Aweikinin 16/02/2015

From Galatians 3:1-12

“Freedom!”

H,

First of all, I should apologise for the lull in my writing to you. I had a rough four days and the law of writing daily could not overcome the harshness of that cutting reality. Laws do that, don’t they? They set us up to fail. They are such cold things that do not respond to the exigencies of the furious moment. They think man is made for them while we know, now, that they are only as good as they lead us to what Buk calls “the best version of ourselves”.

We have been talking about freedom so it may be useful now to place it more above the law. Since we are set free in order that we may learn to love, not to do the nothings we crave for, it follows that it is not abandon that is above the law but love. It is not superior in the sense that it makes the law obsolete but that it fulfills it. All of the law was to bring us to this point, the fullness of time, so we could see God’s gracious plan to save everyone and reveal His full stature to every man through Christ. The law comes together only in this light.

It may seem that this is a tempering down of the full fire of the gospel. That is only our flawed mind thinking. In truth no one has ever been able to live up to this law. The only man that did, Immanuel, looked us straight in the face and said: “the law was made for man and not man for the law.” He showed us, as God with us, what love truly is: doing for others what they cannot truly do for themselves. He fulfilled the law and then told us that in Him we fulfill it also. We are all on that journey to be the truth about the law. We are out of slavery and into the thick of relationship with God. For that is the idea behind the whole law: to walk us closer and closer to pure intimacy with God.

Aweikinin 10/02/2015

From Galatians 3:1-6

“Freedom!”

H,

It is hard for us to adapt to true freedom. We have been in prison too long. We still think it is with hard labour. We run to prophets and charlatans because we still cannot believe that there is something within that can lead us to all truth in any definite sense. We are told the lie that we need to be controlled and fed pop cock by megalomaniacs in robes and suits. We need none of that mess. Church is community or it is nothing at all. Christ is the head of the church or it is a religious cult.

We also forget to be free of our own self will. We may accept the gospel only as it does not affect our personal needs. Now we do not need these things at all but the modern age has written its own bible and we now worship at that most unholy altar. We are told our id and ego need feeding. We are told it is important to be heard over others, to compete, to struggle and to hustle our bit of the cake. We accept this because our self worth has been tied to the basic necessities we have been told not to worry about. It is no longer about having a meal but the best meal, not about shelter but the highest house on the hill and no longer about the cover of clothes but the cover of magazines that tell us how what we wear can “complete us” and we will not be complete if we do not buy the full package. It will never be enough but we are told that it s not enough because we do not yet have enough. Our personal well being now has a price tag.

I am using a material example to the extreme but are we all not like that, H? Are we not all servants to the things that we think we need to feel better? You know my many struggles with…. And I know your many struggles with……

We are offered freedom from that mess. We have a real chance at a rich inner life that surpasses any material condition. We can find it in everyday or we can ignore it and have a ball on the nothing hill. I suspect we will always be drawn back to the riches on offer. There is a witness inside now that will not let go of us. He seems to know we cannot make much out of ourselves. He seems to wake us up every day with a sterling instruction to kneel and be lifted. Of course if we did that more we would be better. No worries, dear friend, we can start today.

Amen.

Aweikinin 9/02/2015

From Galatians 2:1-24

“Freedom!”

H,

It is not possible to fully quantify how truly lost we all are. If we had a way of measuring the depth of our fall or the height of our delusion we may find it hard to continue living any kind of sane life. We are told not to judge because of an absence of standing on our part and not as a sign of the presence of goodness in us. It is a practical bit of advice: do not judge because you cannot take your own punishment if you are measured with the same fairness. We are broken and lost creatures that need to give other broken and lost creatures a break.

There is hope, though. Something eternal is happening to all of us. We can either sit in a dark room thinking that we will always be this way or we can listen to the voice that tells us there is a better world outside. We can choose to open that door and let the light in. It will take a lot of hallucinogens and a lot of selfishness to see the world as a kind and friendly place to all. It will take a lot of faith to see it as it can be: a place of magic and wonder and light, of love and candles and the end of all known spite. This is the true journey of the believer; to find in God all the beauty that the world once was and can be again. To speak of that place again and again and invite people to share in the joy of knowing the end, the beginning and the crucial middle all tie together in Christ as man and man reconnected to God.

This is why we must not despair in all our lostness. We are being found. It does not feel like but it is eternally true. It is little shifts and changes following dramatic decisions but we are stunted by seeing things only as they appear and not as they are. There is a whole process of growth going on underground. One day we will all be trees. This will be a forest again. There will be Eden, again and then much more.

Aweikinin 6/02/2015

From Galatians 2:1-21

“Freedom!”

H,

That may be what it truly means to be free. It seems to me that the first prison is the self. If we can let go of that almighty albatross and any reaction to it, outside love, then we are set for the holies. Yet, even that thought is found in a bottle. It is trying to work out aspects of character when we must see this as a whole quest. If we try to pick and choose the changes that make us more like Christ then we will soon miss the whole point.

This is not about being a little better. This is not a character advance or a moral spurt of growth. This is a total rebirth. It is the way we are to be made more eternal than temporal, more spirit than body and more full than empty. It is not necessary that you know all of you is up for transformation when you start to make this journey. In fact, because you are constantly choosing the light or the dark it may seem that the illusion is true and all you need is small shifts here and there to make you fine. Soon you will have to face the facts: it is not that you are not good enough it is that good is not enough. There is a new way of thinking and being that makes good only a flourish of Holy. It is not even new; it is just new to you. This way has no counterpart or lesser degree. It is full on and lifelong and it will take everything but only to replace it with everything that really counts.

I had that feeling when I really learnt to kneel that there would be a new voice in everything I do. If I listen to it then I see freedom made real and peace, joy, love and all that really shape my life and set my path. If I do not then I keep trying to put a new thing on an old foundation, wine skins and wine, and thus the bondage of earth bound man continues. We will never be the person or people our heart and hearts so desperately want unless we learn to be free. It is only in that lightness away from the weights we carry that we think we need to survive, it is only when we have put down the great burden of friendship with the world system, to carry up that cross of old that is true liberty that we can begin to really soar.

Aweikinin 5/02/2015

From Galatians 2:1-16

“Freedom!”

H,

It has always been clear that we would try our little efforts at glory and we would fail. We are not immune from the need to grow bigger in mind after the first stab of joy from being found by God. Is that not the problem? We forget that we were found. The need to be special points out to us the wrong idea that there is something about us that makes salvation inevitable. We feel we have certain traits that predestine and separate us from the hordes going to hell. Now, we are saved we might as well let that (false) light show.

Of course we are on the road to fail spectacularly. It is the old nature that needs an audience, a bloated sense of self and the need to take all things said or thought by others, good or bad, personally. We have struggled to the top of the pile; we might as well stretch the legs and strut with the walks. So this old nature is unprepared for the epic fail to come. When it does fall down it may not even admit the fall. It may just find a way to hide it or run away from the call to be humble.

When I think of this part of me, I pity him more than anything else. Did we not come here to be free?  Why am I bugged down with these details of the realization of the self above the grace of God to be made a real being? This is the good stuff, is it not? To fall down and realize what freedom tastes like. Is it not a gift to know and grow and be surprised by love over and over again? These critical failures save us from a life of believing that we are set apart for some trait in us that is missing in God. We are not special because we bring something to the eternal table but because we come hungry and in need. Once we have walked past the notion that we are inherently good or holy we can be truly and slowly made into the image and reality that is both those things at once and much more.

Aweikinin 4/02/2015

From Galatians 2:1-5

“Freedom!”

H,

I guess the point you are making is that human nature is the same. Yes, it is. Not in the general sense of no room for individuality but in the specific sense of bad heart and good heart. It is hard to describe it, but I know what you mean. There is a part of all of us that would like to have some kind of rule or say over others and there is, a good, part of us who is learning to let go of that sham of control.

If you put a person in control over others, at best he or she will have to learn the crucial bit of not enslaving the submitting party. It is something you see in others time and time again and if we are being honest, and we are, in ourselves. It then shows why in the charismatic/Pentecostal tradition in which we grew up there was a lot of this dangerous notion of the infallibility of a fallible man. The pastor who could not be disputed and who, like Moses, went up the mountain to get what God wants to say while we revel in our excesses below. We abdicate our responsibility to seek and hear and know so we can be “free” only to become enslaved by this man or woman who is nothing like Moses.

Yet, our freedom is complete in Christ. It is hard won and can erase the stain of the centuries if we let it. There is truly no separation between those who believe and the person whom they have chosen to believe. There is the man who came to bring closeness, there is the spirit ingrained in their living hearts to teach them what is right and lead them to that living out and there is the father who they truly come from and who cannot and will not abandon their eternal date to meet Him. People who purport to lead must know that they are only in God if they help people see this truth more and more. If they do not they have become useless to both God and to the men and women they think they serve.

Aweikinin 3/02/2015

From Galatians 1:1-24

“Freedom!”

H,

Well, it is a human distinction that sets the past as something either to be forgotten or something to be hid at all cost, if it is negative. We have the inverse problem here: it is to be celebrated. Or in more popular terms, it all adds up to glory. This is the most transparent of all things. It has no need to hide anyone’s past or flawed present. It was the same one who denied Jesus who boldly declared the faith at Pentecost and that speech spurred on the march of the church through time.

We are free to be flawed and to admit it. We have no reason to hide. All this nonsense I hear about being a “witness” or not spoiling a “testimony” does not recognize the fact that our testimony is Christ and our witness is of His power to save from the power of sin. We cannot be like the Pharisees who approach the idea of salvation based on their own personal “righteous” armor. What a powerful thing it is when we are vulnerable enough to say that we are “in repair” and that we fall down and this daily. We might also add that this repair is real and that arms lift us up every time we fall.

This is not a faith for those who think it is what they do that matters but for those who realize the reason and power behind what they do. It is not a celebrity hub or a popularity contest. It states “the first shall be the last” and “the parts that do the most hidden bits are the ones with the greater glory”. There is no time for ego here. The point of testimony is to refer to our walk with God and where that has brought us so anyone walking in the trailing dark can realize that this power of light works best in the darkest dark. We are translucent and, even better, transparent so this light and glory might pass through us and land on hearts looking for the freedom we have received to live out to the fullest extent of their being that life less ordinary day by day.

We lose a lot of the immediacy of the gospel when we try to prove points and do PR for God. In real terms, we are not qualified for this. In terms of grace, it is unnecessary. In some strange way, strange to us that is, this whole transformation works best the less we hide. It works best in weakness and better that in weakness revealed. Our whole lives are an open book to God. It may be useful if we let Him continue to do the great work that is writing out true story in it so we may discover the superior tale to our inferior fictions.

Aweikinin 2/02/2015

From Galatians 1:1-12

“Freedom!”

H,

Sorry for the late turn in replies. I have been up and about in that fake place we call real life, and my routines have suffered because of it. Shall we continue now?

I know after a while in the sun it becomes hard to simple say the truth or even, before that, just what you really think. We all want to be liked and appreciated. We all long to be understood in some way. We have that blessing, sometimes, when the truth we have to share is easy to swallow. There is no turning in it and so the ear can hear it and the heart respond and we have a certain glow because we have said what we ought to say and it has been received and all is well with the universe.

It will not always be this way. There will be times when we will not get that applause we seek. There will be words that will ruffle feathery frames and cost us our popularity. This is not because we have gone wrong or missed a plaque or two. It will be because we have gone a little deeper and cut too close to the bone. A parent, in some small way, must feel this when talking to a child who thinks all is known and is very, very wrong about a new direction. The child thinks his/her path is different and, as the buk would say, sex is a brand new discovery and all wisdom is up in the air hereafter.

Jesus had crowds that did not hear or listen and did not believe. One particular haughty assemblage tried to push him off a cliff. We speak for Him and if we do it rightly there will come a time when this will prove unpopular and even dangerous. It has cost so many, over the centuries, everything on earth. It may cost us the same. We do not mind. We serve a higher calling. We are witnesses to the light at the highest point of the dark. We are not here for fortune or fame but for the unfolding glory of a new earth framed under the great rule of a heaven to come.

We are free to do all this because our lives are hidden in God. The outcome of following is to be found by Him, constantly. The consequence of speaking up in the deadly silence, and all that rejection, is to draw closer to the great Holy Spirit and all the intimacy that will bring. There is a great world buzzing in our reformed hearts that I think all the fury of the world will only serve to expand and explore. We are free to feel like failures but not to wallow there. The very next step from that is the realization that we are not failures and we did not fail. We merely look up to a different standard, the highest there is, and that drum beat of eternal victory sounds like nothing else but music of the eternal story unfolding.