This is Personal

My favorite verse in the Bible is in the Book of Micah. Now, Micah is a terrible Book. It’s about destruction and punishment. It’s full of verses like “Put no trust in a friend, have no confidence in a loved one; guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your embrace“. Wow. And “They shall lick dust like a snake, like the crawling things of the earth; they shall come trembling out of their fortresses; they shall turn in dread to the Lord our God, and they shall stand in fear of you“.

But it is also a book with hope. It’s the book where the swords are beaten into plowshares. And “No one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken“.

And this Chapter 6, Verse 8. He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?

This is my favorite verse for several reason. First, because it was my father’s favorite verse. And second, because some famous Jewish scholar said that this verse was the essence of the Bible, that all the rest was just amplification. But mostly it is my favorite because of the last bit, Walk humbly with your God.

Not behind your God. Not at His command. But with your God. Side by Side.

God could have chosen to rule over us by fear. He could command, and things would be so just because He said so. He could smite us with lightning bolts and herd us around like cattle. But that’s not what He chose to do. He chose to govern us with love, and He chose, He created us so that we could have a relationship with Him.

If you read every blog I write and only walk away with one thing, I hope this is it. This is personal.

Your relationship with God, with the Lord can be a personal, one on one, give and take. And your salvation is also personal.


I was working in a bank, this was so long ago, and the women were telling me about a girl who had worked there before, and she told them that she had started on a new diet, and she told them that she knew she was going to succeed this time because she had asked God to help her. And these women were laughing. This was so funny!

And I couldn’t figure out what was funny. They said God didn’t have time to care about whether or not this woman lost weight.

Why not? He has time to count the hairs on my head, which changes every time I brush my hair or pull my ponytail holder out. He has time to care about the things, even the little things which matter to us.

One of my nephews recently converted to another religion, and we were sitting at the table after dinner as we often do, talking, and we were discussing the similarities between his religion and mine.

I was saved when I was nine years old, and at the time I was 54. I had been a Christian for 45 years.

I don’t even remember what I was saying, but I said something about knowing that He died, He sacrificed Himself for me. And it just flooded me. This knowledge just ran through me.

He didn’t die for some theoretical, nameless, faceless person in the future. He died for me. For me. And for you.

How He did that when I didn’t even exist yet, I can’t tell you. That’s for God to explain.

There’s a small story in Mark 10. It doesn’t get told very often:

Jesus and the disciples went to Jericho. And as they were leaving, they were passing through a crowd, and a blind man called out to Jesus, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!“ The people around him told him to be quiet, but he called out again. “Jesus stood still and said ‘Call him here.‘ “

Jesus stood still. Jesus stopped. He heard one voice, and He stopped.

He was here to save the whole world, and He stopped for one voice.

And He’ll stop for your voice.

You did not chose me, but I chose you. John 15:16

A Simple Plan

Leading a good Christian Life is like doing an arabesque in figure skating. You know that thing where they stand on one foot and lean forward and lift the other leg straight out behind and extend one arm. It’s a simple act that’s hard to execute.


Getting saved is really easy. It takes one prayer.

Lord, I believe you died so that I could be saved. I accept you as my Lord and Savior. I ask you to come into my heart and take over my life.


It takes less time than it takes a Quarter Horse to run the 440. And I dressed that up. You can do it with a lot less words.


And that’s it. You’re saved.


I have heard some people add to that.


You have to accept the Lord and be baptized.


You have to accept the Lord and repent your sins.


You have to accept the Lord and publicly confess your faith.


All of these may be positive things, but they are not necessary to being saved.


You may be moved to be baptized. To perform a symbolic act. Or you may be satisfied, like me, to be baptized in the Spirit.

You will repent your sins. You’ll feel bad about things you’ve done and the things you’ll do, and you’ll ask for forgiveness, and it will be given, and you will try to do better in the future. But you don’t have to do that to be saved.


A public confession of faith doesn’t have to be walking down an aisle in front of a bunch of other Christians. When someone asks you to go celebrate by getting drunk, and you say I don’t do that, I’m a Christian, that is also a public confession of faith. Either way a public confession is not necessary for your salvation.


You might say you have to keep the Ten Commandments to be a Christian, but in truth, Jesus gave us two commandments. Not that He threw out the Ten. He just made it simpler.


Love your Father with all your heart and all your might, and Love each other.


If you do those things, you will keep the Ten Commandments. You don’t lie to people you love. You don’t steal from people you love. You love God by honoring His requests, by singing His praises, by maintaining a good relationship with Him.


Loving each other gets a little harder because we aren’t very lovable most of the time.

Leading a Christian life, once you are assured of salvation, is simple.


You just turn your decision making processes over to God, you zipper your mouth, you stop gossiping and think kind thoughts, you tithe and give alms and resist temptations.


Easy peasy.


But truth is even if you could manage to do all those things, leading a Christian life is not about what you do or don’t do. We are all going to fail, to sin, to have habits we can’t kick and weaknesses we cannot overcome. And God accepts that in us.


Living a Christian life is simple because it isn’t about holding yourself to an impossible standard. You don’t have to memorize prayers or chapter and verse, you don’t have to abide by a list of do’s and don’ts. You don’t have to give away all your possessions and live a life of poverty. There isn’t a dress code or dietary restrictions. You don’t have to attend services regularly or hold a membership.


You just have to open your heart, open your mind, let Jesus in. Not just make an intellectual decision that you recognize Jesus as your savior, but let Him into the core of you. If you stay in communication with God, develop a personal relationship with Jesus, let God direct you, fill you, join you as you go about your daily activities, you will live a good Christian life before you know what‘s happening.

Live your life as your spiritual nature directs you. Galatians 5:16 [God's Word]

A Reason to Believe

There’s a joke, which is probably only funny to Christians.

A man has an appointment downtown, and he’s running late. When he gets there, he realizes that the building he’s going to doesn’t have a parking garage, and he’s going to have to park on the street. So he’s circling and circling the block looking for a space, and he says Please Lord, find me a parking space. And someone starts their car and pulls out right ahead and opens the space up for him. And he says “That’s okay, Lord, I found one on my own.”

It’s funny, but it’s not.

Recently, I had an experience that brought this joke to mind.

There are horses that mean more to you than others. Usually for me, it‘s a horse that has required a lot of care giving. We had a filly like that. There were three interesting things about this filly. First, she was really fast. Second, she was really hard headed. If she decided she wasn’t doing something, she wasn’t doing it, and there was no coaxing or beating or whatever you could think of that was going to change her mind, and third, she was afraid of everything. Particularly anything that made noise.

And her reaction was explosive. It wasn’t standing and trembling. It was jumping sideways and taking everything off the outside wall.

So she took a lot of handholding, a lot of care giving, and after just a couple of months, I loved her very much.

She went to the track and she worked, and she worked very well, and she cooled out just fine. But then a few hours later, she was limping majorly. What my boss called three legged lame. The vet came, and they came to the conclusion that she most likely had a slab fracture.

My boss said, Go to Chapel, Beth.

I waited until the barn was quiet, and I went in the stall with her, and I laid my hand on her knee, and I prayed. I was pretty emotional so I’m not sure exactly what I said. I know I started off rather timid.

I’m in this by myself Lord, so You need to give me a little extra help. I pray for healing for Sunny’s leg, I pray that her bones are strong and that they remain strong. And then I got a little braver, and I said I pray healing on this horse, in the Name of Jesus Christ, by the authority He has given us, and I call this horse healed, by His stripes we are healed. And I thought that might be a bit much, so I said She’s just a horse, but she’s important to my heart, and I concluded with something about the Name of Jesus, and the Power of Jesus, Amen.

I went on and finished working, and I was thinking about it. I was not raised to believe in this kind of thing. In fact, the exact opposite. In my house, faith healing and laying on of hands was actively laughed at. That was for ignorant people. But I’ve seen it happen too many times now.

But I was worried that I hadn’t done it correctly. And I thought if her leg is broken, it’s already broken, the time to pray for it was before she went out. And then I looked at her, and I thought No, God, if she’s broken, You just fix it, just reach out there and pinch that bone back together, and I knew that that was true. Not necessarily that He had healed her, but that that is how it would work.

The next day, she walked out of the stall just fine.

Now when I said something to my boss about praying for her, she blew it off. As far as she was concerned, the bone had never been broken. But I don’t believe that. I believe that horse was healed.

It’s easier to not believe. It’s easier to play the cynic card, to stay in your comfort zone, to not open yourself to the possibility that what God is offering you is bigger than you had imagined.

It’s easy to say ignorant people believe in laying on of hands. It’s hard to accept that Jesus imparted to us the power that He did. It’s easy to point to a prayer that you believe went unanswered and say God doesn’t really answer prayer. It’s hard to put yourself out there for ridicule.

What God has given us, if we chose to accept it, is so large, almost incomprehensible, it feels almost dangerous to accept it. Could it possibly be true?

If you let go of your fears, of your self doubt, of your hang ups, if you let yourself, the wonders of the Lord are yours.

Live decent lives among unbelievers. Then, although they ridicule you as if you were doing wrong while they are watching you do good things, they will praise God on the day He comes to help you. 1 Peter 2:12 [God's Word]

An Instrument of God

A flood was coming. There was plenty of warning, and plenty of time for people to evacuate. But there was one guy who lived on a hill on the edge of town, and he said he wasn't not going. He said the Lord would save him.

When the water got up into his yard, he was standing on his porch with his dog, and one of his friends drove over in a big jacked up four wheel drive truck, and he said, "Come on, Sam, I’ll get you out of here." And Sam said, "No, the Lord will save me."

When the water got up over the first floor, a fellow came by in a boat, rowed right up to the second floor window, where Sam was standing with his dog, and he said, "Come on, guy, I’ll get you out of here." Sam said, "No, the Lord will save me."

The dog jumped out of the window, swam to the boat, and the man rowed away.

When Sam was up on his roof, the Coast Guard came in a helicopter. They lowered a guy on a ladder, tried to put Sam in a basket, tried to offer him a life jacket. Sam said, "No, the Lord will save me."

So when Sam was standing in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he said, "What happened, I thought the Lord was going to save me."

St. Peter said, "He sent your friend with a four wheel drive truck, he sent a guy with a boat and he sent the Coast Guard with a helicopter. What else do you want him to do?"

This is one of the most important things I can tell you. But to start it off, I have to get catty.

I know this has happened to you. You go to service, and you see there’s a guest musician. And you see on the overhead that they’re going to sing one of your favorite songs. You get all excited, and then they start and it’s terrible. It’s just terrible.

The rhythm is all wrong, they’re going too fast, and they’ve done something so bizarre with the melody that you have to go out in the hall and sing it to yourself a couple of times, just to remember what it’s really supposed to sound like.

Or someone gets up to speak, and it turns out that they are a Baby Christian and they really have no experiences to share, all they can say is God is so good, He’s so good. And you are very quickly ready for them to sit down and get on with the service.

These people, as weak, as annoying as they might be are instruments of God. And there is someone out there that they will reach.

So you need to be tolerant of them, and you need to give them your attention and your encouragement, and you need to remember that somehow God is using them.

But you also have to remember that you are an instrument of God. And you have to remember when you’re out there in the world that other people see you as an instrument of God.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stand up in the front of the room and perform. Most of the time the best thing you can do to be a witness for Christ is to lead a good life. People will see you doing the things you do, and it doesn’t matter if they know you’re doing them because you’re a Christian, they will just see you being nice to a waitress, picking up something that a stranger dropped, handing the homeless guy standing in the sun a bottle of water.

They don’t have to know because it’s very seldom just one act that leads someone to Christ. It‘s a series of things that eventually get through. And you might just be one tiny part of someone‘s journey to the Lord.

There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that they do not believe in God, and when you talk to them what they mean is they do not trust the Church. They have had bad experiences with Christians who have misrepresented the intentions of Jesus Christ, who have come at them with a bunch of rules and thou shalt nots and driven this person away from God instead of toward Him.

You could be the difference that brings this person back to God.

Preach the Gospel everyday. Use words if you have to. -- St. Francis of Assisi