Chosen to obey …

Posted on May 28, 2012 by dave

Chosen to obey …

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by how rich I am in Jesus Christ. As I set out to read 1 Peter this morning it wasn’t long before I was stopped in my tracks, verse two as a matter of fact.

Here is the phrase that struck me: “chosen … to obey Jesus Christ.”

  • (1 Peter 1:1-2 NASB) Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who reside as aliens, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who are chosen [2] according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood: May grace and peace be yours in the fullest measure.

Not the onerous life of rote obedience to religious rules and arbitrary direction from an impersonal deity, but a calling, the special privilege of one of those who has been chosen for obedience to Christ during my stay on this Earth. What an amazing stewardship we Christians have been trusted with.

What’s the big deal? I already knew this stuff. The big deal is the Spirit of God. He met me as I sat at my desk and flashed the greatness and care of God before my eyes.

I am chosen to obey. I am indeed special. (No snickers and smirks allowed.)

I am rich in Jesus Christ.

Want some more “amazing” information about how special I am? The choosing happened before the foundation of this world. That’s a long time ago. Here is what Paul says.

  • (Ephesians 1:3–5 NASB95) Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love 5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will.

I hope this morning that you can be amazed with me before the greatness of our God, and that together we can bow low before our Wondrous God and King, Jesus Christ.

Chosen to obey, to stand firm in his Name, to bow low in his presence.

Amen!

 

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Lunch and power nap by the lake … Yes!

Posted on May 22, 2012 by dave
Photo

Dave Scott Bottle Rocket Theology … The simple art of following Jesus Son of God
http://bottlerockettheology.com

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When the Spirit of the Lord Moves in My Heart …

Posted on May 19, 2012 by dave
“When the Spirit of the Lord”: Author Unknown / Dave Scott vocals & guitar

When the Spirit of the Lord 041412.mp3 Listen on Posterous

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Hiding behind the trees, lost and don’t know it …

Posted on May 18, 2012 by dave

(Excerpt from Beyond Pretend: A Sheep’s Guide to the Universe! by David Lee Scott, pp. 31-34. Copyright Notices © 2010 by David Lee Scott. All rights reserved.)

LOST
We are lost. Hiding behind the trees, lost and don’t know it, still hiding. Still stupid. And we don’t want to know where we are.

Let’s think through this for a minute. Why do people fight off attempts by others to help them see their standing before God? A person would think that the logical thing is that a lost person would want directions – he or she would want to be found. But depravity is not logical. It wasn’t logical to listen to the snake, no matter how beautiful and clever, rather than listen to God. Forget logic. We humans are desire-driven, and that is dangerous, no, deadly, if our desires are not found in God.

The land of wishful thinking …
So I don’t think it is a stretch to say that we don’t want to know where we are. And if we don’t know where we are, all we have is wishful thinking when it comes to where we are going. We live in a land of wishful thinking, and wishful thinking, the dangerous territory of our flawed minds, is different than hope. Our build, our blue print for the future, is presumed upon a false schematic, overlooking the design and engineering flaws inherent in each of us, hard wiring anomalies resulting from denial and rebellion.

We’re messed up, and we kind of know it, but we still insist on writing the story ourselves.

The myth of the better place …
Doesn’t this reflect the thoughts of the average person concerning “what comes next?” Listen to the person at the funeral of our friend or family member. “Well, she’s in a better place now.” [I hope.] Could you hear the “I hope?” They didn’t say it; it wasn’t audible, but it was very real. They don’t say I hope, but they wishfully hope it to be true because that is what they are wishing for when they die – a better place. But don’t you dare try to get them to think about “it” now. “It” as in, where they actually are now, separated from God, lost, hiding, God’s enemy, and where this means they will be later … and it’s not a better place.

Don’t you dare try to get them to leave the land of wishful thinking.
Don’t you try to get them to “look under the hood” and check the wiring. Don’t you dare try to warn them about hell and the consequences of denying reality and remaining lost. Let them enjoy the sunshine of a fool’s autonomy, let them love what they do away from the light, let them run to the darkness, let them go to hell. What kind of friend are you anyway?

The Son continues the Father’s quest …
In Genesis three we read how God came looking for Adam and Eve as they hid behind the trees after rebelling against him. In Luke nineteen we see Jesus continuing the search, but now on a much larger scale. He came to seek and to save the lost among all humanity. He is looking behind all the trees.

  • For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10 ESV).

Luke’s words present the concept of our lostness. From his words we also then deduce that biblically speaking the state of being lost is something to be saved from. Through their rebellion in Genesis three, Adam and Eve introduced spiritual death, which includes among other things our desire to hide from God and our state of being lost.

  • Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned (Romans 5:12 ESV).

The Bible uses many words to describe our relationship with God, one of those words being “dead” – the state of being spiritually separated from God. The serpent coaxed Adam and Eve with these words.

  • But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die” (Genesis 3:4 ESV).

Kind of true (they didn’t physically drop dead on the spot) but not really true, a stretching of the truth that Adam and Eve were willing to accept to fulfill their immediate desires. On the small screen of their lives they missed God’s big picture. They winked at reality in order to grab what they wanted now. So, no, they didn’t drop over dead, but the reality is that the moment they gave in and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they became spiritually dead (separated from God) and the process of physical death had begun. Death, both physically and spiritually, would now win its battle against every person born onto the planet.

God said they would die. Satan said they wouldn’t. Someone was lying.

  • And you were dead in the trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1 ESV).

So who will we believe? God or the serpent. Seems to be a no-brainer, but that’s not the way depravity plays out in the lives of humankind.

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Cuckoo birds, the whole lot of us.

Posted on May 17, 2012 by dave

Do lost people try to be found?

Let’s review.
What have we discovered so far? As human occupants on this earth we are displaced, hiding, lost and dead. But we have also learned that all is not lost because Jesus came looking for us to save us. So, when we see Christ coming we should be running to him shouting, “Over here, Jesus, over here.” Right? Not exactly. Not how the mind of a fallen human works. We in fact don’t admit we are lost. We pretend we know where we are and where we are going and become angry if you tell us otherwise. So, just as Adam and Eve hid behind the trees when God came calling, we too hide behind the trees when Jesus comes seeking us. After all, we don’t need a map. We aren’t lost. Why come out of the shadows?

Interesting that you brought that up.

Why wouldn’t we come out into the light when Jesus comes calling?
I mean if we were lost in the Amazon, or on the mountains of Colorado, or on the streets of New York, and we heard and saw the leader of our group coming toward us, wouldn’t we be running toward him or her, waving our arms, sending up flares, shouting, building a bonfire on the beach, anything to get their attention so we could be rescued?

  • This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure (John 3:19-20 MSG).

We don’t want to be exposed.
Crazy, nuts? Yes, but this is depravity. Our thinking is mortally flawed. We don’t want to be found, we don’t want to be exposed; we will stay hidden in our denial and illusion. We will wish for the best, but we will die in our sins unless we come away from the trees. Cuckoo birds, the whole lot of us. We like what we have better than what God offers. Looney tunes for sure but just as in Eden, we are still seeking the goodness of life apart from God. It’s our sin and we’re sticking to it. We are holding out for “the better place.”

To be found we must know what it means to be lost, and only God can get through our defenses. Knowing how lost we were before Christ can be a benefit to our growth as a Christian, because when Christ finally finds us and saves us, we will know how saved we are. Here is what I mean. Too many times the enemy beats our heads against the wall with guilt, with accusations which penetrate our human ways and reasoning because we don’t understand how far from God we were, how dead we were, how without hope we were, how desperate, how lost we were. The enemy attempts to knock us down by attacking our goodness. And, yes, he hits a bullseye in pointing out our failure and sin. So what! He is shooting the wrong target!

“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” – Winston Churchill –

When we fully realize and accept that our relationship with God depends on what Christ has done and not on our goodness, then his flailing away is meaningless. The fiery arrows are quenched by our shields of faith because we now know that we were lost and dead and could not have been any further from God than we were, and we know that God loved us and saved us while we were still his enemies. We have God’s full acceptance; we value the enemy’s opinion no longer. The accusations fall ineffective. The truth that lives in our hearts tells us that Jesus completely took care of our debt to God on the cross.

  • As Scripture says, “Not one person has God’s approval. No one understands. No one searches for God. Everyone has turned away. Together they have become rotten to the core. No one does anything good, not even one person” (Romans 3:10-12 GW).
  • … he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us (Ephesians 2:5 MSG)!

When we allow the Holy Spirit of God to instruct our minds to the true condition we were in before Jesus Christ did his saving work in our lives, then we are confident in the helmet of salvation against the hateful and lethal blows of the dark forces. There will be no surprises, no skeletons in the closet, no non-disclosures before God. It is all out there before him in all his holiness and fully and completely dealt with through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. All of our dark deeds are dragged before the light of God’s holiness and we have the blessing of “Yes, approved by God by the blood of the Lamb” applied to us as we believe.

(Excerpt from Beyond Pretend: A Sheep’s Guide to the Universe! by David Lee Scott, pp. 34-36. Copyright Notices © 2010 by David Lee Scott. All rights reserved.)

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The church that made Jesus want to barf …

Posted on May 16, 2012 by dave

The church that made Jesus want to barf …

The leaders of this church must have had compelling, attractive stories about God because outwardly they were quite successful. But when Jesus evaluated the church, he said something like this. “Since you are the way you are and like the way you are, I think I’ll throw up.”

Jesus addressed a church in Laodicea in the book of Revelation which was blinded by its own pretense. If you read their brochures or asked the members about their church, you would hear something like this: “We are rich, wealthy and in need of nothing.” But if you asked Jesus about the same church, you would hear this: “They are miserable, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

  • You say, “I’m rich. I’m wealthy. I don’t need anything.” Yet, you do not realize that you are miserable, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked (Revelation 3:17 GW).

Comparing notes with Jesus …

We really need to give this the attention it deserves because from the many examples Christ could have chosen to give us, this was one of the few he included in his anecdotal accounts of “how not to do church.”

So track with me for a moment and let’s first notice that everything Christ said about them was the opposite of what they thought of themselves. This church must have had something going for it, at least some externals for the members to presume this image of success. Maybe they were “the friendliest church in town.” Or maybe it was their reputation in the community for their food pantry, the generous amount of money they sent to missions, the exciting programs, their stand on abortion, etc.

Can you imagine if the leaders of this church could have arranged a weekend retreat with Christ to evaluate their ministry? So as they are sitting around the large conference table with coffee and doughnuts, basking in their success, anticipating the superlatives, they instead hear – “Okay, so here is my evaluation of your ministry. You are miserable, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

They didn’t see that one coming. Shocked, blindsided, they think that surely he made a mistake, surely he had the wrong church. “Did you pick up the wrong file, Jesus?” “Maybe your secretary loaded the wrong PowerPoint presentation on your laptop?” But Christ had the right church. It was they who had made the mistake. The fatal error of the church at Laodicea was listening to each other instead of listening to God.

Put yourself there. If you are familiar with the dynamics of church operations, I believe that you will come to the conclusion that the leaders of this church must have been convinced that they were on target and on-board with the vision, purpose and mission of the church and of God. Could they have presented the positive attitude and the polished front otherwise?

Bad storytellers …

Their storytellers, the leaders of their church, had kept them from God. But we aren’t surprised, are we? If we can pretend to worship, surely we can pretend to do anything. They pretended to listen to Jesus but firmly held to their own opinions, writing stories about God as they saw fit, contriving a safe, lukewarm religion. And Jesus was ready to puke. Keeping their hearts at a distance, they demonstrated a dreadful unwillingness to relinquish what they had for what God offered.

Maybe not feeling the love …

Now maybe you are not feeling the love in all this, but do you remember our first question? “Where am I?” Jesus was a first question type of guy while on this earth. He wanted people to discover where they were now rather than later. Some were saved but many turned away, but he kept asking his questions.

  • After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:66-68 ESV).

So I am not being mean. I want to help you ask the question before God. Where are you? I want to give you the best opportunity possible. Maybe your storytellers are like those in the church we just discussed. Maybe you want it to be like that. Some of us may need to ask, “Is my church keeping me from following Christ?” I don’t know those things, but if Jesus were to write a brief story of your life, and you were to sit down and write your account, how would your stories compare? Where are you? That is why I am writing the book. So, you are sitting across the table from Jesus. What does he say about your life at this moment? 

(Excerpt from Beyond Pretend: A Sheep’s Guide to the Universe! ! by David Lee Scott, pp. 64-66. Copyright Notices © 2010 by David Lee Scott. All rights reserved.  )

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Blurb for Living by the Words of God – book and web site …

Posted on May 4, 2012 by dave

The main purpose of this site … http://livingbythewordsofGod.com

To promote interest in my book – Living by the Words of God – and to draw awareness of our need in the Church to rethink our approach to the words of God.  I believe we need to shift from a knowledge-based paradigm in which our main (and sometimes only) emphasis is to study the Bible to a path-based paradigm in which we learn the words, love the words and live the words.

The biblical pattern is to learn the words so we can live them.  We put on the yoke of Jesus and follow him down the path of faith.  But for many it seems that though we highly value God’s word and diligently study God’s word that we are more interested in learning about God than bowing before him on the path of life.

This book began as a “How to study the Bible” book but I soon realized that the issue is much more than study methods and determination.  The greatest issue is the preparation of our hearts and minds to receive what God teaches when we do discover his truth.

It is not enough to believe the Bible to be true or to value its character.  We must decide:  Do we believe God for life?  That is our real issue.  Do we trust God enough to live how he tells us to live, no matter how contradictory it may seem to our human perspective?

Until we are at that place of readiness, we will not hear the voice of God no matter how diligent we are in our study because we will not be willing to receive his words.  Not trusting him to direct us to what is best we will find suitable alternatives in which we appear to follow God but which in fact transform the ways and teachings of God into the ways and rules of men.
dave

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You who have no money …

Posted on May 2, 2012 by dave
You who have no money …

Been there. Done that. A certain bus ride from Colorado Springs back to Terre Haute comes to mind. And you who have no money come, buy and eat. Thirsty for true life? But no money? Come, help yourself to the riches of heaven. All paid for and freely given by Jesus Son of God. I love God. I love his truth. Thank you, Mighty One.
Isaiah 55:1 (NASB)
“Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters; And you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost.

Dave Scott Bottle Rocket Theology … The simple art of following Jesus Son of God
http://bottlerockettheology.com

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I love God’s word …

Posted on May 1, 2012 by dave
I love God’s word. Just finished my chicken noodle soup and picked up my Bible and thought: I truly love the words of God. How encouraging.
Psalm 119:97,103 (NASB)
O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day. [103] How sweet are Your words to my taste! Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Dave Scott Bottle Rocket Theology … The simple art of following Jesus Son of God
http://bottlerockettheology.com

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Jesus – “I’m back …”

Posted on April 28, 2012 by dave
  • Isaiah 52:6 (NASB) Therefore My people shall know My name; therefore in that day I am the one who is speaking, “Here I am.”

“I shall return” quotes General Douglas MacArthur

It was March 11, 1942. General Douglas MacArthur climbed aboard a gun ship in the Philippines under cover of darkness, and ran a Japanese blockade. Speaking to the press in Adelaide, Australia, MacArthur told reporters, “I came through and I shall return.”

  • Acts 1:11 (NIV) “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
  • Revelation 19:11 (NIV) I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.
  • Revelation 19:14 (NIV) The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean.

 

Dave Scott Bottle Rocket Theology … The simple art of following Jesus Son of God
http://bottlerockettheology.com

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