Monthly Archives: October 2016

Are you of a different spirit?

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Many of you are familiar with the Bible story where Moses sent the 12 spies into the promised land to check it out. They searched out the land for forty days and returned to give their report. If you remember the story, ten of the spies came back with what the Bible calls an Evil report. It was all negative. These spies didn’t see the promise that God had given them, instead they looked at the circumstances and determined that they were too small and too weak to take the land.

Num 13:31  But the men that went up with him (Caleb) said, We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we. And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched to the sons of Israel, saying, The land through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eats up those who live in it. And all the people whom we saw in it were men of stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, of the giants. And we were in our own sight like grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.

Scripture says that these reports caused the people’s hearts to melt. It wasn’t the giants that were keeping them out of the land, it was the grasshoppers. They were comparing their enemy to themselves. They were not figuring God into the equation.

Hebrews 3 tells us that the children of Israel had “An evil heart of unbelief”. When we look further, we see that, instead of trusting God, they had a spirit of disobedience. They were obstinate, rebellious, intentionally unbelieving and unpersuadable. Hebrews 3:12 warns us that we should pay attention, to make sure that none of us has an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God.

Do you see the issue in that verse? They came right up to the point of making a choice to believe or not and they chose to separate. They departed from God…multiple times. At one point, they even chided Moses (Ex 17:2). The Online Dictionary defines Chide as “To give someone a piece of one’s mind. To take to task, rake over the coals, to tell off”. God called them a “Stiff Necked and Rebellious People”.

Joshua and Caleb were the only two spies that came back with a different point of view. Caleb said “Let us go up at once, for we are well able to overcome it”. They had seen the promised land through a vision of the promise of God and they could see the possibilities. They said things like “Their defense has departed from them, let us go up at once!” All that faith talk started making the faithless people mad. Joshua and Caleb warned the people that they should not rebel against the Lord. The people decided that what they really needed to do was stone Joshua and Caleb. It was at that moment that the Glory of the Lord showed up in a big way! It was also at this moment that Moses and Aaron fell face down on the ground. They knew something serious was happening. They knew God wasn’t just dropping by to say howdy.

There is a ton of stuff to learn in this passage, and I am inspired by the words of Joshua and Caleb. The Lord summed it up best when He was talking about Caleb.

“Num 14:24 But My servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and has followed Me fully, I will bring him into the land into which he went. And his seed shall possess it.”

The Bishops Bible says it like this “Because he has followed me unto the utmost.”

The Bible in basic English says “Because he is true to me with all his heart.”

The Literal version says “he is fully following me.”

The Septuagint says “Fulfilled to walk behind me.”

God said he had another spirit with him. What was that spirit?

The answer can be found in 2 Corinthians 4:13, where Paul, writing to the Corinthian Church, says “We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak.”

Joshua and Caleb were IN FAITH. That simply means that they were fully trusting God to keep His promise. They had a good understanding of what it means to be in COVENANT with God. You and I can have covenant with God today through submitting ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus. In doing that, we open ourselves up to all that God promised. In Him (Jesus) we have ACCESS to God.

Rom 5:2 By whom (Jesus) also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Eph 2:18 For through Him (Jesus) we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.

Eph 3:12 In whom (Jesus) we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.

God wants us to get to the place of trusting Him where we are like Abraham. “He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what He (God) had promised, he was able also to perform”.

If you are a believer, it should mean something to you to actually be in covenant with God. It should change the way you think. The way you think about health, direction, even money. According to some reading I’ve done recently, some Jewish scholars believe that poverty is an unjustifiable suffering. It should not be revered or associated with closeness with God.

Consider what Paul says to the Romans. Rom 8:31 What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? 32 He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Is this not the mind of Joshua and Caleb? They were convinced that the Lord was with them and that He had taken away the strength of their enemies. They were fully persuaded that it was “Take the Land time”!

Are you in covenant with God? Have you made Jesus your Lord, and submitted yourself to Him? If not, click here. If so, are you standing where you should be standing in regard to God and His promises? Do you trust Him to make good on His Word?

This week, spend some time and examine your heart. Let God say of you, as He said of Caleb, “They have a different spirit, and have followed me fully”?

The Driving Force That Is Dad

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father-child-on-beach

A guitar playing friend and I were having a conversation about David Gilmour a while back. We were discussing how we both believe that, Pound for Pound, he’s one of the best lead guitarists ever – for playing with feeling. No one is as good as he is at putting emotion into his leads.

While thinking about this, it occurred to me that as good as David Gilmour is, he was not the primary driving force behind the success of the band Pink Floyd. One of the other prominent members of the band was Roger Waters. Roger played the bass, wrote most of the songs with David, and also sang many of the songs. I am not crazy about the sound of Roger’s voice but he writes good songs.

A lot of Roger’s writing motivation came from the loss of his father. There are references to it in his songs throughout his career. Roger’s dad was killed in Italy during World War II when Roger was only five months old. Sadly, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that Roger learned this. For most of his life, he only knew that his father was missing in action and presumed dead. When I listen to the song Wish You Were Here, I can hear Roger’s heart about not knowing what happened to his dad.

This caused me to wonder. Would the Band Pink Floyd have ever reached the status that they have achieved had this sadness not existed in the heart of one man?  The things that I identify with, and enjoy in their music are in part, because of the veiled references to this very thing.

The truth is that fathers matter. Even absent ones have a remarkable effect on their children. The ripple that’s caused by a missing father can be seen and felt over multiple generations. I see in some people, how the training they received from their father concerning money has affected how even their children think about money. The opposite can also be seen. Fatherlessness often results in families that struggle financially. I can see it in the lives of people I know. So many struggle when it comes to money, and it becomes a generational mindset that gets passed down. Fathers matter.

In his article Manifesto of the new Fatherhood, Stephen Marche wrote “Fatherlessness significantly affects suicide, incarceration risk, and mental health. The new fatherhood is not merely a lifestyle question. Fathers spending time with their children results in a better, healthier, more educated, more stable, less criminal world. Exposure to fathers is a public good.”

You may be a man who’s dad isn’t present very often anymore, and now you find yourself being a dad.  What do you do?  What’s the right thing to do?  Below are some important guidelines every father needs to follow.

  1. Show up. You can’t have any influence for good in your child’s life if you’re not there. I promise, there will be tons of negative stuff to take your place when you are not there. Many fathers don’t realize that it’s not just what you bring into the relationship that matters, it’s what stays away because you’re there.
  2. Teach what you know is right. The lasting solution is to raise our children God’s way. That means that we teach our children the right way, and we exemplify what it means in our own lives. By precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little & there a little (Isaiah 28:10). It’s important for you to teach what you know is right. Some things are too important to just leave them to find out for themselves.  If you’ve found some right answers in your life, some things that work, then it’s incumbent upon you to pass it down.
  3. Lead by example. It means that fathers need to discipline themselves to model the right behavior. Paul the Apostle also tells us in Ephesians 6 that we as fathers are not to provoke our children to wrath (anger) but to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Scripture also tells us to train up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old, they will not depart from it. The next verse is also connected to it, the rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.
    To me, fatherhood is one of the most important things I do. I think it’s vitally important to not only teach my children the right things, but to also live the right things out in the open where my children can see me. I do not give myself permission to be sloppy in this area. These are my children, and in the end, I will be accountable to God for what I did and didn’t put into them.

Like Roger Waters used his pain to fuel his creativity, I use the pain that came from growing up without my dad to fuel my desire to help others who are enduring it now. There are just so many of us.

I say to all fathers that read this. You are more important than you may think. Your children are worth fighting for. Remember – Show up, teach what’s right & lead by example.

Until next week – be encouraged.

Art

Living In The Realm Of What Is, Not What Isn’t.

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When I was about eleven, my sister and I hatched a plan. My parents had divorced the year before, and my Dad lived three states away. We hadn’t seen him since before the divorce, and we missed him some kind of bad.

We heard that our grandparents were planning a trip to go see him. Our caper was simple, we would find a way to get to our grandparent’s house right before they left and we would stow away in their camper. They always had a camper and we were pretty sure they would take it on this particular trip. Our idea was that they wouldn’t find us until it was too late to drive back. You know, It would be a “Well, we’ve already gone this far”, kind of thing. It never quite worked out. We didn’t get to stow away in the camper.

A photo by Tim Arterbury. unsplash.com/photos/VkwRmha1_tI

Thinking back today, I’m so glad we failed. Eleven year old’s just don’t think very far ahead. When I think back on it and I think about all of the potential problems it would have caused, I just shudder. It would have likely cost everyone a lot of money and we would have ended up where we started. Also, it would have broken my mom’s heart and ruined my grandparent’s trip.  We were so focused on our Dad that we weren’t considering everyone else.

Recently I watched a documentary about Tony Robbins. It’s called “I’m Not Your Guru”. It chronicled one of Tony’s 4 day “Unleashing the Power Within” seminars. One of the people that Tony helped specifically, was a young woman who was there with her mom. This young woman had a fractured relationship with her Dad. I don’t remember what the issues were specifically, but I know he hadn’t been in her life for many years. One of the things that came to light was that she blamed her Dad for many of the difficulties that she had experienced. She felt abandoned. She traced most of the problems she faced in her life back to the fact that he wasn’t there.

Tony said something to her that stuck with me, and I’ve given it a lot of thought ever since. He pointed out that we have a tendency to fixate and obsess over what’s missing in our lives, and completely ignore what’s actually there. When it comes to our absentee fathers, we ascribe a value to them based on what we imagine would have been different, or better, had they actually been there. Everything from the rough neighborhood we had to live in growing up, to the imagined advantages that we never had because we didn’t have a man around to teach us man things.

When we obsess about the missing pieces in our lives, we hurt ourselves in many ways. I’ve outlined four that I had to deal with below.

  • When we focus on what’s missing, we ignore what we have. Spending all our time thinking about the Dad that left often blinds us to the Mom that stuck it out. When I think about the things my mom went through raising us, I am humbled. Against some pretty tremendous odds, she managed to keep us together. And it’s that more than anything else that gives us strength today.
  • When we focus on what’s missing, we develop a victim mentality. We look at our lives with a sense of powerlessness. Situations and circumstances are mostly beyond our control and we feel that we either have no right or no power to change things. This leads to the thinking that everything bad that happens to you is always someone else’s fault.
  • When we focus on what’s missing, we tend to become ungrateful. We tend to overlook the good that we have. We may unintentionally let all the negative overshadow the positive in our lives.  This includes all the people who never gave up on us.  The ones who stuck it out.
  • When we focus on what’s missing, we accept the limits of the wrong story. For many years, I thought that I couldn’t get ahead because my Dad left me without advantage. My friends and relatives who’s Dads were still there, helped them with things. Things like understanding money, basic knowledge of cars, work ethic, and knowing how to build and fix stuff. The first time my grand dad took me to the garage to work with him on my mom’s car, I had a revelation. I was not without help. I began to understand that I had a lot of the help that I thought I was missing. God just brought it to me by another route.

Tony Robbins made a strong statement to the young woman in the documentary. He said that if she was going to blame her Dad for the negative, she was also going to have to blame him for all the positive that came from it. She was going to have to blame him for the fact that she learned how to deal with problems. She was going to have to blame him for making her into a strong woman. She was going to have to give him credit for those things too.

Look at the person you are today. What difficulties or hardships in your past shaped you for the better? What do you possess today that you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t endured your past? It’s time to focus on what is, and forget about what isn’t.

It’s time to re-frame the picture of our life, let go of the imaginary life in our head that never happened and give real thought to how we can move forward from where we are. Let today be the foundation for a future where we focus on possibilities. Not a foundation that’s haunted by the ghost of what wasn’t, but, at least in our minds, should have been.