The 260 Journey

Day 176

Today’s Reading: Philippians 2

We live in a time when it is more popular to be a celebrity than a hero. Numbers of followers or views have replaced the one who risks their life for others. Media has given us celebrities, where danger and risk give us heroes. The gap is much wider between fame and greatness. Heroism is linked to honor and bravery, while celebrities just have links. We have big names today but not big persons.

The scary part of all this celebrity worship is that we are seeing celebrities and not heroes rise in the church. We must be careful that we don’t allow pastors to become the center of the story. Jesus is. We have to make sure the “stars” aren’t outshining the Son.

Philippians 2 reminds us of who is the center of attraction. The apostle Paul gives us the Hero of the greatest story ever told:

God exalted him and multiplied his greatness! He has now been given the greatest of all names! The authority of the name of Jesus causes every knee to bow in reverence! Everything and everyone will one day submit to this name—in the heavenly realm, in the earthly realm, and in the demonic realm. And every tongue will proclaim in every language: “Jesus Christ is Lord Yahweh,” bringing glory and honor to God, his Father! (Philippians 2:9-11, TPT)

Paul not only wants us to remember this, he also wants to remind us of what the Father thinks of His Son. Paul tells us that God put Jesus on the pedestal. And we must always remember it’s all about the Son. As Augustine said, “Christ is not valued at all unless He is valued above all.”

Don’t get it mixed up. It’s not what church you go to, it isn’t who your pastor is, it isn’t whether your ministry is on television. It’s whether or not you choose the Son! Anything before that means you have chosen celebrity over Hero. Hero Jesus. That’s the name that gets you it all. That’s the name that gets you to heaven. Jesus is the name that changes your life.

I have had people tell me, “I tried Jesus and it just didn’t work.”

“Wait one second,” I tell them. “You may have tried church. You may have tried religion, or a denomination. But you didn’t try Jesus. It’s impossible to say, ‘I tried Jesus and it just didn’t work.’”

Why? Romans 10:11 answers that for us: “The Scriptures tell us that no one who believes in Christ will ever be disappointed” (TLB). Can you name one true follower of Jesus who was on his deathbed and said, “Jesus is a liar. I regret ever following Him”?

Jesus is not a hobby. He is not a Sunday thing.

The words Paul uses in Philippians 2 to describe Jesus is really important. He seemingly hijacks a verse from Isaiah 45, which speaks about Jehovah God, and he inserts it into his chapter to describe Jesus in Philippians 2:10: “At the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth.”

And now Jesus is being bowed to and declared to be Jehovah. Let me make it even simpler. Listen to Isaiah 45:21-23:

Is it not I, the Lord? And there is no other God besides Me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none except Me. Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other. . . . To Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance.

God says in Isaiah that every knee will bow and every tongue confess to Him. Now in Philippians 2, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess to Jesus. It not only tells me about the deity of Jesus and that Jesus is God, it also reminds me that Jesus is the Hero of our story. Whenever I am tempted to follow a celebrity or try to be one, I need to remember Philippians 2. If we want to be reminded of our part of the story, remember the words of Robert Capon.

Jesus came to raise the dead. The only qualification for the gift of the Gospel is to be dead. You don’t have to be smart. . . . You don’t have to be good. You don’t have to be wise. You don’t have to be wonderful. You don’t have to be anything. . . . You just have to be dead. That’s it.

Day 175

Today’s Reading: Philippians 1

H. B. Charles Jr. said these poignant words about answered prayer: “It may seem God did not answer prayer when the real issue may be that we did not like the answer.” Today’s chapter discusses answered prayer in the apostle Paul’s life. If you don’t look closely, you can easily miss his prayer and his answer.

Always remember that our job is to pray and not forecast the answer on how we think it should be done. We leave that to God to figure out. Let’s look together to see what Paul was praying throughout his life and how the answer came in Philippians 1. Paul had a great desire to preach the gospel in Rome and made it a matter of prayer. Listen to some of these passages that reveal his heart:

Now after these things were finished, Paul purposed in the Spirit to go to Jerusalem after he had passed through Macedonia and Achaia, saying, “After I have been there, I must also see Rome.” (Acts 19:21)

He wrote to the church in Rome and told them of his desire and prayer:

Always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you. . . . So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. (Romans 1:10, 15)

Paul had no idea how that prayer would be answered. But that wasn’t his problem, that was God’s problem. Philippians 1 tells us God did answer that prayer. How did it happen? Rome never became his fourth missionary journey on his itinerary, because he got arrested and put in jail. Can you imagine Paul saying, “I wanted to go to Rome and preach the gospel, and now I can’t go.” And then he was sent to Rome for his trial.

He wanted to go as a preacher but he went as a prisoner. He made it to Rome but he was in chains. He was eager to preach the gospel there, but because of his circumstances, that seemed like a bust—at least in Paul’s mind. Remember, we pray and let God figure out the answer.

But then it happened. Paul’s prison sentence became the platform. The trial was his answer. God came through. This is Philippians 1:12-14:

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear. (Philippians 1:12-14, NIV)

The palace guards were the handpicked bodyguards of the Emperor Nero. Paul was saying that as a prisoner he was chained to a Roman soldier, which meant the gospel had been penetrating the handpicked bodyguards of the emperor. The gospel was going through the most guarded palace in the world and was advancing. It was going through a palace that was very anti-Christ. Nero persecuted the Christians so harshly and inhumanly, that God decided to bring the Good News through Nero’s front door and into his palace.

Listen to Paul’s words again: “What has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel.” His prayer was answered and even better than he prayed. He was not only advancing the gospel, it made its way into the elite army. The message was getting to the palace guards. Paul in Rome as a preacher; he was limited, because he was there as a prisoner, yet he was in a place he could never have gotten into—Caesar’s palace. And he got to preach in that high-security place for two years!

Paul was in Rome, the imperial city, capital of the world, the seat of the government, and right in the imperial palace—and so was the gospel of Jesus, because God answered Paul’s prayer better than Paul could ever have imagined. That’s why these words resonate even more on this palace answer from Ephesians:

Glory be to God, who by his mighty power at work within us is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of—infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, or hopes. (Ephesians 3:20, TLB)

What was defined as an imprisonment was really an answer to prayer. It was beyond the prayer and desires Paul had back in Acts. Sometimes we stop short in our prayers, thinking God did not answer, when the real truth is, He may not have answered it the way we wanted.

One day I was listening to an interview with Luis Palau, considered by many to be the Billy Graham of South America. Luis said in his life he had seen God answer prayer five different ways. Remember these, because you will need them one day, so you can see imprisonment as an answer to prayer just like Paul did. 

God answers, “Yes, I thought you’d never ask.” We often tell everybody except the Lord that we need this, or we want that. Secondly, “No, I love you too much.” That’s a good answer to prayer. Many times the Lord answers, “No, buddy. I know better, and I love you too much to give you that one.” Number three, “Yes, but not yet.” Timing. Number four, “Yes, and here’s more.” That’s the one I really like. The Lord not only answers your prayer, but he throws in some extras. Then fifth: “Yes, but differently from what you thought.”

Five ways God answers prayer: 

1. Yes. I never thought you’d ask.

2. No. I love you too much.

3. Yes, but not yet. The timing is not right.

4. Yes. And here’s more.

5. Yes. But differently than you thought.

Day 174

Today’s Reading: Ephesians 6

Men will argue over which is the greatest “man movie” of all time. The movie “winners” range from certain Westerns to mob movies to the historical heroic tales of Braveheart, 300, and my favorite, Gladiator.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is set during a time of both Roman world domination and Roman persecution of a group who seem to beat Rome without weapons, the early Christians. Russell Crowe plays Maximus, the Roman army general. In a scene where he is in the arena fighting for his life with other gladiators, he tells these men: “Whatever comes out of these gates, we’ve got a better chance of survival if we work together. If we stay together we survive.” And they did. Maximus gave them the key to winning the fight.

In today’s chapter, Paul gives us a key to winning the spiritual fight. Ephesians 6 is called the spiritual warfare chapter. It speaks about the armor of the Christian by associating it with the armor of the Roman soldiers.

Ephesians is called a prison letter, because Paul wrote it while in prison. During that time, if someone was in prison, he was chained to a Roman soldier 24/7. Many believe Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was looking at the guard he was chained to and was giving the Christian a picture of his weapons in a bigger and different fight.

In Ephesians 6, Paul gives us two contrasts in the fight that we need to focus on. First, Paul tells us that people are not our fight, the government is not our fight, Democrats and Republicans are not our battle. It’s much deeper and bigger than that:

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Verse 12, KJV)

If you want to get really raw, listen to this verse in the Passion Translation:

Your hand-to-hand combat is not with human beings, but with the highest principalities and authorities operating in rebellion under the heavenly realms. For they are a powerful class of demon-gods and evil spirits that hold this dark world in bondage.

The apostle is warning us not to fight people but to realize we are fighting in another realm, the spiritual realm. That’s the first contrast—natural versus spiritual.

The second contrast, which we often overlook, comes when we read verses 12 and 13 together. In verse 12, Paul says that “we wrestle not,” and then in verse 13 he says, “put on the whole armor of God.” Then he proceeds to go through each of the Roman soldiers’ equipment and associates each piece with a spiritual weapon we have. The sword the soldier carries represents the Word of God, the sword of the Spirit. The shield protects the Roman against fiery darts, but for us it is a shield of faith to protect us from the enemy’s missiles.

The contrast comes between “we wrestle not” and “put on the whole armor of God.” For wrestlers in the first century, the men would oil up their bodies, enter a ring, and fight until one was actually killed. It was one man against one man. The apostle Paul is saying, though, that if we are Christians, we are not wrestlers, we are soldiers. That means we are not in the Christian life by ourselves. We have soldiers side by side.

One of the great things the Roman army used to do when going into battle was to lock arms with each other, which would show strength and unity in the hand-to-hand combat. We often lose because we wrestle instead of being a soldier.

Recently a number of Christian leaders, authors, and musicians have gone public, announcing that they are abandoning their faith. They have denounced everything from the books they have written to the songs they’ve composed. They have come to the conclusion that God does not exist. Let me tell you that their tragic declarations show that they have faced their faith as individual wrestlers, not as soldiers, and they did not lean on other soldiers. You can’t win when you wrestle by yourself. One of my dear friends said, “Only weak people think they are strong enough to do the Christian life alone.” These leaders who abandoned their faith were doing the Christian life alone.

Have you ever seen a redwood tree up close? They can stand upwards of three-hundred-feet tall (almost the length of a football field), and have roots that stretch only five feet under the ground and still remain unmovable. Their roots are shallow because they can’t go deep. But they do something else: they never grow alone. They know they can’t wrestle so they have to be soldiers. That’s why Redwoods grow in bunches. Their roots can intertwine with one another and be strengthened by one another. With that height and those shallow roots, what keeps them from blowing over and uprooting in wind storms? They are all connected to one another. A storm can’t blow just one over, it has to be strong enough to blow them all over.

Those tragic Christian leaders did not connect roots with anyone and they lost their faith and got blown over. They didn’t reveal that God doesn’t exist. The only thing they revealed is that their root systems did not exist and that they’d tried to wrestle instead of being a soldier.

Let me remind you of Maximus’s words from Gladiator: “Whatever comes out of these gates, we’ve got a better chance of survival if we work together. If we stay together we survive.”

Those are not just Maximus’s words, that is God’s Word in Ephesians 6.

Day 173

Today’s Reading: Ephesians 5

In today’s chapter Paul reminds us of something that will take our Christianity to another level.

When we become Christians, we don’t simply get church, we get God. And God is not limited to Sundays for a few hours. Religion wants a few hours on Sunday. A relationship with Jesus is God every day. That’s what today’s revolutionary verse out of Ephesians 5 is about. And it breaks away from denominationalism norms.

This is pneumatology gone rogue. Pneumatology is the study of the Holy Spirit—something we keep bound in church or restricted to the classroom. But today Paul is telling us to break free of those boundaries. Listen to Ephesians 5:18 from the Contemporary English Version: “Don’t destroy yourself by getting drunk, but let the Spirit fill your life.”

Devotional writer Oswald Chambers said this about the Holy Spirit: “The Spirit is the first power we practically experience, but the last power we come to understand.” I want to help you understand His power today. We don’t do this often, but it’s worth taking a little journey into the Greek.

First, the verb fill is in the imperative mode. That means it is a command. It isn’t an option for certain Christians; we all need to be filled. Since this is a command, are we free to disobey any commands of God? This is as strong as, “Thou shalt not kill.” Thou shalt not kill and be filled with the Spirit are in the same category. Do you negotiate with the kill command? Of course not. Don’t do it with this one either.

Second, the tense of the verb is present. Present tense in the imperative mode always represents action going on. It is not filling for preaching and doing stuff in the church but for the believer’s life every day in every task, moment by moment.

Now get ready for the really revolutionary part. After Paul says to be filled with the Spirit, he tells wives to submit to their husbands, and husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church. He then tells children to obey their parents, parents to bring up their children in the instruction of the Lord, and workers to work as unto God. Remember, the original New Testament had no chapter or verse divisions, so from talking about being filled with the Spirit, Paul moves right into marriage, parenting, children, and working.

How can we be a great . . . wife or husband? son or parent? worker on the job? We need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The filling of the Holy Spirit is not for Sundays, it is for every day. We need the Holy Spirit in our homes, our marriages, our parenting, and our jobs.

Third, the verb is in the plural, which teaches us that this command is addressed not only to the preacher and the deacon but to every Christian. As A. W. Tozer reminds us, “The Spirit-filled life is not a special, deluxe edition of Christianity. It is part and parcel of the total plan of God for His people.”

Fourth, the verb is in the passive voice. This grammatical classification represents the subject of the verb as inactive but being acted upon. This teaches us that the filling with the Spirit is not the work of man but of God. That means it’s easy. It is not a difficult command, because it is not you doing it but you receiving it.

All this being true, we realize how important those words are to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Some have said that the most accurate interpretation of that verse is “Be being filled with the Holy Spirit” or “Keep being filled with the Holy Spirit.”

The great American evangelist of the nineteenth century, D. L. Moody, was once asked why he urged Christians to be filled constantly with the Holy Spirit. He said, “I need a continual infilling because I leak!”

A friend of mine was asked if he believed in the “second blessing”—the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He said, “Of course I do! And in the third, fourth, fifth blessing, and so on.” He believed in “be being filled” because he leaks. We all leak.

Day 172

Today’s Reading: Ephesians 4

I love these words from Corrie ten Boom: “When we confess our sins . . . God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. . . . God then places a sign out there that says No fishing allowed.” She is giving a unique way to describe Isaiah 43:25, which tells us something so important about God’s forgiveness. God says in that verse “I will not remember your sins.” That’s incredible when we think about God’s forgiveness of our sin.

Today in Ephesians 4, we are going to see that incredible forgiveness, that is bestowed on us, take one giant leap forward in a direction that will blow you away. Think about this. God sees the people who have cursed Him and blasphemed His name but yet have been forgiven of their sins. He never says to them, “Oh yeah, you’re the guy who said this about me” or “I remember you, you committed that sin.” Not once does God bring up our past. He chooses to never remember what we did.

Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was reminded one day of a vicious deed someone had done to her years before. But she acted as though she had never heard of the incident. “Don’t you remember it?” her friend asked. “No,” came Barton’s reply. “I distinctly remember forgetting it.”

God remembers our sin no more. That’s forgiveness. Think of the biggest sinner you know and what God’s forgiveness looks like for them. God never turns down anyone who asks to be forgiven and He never places limits on what He will forgive. How amazing is that kind of forgiveness?

Now get ready for Ephesians 4. I want you to think of the biggest sin committed against you. Someone and something that hurt you to the core. What has been the hardest thing for you to forgive? Have you ever turned down someone’s request to be forgiven? Now we take God’s forgiveness to a crazy place. Paul tells us, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32).

Did you catch that? Forgive each other just as God has forgiven you. I know, I know, you are already thinking of the crazy list.

But it was adultery.

It was sexual abuse.

That man hit me every day.

She betrayed my confidence.

He raped me.

She stole thousands of dollars and put my family at risk.

They fired me.

These are big deals. I am not minimizing these offenses. But I don’t want you to minimize what this verse says either. Augustine said something powerful. Ponder these words: “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.”

Here is what Paul is saying—and it’s revolutionary: if God would forgive the offense, then you must forgive it. This is not a suggestion. This is the way a Christian is supposed to live. Keep in mind that Ephesians 5:1, the verse that follows Ephesians 4:32, says, “Imitate God.” Or The Message says it like this: “Watch what God does, and then you do it.”

C. S. Lewis reminds us of the why: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” When it comes to imitating God, we would love to imitate some of His attributes that would make us big-time important: His sovereignty, so no one bosses us around; His power, so we are in control; His healing so we can be adored; His teaching, so we can be stand outs; His holiness, so we can be admired. But imitate His forgiveness? Seriously?

But as Andy Stanley tells us, “In the shadow of my hurt, forgiveness feels like a decision to reward my enemy. But in the shadow of the cross, forgiveness is merely a gift from one undeserving soul to another.”

In 1948, a group of communists led the Yŏsu Rebellion in Korea. Taking over one city, they grabbed Pastor Son Yang-Wŏn’s two sons, Matthew and John, and executed them. Before they died, the boys called on the persecutors to have faith in Jesus. Later when the communists were driven out, Chy Soon, a young man of the village, was identified as the man who fired the murderous shots that had killed the pastor’s sons. Chy Soon was convicted and sentenced to be executed. But the Pastor requested that the charges be dropped and that the boy be released to him as his adopted son. “I thank God that He has given me the love to seek to convert and adopt the enemy that has murdered my boys,” he said. The young man was adopted and accepted Jesus. Did this young man have a choice? Can you respond to that demonstration of forgiveness any other way but to accept Jesus?

All because someone forgave him as God forgives.

I am forgiven to be a forgiver.

I am forgiven to be an imitator of God.

I am forgiven to forgive as God forgives .Our reason to forgive is not because the person is forgivable or the offense is forgivable. We are to forgive because we have been forgiven. And because we are to imitate God in forgiveness. Forgiveness is not just for us but must come through us.