The battle ground

Poatina Morning tea devotion given today

Just back from Melbourne, spending a week there with Arrow, a mentoring group for Chn leaders. Pick 30 each year and invite them. I went into the week feeling a bit heavy. They sit you down in peer groups and ask what you want to get out of the week. I said I want to feel freer, and I want to get a sense of my bearings. It’s nice to be able to report that’s what happened.

There’s something really important to getting outside the box, rubbing shoulders with a whole bunch of very different people. About 10 Anglicans, 6 or 7 from Salvos. Churches of Christ and Baptist. A Coord of Chn Surfers and Alpha. It gives you a sense that the team’s bigger than it feels. This is God’s team. Just meeting these lovely Kingdom people who are living in their own structures, their own paradigms, that don’t always make sense to me is good – it is nice hearing their voices.

We had a day of prayer and fasting– no food (none provided!), a candle. It’s not something I’m good at, or have been good at.

In these morning tea devotions I’ve been tracking through Eph 4. In the last couple I talked about truth. The scary truth is that you are most likely to see and hear the stuff that reinforces what you already believe. That you turn off input doesn’t fit with what you already believe. In an experiment, smokers failed to press the button that would have enabled them to hear the facts about smoking; but similarly Christians without fail chose not to hear the case being put by an atheist.

We have a mechanism that helps us hear the things that reinforce our self picture and makes us feel comfortable. I have my version of the truth. It is a copout to say “You believe what you believe and I believe what I believe and that’s a private thing and it’s about respecting one another.” It means truth isn’t an issue and we’re both deluded.

Eph 4: 20 – 25 says,

“That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbour, for we are all members of one body.”

One of the things I don’t like about fasting is you get hungry. You actually have to fight against your desires to find space with God. it was really important for me to fight. I found myself going to my phone a couple of times in my desire to fill up the space.

Here in Ephesians, Paul is talking about spiritual warfare. There is a part of you wants to go with what ‘feels’ good and we all have weaknesses. I haven’t yet met somebody who doesn’t have weaknesses in some part of their lives. They can come up with justifications for their behaviour.

I read a Rolling Stones article about Slash, lead guitarist for ‘Guns and Roses’. He’s now a teetotaller. He got to realising that living just what feels good, kills you. There is a lie that is propagated on TV, in the ads on the side of Facebook that says “go with what feels good and anything else is repression”.

They’ve given themselves to sensuality, to every kind of impurity. But it’s not for you. You were taught to put off your old self. Do you have a glimpse of what your deceitful desires are? If you don’t, the chances are that you’re repressing them, but they will lead you to death.

Eph 4 again, “to be made new in the attitude of your minds” – to face the real battle ground. It’s not the demons that make you stub you toe…but the battle is real – it is out there. Be ‘sus’ of anyone who acts like they have it together.

I have never had real conversations with anyone who doesn’t have what they call a ‘thorn in the flesh’…something that has them saying to God, “Can’t this be taken away? Am I going to be defined by it for the whole of my life?” But no, God says, “I let you have this battle because you need to know it’s not about you having it together”.

Blaise Pascal wrote:

“Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.”

One really good thing last week was to get to a point where I feel I’m fighting for my life; Where it feels like it’s life or death for me. But no! It’s not about me. It’s about Jesus! My job is to hang onto Jesus and to take the journey he calls me to, which is what Paul is saying here.

He says “Put on the new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” Both of these things are actions – it’s not about having the right kind of feelings – we are not let the feeling world set the agenda.

The bloke from Empart talked about the word testimony. He pointed out the word is derived from tests. If we keep avoiding the tests, we become very boring…maybe you’ve heard testimonies like that. Your testimony is interesting if you’ve been on adventures with Jesus. You are less interesting if you’ve spent your life watching TV. Paul is exhorting them to face up to the tests.

I love the heart behind what we are doing in Poatina and in Fusion but I know all of that is predicated on people facing the internal battles, the mess and the chaos. When people avoid that kind of work that’s when we get messy…it’s when I get messy. I wonder if there are desires that are running the show for you?