A Necessary Death – Part 2

Posted on September 1, 2019 by BLee

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24

If you read my previous post, you saw from these words of Jesus that a necessary death needs to take place in each of us. It is the death of the false self or that aspect of our soul which reflects our old, fallen nature. That death must take place if we are to experience all of the life God has for us.

Hopefully, as you thought about this, you found yourself open to the idea. There are aspects of your old nature that still haunt you. They need to die. You agree – at least theoretically. But when you start looking at some of the specific things that need to die, it can be quite challenging. This is where we discover just how much of the life of God we really want.

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A Necessary Death – Part 1

Posted on August 18, 2019 by BLee

“Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24

Death. That’s not a subject we like thinking about. In fact, much of our culture is designed to avoid the topic as much as possible. We use terms like “passed away” or “departed” to cushion the blow. Some people are so averse to the idea of death that they trivialize it by referring to it as “kicking the bucket.” Whatever the case may be, we know that death is coming regardless of how we describe it.

When we do think of death, we usually limit it to the death of our physical body. But there’s another death that’s just as real. It’s a death that takes place in the soul. It’s a necessary death that must happen if we are to experience the life God has for us. At first glance that may sound a bit odd. You have to die in order to live. But that is the way of the Kingdom.

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A Sense of Desperation

Posted on August 18, 2019 by BLee

“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.” Psalm 42:1

I think it was in Mr. Smith’s 9th grade science class that I first learned about Newton’s first law of motion. It’s called the law of inertia. It simply states that an object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion unless something acts upon it. Some external force is needed in order to bring about change.

That’s true about physics. It’s also true about our spiritual lives. Unless something comes along to challenge our spiritual inertia, we will seldom have the motivation to do anything about it. Christ-followers experience this as well. They can easily slip into patterns of living that are robbing them of real life without even realizing it. In some cases, they get caught up in the frantic pace of life, the pursuit of things, the striving for recognition, or the quest for pleasure thinking that these things will ultimately satisfy them. In other cases they find themselves overly engaged in church activities believing that this is the path to abundance. In either case, they convince themselves that it’s working even though it isn’t.

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Naming Your Desire

Posted on August 8, 2019 by BLee

“Lord,” they answered, “we want our sight.” Matthew 20:33

Most of us have had the experience of sitting at a restaurant, looking at the menu and not knowing what to order. We know we are hungry, but we don’t know which item on the menu would best satisfy us. Typically, we either just order what we’ve ordered in the past, or we tell the server to come back in a few minutes while we make up our minds. We don’t know what we want.

That can happen to us spiritually as well. We may have a vague sense that we aren’t experiencing the life that we really want to have, but we struggle putting a finger on exactly what it is that we are needing. So learning to name our desire is critical if we want to experience more of the life God has for us.

That’s what the blind men in Matthew 20 did when Jesus asked them what they wanted Him to do for them. Without hesitation they told Him that they wanted to receive their sight. They named their desire. While it may seem obvious that they would ask for this, I contend that it’s only because we have read the rest of the story. They could very well have sensed that the large crowd that was following Jesus would be the perfect opportunity for a significant, benevolent offering. If the offering was large enough, they might not have to resume begging again for awhile. But that’s not what they asked. Instead they wanted something better. They wanted their sight, and they said so.

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What Do You Want?

Posted on July 26, 2019 by BLee

“And Jesus stopped and called them, and said, ‘What do you want Me to do for you?'” Matthew 20:32

I suppose this dates me, but I have fond memories of the annual arrival of the Service Merchandise Christmas catalog. Page after page of items were there to help you answer the all important question: What do you want for Christmas? I remember turning down pages or leaving the catalog open to give not-so-subtle hints to my parents. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not. But it was a way for me to communicate my desires.

That was the basic issue in the story in Matthew 20 of the blind men who were healed by Jesus. In its simplest form, the question Jesus asked was, “What do you want?” It was a question of desire. Unfortunately, we don’t often talk about desire in a positive light. But desire comes from God and leads us to God.

As author Gerald May put it, “There is a desire in each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart. We were born with it…. We are often unaware of it, but it is always awake…. Our true identity, our reason for being, is to be found in this desire.”

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