Don’t Fear the Reaper - A Harvest of Repentance Purity 880
Purity 880 11/04/2022 Purity 880 Podcast
Purity 880 on YouTube:
Good morning,
Today’s rather dark photo of a recently harvest
cornfield set against the contrast of the thriving green of what I believe to
be “winter wheat” comes to us from yours truly as I captured this scene while
out for walk along Waite Rd in Easton yesterday as the sun was dipping into the
horizon.
Well, it is Friday, so Thanks God, and rejoice over
the last day of the normal work week, if that applies to you, and for all that
the Lord has done to make your lives new. While today’s photo isn’t
particularly spectalur I thought it was a good visual representation of us
transitioning into the “life of the weekend” and because I will be leading another
man through the Steps to Freedom in Christ today and I hope to see the Holy
Spirit reap a harvest of repentance as we meet later this morning in
prayer.
For those who follow the blog, you may remember I
already shared a photo of this field and the contrast of corn ready for harvest
and the humble beginnings of the sprouting winter wheat. But yesterday I saw that the farmers had
completely cleared the corn field of its harvest and I am sharing this photo
today because it reminds me of what the Lord can do with the unruling overgrown
messes of our pasts.
Just like that cornfield, our pasts can be a
substantial unruly mess and the sheer volume of it and all its accumulated
trauma, sin, and bitterness can seem like its just too much to deal with and it
is something that we should just ignore and keep walking past. But just like that cornfield, if we don’t
clear the land of our pasts and use the things in it to nourish us, its just a
waste. And we can’t just pick and choose
the good things of our pasts to be able to walk free of it. Just like the
reaper took the ears of corn and all the stalks, leaves, and ripped out the
roots, in order to adequately be free of the pain of our pasts and to be able
to grow anew, we have to take all of our pasts and give them to the Lord and
allow the Holy Spirit to process it all to make us grow.
With the Lord’s help we can acknowledge it all. All
of that did happen to me. Some of it was good. But some of it was bad. Some of
it just wasn’t right. The things I did
weren’t right! The things others did to me weren’t right. And some things that
happened to my friends and family, or by my friends and family weren’t
right!
While the world would suggest either to move on from
your past by just forgetting about it or by settling scores by getting even, The
Lord wants you to processour past, your old life, by living the new one He has
for you.
And the new life that the Lord has for you commands
that you enact the Lord’s solution for your problems, past and present. His solution is forgiveness and repentance
and the Holy Spirit in every Christian, is the One who can help us reap all of
our spiritual and personal conflicts according to God’s wisdom and love, to
clear the land and allow you to sow the seeds of a new life that won’t be
choked out by the weeds of your past.
Going to the Lord and confessing your sins and then
making the decision to live for Him and according to His way, to learn who you
are in Christ and to follow the example of Jesus, is the way to the new
life. It is a process of prayer, faith ,
and action.
We can’t just reap our own harvest. Repentance is
granted by the Holy Spirit alone and it is with and through Him that we can be
healed of our hurts and give the power to transform our lives.
So for those who have already had the Lord clear the
fields of your pasts, rejoice! Your victory and freedom need never end, as long
as you keep on walking and talking with God.
As for those whose pasts still have a tendency to
loom over you, I suggest you go to the
Lord and ask Him to help you to clear your field. The Steps to Freedom in Christ
is one way you can do it. The Steps guide
people to pray to the Lord and to ask Him to help them repent and deal with the
hurts of the past. The steps are just a
road map but you invite the Lord to walk through them together, in faith, the Lord
has been known to use them to set people free.
I have seen it happen to others and I have seen the Lord do it for
me.
But hey, I’m just suggesting one path of many right?
I guess that’s true but just like our pasts are filled with choices to many
paths we wish we never took, sometimes we know there really is only one RIGHT
thing we should do and I pray that the Lord reveals the truth of THE WAY, THE
TRUTH, and THE LIFE, of Jesus, to you.
The Lord is patient and loving and He won’t force us
to do anything but, man, if you accept Jesus’ invitation to Follow Him, you
will discover just how good walking and talking with God can be.
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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:
Romans 12:20 (NLT2)
20 Instead, “If your enemies
are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In
doing this, you will heap burning coals of shame on their heads.”
Today's Bible verse encourages us to show love to those who would
despitefully use us, to put into practice Christ’s command to love our enemies
with the expectation that love can conquer hate.
I have to thank God for the godly men that He has put on my path
of Christian growth. While some “Christians”
are known to quote Bible verses, chapter and verse, some of these zealots give
Christianity a bad name because while they can accurately state the word of God
and obviously have it in their heads, there unfortunately seems to be a
disconnect with the hearts as they use the word of God to chastise, criticize,
manipulate, and control others, they haven’t allowed it to produce the spiritual
fruit of love in their lives. And in
some cases, the knowledge of the word is only a sheep’s covering that is used
to conceal secret sins and a hidden agenda.
But then there are those Christians who not only know the word of
God but seek to understand it and apply it to their lives and how they interact
with others.
Today’s verse reminds me of my mentor Pastor Bob Costello and our
days serving together in Celebrate Freedom, the now disbanded recovery ministry
at my former church. In the early days
of that ministry, a homeless veteran of the Gulf War with physical, mental, and
spiritual problems came to our church’s attention and Pastor Bob was given the
task of trying to help this troubled man. Although this man served our country
and professed to be a Christian, he also served his flesh and didn’t always
express gratitude for Bob’s companionship and efforts to help. The veteran had addiction issues, physical
disabilities, and a history of prison time so like a wounded dog, he would
often bite the hand that literally fed him and would periodically run free and
make a mess of things.
I know Pastor Bob to be a man of great patience but this man’s
ungrateful attitude and unrighteous antics test his limits, so much so that he
took his concerns to the senior pastor who suggested that Bob apply Romans 12:20
to the situation.
As much as Bob wanted to complain about this man and wanted to
just shake the dust off his feet and walk away from the whole situation, the
word of God convicted Bob to forgive much because he himself had been “trouble”
in his youthful days back in the Bronx and had been forgiven much by the Lord
and other Christians.
And the word of God, really did a work on Bob. He didn’t just begrudgingly
keep on trucking along out of some sense that was what He was supposed to, He
applied that verse to His heart and it changed everything. Instead of seeing this troubled vet as a big
problem, Bob started to see Him as one of God’s children that needed love.
So Bob just kept serving him and showing him compassion until something
amazing happened, things got better. The
Vet entered into our recovery ministry and resisted the real and present danger
to relapse. Bob and the church eventually
connected him to resources and provided him with financial assistance to get
him his own apartment. After a while this vet was actually walking in sobriety
and was so grateful that he decided to lead worship at our recovery ministry with
a soulful rendition of Christ Tomlin: “You’re a good, good father.” The heaping coals of kindness on this man’s
head had worked. The love that Bob and those
at the church had given this man had “shamed” the evil in him and caused him to
repent and start walking in the way the Father would have him go.
This man had been a hostile combatant against the world for the
pain he had suffered but the love he received caused him to literally sing the
Lord’s praises.
So feed your enemies, if they are thirsty given them something to
drink, because love is great than hate, good is better than evil, and the light
of God’s love that we allow to shine through us will dispel the darkness.
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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 6
On
the Hidden Nature of the Christian Life
Hidden
Righteousness concludes
Second, we ask: what in the content of the act of
following Christ constitutes the union of the visible and the hidden? How can
the same thing be simultaneously visible and hidden? To answer we need only to
turn back to the result of chapter 5. What is extraordinary and visible is the
cross of Christ, beneath which the disciples stand. The cross is at once what
is necessary and hidden, and what is visible and extraordinary.
Third, we ask: how can the paradox between the fifth and sixth
chapters be resolved? The concept of discipleship itself provides the
resolution. It is exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. Disciples always look
only to their Lord and follow him. If they were to see the extraordinariness
itself, then they would no longer stand in discipleship. In simple obedience
disciples do the will of the Lord who bids them do something extraordinary, and
they know in everything only that they can do nothing else, that they are,
therefore, doing what is simply a matter of course.
The only required
reflection for disciples is to be completely oblivious, completely unreflective
in obedience, in discipleship, in love. If you do good, do not let your left
hand know what your right hand is doing. You should not know your own goodness.[170]
Otherwise it will really be your
goodness, and not the goodness of Christ. The goodness of Christ, the goodness
of discipleship takes place without awareness. The genuine deed of love is
always a deed hidden to myself. Pay heed that you do not know it. Only in this
way is it the goodness of God. If I want to know my own goodness and my own
love, then it is no longer love. Even the extraordinary love of enemies remains
hidden to disciples. When they love their enemies, then they no longer view
them as enemies. This blindness of the disciples, or rather this vision
enlightened by Christ, is what makes them certain. The hiddenness of their
lives from themselves is their promise.
The other side of
hiddenness is its being in the open. There is nothing hidden which will not be
revealed. That is how God made things to be, before whom everything hidden is
already revealed. God wants to show us what is hidden. God will make it
visible. Being revealed in public is the reward ordained by God for hiddenness.
The question is only where and from whom people receive this reward of public
recognition. If they long for it to be in sight of other people, then they will
have had their reward as soon as they get such publicity. There is no
difference whether they seek it in the cruder form, in the presence of others,
or in the more subtle form, in the presence of themselves. Whenever the left
hand knows what the right is doing, whenever I myself become aware of my own hidden
goodness, whenever I want to know about my own goodness, then I have already
prepared for myself the public reward which God intended to store up for me. I
am the one who revealed my own hiddenness to myself. I do not wait for God to
show it to me. So I have gotten my reward. But those who remain hidden even
from themselves until the end[173] will receive from God the reward
of being revealed. But who can live in such a way as to do the extraordinary in
secret? Who can prevent the left hand from knowing what the right hand is
doing? What sort of love is that which does not know of itself, but can remain
hidden from itself until the last day? It is clear that because it is hidden
love, it cannot be a visible virtue, a human habitus [attitude]. Beware—it says—that
you do not mistake genuine love for the virtue of kindness or for a human
“quality”! It is self-forgetting love in the most genuine sense of the word. In
this self-forgetting love, however, the old self must die with all its virtues
and qualities. The old Adam dies in the disciples’ love, which is oblivious of
the self and bound solely to Christ. The death of the old Adam is proclaimed in
the sentence: “Let not your left hand know what your right is doing.” Once
again, who can live so that chapters 5 and 6 are one? None except those whose
old self has died in Christ and who have found a new life in Christ’s community
of discipleship. Love as the deed of simple obedience is death to the old self
and the self’s discovery to exist now in the righteousness of Christ and in
one’s brothers and sisters. Then the old self is no longer alive, but Christ is
alive in the person. The love of Christ the Crucified, who leads the old self
in us to death, is what lives in Christ’s follower. Disciples find themselves only
in Christ and in their brothers and sisters.[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the
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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), 150–152.