St. John Studies

We sometimes look for a formula, a means of assurance, some notion that we are doing things right.

I hate to write this, but it is true.

We are about to enter a season of the year, a season that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ.  That should be the focus of our attention.

Sadly sometimes it is not.

One of the many distractions that take away our focus is the desire to start the New Year with a healthier body.  Get ready, the television will be flooded with ads for weight-loss products, gym offers and countless miracle exercise machines that “guarantee” results.  You will look like the buff young man or the fitness model if you can just commit 20 minutes per day.  We look for a secret formula.

Dr. Willard states that there are even formulas for hearing the voice of God too.  Wouldn’t you know it?

One of these is called the “Three Lights”.

The formula works like this.  We are not supposed to believe that we have a true communication from God until three things line up together: the circumstances of our life, our impression of the Holy Spirit and passages of support from the Bible.

Some may see this as a formula that assures that God is speaking to us and that is a good thing.

Others may think it is just confusing.

Let me get personal. I hope that is ok.

I believe God’s voice helps me to discern when I am supposed to act.  Many of my actions are small and to many people, very inconsequential. However the voice or the “feeling” is there and I act on it without consulting Scripture or questioning my Holy Spirit.

This past week I had a visit from my son and all the while he was here, I kept looking for God to direct me about what to do to enjoy his visit.  He lives in Chicago and I don’t see him much and he is not going to be at our home for Christmas.  He is going to his in-law’s home in a foreign country.

I prayed about his visit, asking God to help me enjoy all the moments I had with him, asking God to help me adjust my schedule in a way that I could make him feel welcome and loved.  I even asked God to help me prepare food that would please him and give him and my wife opportunities to enjoy time together without the stress of cooking.

It was the best time I have ever had with my son.

God seemed to help me to act in accordance with my prayers.

Did I consult Scripture?  I didn’t.  Did I question my Holy Spirit about the authenticity of God’s voice?  I didn’t.  Were there circumstances that allowed me to act on the situation that was before me?  There were, and I did act on those circumstances.

I give you this critique of the “Three Lights” to say that I can’t imagine a person waiting until three things in life “line up together”.  That can cause us to be frozen when we need to act.  That can cause us to be indecisive while we wait for the perfect moment.

What about the young person who is waiting for the “Three Lights” to line up about taking a job?

What about the man or woman who is waiting for the “Three Lights” to line up about starting school?

What about the person who is waiting for confirmation about the person they are going to marry?

Is there a possibility that opportunities will pass a person by?  Yes, I am afraid so.

In my experience, I can feel God’s presence in some of the things I do.  When I have that feeling, I think I need to act and then watch the flow.  If it is there, I will continue to feel like things are working out right.  I sense that I am doing the right thing.  I don’t have to have a formula to tell me when to act (or slow me down).

Dr. Willard states “when God speaks and we recognize the voice as His voice, we do so because our familiarity with that voice enables us to recognize it.  We do not recognize it because we are good at playing a guessing game about how the occasions through which His direction comes do or do not match up with each other.”

If Dr. Willard is going to reveal to us how to recognize the voice of God in Chapter 8, it will not be through a formula.

Maybe we need assurance, maybe we need a quick fix, but maybe God prefers action based on faith.

Here we are in Chapter 8, entitled “Recognizing the Voice of God”.

I began posting on Hearing God on August 24^th with the first post “Meet our Author Dallas Willard”.

Since then it has been a wild ride as Dr. Willard has discussed numerous aspects of hearing God from “Guidelines for Hearing from God” to “The Still Small Voice.”

As we near the end of the long journey (there is a Chapter 9 and an Epilogue) we wonder when he will really talk to us about The Voice.

Maybe in Chapter 8?

I find it interesting that human beings question if the voice of God is authentic or not.  Dr. Willard cites voice recognition in nature in Chapter 8.  Chapter 8 begins with John 10: 2-4, 14 and 27,  when John talks of the shepherd and the sheep.  The shepherd calls his own sheep by name and they follow him because they know his voice.  Jesus is the Good Shepherd, our Good Shepherd.  He knows us and we know Him.  Of course, if we are His good sheep, we follow Him [my paraphrase].

When I was growing up, I lived my first 17 years on a farm.  My Dad held many jobs over the years but his foremost passion was his job as farmer.  He had hogs and he had cattle (no sheep).  As a boy I was always amazed at Dad’s animal calls.    He had a whhhhooooooooo! sound that he used to call his animals for feeding.  He also had a sound that he used for directing them around in the fields.  The amazing part was his ability to command the animals.  They knew what to do when he made his sounds.  As a kid, I tried to make my own animal sounds but they never responded the way they responded to Dad.

How do they know what to do?  Why won’t another person’s voice work?

Because experience taught them to recognize my father’s voice.

What does this have to do with us?

How will we recognize the voice of God?  What if the voice we hear is the voice of Satan?  What if the voice we hear is our own self speaking what we want out loud?

What can we do to determine if we have really heard the voice of God?

Dr. Willard states that sometimes it is obvious.  If the voice is telling us to do something contrary to God’s word, then it is not God that is speaking to us.  He cites an example of worshipping an idol or coveting something.  Those two things are obviously violations of the Ten Commandments.

We also have to be aware that people can use “proof texting” against us, which is a fancy way of saying someone is quoting the Bible out of context.  When that is done, a person can use the Bible to prove all kinds of things that are contrary to the teaching of God.

As we have seen in the previous post “Confession—Let’s Get Honest About Bible Reading”, Dr. Willard asks us to apply the Bible to our lives. He does that again in Chapter 8.  The words of the Bible “have to be applied to us as individuals and to our individualized circumstances, or they remain no part of our lives.”

“What is my life like since this is true and how shall I speak and act because of this?”

Those are the questions he implores us to ask as we read God’s words.

He also states that those of us that have been given “new birth” in Christ can learn by experience to hear God as He speaks.

But there is a catch.

Campbell Morgan states that “the doctrine of the inner light is not sufficiently taught” [from his book God’s Perfect Will ].

Dr. Willard says we need assistance.  We don’t automatically know who is speaking to us just because we have a born again experience.

Is Dr. Willard going to provide that assistance?  Is he going to help us to understand the voice of God that is there for us to hear?

“Without qualified help, which works alongside our own desire to learn and readiness to cooperate, God’s direct word will most likely remain a riddle or at best a game of theological charades.”

My prayer is that Chapter 8 will be a seminal chapter for us as we seek to hear God’s voice in our lives.  Dr. Willard says that today there is great confusion about what it means to walk with God and where there is confusion; “evil impulses” can move in and sweep us away.

To be a man is to question if God’s voice is authentic or not.  Maybe we would be better off if we were animals.   We would follow and not have so many questions.

Dr. Willard ends Chapter 7 with a very surprising recommendation for reading the Bible.  He states “the eager use of the Bible leads naturally and tangibly to the mind of God and the person of Christ.”

But what gets in the way of Bible reading?

Why don’t more Christians read the Bible regularly?

Part of the answer is found in attitude.   We think it is so big and written in a way that makes it hard to understand.  Well, it is a big book compared to a short, easy to read magazine article.  It is often written in a way that is hard to understand until you get a good version that is easier to read but even then, the context of the Bible is tough.  Our culture does not understand the culture of the Middle East and add to that the writing is from a time thousands of years ago for the Old Testament and two thousand years ago for the New Testament.

Yet Dr. Willard says that Bible reading leads to the mind of God.

We should read it.

I like his easy going method of reading.  We should not read the Bible to impress others.  What is your goal?  Do you want to be a scholar of the Bible?  Do you want to show off your Bible knowledge to others?  Some fall into the trap of trying to read the Bible in one year?  Why do that?  Is that to feel pride about your accomplishment?

Dr. Willard clears all that away, the obsessive compulsive attitude of the legalist, the individual who wants to work themselves to heaven.

What is our goal for our reading?

He said it above, I have paraphrased it once and here it is again—to lead us to the mind of God.

1.Start with the passages that we are most familiar with and pray that God’s desire for His will for us will be revealed in those passages.  This is very different from many Bible teachers who say start with Romans or read passages in the Old Testament and alternate passages of the New Testament.  “Your aim must be only to nourish your soul on God’s Word for you” [Willard, 162].

2.Do not read a great deal at once.  It is better to think deeply about a few scriptures than skim over hundreds.  Again the idea is to meet God in the pages; not brag about how fast you tackled “God’s Book.”  Dr. Willard cites 2 Corinthians 3:6 “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

3.Recognize that your chosen passage is where you will have a “holy meeting with God”.  Prayer is needed.  Pray that the spirit of God will bring you fully into the reality expressed in the Scriptures.    Dr. Willard recommends two questions that all readers need to ask:  “What is my life like since this is true and how shall I speak and act because of this?”

These questions lead to what Dr. Willard calls invocation and appropriation.  Invocation means what you think it means; we invoke God to make the passage a part of our lives.  We know the passage is true but now we ask Him to make it true for us.  Appropriation means that the statement that we have been reading becomes “a statement of fact about you.”

This reading of the Bible cannot be forced and it cannot be faked.  You want to find God in the Bible and you want God to move in your life.

This is an approach to Bible reading that is more about prayer over God’s Word than reading a certain number of pages, chapters or books of the Bible.

I was having a discussion about Christian faith the other day with a family member and I was shocked by what she said.  A man who was from another denomination visited her church and he kept coming back.  My family member expressed irritation by the habit the visitor had of always bringing his Bible with him.

I wondered why she was irritated.

Why would someone feel irritation about a man carrying around a Bible in church?

Then I thought, maybe that is where we are today in our relationship with the Bible.  We revere it but we don’t actually read it.  We may take it to church but maybe people would wonder why?

We need help.

We need to read our Bibles.

We need to remember that those pages lead us to the mind of God.

All Christians are familiar with Paul, the apostle who was the persecutor of Christians, the writer of 14 of the 27 books of the New Testament.

Paul wrote so much about salvation, especially in Romans, that it is inevitable that Dr. Willard discuss his thoughts on salvation.

Of course, Paul had a word from Jesus on the road to Damascus and from that point on, his life was changed.  He was “on board” for living the life of Christ.

Romans 6: 4 says it all:  “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”

Paul knew that belief in Christ led one to a new life, in fact this “new life” is the “real life” the Christian is supposed to lead.  Dr. Willlard quotes from the book A Man in Christ by James S. Stewart, “Only those who through Christ have entered into a vital relationship are really alive.”

The problem that all people on earth have is they are living in what St. Thomas Aquinas calls aevum.  It would be wonderful to be “alive” in Christ but we have to acknowledge the push and pull between the life we should be leading and the life we are leading.  To express this another way, it is the age-old battle between the flesh and the spirit.

Paul knew this.  He knew that the believer is a new creation.  He knew that the spiritual life that one can find from God is unlike anything man can experience on a “natural plane”.  Dr. Willard states that to live in Christ is to have a “supernatural quality” about life.

Yet we have that old push and pull.

When one really considers real life [no matter how much one is in love with God] there is the push and pull.  Dr. Willard says it is like a person trying to steer a boat.  Despite serious efforts to direct a boat, there are so many forces that can take away your control.  The boat’s rudder is not enough to counteract wind, waves, objects etc.  “The pilot must learn how to direct the boat partly in terms of powers that move independently of his will and do not represent his intentions.” [Willard, 159].

Some read Romans as Paul trying to excuse his “bent toward sinning” but I have never ever read Romans that way.  I have always read  Romans 7:15 [“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”] as his effort to be a real person.

Yes, Paul was an Apostle for Jesus but he was also a man with human feelings and real human urges.  He was not perfect.  He couldn’t be perfect.  He was a man.  So what was he doing when he wrote Romans 7:15?

He was acknowledging his limitation.

Was he serious about becoming a person who was trying to live the life of Christ?  Yes he was.

A step to getting there is accepting the responsibility for the part of your life that is sinful.  For all of us on earth, we all need to do this.  It does no good to fake a perfect life.  None of us live it.

What does this all boil down to?   We have to choose.  Do we live the life of sin?  Do we keep going down the path that is away from Christ or do we choose to do better?  Dr. Willard says it is a “set of the will” to not do that.

Let’s be honest like Paul.  No matter how hard you try, you will still make a bad choice from time to time.  We need God’s grace.  Like Paul, no matter how hard he tried, he says “I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.  For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man,  but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.”

For me and maybe you, the phrase that means the most is “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”   Paul knew he needed God.

We all do.

We may be in a state of aevum but Paul did not want to be there all the time.  He wanted to experience a new life in Christ.

He wanted to be a new creation.

Don’t you?

I have always been fascinated by habits, how they happen, how to create one, how to break a habit.  Sometimes we think of a habit as a good thing; of course, many of us have bad habits.

When I work with students who need to improve their communication skills, I spend some time talking about how to develop good communication habits.  I explain that there are three levels of habit development:  unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence and unconscious competence.

Unconscious incompetence may be a bit like what Dr. Willard expresses in his concept of communication with God.  It is a time of life when the habit is ingrained and you are horrible at something and you don’t even know you are.  Maybe you are a terrible listener or you have a hard time stating something without hundreds of uhs and “you knows.”  Dr. Willard says that the communication stage of relationship building with God is a time when we are possibly dead to God due to our sins but He is still trying to speak to us.  We may not be hearing His messages but God never gives up.

Conscious incompetence is a very awkward stage of life.  You are bad at something and you know you are bad.  You feel awful that you are performing so poorly and you are working to correct your flaws but you are so aware of your efforts that it is painful at times.  Communion is the stage of character development where God is sharing thoughts with you and you are processing those thoughts; you are aware.  You may

be aware of your sins but they are not going away quickly.  Young “born again” Christians struggle with using inappropriate language at times.  They know that they should clean up their expression but it is tough.  Maybe they have a 30 year habit of peppering their language with a curse word and it is not going away overnight.  Nevertheless, God is moving in the person who is experiencing communion.  Individuals who are going through this know it.

The next stage, unconscious competence, is when a habit becomes part of a person’s life.  They have worked so hard and repeated their action so much that it is natural.  The behavior is no longer awkward; it flows.  It is a natural part of a person’s behavior.  I hate to use this but golf is a good analogy.  If you know anything about the game, the golfer who swings a club thousands of times begins to develop a “groove”.  That is a repeated, natural movement that is their distinctive swing.  If it is effective, they want to keep it.  If a golfer is good, they like their groove.  Union with God is desirable too.  When this occurs a person may have a natural focus on God in their life.  Actions performed in daily life get evaluated on a Kingdom level.  Thoughts about God occur with great frequency.  It is no longer a divided life where a person may compartmentalize God in one section and compartmentalize fleshly behaviors in another.  Life is about God.  God rules.

Dr. Willard states “So where there was fear, there is now hope; where there was suspicion, there is now confidence; where there was hate, there is now love; and all are based on a new understanding of God conveyed to us by His word.  Vessels of wrath become vessels of patience and kindness.  Where there was covetousness and lust, there is now generosity and courteous consideration.  Where there was manipulation and possessiveness, there is now trust toward God and encouragement of others toward liberty and individuality.  We now have the character to which listening for God’s voice is natural.”

If you understand this process you will understand Galatians 2:20 “It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me”.   If you understand this process, you will understand one of the most famous images that are in the Bible [ John 15 ]: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit He prunes[a] so that it will be even more fruitful.  You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in Me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me.

God will have changed your character.

You will have unconscious competence for your Lord and Savior.

Christians use images to explain their religion.  When I began to “hang around” a Christian crowd, it was very common to refer to a person’s life with Christ as a walk.  “My walk with Christ” is my life I live with Jesus.  Planting is another normal image that is used.  Dr. Willard refers to that in Chapter 7 as he refers to the “implanted word” in the life of the born again Christian.  Until I studied Hearing God I had never heard of the image of washing a shirt referring to the process of living a sanctified life in Christ.

When we are born again, you might say that we have a “new life” that is in us.  Dr. Willard references James 1:21 when he states that we should “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.”

What happens to our old life?  It is there but it takes on a new direction, which Dr. Willard calls “channeling.”  Our normal human powers remain but we have a different purpose for them; they no long are used to gratify our own desires.  If we are open to the leading of our Lord and Savior, we find reasons for doing what we do, “Godly reasons.”

Another image that we all know is the human body as a temple.  Paul used this in 2^nd Corinthians 6: 16-17 “For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them,

and I will be their God, and they will be my people.’”  The born-again Christian now possesses a temple in which God exists and a person’s “natural life…promotes the ends of God’s kingdom” [Willard, 151]

This takes us to the image that really captures my imagination, the washing of the dirty shirt.   We know that a person who feels that the Holy Spirit has taken over their life does not become a perfectly “clean” individual overnight.  This is not a switch on, switch off process.  I use the word process on purpose because it is just that.  The old ways still linger as one becomes redirected.  “Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” [Ephesians 5: 25-27].

It is not much stretch from this Scripture to the image of washing a shirt.  Dr. Willard says to think about the washing of a dirty shirt as the water and laundry soap move through the fibers of the material to carry out the dirt lodged within the fibers.   When we come to God, we have all kinds of things in our minds that are not of God, habits that we need to eliminate, past deeds that linger on in our memories, and attitudes that are dangerous to our newfound faith.

The word of God “moves into every part of our personality, just like the water and soap move through the shirts fibers.  God’s word [the laundry soap] pushes out and replaces all that is false and opposed to God’s purposes.

Years ago, I encountered another image that was almost as powerful for me as this one.  The fact that I remember it after many years is testimony of its power.  Pastor Charles Swindoll used it.   He told of a vacation home that his family owned and compared the land around the home as the Christian life.  The home was on the side of a steep hillside and every year that his family visited, his father asked him and his brothers and sisters to pick up stones in the yard.  The problem was that between visits the area had several inches of rainfall which caused a runoff of soil from the hillside.  What happened?  All the stones were picked up, time elapsed, rainfall occurred and new stones were exposed.  More stones had to be removed as they became evident.  It was easy to see that he used this image to illustrate the Christian life.  As time passes, we become aware of more sins that we once took for granted as normal ways of life.  They are not “normal” anymore and they must be removed.

Either way, Willard or Swindoll are trying to say that the Christian life is a process of cleansing that occurs over time.  Whether it is the washing of soil off a hillside or the washing of a shirt, the end result is the same:  “Hearing God becomes a reliably clear and practical matter for the mind that is transformed by this washing of the Word” [Romans 12:2].

My last post tried to explain our need for redemption. Without it we will never hear from God.

Today, let’s look at what else we will need for solid communication with our Lord and Savior.

John 3:3   “Jesus replied, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.’”

Dr. Willard begins a significant part of Chapter 7 with the words of Scripture “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  Phillipians 2:5  and 1 Peter 2:21-23 “For this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in His steps. ‘He committed no sin and no deceit was found in His mouth.’  When He was abused, “He did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted Himself to the One who judges justly.”

Stop.

Is this intimidating?

It should be…

What is Jesus telling us?  We have to become a new person in order to fulfill our mission here on earth.  What a role model Jesus Christ presented to us in 1 Peter.  Would you be able to do what He did in His life?  As a Christian, these Scriptures are defining us, telling us what we must do.

Can you “wrap your mind” around this?

This is Christianity 101 in just a few pages…

1.God acted on us human beings so we can live fulfilling lives in His Kingdom here on earth.  God cares.  As I wrote about the “original sin” in my last post, we have to admit that God does not seem to want that to be a part of our permanent makeup.  He wants something better for us.  He wants us to have an opportunity to have more of the mind of Christ than we now have.  If we can find a way to learn more about God’s creative and sustaining will for our lives, we have a chance to meet our potential as humans here on earth.  I find it amusing that Dr. Willard uses an analogy of humans and kittens and cabbages to explain how we have the potential to have the mind of Jesus.  Humans have the “power to act and respond in specific kinds of relations”.  A kitten is alive and it can respond to a ball of string but it cannot respond to Scripture.   A cabbage is alive to soil, water and sun but it is not alive to the effect of Scripture.  Only man has that ability.  But we have to choose to use our potential; we have to want to be born again.

2.Those born again, manifest a different kind of life.  When a person chooses to be born again, a power from God begins to rule in a “born again” person’s life.   Keep in mind,  man is biologically alive like a kitten and a cabbage but spiritually dead to God because of what happened in the Garden of Eden.  This new birth establishes a spiritual connection that supersedes the spiritual death of original sin.  New life “enables us to see and enter the Kingdom of God as participants.  It opens the door of the mind and enters the heart.  From there it is able to progressively transform the whole personality.”  I love Dr. Willard’s use of Mark 4:14 here as he writes “The sower sows the word”

What does this mean for you?

Only you can answer that.

I know what it means for me and I can tell you why I did not understand this in my past.  Honesty from your writer will be helpful here.

I was too stubborn to let God have His way with me.

I wanted to control my life.  I wanted to reserve some of my choices to get what I wanted and I wanted freedom to choose to sin and have “fun”.  I was too selfish to see that the best life I could have on earth was giving my life to Christ.  I thought I could find the best way to have my best life.  I was too obstinate to understand that the worries I had could have been eliminated by God.  I wanted to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish and doing God’s will was just a distraction from my goal.  I knew better than God.

As I look back, I had no real purpose for my life, or at least, my purpose for life was not very significant.  The reason it was not significant was because I was directing my life, not God.

With God directing me, I have a better understanding of what I should be doing.

I aspire to the powerful words of C.H. Spurgeon which Dr. Willard uses: “We have been raised from the dull sphere of mere mind and matter into the heavenly radiance of the spirit-world; and now, as spiritual men, we discern spiritual things, we feel the forces which are paramount in the spirit-realm, and we know there is a Holy Ghost, for we feel Him operating in our spirits.”

There you have it:

The greatest thing I will ever understand about hearing from God…

“The act of saving people from sin and evil : the fact of being saved from sin or evil.”

As we get into Chapter 7, we encounter some of the most important pages in Dr. Willard’s book so far.  For you quick readers, my slog through Hearing God may be maddening but there is so much depth to the book.  I feel compelled to comment on the good points.

In the sections “An Additional Birth by the Word of God”, “The Teacher Who did not Know” and “Birth Through the Spirit and Word of God” Dr. Willard discusses what I call “foundational ideas” of Christianity.

I just can’t skip over them.

You might ask, why comment on redemption?

Because as human beings, we either think we don’t need it or we forget that we need it.

How could that be?

We get too caught up in our life here on earth.

When you explore Scripture in Genesis, you will see man and woman in constant, everyday communication with God in the Garden of Eden.  In fact God created man and woman to be interactive with Him.  We all know the story.  The forbidden fruit was eaten and what God said came true “in the day you eat of it you will die.” [Genesis 2:17].

You might ask what does this have to do with the premise of the book, Hearing God?

This is a major reason why many of us don’t hear God.  Man is mired in “original sin.”

Life can be very distracting.  We all get busy.  We have jobs, children, goals we want to accomplish.  Numerous responsibilities confront us every day.  Who has time to think about God?

God gets put on the back burner of our lives.  It is only natural.

Do you think God likes it on that back burner?  Let me go “out on a limb” and tell you, He does not.   God wants to be the center of your life.  He wants you to realize that all that you have comes from Him.  He is in control of your life if you let Him be in control. If you insist on having control, He is in control anyway [just ask Job].

Sometimes we act like we just don’t want redemption.  We don’t want it because it means giving up something.  I have friends who tell me that they don’t want Christ in their lives because the Christian life is “no fun.”  What they are experiencing is so much better.  They want to do what they want to do with no God guilt making them feel bad about what they are doing.

Sometimes people act like they just don’t have any of that “original sin” to deal with.  That was Bible stuff.  That does not relate to me.  What Adam and Eve did in Genesis has little relevance for my life.  I am a good person.  My efforts to be good are good enough.

Let me be blunt.

Trying to be good just won’t get it.

Well you might ask, what’s a person to do?

1.Stop.  Take some time every day to open yourself to God in prayer, serious prayer.  Acknowledge His role in your life, no matter how busy you are.  You would not have the opportunities to do as much as you do if God had not given you those opportunities.  Make time for God

2.Honestly access the peace in your life that you have from all the fun you are having.  Is it real peace?  Are you lacking something?  Can your whole life revolve around the activity that you love so much or do you need more?  Maybe the real fun is knowing that you are making an effort to connect with God, you seek Him, you want Him, you need Him and you let Him know.  The reward is “peace that passes all understanding”

3.You can’t be good enough on your own.  People kid themselves that they can be nice and that is good enough.  You can’t be good enough because we all sin.  That is what makes us humans.  That is what we got when Adam and Eve did what they did in the Garden.  We got the penchant to sin.  It is hard to admit it but we need God to work on our sin.  We can’t do it on our own.  A person who is trying to be nice and they think that is enough is making a feeble effort and they are going to to lose the war against sin.  Satan knows that and he will put that person in a position where they will not be able to say no to a very strong temptation.  Then they will know that “being nice” is not good enough.

Why have I rattled on about this idea of redemption today?

Because the fact that we need to be saved from sin and evil is the basic reason that we need to communicate with God.   Unless we admit that we have this stain, we will never even begin to make progress removing part of it.

When we open dialogue with God, we will begin the process.  When you hear from God, He will tell you what to do.

In Chapter 7, Dr. Willard begins with a discussion of the role of the Christian.  At times we get distracted and forget why we are here; what we are supposed to do.

What is a Christian supposed to do?

Bring light to a dark world.

Dr. Willard is not immune to the problems of this world; he lists them as “incest, atomic warfare, mental illness, poverty and pollution.”   The problems are brought about by “confusion, ignorance and perversity.”

Today our ever-connected world of social media keeps us informed to the point that we know a kernel of truth about anything newsworthy that happens, the instant it happens.  Social media is instant.  Recently the massacre in Paris was reported not only by news media but by victims of the massacre as the massacre was taking place.  The problem with all this instant communication is that it does not explain the problems that brought about the news event.

We have bits of information but we don’t have explanation.

This is where the Christian can have an effect.  Christians can deal with the unexplained problems because they know who is in control.

Society [especially American society] is analytical.  For every cause, there must be an effect.  If a plane crashes, Americans have a fit until they know why.  If a gunman walks into a school and kills kids, Americans want to know why the heinous act occurred.  If gunmen kill innocent Parisians at a theatre, in restaurants, there must be a reason.

Not really…at least not a reason that we can understand.

God can explain all to us because He knows why things happen and as Christians it is our job to be able to live with the powerful events of life, trusting that God is in control.

What could we do if we were friends and family of the Parisian victims?  As hard as it is to do, we need to forgive the attackers.  This past June 17 in Charleston, South Carolina the family and friends of the victims of the Emmanuel AME shooting showed their Christianity by forgiving Dylann Roof soon after the killings.

Hard to do?  You bet it was.

What a Christian should do?  You bet it is.

Those people knew their role, to “reveal the basis for God’s redeeming Word and Spirit to an ever larger circle of human beings.”

What have we seen in light of the Paris attacks?  Defiance on the part of the French people.   Stepped-up air strikes against Isis.  Calls for not allowing Syrian refugees to cross borders because terrorists may be in their midst.

These are all reactions from people of this world.  They are understandable because there is so much pain right now.  Making blanket statements about Muslims is not shining a light in the world.  Making blanket statements about Syrian refugees who are fleeing terror in their own country is not shining a light in the world, especially coming from Americans, people who emigrated from other countries.

Our role is to bring light to this situation.  Our role is to “hold fast to the word of life” and show that we are “redeemed, shaped and conformed to the likeness of the Son.”

When things go wrong in life, that is the time when the Christian message is delivered the strongest.  When things go wrong in life, that is also the time when many Christians fail to send out a message that is consistent with their belief.

And nonbelievers see it.

They ridicule us; they have another reason for not believing in God and a stronger excuse for skipping church.

You want to know your role as a Christian?

Dr. Willard says it so well when he says we work shoulder to shoulder with God.  The Christian is the “point of contact between heaven and earth, a kind of Jacob’s ladder by which the angels of God may ascend from and descend into human life.”

What is our role?

Simply to live out what it says in the Bible, being cognizant that how we live speaks louder than anything we can say.

If we do that…

The much needed light will come.

As we close Chapter 6, Dr. Willard spends some time answering the peculiar question posed above.

Why ask it?

Maybe it is because his book Hearing God is about hearing the word of God and developing a conversational relationship with God; it is not about reading the Bible.

So maybe it is perfectly reasonable to ask “what is the Bible?”

The Bible is not an ongoing conversation; it is not the living word.

It is a finite, written record of God’s truth, spoken through God’s people, the history of the times and God’s words spoken through His son Jesus and His followers.

Because the Bible is finite does not mean that the Bible is not valuable.  It only means that it is an entity, a book that exists.  It also does not mean that God cannot speak from the written word.  I hate to use this as a comparison but what happens when I need to leave my home and I leave a note for my wife to read, informing her about my errand and when I will return?   My note speaks for me.  The Bible speaks for God. Dr. Willard states that the Bible does a whole lot more than my note; it “fixes the boundaries of everything He [God] will ever say to humankind.  It fixes those boundaries in principle, though it does not provide detailed communications that God may have with believers today.”

Can you meet God in the Bible?  Of course you can, and the more you study it, the more God is revealed in the pages.

But the Bible does not express the word of God like Jesus did.  Jesus was the Living Word while he was on earth, whereas the Bible is a finite thing.

The Bible is not the world of nature.  It is not a living thing like nature which is growing and revealing God in its beauty.

The Bible is not the Holy Spirit that descended in the Book of Acts, the Spirit that went through the church and caused Christianity to spread as God sent out followers to witness to the unchurched.

But most of all, the Bible is not the word that God can give to us as believers.  God can and does communicate to all people who earnestly seek him.  We can speak to God and God in turn He can speak to us.  “God reigns in His kingdom through His speaking.  That speaking is reserved to Himself, but it may in some small measure be communicated through those who work with Him.”

Don’t get me wrong.  Serious Bible study is valuable.  The lessons that one can receive from the Bible are timeless and can be extremely helpful.  Dr. Willard states that for the person who approaches “it openly, intelligently and persistently, God will meet them through its pages and speak peace to their souls.”

In my experience, it is best to approach the Bible in a serious manner, praying before reading and thanking God after the reading is finished.  Years ago I found a book that helped me with Bible study and I would like to recommend it in this post.  It was entitled How to Study the Bible and Enjoy It.   I found the book very inviting because reading the Bible is very intimidating for many.  The special nature of the Bible seems to make it unapproachable. Pastor Skip Heitzig in this book makes the reading of the Bible very comfortable and he explains the process of reading from getting started to “practicing what we’ve preached.”

I liked his prayer before Bible reading so much that I have a copy of it inside my Bible and have read it many times before Bible study.  I like it so much that I am going to share it with you as Dr. Willard closes Chapter 6 with words that inspire us to read God’s word.

“Lord, I submit myself to You as Your servant.  I pray that you would speak to me personally as I now open Your Word.  Sharpen my powers of observation and open my eyes to what the text is saying.  Give me wisdom and insight as I seek to interpret what the text means.  And help me to apply your truth to the specific areas in my life that need your touch.  Gently convict me of any issues I’m neglecting or trying to hide.  Lord, I give You complete permission to search my heart to see it there is anything in me that is contrary to Your will.  Challenge me with Your holiness and comfort me with Your promises, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”