9th Week - Leaving the Orphan Spirit!

Discipleship Training School. We train to be disciples following the apostles example: full-time Christian life. That's the premise of this time, that should make from us the same as the apostles were. Simple enough, isn't it?

Alright then, WHAT were the apostles to Jesus?

They came to him as disciples. They served him, because they came to believe that he was the Messiah. They learned from him, slow and steadily. Eventually, they understood his nature as the son of God. They were close. I can only guess that, at some moment, they found themselves thinking of Jesus as a friend. A close friend, in fact. The Hebrew people was waiting for a militar leader, a son of David, who would free their land from the Roman oppression. Surprisingly, he was a caring and wonderful friend who was more interested on bringing hope and good news to the despised than in rising an army. Judas rebelled against that; he couldn't stand that.

Meanwhile, the other apostles ate with Jesus. It was an usual ocurrence for them to share a same plate and soaking their bread on it. John rested his head over Jesus  chest. They were friends. Pals. They worked for him, and whenever he gave an order to them they obeyed. Again, their orders were to procclaim that the Kingdom of God was getting closer and closer, and to bring health and blessings, and rebuke demons. He was a teacher more than a boss, and finally, some of a big brother more than a teacher.

And then a Bro.

When the son of God calls you brother, what does that mean? The Bible tells us that Jesus is not ashamed of calling us, the ones who believe in Him as our saviour and Lord, his siblings. That's amazing. Not only in a "how cool!" sense; it amazes me. The Creator itself... God the Son... calls me "brother"? God the Father calls me "son" too? How can that be?

It's something too big to be understood at once. I needed to take it step by step: servant --> friend --> son. The thing is, on a normal relationship, when you arrive to a new job, you have co-workers that can eventually become friends, and good friends. Unknown people can become friends. They are potential friends. But only on very specific circumstances you can become someone's son. Or father. So, the sonship is a change on the nature itself of the relationship. It's not a natural progress of it. To become a son, you have to be born again.

In Acts 5, Peter and the apostles are being judged about sharing the Gospel by the Sanhedrin, who considers it an heresy. But then, Gamaliel -Saul's own teacher of the law!- tells the Sanhedrin that, if this doctrine is false, it will disappear on his own in a while. If it's true, opposing the apostles is the same as fighting God. That wise man was a servant of God. Probably, this show of mercy means that he was a friend of God; he understood God's mercy and closeness to His people. But he couldn't be a son yet.

Alternatively, he was just procrastinating.

After a lifetime of being an spiritual orphan, and also being influenced by human's mindset of achieving everything by ourselves -that makes total sense for an orphan who cannot ask his Father for help!- it takes time for the Holy Spirit to convince us for opening ourselves to Him. Layer by layer, our wrong mindset must go, so we can receive the full blessing of our true identity.

Being God's son means a closeness unattainable by our own means. It means that God's nature live in our own, that we receive the spirit of adoption (see Romans 8:15). It means that our dreams and desires are the same of the Holy Spirit. We'll have to lay our rights, yeah. We'll have to lay them over those God-inspired dreams. So we shouldn't stop having ambitions and desires. In fact, we should aim them higher than ever! Our Father is there to give them to us!

Of course, we should never stop the search for holiness, nor stop praying, talking and listening to the Lord. Is just that we will never need again to desperately beg, but to wait in hope and trust. We can ask passionately. Last night, I was praying with the guys from our bedroom for the finances needed for the outreach. I discerned a burden: many of us, myself included, had stopped paying the tithe for some time. Then I had a strong change of feelings.

God's definition of love is giving yourself to others: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." The outreach means that we're on our way to give ourselves to the unreached people. We love them, because God's love for them lives in us. Suddenly, I felt the urge of being able to give myself.

I wanted to. I needed to. The idea of being unable to because of my sin was unbearable. Then, crying, I repented of my sin. I asked for God's mercy, so we could be freed, as our act of disobedience was giving power to the kingdom of darkness over us, so it could block the flow of God's blessing to us. I was so sorry! I understood God's heart for the people because I shared. My Father wants to save everyone, and my sins and mistakes were hindering His love!

The prayer meeting was intense, beautiful and succesful. We're waiting for God's full provision to reach us in brief. Meanwhile, we will enjoy our time of being collected with our dear Abba.

I didn't even want to make this joke.
I was just afraid of exploding if I didn't take the chance.

8th Week - Relationship

My relationship skills... suck. I've been a loner for a long time, prefering books,games and music to social interaction. Because I was shy, and quite smart, so this kind of leisure gave me all that I wanted -fun, fantasy, surprises and personal development- without having to handle bullies, meanies and sports. Seriously, what was the deal with sports? I was asthmatic, so I could never stand them. They weren't fun for me, so how could they be for the other kids?

First symptom of lacking social interaction is lacking empathy.

And lacking empathy is the main characteristic of psycopathy.
... stop looking at me like that, guys.

Is very conforting consider the fact that God is a relational being. He doesn't need us, but He wants us. That's fatherhood and closeness. I've found, during the week, a newfound love -and understanding of what this love means- for my friends, my partners here at DTS, my family and even for strangers, as I see my evangelistic work as an act of love for those who haven't found God's grace yet.

I must say that, during all this week, I found myself working on a different idea. What's God standar for relationship? This seems to be the real question after every week, and the answer has never stopped being surprising. But this time it didn't come like that, so I started thinking about it by myself. And the answer I come by was Unity.

Guys, if we all throw Paper, the game gets boring.

God's relationships are about unity. I think the idea started with some comment that Justin did during Worldview's week: he said that when he asked God saying that he couldn't understand trinity, God's answer was that in fact Justin didn't even understand unity. Let's take a look about that.

Adam was in closeness with the Lord. He was happy and intimate with Him, but still, there was something that God Himself couldn't do to Adam. Adam was alone, the only one of his species. That wasn't good enough. Adam needed Eve. Not only so they could mate and create marriage. God can't marry a man, nor a woman. God can't physically love. God can't love you as a son, even if He of course understands sonship. God can't give Adam the kinds of love that mankind eventually would, so He provided him with that. I know, I'm digressing, but it's good digression.

The main verse I can find about my idea is in John's Gospel, chapter 17, verses 20 to 23:

“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will[a] believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me."

So, the unity consists in sharing love. God loves Himself, and loves us. Someone told me once that, even if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit loved each other so much, the natural next step to express their mutual, shared love was creating mankind to love them, not too differently from a loving couple who desire to father a child as the natural progression of their relationship. The child is not needed for love. He doesn't break the family unity, either; only adds to it, receives love, and promptly gives it too.

And then they can send their son to reach for the highest!
Yeah, the child in top of a Catalanish human castle uses to be younger than 10 years.

The man and the woman will be a single flesh. That's more than a metaphor of sex nor of breeding children. States a new state of being. God's glory is only His; still, we read that Jesus gave mankind the glory that He had received. He shared His best; love, glory and ministry. He gave it all to us. That was our adoption, our moment of becoming his. He cleaned us at the cross, because his glory is shekinah glory, and wherever it is, nothing else can stand, so everything else had to be taken off.

The trinity has unity as a whole. The Father is head of Christ, Christ is head of the church. The church will be Christ's wife in heaven, providing God of the kind of love that He couldn't share with Adam. It's, as everything in the Word, amazingly big and surprisingly simple, like hidden on plain sight.

FRESH WIND, FRESH FIRE

by Jim Cymbala

with Dean Merrill

Commented by Tony Herrera, candidate for the Best Missionary in the Tony Herrera Annual Prizes

Four main principles:
1- God is attracted to our weakness

We are broken. We are in need. Always. Sometimes we won't acknowledge that until such a desperate moment that praying becomes our only resource. At that moment, the sincerity of our weakness will speak to God without barriers.

It's a shame needing such things to look for Him. God isn't only all-powerful, all-knowing and all-present, He's also all-merciful. He's waiting the moment when we toss aside all of our pride, the source of all sins. At this moment, our prayer is real, stops being a mechanical routine and recognizes that we are begging for a terribly needed help that is out of our reach to get.

2- Call on the Lord!

After the help arrives, we have the best chance of going on, restoring our relationship with God. The nation of Israel did that many times on biblical times. The modern church has also seen many revivals of our connecion with the Lord. After our weakness has called Him, we can start praying to learn, to grow ourselves, to follow His lead through the Bible and through revelation in prayer. The intimacy with God must be build, and with it, the mutual trust.

At such a time, God will put responsibilities, gifts and blessings in our hands. It's our duty to put them in good use and administer them. We see, too often, that we lose the humbleness and start feeling that we, the blessed ones, are more important than others who have gifts less recognized, or less rewarding in a material, financial time. That isn't God's plan. That kind of behaviour hurts our testimony and shows, again, our pride and hipocrisy.

It's beautifully shown in the book when Jesus enters the temple and gets angry, as the place that should be "house of prayers for all nations" is being used for merchants who make a great profit in selling the animals for the sacrifice, staining the sense of the reconciliation and gratefulness to the Lord and making a business of it. It's a strong image, and after getting the full understanding of the meaning of sacrifice, I can understand Jesus righteous anger against them.

3- Nothing new under the sun

Gospel is simple. So simple, it can be hard to believe, due to our human mindset that says that everything that is worthy must be achieved through our own effort. Didn't God Himself tell that to Adam? "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food". Then again, that was what God stablished as a consequence of man falling from God's grace. When Jesus saves us, grace is restored first thing. It's by grace that we are saved. It's by the influence of the Holy Spirit living on us, and us being accepting and close with Him, that we develop holiness. The closeness comes through prayer, the time that we actively share with God, and the Word is quite clear about that.

But then we go for the last kind of ministry, the last interpretation that let's us take an active role by ourselves. The book mentions a couple of them; rejecting generational curses and "advanced" spiritual warfare. Part of this concepts are anti biblical. Part of them are Bible-inspired, but again, that's not the same thing. Any doctrinal derivation must be rejected.

This changes on God's word aren't something new, either. Paul's letters to the Corinthians are about avoiding the corruption of the right doctrine, so we can see that this trouble existed even between the first believers. We could also think about the Pharisees laws that were added to Moses law, making impossible to discern the true God's grace behind this one. Either way, we should avoid the mistakes from the past, instead of repeating them.

4- Never stop trusting God

Eben-Ezer, "God help us up to here". The Bible signals one in special, but this "stones of promise", as it's translated, were meant to be remembrances of past victories achieved thanks to God, to strenghten and affirm the faith in later times. So, our victories don't mean "we don't need God anymore", nor even "God helped me up to here, now I can take charge". Our victories mean "God is faithful". And we should remember that before the victory, on our triumph moment, and in the future.

As I said before, the pride was and is the source of all sin. It's the old lie that says "God is a liar, He is afraid of you being independant, you don't need God, you're made in his image and likeness, so you can take charge of your fate...". Satan knows that better than us; our human nature hasn't changed since the fall and we keep believing the same stupid words.

We need to live in dependance of God. Jesus restored our relationship; let's enjoy it, rejoice in Him, share with the Lord every moment, seek for His guidance and let our heart become like His, so our desires would be on unity with those of the Holy Spirit. Then we will be able to say that Jesus is the head of the church on every moment. Do you imagine what would happen if our body, eventually, stopped following the orders of our brain and started to go around on his own?

My personal reflexion:

Prayer is amazing! We have a direct line with the Lord, the Creator of the Universe! And He is happy to receive us, He compels us to get close, trusting Him, to the throne of grace. It's the healthy place were our spiritual life can be nourished and built. This aren't new words nor arguments, but this book has made me understand it and make it a deeper part of me. I'm really thankful for this book, and I'd like to get also "Fresh Faith", from the same author.