makes me consider the possibility
of following in his footsteps someday!
Well, after what turned out to be an extra long Friday
at work for me yesterday, I am happy to have made it to the first day of my
vacation this Saturday morning and pray that all who listen to or read this
message use this 2nd to last weekend in August to have some summertime
fun and to thank the Lord for all He provides.
Unlike, my friend I didn’t make any plans to travel
this week but have decided to use my time off to enjoy the things I have at
home that work keeps me away from. Sometimes
familiarity can breed contempt and send us seeking happiness elsewhere when we don’t
appreciate the good things we have in our lives. But I know how good I got it and I know the
One who led me here, so this week’s “stay-cation” will be one of rest,
relaxation, and gratitude.
But let’s keep it real, as someone who does a blog six
days a week and who is always looking to follow the Lord’s will for my life, I
won’t be just sitting around bored as I have some things I want to do this week
that will make my “time off” seem like the illusion that it is. Let’s face it. Even when we are on vacation,
there are things that have to be done, or should be done anyway, like bathing
and feeding ourselves for instance.
I suppose I could stay in bed and fast to “do nothing”
but I’d rather not waste the time I have off avoiding anything that could be
considered work just to say “I didn’t have to do anything this week!” The truth is I like to be clean and to be fed
and that desire goes beyond the physical realm.
The desire to follow the Lord make you want to be
clean in His sight and well fed with His wisdom. So we study the word of God and connect with
God in the conversation of prayer, to know His presences and to live in harmony
with Him. When we follow Him, God cleans
up our act and after we walk in it for a while we discover that even though we
have the choice to do whatever we want or to do nothing, walking in the Spirit
is the way that leads to real peace, love, and joy.
So this week I am not going to take a vacation from
the blog. Frankly, it’s part of my daily spiritual practice at this point and
the idea of stopping even for a short while doesn’t appeal to me at all. I consider encouraging others to follow the
Lord part of my mission in life and the blog also provides a forum where I can
thank the Lord and share His goodness and faithfulness that never takes a day
off.
I also have plans on creating lesson content for the
Bonhoeffer Discipleship course that I plan on launching after Labor Day and
look forward to allowing Bonhoeffer’s exposition of scripture fill me with
wisdom and encouragement to keep walking and talking with God on the path of
Christian Discipleship.
I also have a training scheduled to do become one of
the web hosts of Freedom in Christ Ministries monthly Care and Training Series that
they do once a month that encourage and equip anyone who wants to join the
cause of helping people experience and maintain their Freedom in Christ. What some could possibly look at as an
imposition, I look at as an honor and as further evidence that I correctly followed
the Lord’s call when I decided to become a Community Freedom Ministry Associate
on the heals of completing my Master’s degree in Christian Counseling.
When others would be looking to take a rest from the
whirlwind trials and tribulations of going through a nasty divorce, working two
jobs, buying a new home, and completing a post graduate degree, I felt the need
to spend the money and the time to be trained as a CFMA and to launch a new discipleship ministry. This could have seemed a fool hardy thing to
do considering “all that I had been through” but the fruit of that decision has
resulted in me not only finding and marrying the love of my life but has led to
what I consider to be a worthwhile ministry where I have literally seen the
face of the enemy and watched captives get set free. God led me to my purpose it seems and I am
happy to serve in this new capacity.
But God also led me to my wife, and when you love
someone you walk with them and you support them in their walk in what ever way
you can.
My wife’s journey has been as tumultuous as mine and
continues to be a roller coaster ride of sorts.
The latest turn is a new career as the general manager at a local restaurant.
What started as part time job to help
ends meet in the summer months quickly turned into an opportunity that she
boldly decided to pursue.
But with the new job, comes new responsibilities and
new hours. The role of Schulyerville Pizza and Pasta general manager requires her
to cash out the days receipts at the end of business 5 days a week and it
requires her to work Saturdays.
As a two household family that meant we would be separated
from one another during our time together on the weekends. When I considered the new schedule, I assured
TammyLyn that I would still come up to our countryside home like I always do
and would patiently wait for her to get out of work.
But then I decided that I really wanted to show my
wife I support her new career and wanted to her that “where ever you go, I go”. So since I know the manager, I applied to
work at the restaurant as a delivery driver.
Yup, a pizza delivery guy. So, today on my first day of vacation from my
regular job, I will be headed into work with my wife and be trained to help the
kitchen staff with being prepared for the day and to make deliveries when
called to.
I see my life as a living expression of my faith and
when my wife was called to this new career, I wanted to show her that we are in
this thing together and since God brought her into my life I would boldly go
where ever He called us.
So I will seek to represent the Lord by doing the
best job I can and to encourage the people I encounter along the way that life
is good because God is with us.
So whether you are called to work today, or if you
are on the road or just enjoying the comforts of home, keep walking and talking
with God. When you draw close to Him, He will lift you up and direct your steps
in all kinds of ways you couldn’t anticipate but when we follow Him we can take
each new opportunity or face each new challenge with peace, love, and joy.
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Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible
Promise Book for Men”.
This morning’s meditation verse is:
Psalm 46:10 (NLT2)
10 “Be still, and know that I
am God! I will be honored by every nation. I will be honored throughout the
world.”
Today’s verse encourages us to be still and to know the Lord with
the assurance that “every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord.”
Okay, I know, today’s verse doesn’t same that! But it does say that God will be honored by
every nation and through out the world. And
how will this be? Through Jesus Christ,
of course!
Today’s verse is God speaking in the Old Testament of a future
fulfillment of the entirety of His creation honoring Him, that points to the
second coming of Jesus Christ.
As much as the church can evangelize and I can encourage people to
follow Jesus, the word indicates that not everyone will come to faith in Jesus,
even though the word tells us that the Lord doesn’t want anyone to perish.
So how will the Lord be honored by every nation and throughout the
world when a good portion of the earth’s population openly rejects His Messiah
and even denies His existence?
Oh, God is going to make everyone know who Jesus is and when He
comes back they’re won’t be any denying who He is. God in the person of Jesus
Christ will be honored by every nation through out the world when He comes back
to judge and rule the earth. It will be
with tears of joy or with tears of bitterness but every person in every nation
through out the earth will give honor to God by declaring that Jesus is
Lord.
So what do we do in the meantime?
Today’s verse tells us to be still and to know that God is God and that
He basically has everything taken care of.
Things will be made right. Justice will come to those who refuse God’s mercy
and grace and there will be hell to pay.
But for those of us in Christ, we can be still, we can rest in
knowing that God is with us and for us and that we have nothing to fear because
we know Him and have entered into His kingdom family.
So be still and know that God is the sovereign king over all
creation and that we have peace with Him through Jesus and He will work all
things together for good until the day when all the nations through out the world
will give Him honor.
______________________________________________________________________
As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.
Today we continue sharing from Clinton E. Arnold’s
“Powers of Darkness”
As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage all to purchase Clinton Arnold’s books for your own
private study and to support his work. This resource is available on
many websites for less than $20.00.
Critiquing the Modern World View
Should
the academic community begin to rethink the part of the Western world view that
denies the actual existence of spirits, demons, angels and supernatural powers?
I am convinced that we should for the following reasons:
1. On the issue of
the actual existence of evil spirits, science is unable to decide the question.
Bultmann, together with many modern thinkers, did not frame the question about
the real existence of evil spirits in terms of competing world views. For
Bultmann the question hinged on whether one accepts a mythical view of the
world or an accurate scientific understanding of the world. He whimsically
quips, “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless [note: he is
writing in the middle forties] and to avail ourselves of modern medical and
surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament
world of spirits and miracles.”
This kind of view,
ever so present in our modern world, elevates science to a pedestal where it is
given authority to make judgments on questions that it has no ability to judge.
Just as it is beyond the scope of science to adjudicate on matters of morality,
so it is also beyond the parameters of science to make a decision on the
question of the real existence of the devil and evil spirits. J. B. Russell has
rightly commented, “The fact that most people today dismiss the idea as
old-fashioned, even ‘disproved,’ is the result of a muddle in which science is
called on to pass judgment in matters unrelated to science.” If spirits do not
have a tangible physical existence, modern science does not have the tools for
verifying or denying their real existence. This makes the question of their
existence depend not on scientific observation, but upon revelation, world view
and human experience.
My interpretation of
the Old and New Testament affirms that these writers believed in the actual
existence of the powers. Significantly, there are not two schools of thought
within the biblical revelation, one affirming and the other denying the reality
of the powers. All the writers of sacred Scripture spoke with a common voice on
this issue. The tradition of the church also corroborates it. As will be shown,
the world views of many societies give credence to the idea of evil spirit
beings.
2. Purely
naturalistic explanations are not adequate for describing many forms of evil in
the world. Even in the West many people experience phenomena in their lives
that are difficult to explain scientifically, either through physical or
psychological analysis. Australian scholar Graham Twelftree develops this point
quite convincingly in his book Christ
Triumphant. He notes that T. K. Oesterreich, in his monumental study on the
concept of “possession” among primitive and modern people, reached the
conclusion that possession is a psychological compulsion. Nevertheless,
Oesterreich admitted that “an important unexplainable residue remains, for
which there is as yet no psychological explanation, and which continues to
leave the question open as to whether certain happenings transcend nature.”24
While the field of psychology was only in its infancy when Oesterreich wrote,
Twelftree demonstrates that psychologists and counselors today are still faced
with an “unexplained residue.” Even anthropologists face the same unexplainable
phenomena in the interpretation of their fieldwork. Twelftree explains:
From
this we cannot go on to conclude that there are no medical, psychological or
rational explanations for the anthropologists’ and sociologists’ observations
of an unexplained residue but it still does suggest that the question [of
demonic influence] remains open. It also means that even where diseases may be
considered to have a natural or regular explanation the demonic need not be ruled
out.
It
was in the process of his lifelong quest to find an explanation for horrific
evil in the world that Jeffrey Burton Russell became increasingly convinced of
the real existence of the traditional devil—“a mighty person with intelligence
and will whose energies are bent on the destruction of the cosmos and on the
misery of its creatures.” For Russell the potential global annihilation insured
by nuclear war, the untold suffering and killings of an Auschwitz, and the fact
that a mother could put her four-year-old child in an oven and burn her to
death (Auburn, Maine, 1984), cannot be explained by mere human destructiveness.
There must be a powerful force leading humanity to destruction.
3. Those of us in the
West need to place our attitude toward the supernatural into the broader sweep
of human history. The last 300 years in the West represent the only time in
human history that the existence of evil spirits has been treated with
widespread skepticism. Certainly one can point to a variety of ancient philosophers
throughout the centuries who doubted the reality of the gods and displayed a
skeptical outlook toward supernatural interventions in human history. Such
writers are, by far, more the exception than the rule. On the popular level, in
particular, never was there a time of such widespread skepticism than in the
West over the past three hundred years. This consideration by itself is not
sufficient justification to engage in revisionary activity, but it should
provoke a questioning of the prevailing world view.
4. The West also
needs to realize that it is the only contemporary society that denies the
reality of evil spirits. The field of anthropology reveals that throughout
Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands, among folk Muslims—virtually anywhere the Western
world view has not permeated—the idea of evil spirits is an integral part of
the world view of many people groups.
African or Korean
Christians, for instance, have no difficulty understanding Jesus’ exorcisms or
Paul’s references to principalities and powers. In fact, Christians from these
regions often express disappointment that the Western church has not been able
to help them develop a Christian perspective on the realm of spirits.
For many Westerners,
unfortunately including even Christians, such world views that continue to give
the demonic a place are discounted as prescientific. Often there is an
assumption that once these people are educated, they will eventually see that
their ways of perceiving reality were skewed. It is supposed that they will
eventually begin to think of evil in “correct” abstract terms.
A number of Christian
scholars, however, have begun to question the Western world view. As a result
of teaching over a ten-year period in an Indian theological college, New
Testament scholar Peter O’Brien grew increasingly convinced of this Western
cultural anomaly. He remarks, “A number of those from southern Asia who were
studying in the college expressed their dissatisfaction with some Western
commentaries on the Gospels and the Epistles because of their failure to take
seriously the accounts about demons, exorcism, or Christ’s defeat of them. The
biblical and Pauline world view did not present a stumbling block to these younger
third world scholars.” O’Brien argues forcefully for taking the realm of evil
spirits seriously.
Anthropologist Paul
Hiebert made a similar observation as a result of ministering the gospel in
India. He came to the conclusion that Western culture has a significant blind
spot when it comes to the question of spirits and evil powers—a blind spot he
has termed “the flaw of the excluded middle.” He describes Western
evangelicalism as answering questions of life experience either in empirical
(scientific) or theistic (divine) terms, but neglecting the middle zone of
spirit forces that are believed by non-Western cultures to influence life. He
paints the results of this dichotomy in rather startling terms for its
implications for missions: “When tribal people spoke of fear of evil spirits,
[Western missionaries] denied the existence of the spirits rather than claim
the power of Christ over them. The result, as Newbigin has pointed out, is that
Western Christian missions has been one of the greatest secularizing forces in
history.” Hiebert’s article has begun to have a significant impact on many
evangelical thinkers.
New Testament scholar
Gordon Fee also reacts to the undue amount of influence the Western world view
has exerted in our reading of Paul. Commenting on Paul’s reference to “demons”
in 1 Cor 10:20, he remarks:
It
is fashionable among modern scholars to “exonerate” Paul at this point as being
a man of his times. He believed in demons as did all his contemporaries; but we
do not because we have “come of age.” But that takes neither biblical
revelation nor spiritual reality seriously. Bultmann’s “modern man,” who cannot
believe in such reality, is the true “myth,” not the gospel he set out to
“demythologize.” The cloistered existence of the Western university tends to
isolate Western academics from the realities that many Third World people
experience on a regular basis.”
5.
The naturalistic world view of the West has never convinced the entire populace
on the issue of evil spirits. The occult has found many devotees throughout
Europe and North America over the past 200 years. With regard to the phenomenon
of spirit-possession, London anthropologist I. M. Lewis observes:
Although
the increasingly liberal treatment by the Church of possession that was assigned
to the work of Satan, and the rise of secularism and modern science in the
nineteenth century, naturally fostered a widening of skepticism regarding
peripheral spirit-possession, the phenomenon did not entirely disappear.
Lewis
calls attention to the irony of an upsurge in spiritualism in the Victorian
era, especially after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859.
Many Christian groups
have continued to affirm the real existence of evil spirits. Protestant
Pentecostal and charismatic groups unanimously believe in the reality and power
of the evil spirit forces and minister to people on the basis of that
assumption. Numerous other Protestant denominations, subgroups, independent
churches and individuals within some of the mainline churches affirm the
existence of this realm. Even the Roman Catholic church continues to maintain
an office of exorcist. It should also be noted that the pope, supported by a
number of theologians, including Cardinal Ratzinger, have reaffirmed their
belief in the objective reality of the devil and his demons.
In recent years
evangelicalism has grown increasingly open to the idea that evil spirit
emissaries do exist and need to be reckoned with on a spiritual basis. This
concern is evidenced in part by the vast number of books and pamphlets
published over the past decade on the topic of “spiritual warfare.” Much of
this literature is coming from the pens of evangelicals who are neither
Charismatic nor Pentecostal. The formation of the “International Center for
Biblical Counseling” (Sioux City, Iowa) is representative of this growing
concern to factor in principles of “spiritual warfare” into the counseling
ministry of the church. A recent symposium at Fuller Theological Seminary also
brought together forty participants from a wide variety of traditional
evangelical institutions (only seven participants represented classic
Pentecostal/charismatic institutions) to discuss the issue of evil spirits in
relationship to local church ministries and world evangelization; all the participants
assumed the reality of the demonic.
The “Western world
view” therefore does not represent everyone in the West. Nevertheless, an
antisupernatural bias still characterizes the academic community in the West
and perhaps also a majority of the populace, although change is on the horizon.
6. Popular Western
culture is changing. I noted in the introduction how the West is experiencing
an “occult explosion,” which the rapid growth of the New Age movement is now
fueling. The end result is that more and more people are opening themselves up
to believe in the supernatural, the paranormal and the realm of spirits.
Western culture (quite apart from the influence of Christianity) may very well
be far down the road of change. It is quite possible that Hans Küng is correct
in his assessment that we are on the verge of a new epoch, a change in
paradigms (world view), that will distance us from the “Modern-Enlightened”
age.
In conclusion, I want
to stress that I am not advocating a complete paradigm shift that would take us
back to a prescientific era. I do not believe in a flat earth or a geocentric
universe. I laud the utility of the scientific method for helping us to
discover innumerable secrets about our world.
What I am suggesting
is that we engage in a critical re-evaluation of our Western world view on one
important issue—the actual existence of good and evil spirits. There are many
reasons we should not only accept Paul’s affirmations regarding the existence
of evil spirits, but also directly appropriate his suggestions for responding
to this realm as Christians.
As citizens of the
West, however, we must first strive toward making this as important a part of
our world view as it was for Paul. The powers of darkness are real, we need to
be conscious of their influence, and we need to respond to them appropriately.[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!
at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
to be encouraged.
My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)
Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship
[1]
Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness:
Principalities & Powers in Paul’s Letters (Downers Grove,
IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 1992), 177–182.
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