Bend, Don’t Break…. Or Go Ahead and Break it! - Purity 874
Purity 874 10/28/2022 PURITY 874 PODCAST
Good morning,
Today’s photo of the sun captured between clouds and
framed perfectly between the seasonally decorated posts of a front porch comes
to us from a friend who shared a series of photos of their newly constructed
home. While my friend didn’t share their
new address, judging by the distant horizon, I would guess that they didn’t
move far from their previous place and that this view is of an easterly
direction toward the Hudson River and the distant Berkshires, but that only
narrows down the location of their new homestead to be, possibly in the Ulster,
Greene, or Albany County areas of Upstate NY.
My friend’s husband is a humble man of God who I
worked with on a vacation mission trip to flood affected areas of Louisiana
back in 2017 and I knew him to be highly skilled in the areas of construction,
but the other photos his wife shared of their new home show that he is a master
craftsman as the photos she shared could have been lifted from the pages of Better
Homes and Garden.
Well, It’s Friday again and as much as we might like
the excitement of going away for the weekend or going away for vacation to
distant lands, in the end there is really no place like home to find comfort
and rest. And I for one am looking
forward to the end of the work day as I will make my way north to be with the
one who gives me a sense of home no matter where we are, my beloved wife
TammyLyn.
In our love for one another, we married with two
households. While we may have to be patient to arrive at a date when we dwell
under the same roof on a permanent basis, we knew that we were meant to be
together and I was just telling her last night of how I couldn’t imagine, and
didn’t want to imagine, a life where she
wasn’t my wife. They say home is where the heart is and my heart is with TammyLyn,
now until the day the Lord calls me home.
Well as much as I can find peace in the presence of
the Lord and my wife, I am currently in a season where the demands of work,
ministry, and family are all coming together in a way where there is scarcely a
moment to kick back and enjoy all that the Lord has provided me with.
The Freedom in Christ Course I facilitate only has
three weeks remaining and I am now in the season of leading the participants
through the Steps to Freedom in Christ.
I am also currently presenting an informal walk through of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
Discipleship on the MT4Christ247 podcast and YouTube Channel on Thursdays. Tonight
and tomorrow I am volunteering for Operation Adopt A Soldier’s Harvest
Festival. And the week after next, I am hitting the road to volunteer at an “Evening
with David Jerimiah” event at the KeyBank Center in Buffalo NY on November 11th.
And two weeks after that it is Thanksgiving.
So while we are coming to the end to October on Monday, with All Hallows
Eve, in my mind I am contemplating just how I will have to simultaneously take
care of the things before me but also keep an eye out for the Next Thing to be adequately
prepared when they arrive.
The Bonhoeffer study I am doing is a labor of love
but it requires time to adequately absorb the material and to create a power
point presentation for each session. So
to stay on top of things I have started creating the next one as soon as I
complete creating the power point that I am going to present. The one I did last night was long, 40
slides! and the total program ran longer that any of the other one’s I have
done thus far and it was my goal was try to keep it close an hour.
So you can imagine the stress I was feeling when I
slapped together the barest bones of the next power point presentation for the
study when it came in at 50 slides!
While normally, my tendency is to just “press in and get ‘er
done”, I realized that because, my time is also being divided by volunteering
and with freedom appointmenst, that I
was going to have to do something else, especially when I saw those 50
slides.
“Its all too much Lord.” is a common lament when you
are walking in the Spirit but just like the Lord will show us a way of escape
to overcome and avoid temptation, He also will cause us to think outside of the
box to consider alternatives to “just pressing in”.
Generally, it is good advice to bend and not break,
right? So I thought of postponing the Bonhoeffer study for a few weeks until
things settle down, and I still might do that. My decision to do it was born out
of a desire to highlight the material and encourage others to get on that path
of Christian Discipleship and even though I desired to have it done at a particular
time, I am not really under any deadlines with it other than the ones I put on
myself. So I might take a break from it,
if I determine I need to but this morning, while I rose to start my day, I had
the conviction to forgo my normal work out and to take a look at the power
point I had started.
So I went against my normal discipline and as I struggled
to figure out what to do with this behemoth of a power point presentation, an idea
suddenly occurred to me: Cut it in two.
Instead of trying to figure out a way to trim it
down or “bend it”, I got an intuition to “break it”. Now for anyone who has put presentations
together before as good as an idea that might sound, in reality sometimes you
can’t break it because there is no middle point that would give you two good
halves. The content might not be so
easily divisible.
But of course, I walk in the Spirit and I don’t think
this idea to “break it” was my bright idea. So although I had this feeling to “cut
it in two” I was skeptical that I would be able to do it in a balanced
way.
But sure enough as I went through the material I
realized that there were four chapters in this presentation and the dividing
point just happen to be right in the middle of the presentation and all I had
to do was save a copy of it, change the design to the new copy and delete the
first half of the new copy to have another power point for a subsequent lesson.
And as for the power point for next Thursday, I just had to delete the second
half to be at a point where I could start to “get er done” for next weeks
lesson. And all of this took a relatively
short time to figure it out. So what was
one big headache became two lessons and launched me into being prepared possibly
a week in advance, or at the very least on track, granted with an additional
week.
But the solution and last nights extended session,
showed me the limits to keep things in and it told me that instead of being
captive to a self-imposed deadlines, I could and should keep things fresh and
that “less was more”.
Bend but don’t break, Or if it don’t bend, break it,
Get ‘er done, or take your time. Take a
rest, or Keep on Going. Do it now or Do
it Later. Lee
In contemplating all these things I realized that we
have freedom and when we walk in the Spirit the things we do don’t need to be
so rigid. In Christ, we are accepted. Although we may have ideas of good works
we can do, none of our accomplishments will cause God to love us or accept us
more.
So if things get hectic, remind yourself of that,
God loves you. God accepts you.
The way the Spirit operates to reveal truth to us
and to guide us in a way that will keep the fruit of the Spirit flourishing in
our lives, we can see that there are no deadlines or commitments that we put on
ourselves that will make us more loved or accepted.
Christ came to give us life and life more abundantly
but He also came to give us peace. So
your life is getting too abundant, remember to listen to the Holy Spirit and He
will show you the way of escape and guide you in the pathway to peace.
Out of time for today, but that’s okay. I have peace
with just doing what I can and will keep walking and talking with God to stay
there.
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 Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
“Discipleship”, also known as “The Cost of Discipleship”
As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage all to purchase Bonhoeffer’s books for your own
private study and to support his work. This resource is available on
many websites for less than $20.00.
The
Sermon on the Mount
Matthew
5
On
the “Extraordinary” of Christian Life
Retribution
concludes
At this point, the
Reformation interpretation introduced a decisively new concept, namely, that we
should differentiate between harm done to me personally, and harm done to me as
bearer of my office, that is, in the responsibility given me by God. In the
former case I am to act as Jesus commands, but in the latter case I am released
from doing so. Indeed, for the sake of true love, I am even obligated to behave
in the opposite way, to answer violence with violence in order to resist the
inroads of evil.[121] This is what justifies the Reformation
position on war, and on any use of public legal means to repel evil. But this
distinction between private person and bearer of an office as normative for my
behavior is foreign to Jesus. He does not say a word about it. He addresses his
disciples as people who have left everything behind to follow him. “Private”
and “official” spheres are all completely subject to Jesus’ command. The word of
Jesus claimed them undividedly. He demands undivided obedience. In fact, the
distinction between private and official is vulnerable to an insoluble dilemma.
Where in real life am I really only a private person and where only the bearer
of my office? Wherever I am attacked, am I not simultaneously the father of my
children, the pastor of my congregation, the statesman of my people? For this
reason, am I not required to fight back against any attack, just because of my
responsibility for my office? Am I not always myself in my office, too, who
stands alone before Jesus? Should this distinction cause us to forget that
followers of Jesus are always completely alone, single individuals who can act
and make decisions finally only by themselves, and that the most serious
responsibility for those entrusted to me takes place precisely in these acts?
But how can Jesus’
statement be justified in light of our experience that evil seeks out the weak
and rampages most wildly among the most defenseless? Isn’t Jesus’ statement
just an ideology which does not take into account the realities of the world,
let us say the sin of the world? Perhaps this statement could be valid within a
Christian community. But in confrontation with the world it seems to be an
enthusiast’s ignoring of sin. Because we live in the world and the world is
evil, therefore this statement cannot be valid.
But Jesus says:
because you live in the world and because the world is evil, that is why the
statement is valid: do not resist evil. It would be difficult to accuse Jesus
of not knowing the power of evil, Jesus, who battled with the devil from the
first day of his life onward. Jesus calls evil evil and that is just why he
speaks to his disciples in this way. How is this possible?
Indeed, what Jesus
says to his disciples would all be pure enthusiasm if we were to understand
these statements to be a general ethical program, if we were to interpret the
statement that evil will only be conquered by good as general secular wisdom
for life in the world. That really would be an irresponsible imagining of laws
which the world would never obey. Nonresistance as a principle for secular life
is godless destruction of the order of the world which God graciously
preserves. But it is not a programmatic thinker who is speaking here. Rather,
the one speaking here about overcoming evil with suffering is he who himself
was overcome by evil on the cross and who emerged from that defeat as the
conqueror and victor. There is no other justification for this commandment of
Jesus than his own cross. Only those who there, in the cross of Jesus, find
faith in the victory over evil can obey his command, and that is the only kind
of obedience which has the promise. Which promise? The promise of community
with the cross of Jesus and of community with his victory.
The passion of Jesus
as the overcoming of evil by divine love is the only solid foundation for the
disciples’ obedience. With his command Jesus calls disciples again into
communion with his passion. How will our preaching of the passion of Jesus
Christ become visible and credible to the world if the disciples avoid this
passion for themselves, if they despise it in their own bodies? Through his
cross Jesus himself fulfilled the law he gives us, and in his commandment he
graciously keeps his disciples in communion with his cross. In the cross alone
is it true and real that suffering love is the retribution for and the
overcoming of evil. Participation in the cross is given to the disciples by the
call into discipleship. They are blessed in this visible community.[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
(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The mt4christ247 podcast is also available
on Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio, and
Audible.com.
These teachings are also available on the
MT4Christ247 You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTxjSNstREpuGWuL0bF3U7w/featured
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]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship,
ed. Martin Kuske et al., trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, vol. 4,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 134–137.
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