Cut Off

One day in August of 2014, I got a call from my friend Deb. She said that a friend of hers, Diana, had been battling lung cancer for several months and that now God had told Deb to go into the hospital and pray for her healing. She felt sure that God’s intention was to heal her, and she wanted me to come along for moral support.

Deb is my age and about ten years Diana’s senior. They first met when Diana was a troubled teen in a group home and Deb was one of the staff there. They remained in touch as Diana matured and got married. When she was pregnant with her third child, her husband left. Divorce followed. Diana remarried in 2000, this time very happily.

Early in 2014 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors pounded it into temporary submission with chemotherapy and radiation, but now, late in the summer, it was back with a vengeance. Once again, an aggressive regimen of treatment was begun, but soon the chemo took too great a toll on Diana’s body. Blood clots formed in her right hand and arm, cutting off the circulation. Essentially her arm was dying. Doctors were forced to cease all treatment. At the point where we went in to see her, they were scheduling her for an amputation, after which she would be sent home to die.

What a pitiful sight she was that day. I had met her a number of times over the years, but I could barely recognize her now: bald head, puffy face and body, and her right arm discoloured purple and black. I was so moved that I kept reaching out to touch that hand, which lay closest to me, and she would wince in pain and ask me please not to touch her there. She spoke about the upcoming amputation. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” she said.

As Diana had known Deb for thirty-five years, I had made the assumption that she had become a believer somewhere along the way. There was a scripture that had come to mind as I anticipated this visit. I was thinking of how, when we as believers need to ask something really big of God, sometimes we are inhibited by the remembrance of our weaknesses and failures, wrongly assuming that these shortcomings disqualify us from God’s mercy and grace. So I told Diana the scripture that was on my mind.

“If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God. But even if our hearts do condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything” (1 John 3:21, 20). But the conversation that followed soon made it clear that I was several steps ahead of where Diana was; she had never yet entered into that personal relationship with God.

“I could always come to you, Deb,” she said, “to hear from God.  You have always been like a go-between for me.”

“But God wants to have a relationship with you directly,” Deb answered. “He wants to speak directly to you and have you hear and respond. He wants you to know Him.”

It wasn’t many minutes before Diana expressed that she did indeed want this one-on-one relationship with God, and that she wanted to know where she was heading when she passed on. Deb led her in a prayer, and it was the most precious things to witness. Diana’s eyes were locked into Deb’s face, tears rolling down her cheeks, as she repeated after Deb with earnest sincerity the phrases that expressed her need of God and her desire to have Him take charge of her life.

When that was over, Deb and I spent some time proclaiming scriptures over Diana that reinforce the fact of Christ’s complete provision, the healing that He established for us in His scourging and crucifixion. We declared God’s desire to heal her. Then we left.

In the next few weeks, I heard that they had amputated Diana’s arm just below the elbow, but that the damage had continued to move upward and they’d had to do the procedure again, further up, above the elbow. Then they sent her home, giving her no more than two months to live.

Six months later, she was still alive. She was booked for tests at the Cross Cancer Clinic in Edmonton and, astoundingly, was declared cancer-free. She phoned her sister and with characteristic wry humour said, “I have some good news and some bad news.”

“What’s the good news?” her sister asked. “I can handle the bad news if I hear the good news first.”

“I have no more cancer,” Diana said.

“And what’s the bad news?”

“You’re stuck with me for a while yet.”

All joking aside, this was a glorious miracle, such an exciting turn of events. I was so amazed and grateful when I heard about it. As the months went by, I began to think that I would like to write her story, so I asked her permission, which she graciously gave. One day she came by the Farmers’ Market to chat with me about it. She brought up something that hauled me up short. She said that some time after Deb and I prayed for her, Deb had contacted her, said that she had been hearing some amazing things about the use of marijuana oil and that she felt Diana should give it a try.

“It’s really powerful stuff,” Diana told me.

“Oh,” I said, and then I had to sit there and think about it for a while. “So what do you attribute your healing to,” I then asked, “God or the marijuana oil?”

“Both,” she answered.

Hmm. Suddenly I was feeling that I didn’t want to write her story after all, especially not on my Life Lessons blog, which is intended to journal God’s marvellous workings in our lives. How could I give all the glory to God when there had been a natural remedy involved as well? And not just any remedy, but a derivative of marijuana, of all things! It took me back suddenly 38 years to the night that God clearly showed me, a young hippie just beginning to enter into faith in Him, that there was no place in His kingdom for using “recreational” drugs. And despite the current press on medical marijuana, a stigma lingers for Christians like me whose past includes a relationship with pot that had nothing to do with its isolated medical qualities.

Of course, there would be some people who would read such a story and give all the glory to God, but others would be very happy to ignore the God factor and give glory to cannabis.

Oh dear, this was so confusing! I didn’t say anything to Diana; I took it away with me to ponder and ask God about. When I finally did talk to her again, I laid out my misgivings as frankly as I could.

“I understand,” she said. “That’s why I told you. I wanted to be honest.”

So I just left the idea of the article on hold, simply asking God about it whenever it came to mind.

Then one day I was reading through the story of Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20:1-7, NLT:

About that time Hezekiah became deathly ill, and the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to visit him. He gave the king this message: “This is what the Lord says: Set your affairs in order, for you are going to die. You will not recover from this illness.”

When Hezekiah heard this, he turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord … and wept bitterly.

But before Isaiah had left the middle courtyard, this message came to him from the Lord: 

“Go back to Hezekiah, the leader of my people. Tell him, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of your ancestor David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. I will heal you, and three days from now you will get out of bed and go to the Temple of the Lord….

Then Isaiah said, “Make an ointment from figs.” So Hezekiah’s servants spread the ointment over the boil, and Hezekiah recovered!

Here was the answer to my dilemma! After declaring the Hezekiah was going to die, God considered his prayer and announced through His prophet that He was going to heal the king from his fatal illness. Then He told the prophet to mix up a natural remedy, a poultice made from figs. There has never been any question that this was a supernatural healing, and God certainly did not need the fig poultice to accomplish it, but for whatever reason, He saw fit to make this a part of the treatment. Jesus Christ, although He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8), rarely does anything the same way twice.

It was the prophet Isaiah whom God told of His intention to heal Hezekiah and whom He also told to make the poultice. It was Deb whom God told of His desire to heal Diana through prayer and the proclamation of His Word; and it was Deb whom He told to suggest the marijuana oil. Interestingly, when Deb passed this recommendation on to Diana, it turned out that her husband had already begun her on a regimen with the oil, just the tiniest drip placed in a gelatin capsule, swallowed once a day. The rest is history: Diana has been free of cancer these past three and a half years.

A year went by. Deb frequently mentioned Diana’s hunger to know God more and to gain knowledge of the Bible. Unfortunately, said Deb, she had no one to help her. She wasn’t attending church because her husband wasn’t interested in going and she was not inclined to leave him alone at home to pursue her faith—when she has little enough time with him as it is. She doesn’t read very well, what with both vision and comprehension problems, and the various medications she has been on have scrambled her brain.

One day Deb became more direct with me: “I would teach her myself, Nancy, but with work I just don’t have time. Besides, it’s not really my gift. Mine is prayer. But you—you’re a teacher.”

I went home and thought about it—for several months. I only go to town when it’s necessary, and I value my time at home with my own pursuits. But I finally determined that this was something God wanted me to do.

It seemed to me kind of a waste to drive all the way in and spend that hour and a half with just one person, so I decided to invite several other women. And now and then Diana and I did have another one or two join us, but it was when it was just the two of us that the Holy Spirit came so richly and so sweetly. I would share a grand old story from the Old Testament or a spiritual principle, and her eyes would lock on mine the way I’d seen them rivet on Deb’s that day in the hospital. Her eyes would fill with tears as the understanding and power of God’s word came through to her, and I would cry, too, with the beauty of what we were experiencing.

I had felt led to begin our study with the genealogy at the very beginning of the New Testament—of all the unlikely things, because it gave us a framework from which to view the entire history of God’s story with mankind and a timeline on which to orient all these wonderful characters and their experiences. Each week we looked at a story or two from the Old Testament and then did some reading directly out of the New, beginning in Matthew. Stories and principles were not enough for Diana, she wanted to also be reading the Bible itself.

The day came, inevitably, when, taking turns reading verses by verse, we arrived at Matthew 5:30. In her halting, floundering way, Diana read aloud: “And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”

It was kind of brutal. We were quiet for a moment. Then I said, “Not that your right hand was causing you to sin like in this context, Diana, but look at it this way: all that has happened to you, the cancer, the amputation, has brought you to the place of finding a relationship with God. He has promised that He is continually working everything together for your good, and although this may sound insensitive, I believe the day will come when you will honestly be grateful to God for the loss of your arm, because of where it has brought you.”

She looked steadily at me through her tears. “I’m already there,” she said. “Because now I have—” she deliberated for a split second, “I have life.” She went on to say that she is now much more content, not as anxious. She has an inner peace that she didn’t have before. She finds that she no longer picks fights with her husband, and that they really talk now.

 There have been big adjustments since her arm was cut off. She has had to go through a grieving process, very much like when a loved one dies. Simple things become impossible. I remember one day watching her struggle with her jacket. I felt awkward; I didn’t know if I was supposed to help her or let her alone. She saw my dilemma and rescued me: “The rule is, let me do it myself unless I ask for help.” Another day I stopped by Deb’s business, and she mentioned that she had to go by Diana’s place after work. “I’m going to glue a nail brush into her sink,” she said. “She hates dirty nails, and she hasn’t been able to keep her left hand clean.” How ingenious; how kind!

As difficult as her loss has been, there is another loss that has cut her much more deeply. When her ex-husband remarried, he came looking for the three children. He and his new wife trumped up some charges of sexual abuse and were able to secure custody and to bar her from seeing them. While she admits that she had shortcomings as a mother (don’t we all!), she maintains that the allegations of sexual abuse were a complete fabrication. But as of this writing, Diana has been cut off from her children for 18 years.

However, along with the physical healing that she experienced, there has come a steady faith and hope that the God Who healed her body can and will also heal the relationship with her kids. Perhaps those who read this story will be moved to add their prayers to hers, that the God of all reconciliation will have His way in this situation.

In the meantime, Diana has raised her husband’s daughter. Deb has the highest commendation for Diana as a mother. It was she who told me that this girl, who was two years old when she came into Diana’s life, has fetal alcohol syndrome, which brings with it many challenges. Diana found just the right balance of being very loving and very strict to give this daughter the boundaries and security she has needed. Deb feels that the girl, now a young woman, has been given the very best foundation for life that she could have.

Diana continues to wait and hope for God to expose the lies that have been told and to restore her own children’s hearts to hers. Meanwhile, one unshakeable thing remains: Diana is reconciled to God. She has found right-standing with Him through faith in Christ; and from the foundation of His life within her, she is living out a whole new kind of existence. And this is God’s promise to her, and to all who live in obedience and faith toward Him (Isaiah 56:5, NKJV):

“Even to (her) I will give, in My house and within My walls, a place and a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give (her) an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” 

The Visitation of God

The other morning I was reading Matthew 23. The chapter ends with Jesus making a nebulous statement: “You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’” (v.39), NIV. It’s one of those verses that has always seemed to me to be obscured in a fog of religious meaninglessness. But suddenly I thought I glimpsed, through the mist as it were, something taking shape before my eyes.

Context is everything. Let’s go back to the beginning of the chapter. It starts with Jesus speaking to the crowds and his disciples about their spiritual leaders. He affirms that they are the legitimate interpreters of the law of Moses, so, essentially, “Go ahead and do what they tell you. But,” He adds, “don’t do what they do, because they don’t practice what they preach” (v. 3).

Then He thoroughly scolds these leaders, the Pharisees, who are ever-present in the crowds that follow the Teacher. Over and over He declares, “Woe to you! Great sorrow awaits you!” Now he outlines their faults. They are hypocrites: that is, they say one thing and do another. They are full of pride, Jesus says, caring more about being approved by people than being commended by God. They look righteous on the outside but are inwardly full of corruption.

They zealously proselytize, but then subject their converts to impossible standards of behaviour that even they themselves cannot keep. They don’t know what it means to have a change of heart, to be truly regenerated by the Spirit of God. They nit-pick about technicalities of the Law and yet miss the whole heart of God’s instruction.

They honour posthumously the prophets whom their very forefathers persecuted and murdered, saying, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would never have joined in the killing” (v. 30, NLT). And yet, says Jesus, “Your words and deeds testify that you are just like them and prove that you are indeed the descendants of those who murdered the prophets” (v. 31, The Passion Translation).

In what way did their words and deeds show that they were like their forefathers? In their attitude toward Jesus. They resisted Him from the get-go. Like their fathers before them, they did not realize when God was among them. They failed to recognize the day of His visitation.

He calls them a brood of vipers. This doesn’t just mean a bunch of snakes; it means the offspring of such. Like father, like son. (Interesting that one of the dictionary definitions for snake is “a treacherous or deceitful person.”) Jesus was saying in so many words, “We all know what your fathers did to the prophets, and I know what you’re going to do to Me.” In The Passion Translation, He says, “Go ahead and finish what your ancestors started!”

He wishes longingly that this broods of snakes would behave like another species instead: a brood of chicks, gathering trustingly under His wings:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem—you are the city that murders your prophets! You are the city that stones the very messengers who were sent to deliver you! So many times I have longed to gather a wayward people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings—but you were too stubborn to let me (Matthew 23:377-39).

Another account of the same event, in Luke 19:42, adds to Jesus’ soliloquy over Jerusalem: “How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace. But now it is too late…. Before long your enemies will … close in on you from every side… because you did not recognize it when God visited you” (NLT).

He was foretelling the overthrow of Jerusalem by Titus, the future emperor of Rome, which would happen in 70 A.D. At this time, the temple, the centre of Jewish worship, built by Solomon a thousand years earlier and rebuilt after Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion, was completely destroyed. “Not one stone will be left upon another,” Jesus said of this future event (Matt. 24:2), and that was exactly what unfolded. 

Why did God let this calamity befall His people? We find a clue in these haunting words from John’s Gospel: Jesus “was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own [the Jews] and his own received him not” (John 1:10-11, KJV). The nation of Israel as a whole rejected Jesus, failing to recognize the visitation of God, and so falling under His judgement.

But we mustn’t think of this type of judgement as “punishment,” not as a churlish and retaliatory reaction. God’s heart is always toward correction and reconciliation. When He sends judgement in this way, He is trying to rouse people to spiritual reality.

I looked up definitions of visitation on merriam-webster.com. Here is the one that fits the context of this article: “a special dispensation of divine favor or wrath.” I found eleven references to God’s visitation in the Old Testament: ten of them refer to God’s judgement falling on a continually disobedient people. There is only one where it is used in a positive sense, when Job says, “Thou hast granted me life and favour, and thy visitation hath preserved me” (Job 10:12, AKJV). The only reference to visitation in the New Testament is used in the positive sense, that of blessing, and it is in the passage that we are looking at here. However, that blessing, in the person of Jesus, was rejected, and so judgement still came.

I commented to Greg on these scriptural examples of the two different kinds of visitation, and he said this: “The visitation of God always comes with both blessing and judgement. It’s all part of the same God. His blessing comes to those who love the truth. When the same visitation falls on those who reject the truth, it manifests as judgement.”

To explain this seeming contradiction, I think of an illustration I once heard James Robison give. He spoke of holding a cat in his arms and stroking its fur, much to the contentment of the cat. But if the cat turns around and faces the other direction, the same stroking, now against the fur, becomes an irritant to the cat.

When we align ourselves properly with the movements of God, they are a great blessing to us. Even His judgements, which are “true and righteous altogether” (Ps. 19:9, KJV) are the fire that burns off impurities and refines our faith. That is why David, who wrote Psalm 19, goes on to say regarding God’s judgements, “more to be desired are they than gold” (v. 10, KJV). We see him embracing and inviting God’s judgement at the end of Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (v. 23-24). He loved the truth, and he welcomed God’s refining fire.

The Pharisees, however, did not. We don’t have to read much of the Gospels before we recognize that they are almost always the bad guys. We sure don’t want to be like them. But perhaps we sometimes are. Look again at the list beginning in the third paragraph above. Do we preach one thing and practice another? Do we sometimes care too much what people think of us and consequently turn away from what God is prompting us to do? 

Do we pretend to be something we’re not, acting upright on the outside but refusing to show our faults—for fear of rejection or loss of status. James encourages us to be transparent: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16, KJV). Did you catch that? Healing is what comes when we drop our facades and show who we really are. What a blessing we will miss if we refuse to do so!

The invitation to transparency comes with the promise of wholeness and restoration. This was readily sensed by the so-called sinners that flocked to Jesus. Not so their religious leaders. Jesus said at one point to the Pharisees, “I have not come to call those who think they are well but those who know they are sick (my paraphrase); not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13, NLT).

Also like the Pharisees, we become focussed on and critical of the behaviour of other believers, trying to get them to live up to our arbitrary standards. We “regard [them] according to the flesh” (2 Cor. 5:16, ESV) rather than by the Spirit, judging by our own faulty senses how well they are following God, failing to recognize that they are new creations in Christ (5:17), that they are God’s workmanship (Eph. 2:10), and as such, above our reproach.

(There are exceptions: when we see a brother or sister “overtaken in a fault,” if we have the discernment and spiritual maturity ourselves to go to them in true humility, we may be effective in helping them along their path [Galatians 6:1, KJV].)

Our criticism of other believers, our Pharisaical contempt, is rooted in our inability—or our refusal—to see the Kingdom of God at work in other people and in the world around us. We feel unable to relinquish the workmanship into God’s capable hands and must express our own opinions or interfere in the process instead of simply and powerfully interceding. We fail to discern His presence and His movement among us—His visitation, and in that, we fail to recognize Him for who He really is.

Like many of the Jewish forefathers, and like the Pharisees who came after them, we often fail to recognize the day of God’s visitation. We sometimes fail to recognize the true authority of God’s prophets, of His Word, and of His Son. We fail to see the presence of God in the people we come across, fail to recognize His hand in—think about this—the circumstances that overtake us. We don’t understand that “the kingdom of God is at hand.”

That’s why Jesus said to the hard-hearted that day, “You will not see me again until you are able to say, ‘We welcome the one who comes to us in the name of the Lord’” (TPT). We will really see Jesus when we have the humility and discernment to recognize the people who come in His name—and receive them, honour them, and bless them as such.

As I finished writing this article, I pondered on it for a few days. I asked the Lord if I had said what I wanted to say, if I had stayed on track from beginning to end with what I was trying to get across. I had begun with a single verse, and when God opened it up to me, the thoughts had come gushing with such abundance that I couldn’t get it all down.

It had all been about coming to understand one specific sentence in scripture that I had always had difficulty getting anything out of. God, is there any other thought you wanted me to add?

Then after a few days of thinking about it, I woke up one morning with a thought coming suddenly to mind. Yes, it was initially a tough verse for me to understand, hard and impervious like a rock. And then right on the heels of that thought came this: When the Israelites thirsted in the desert, God brought water out of—of all the unlikely places—a rock. Talk about hard and impervious! And yet from that seemingly unyielding rock, God refreshed a couple of million people. And the New Testament tells us (1 Corinthians 10:4) that that Rock was Christ.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

This isn’t the first time I’ve been tested on a subject shortly after writing about it, but this life lesson kicked in only a little more than 24 hours after finishing my last article. I posted “Where Am I?” at about 6:30 on Sunday morning. Then I went back to bed to top up what had been too short a night. But I could not go back to sleep after my early awakening.

The rest of the day was intense. There was church, followed by a baby shower, followed by having friends over for dinner, and then finally a late-night phone call with one of our daughters. I wasn’t settled until midnight. A day like that can still stress my adrenals, seven years after crashing them. So Monday morning when I woke up once again at 5:00, I knew I would need several more hours after I’d had my first breakfast. By the time I saw Greg out of the house and got settled again, it was 9:00. That’s almost too late for me to get sleepy again. But I tried to relax in the Lord, and I read scripture on my phone for a few minutes while I tried to gear down.

A phone call came in, and it presented something that was going to make a demand on my schedule for the day. Up until that point, there had only been a dentist appointment to consider, early in the afternoon. Now I could feel myself getting tense with an added responsibility. Once again I tried to relax and push the cares of the day away, reading scripture until I began to feel sleepy. I was just powering off my phone when it rang again.

This call was longer, and it engaged my emotions in a negative way. I finally had to cut the conversation short. I lay back on the pillows and took some slow, deep breaths, but I found my emotions starting to spiral out of control. I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, or so I feared. The day was beginning to look like too much to face. (Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a big deal to many, but for me it is a frequent challenge on my long, slow journey back to health.)

I knew I needed Jesus. Remembering the article that I had posted the day before, I knew I needed to find my place in Him, but suddenly it just seemed too hard. Instead I phoned my husband. And I ranted a bit. I considered aloud that perhaps I should cancel my dentist appointment, and Greg agreed with me. Then all at once I realized that Greg had arrived at his destination and I needed to let him go.

Saying goodbye, I hung up, phoned the dentist’s office and left a message, then lay there wondering if I had done the right thing. I was starting to fret. I knew I had to call on the name of the Lord. And I did, even though I wanted to cave in and wail, “This is too hard! I can’t do it!” Mustering the self-control afforded by the Spirit of God, I called Jesus’ name, really loudly. Then I clasped my wrists like in the photo in the previous article, and aloud I said, “Jesus, I am in You, and You are in me. I am hanging on to You, and You are hanging on to me.” I thought it was going to have to be a long prayer, but I felt the oppression begin to break with just taking that stand, affirming my place in Christ.

The dentist’s office called back and told me they could see me the next afternoon. Thank You, Lord!

Before turning off my phone, I texted my husband, saying, “Please don’t worry about me. Jesus is helping me.” Then I lay there breathing deeply, praying in the Spirit. Amazingly, I fell asleep within a few minutes. When I woke up, I was surprised to see that only an hour had passed: I felt so refreshed, as though I had slept two or three hours. There was a great peace and calm in my soul, and I got right up, ready to take on the rest of the day. 

As I turned on my phone, it displayed a text from my dear husband: “Satan has asked to sift you,” it said, “but I have prayed for you that you will not faint.” It was perfect. Tears prickled in my eyes as the Word of God touched my heart, a word in season (Proverbs 15:23 & Isaiah 50:4—two beautiful scriptures on this concept). Greg was quoting Jesus, shortly before Simon Peter would deny Him: “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift each of you like wheat.  But I have pleaded in prayer for you, Simon, that your faith should not fail. So when you have repented and turned to me again, strengthen your brothers.”

Yes, Satan had tried to sift me, to shake me in the sieve of emotions and circumstances, hoping that all my faith might run out the bottom. But my husband had been praying for me—and then I suddenly realized that, according to the scripture above, Jesus also had been praying for me: anything Jesus told His followers can be applied to us in our day as well. And Hebrews 7:25, KJV, says, “He is able also to save them (deliver or protect them—Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary) to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.” I had just experienced the truth of this: Jesus had rescued me from my circumstances and my emotions.

When I looked up that scripture, I was struck by the fact that when Jesus spoke to Simon here, He concluded, in effect, with this: “So when you have changed your mind and turned to cleave to Me again, share what you’ve learned with your brothers and sisters in order to encourage them.” The desire to do exactly that is what, in fact, compels me to write.

Having cancelled my dentist appointment in Edmonton, I realized there were some things I needed to look after in Wetaskiwin instead. I got ready to go with an uncharacteristic efficiency and drove to town. It was a warm spring day, bright and cheerful. I felt sunny too, body, soul, and spirit. I was so in-the-moment, so unhurried, still filled with that peaceful calm, aware of God’s presence, cognisant of His leading and timing. I had several encounters that could only be described as divinely orchestrated, all of which would take way too long to relate. 

But here is a small excerpt: I stopped to drop something off for an elderly shut-in and found God making me very aware of his recently widowed state and cautioning me not to be in a hurry but to take some time to let him chat for a bit. And then as I left him, the timing was such that a staff member passed me just as I arrived at the exit. She smiled and said hello. It would have been perfectly appropriate to just return the greeting and keep right on going, but God prompted me to pause, resulting in a delightful conversation with this complete stranger. The subject of health came up (no big surprise to anyone who knows me!), and she indicated that she would like to come by the Farmers’ Market sometime and talk further.

As Greg and I got ready for bed that night, I shared with him all about my amazing day. Then I thanked him for the timely word he had texted me, telling him how much it had helped me. He draped a big arm across my shoulders. I thought it was just a gesture of affection, but it was more than that. “When two walk together…” he said.

Right. Ecclesiastes. ^“Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble” (4:9-10, NLT).

“The enemy really was sifting me,” I said.

“But God was there too,” Greg said, “giving you an opportunity to test what He is teaching you and to prove it true.”

The next day I made my way to Edmonton for my dentist appointment. As I waited my turn, the receptionist said to me, “It’s a good thing you cancelled yesterday. We were crazy busy and were running really late.”

“So it worked out for the best at your end too?” I commented.

“Yes,” she said, “it was meant to be.”

Greg stayed out of town that night, so as I ate my dinner alone, I went on YouTube to listen to Graham Cooke. I clicked on a short piece obscurely entitled “Why We Must Always Begin with the Goodness of God.” I was astounded to hear him summarizing many thoughts from my last article and this one.

He began by speaking prophetically in the voice of the triune Godhead:

“Beloved, we abide with you in both the present and the future. Our intention is to teach and develop you to live in Us—now. All your life circumstances…, no matter how hard, grievous, or oppositional—they can be turned around for your good, and for your personal growth in Us. We do not cause the painful moments in your life…. However, we will teach you how to take charge as you lean in to Us, yield to us, and practice your identity in Jesus.”

Yes, this whole experience had been an object lesson in deliberately taking my place in Christ.

Think about the freedom that we experience when every single circumstance … becomes an opportunity for us to encounter the goodness of God. It doesn’t mean that what’s happening is always good. But it does mean that God wants to come to you in those times and say, “Here’s my goodness, here’s my peace, here’s my kindness—whatever it is that you need, here is my gift for you…. And every gift I bring is wrapped in self-control, because you’re going to need that….

Graham’s mention of self-control (which is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit mentioned in Galatians 5:22) reminded me of how I had been required to get a grip on my emotions that morning and to choose deliberately with my will to lay hold of Jesus and His provision.

Self-control is like the crossing guard who stops the traffic of negativity…. When fear rises, self-control joyfully rises up from inside of us. He puts his hand out and says, “Stop right there! There is no fear in perfect love [1 John 4:18], so fear, you stay there, and perfect love, you come right on through. …” [Self-control] is like pressing a pause button: it creates the stillness that allows us to hear Him saying, “Take a deep breath. Be at peace. Don’t fear.” It gives us a “pause moment” when we can be still and come into a greater awareness that He is God….

He finishes off speaking once again in the prophetic:

“My peace … will elevate you to a place of stillness, rest, and confidence where you’ll know that I am God.”

“Stillness, rest, and confidence”: that perfectly described the great calm that had enveloped me as I awoke from my nap and moved on with the rest of that glorious day.

The next morning when I got up, wanting to once again remind myself of my powerful place in Christ, I linked my hands on my wrists once more and repeated the current theme: “Jesus, I am in You and You are in me. I am hanging on to You and You are hanging on to me.” 

In a split second, an entire thought flashed through my mind. 

“Yes, Lord,” I responded, “there is a difference between how I hang on to You and how You hang on to me. I hang on to You because I need You; You hang on to me because You love me.”

Where Am I?

A month ago, I wrote about the Crucifixion and what it accomplished. I talked about Jesus taking into His person every kind of sin—every manifestation of a fallen creation, and breaking the power of it all by carrying it through to death: every disease and infirmity, every oppressing emotion, every selfish, wicked act, every calamity.

It was a complete victory. That is why Jesus proclaimed from the cross just before He died, “It is finished.” And yet I’m sure there are many people who read that and thought, “Such grand conclusions bear little resemblance to the world in which I live. I am sick. I am depressed. I’ve done awful things. I’ve had terrible things happen to me. Where is this victory?” It’s a fair question.

It all comes down to where you live. Where are you?

As we read the Bible persistently, we continually get more of a sense of its broader overview. One of the things we discover is that as we embrace Christ, all that He is and all that He did, we are living in two places at the same time. We live here on Planet Earth, with our lives planted in temporal terra firma, and we also live in a mysterious place called “in Christ.” Unlike our physical life in a world that we can see and feel and touch—a life that is slowly, inevitably, passing away, our life in Christ goes on forever. And that forever has already begun.

The trick is to learn to live there. We are already there, in Christ, positionally, as far as God is concerned, once we have placed our trust in Christ; but experientially, we must learn to live there, continually conscious of the kingdom of God and its rule over us. It is there we discover that the shackles of our worldly life are losing their power over us.

Life is hard. That should come as no surprise to us; Jesus Himself said, “In the world you will have trouble.” But then He adds, in one eye-witness account, “But be of good cheer—” and in another, “But don’t be afraid—for I have overcome the world.” He overcame the world and all its troubles—all its fallenness—through the Cross.

Now, how is it any benefit to you and to me that He has overcome, if we still have to walk through all the brokenness ourselves? Jesus wants us to know that we don’t have to go it on our own, alone and powerless. Because—if we will learn to live “in Him”—and not just in the world as carnal beings, we also—like Jesus, and through His help—will overcome the trouble that comes our way.

“This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith.  Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God” (1 John 5:4-5, NIV). So embracing Jesus as the Son of God is the first step in positioning ourselves to being an overcomer through Jesus.

Paul the Apostle instructs us further: “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith” (Col. 2:6-7, NKJV). So walk in Him. Or as the NIV has it, “Continue to live your lives in Him.” Because, as Paul goes on to say a few verses further, “In Him, you are complete” (v.10). The whole verse reads like this: “For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.” As you can see from that verse, at the same time that we are in Christ, so also is “the fullness of the Godhead” dwelling there. What a place to live! There can be no lack of any kind. That is why the Psalmist said, “I shall not want.”

What is it that you need? Love—when you’re feeling unloved, or unloving? Joy—when your habit has always been to just plod on in the dull doldrums of duty? Peace—when circumstances threaten to overcome you in a whirlwind of anxiety? For every challenge, the antidote lies in Christ. “For in Him we [were designed to] live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), “just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).

This is what God did: “He raised [Christ] from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come” (Eph. 1:20-21). This age and also in the age to come: this means both present and future. And then “God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ … and made us sit together [with Him] in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” This is right now, real time. And here’s the kicker, if you can get your head around it, “… that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-7).

In John Chapter 15, Jesus calls it abiding in Him. Eleven times in six verses He uses the word abide, and He makes some powerful promises about what will happen as we learn to do that. Twice in that short passage He says, “Abide in Me, and I in you.” I used to read that and wonder, How can He be in me at the same time as I am in Him? But one day I got the picture: I clasped my right wrist with my left hand at the same time as I clasped my left wrist with my right hand. 

Now that is a secure relationship! I in Him and He in me. He's hanging on to me, and I'm hanging on to Him.

Also in that passage, Jesus gives an important clue to how we can cultivate awareness of our position in Christ: “…if My words abide in you” (v.7). The only way for His words to live in us is for us to spend time in His Word. Another clue: “Now he who keeps His commandments abides in Him and He in him” (1 John 3:24). So listen to what He says, and then do it!

In John 17, Jesus prays to the Father for all who believe and those who one day would believe, down through the ages, “that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me” (v.21-23). God in Christ and Christ in us, at the same time as we are in Christ. What a great place to be!

Where am I? I’m in Christ, positionally (according to God); and experientially, I'm learning to live there, more and more each day. Where are you?

Did It Please God to See Jesus Suffer?

I found this picture online, bearing the notice "This image may be subject to copyright,"
and yet I could find no information on how to get permission to use it.

I sat down for breakfast with Graham Cooke the other morning. I was at the dining room table with my broccoli omelette; Graham was on YouTube. It was a ten-minute clip called “Uncommon Love,” probably an excerpt from a much longer sermon. I could listen to Graham Cooke all day, but this time, a few minutes in, I choked on something he said. I couldn’t swallow it. Perhaps in this case he didn’t choose his words carefully enough.

Pausing the video, and my meal, I grabbed the big concordance and a couple of Bibles. If I didn’t agree with what he said, I had better articulate exactly why not, and then put into words what might perhaps be a clearer way of expressing the matter.

Graham was painting a picture of how much God loves us:

Beloved, He has everything covered. He knows you—oh, does He know you! And He’s not embarrassed by you; He adores you. He is not offended by you, He is not disillusioned with you, He’s not angry at you.

Great so far. But then:

He’s never going to punish you, because he got angry with Jesus and He punished Jesus. [Here he quotes from Isaiah:] ‘It pleased the Father to bruise him.’ Why? So he would never have to do it to you.

I believe that God loves us with a fathomless love, but I cannot conceive of a God—nor can I trust One—Who got angry and punished His own beloved Son—on my behalf. It sounds sadistic and schizophrenic—and I think such a portrait would frighten away those who do not yet know Him or who haven’t yet grown to trust Him. But I do understand the biblical truth that is being referenced, and I’d like to try to present it more clearly, more accurately.

God is love. And what of “the wrath of God”? I once heard someone say that God’s wrath is poured out on anything or anyone who threatens the objects of His great love. And who are the objects of His love? We are. Not just we the believers, but we the people of this world. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16); “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

God hates sin because it hinders and enslaves and destroys us. His wrath is directed against it. If our lives are so controlled by sin that we are damaging other people, along with ourselves, then we might get seared and scorched by being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong life-view. But God’s heart is always looking to restore even the worst of us, if we will but yield to Him. “He is not willing that any should perish.”

God, the Living Word (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit had a plan all the way from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8), that the Word would take on flesh (John 1:14) and offer Himself as a sacrifice for sins. “When Christ came into the world, he said to God, ‘You did not want animal sacrifices or sin offerings. But you have given me a body to offer…. Then I said, “Look, I have come to do your will, O God—as is written about me in the Scriptures”’” (Heb. 10:5-7, NLT; Ps. 40:6-8). He offered Himself willingly to fulfil His part in the plan of the Godhead, not just to die for the sins of the world but to actually become that sin. “He became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21).

Think of the worst thing you’ve ever done; then think of the vilest thing you’ve ever heard of being done. Add to that the ravages of every disease and infirmity. Think, too, of the deepest depression, the most grievous sorrow, paralyzing fear, and uncontrollable anger. Multiply all that, the darkest of thoughts and words and deeds and conditions, by however many people have ever lived on this earth or ever will: that grand total is what settled on Jesus as He hung on the Cross. That is what He became. He drank to the dregs the cup that had been given to Him, and the Father poured out His wrath against all of it, every single thing that ever threatened the peace and joy and righteousness of any human being—everything that is contrary God’s nature and design. The power of sin died there on the Cross with Jesus. Then He rose again from the dead.

Graham Cooke quotes above, “It pleased the Father to bruise Him.” This comes from Isaiah 53:10, the prophet proclaiming the events that would unfold at Calvary, about 700 years before they happened. Here is the whole verse, drawing from many different translations: “Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He was willing—it was His good plan—to crush Jesus and cause Him grief. Yet when His life is given as a guilt offering, an atonement for sin, He will have many spiritual offspring or descendants. He will enjoy a long life: He will continue to live—forever, and the will and pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand—Adonai’s desire will be accomplished. God’s purpose will succeed. The will of the Lord will triumph through Jesus.”

In Isaiah 55:11, we are told that God’s Word will not return to Him empty but will accomplish that which He pleases; it will prosper in the thing He sent it to do. Think of that verse for a moment in this particular context: Jesus is the Word (see John 1:1-14). After He died and rose again, He did not return to the Father empty-handed: when He “ascended on high,” He “led captivity captive” (Ps. 68:18 KJV; Eph. 4:8) and brought “many children into glory” (Hebrews 2:10, NLT). The living Word accomplished what the Father sent Him to do.

It was the fulfillment of a plan, a holy mystery, devised before the world began, a plan that the enemy of our souls could not perceive or penetrate. The powers of darkness thought they would gain a tremendous victory in destroying Christ. They didn’t understand what God was doing; “had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (I Cor. 2:8, KJV).

The Father drew no pleasure from seeing His Son suffer on the Cross, but there was pleasure in the anticipation of its end result. Even Jesus Himself, in spite of His terrible suffering, “endured the Cross”—"for the joy that was set before Him” (Heb. 12:2, KJV). That joy was the triumph of seeing mankind reconciled to God.

In the Little Things

Last month Greg and I were invited to attend a fund-raising gala. It was to be a classy event, which meant I was going to have to reach way back in my closet and find something much dressier than I usually wear. The day came: we got all dressed up and went out and had a wonderful time. 

And that is the end of that story. But wearing that outfit reminded me of a story that I have only ever shared with a couple of friends and yet which I always meant to tell to a larger audience: a story of the goodness of God in the little things, His readiness to help in the tiniest details of our lives—when we simply ask.

It must be ten years ago that I found that plum and metallic gold dress at Winner’s: only $29 and it fit like a glove. I wore it on a couple of occasions, in places like Mexico where one is quite comfortable going out with nothing to throw over bare shoulders. But then a couple of years later, I wanted to wear it to a special event in Wetaskiwin in March, and I knew I would freeze if I didn’t have a wrap.

But plum and metallic gold—what an impossible material to match. I began to think that I should try to find a piece of all-gold metallic fabric. Tending to procrastination as I have often been inclined, it wasn’t until a couple of days before the big dinner-dance that I did anything about it. In my usual running conversation with God that morning, I asked Him to help me find something suitable. After praying that little prayer, I felt impressed that I should drive to the solitary fabric store in Leduc, 20 minutes away. Not that that seemed a really supernatural leading; that was the only choice I had without driving all the way into Edmonton.

I stuffed the slinky little dress into a plastic bag and headed out. Once at the store, I went directly to the remnant bin, looking as always for a bargain. As I pawed through bundles of leftover cloth, a sales woman came over and asked if I needed any help.

“I’m hoping to find something to make a shawl, maybe a gold metallic, to go with this,” and I pulled the dress out of the bag.

“We have a rack of metallics over here,” she said, and she led the way.

And there I saw it: the same plum, the same gold, the same fringe, just with a slightly different weave. I was absolutely astounded.

The fabric was made in large square panels surrounded by the fringe. The woman cut off a single square for me. I paid her $13 and headed home, planning exactly how to sew up this little treasure.

That evening a friend happened to drop by. Excitedly I pulled out the dress and shawl fabric and told her the story, finishing with, “What do you think?!”

And she said, “I think Jesus loves you very much.”

What a cool way to put it. I did feel His love through that gesture; I felt His caring heart in the little details; His provision—not just in the necessities but in the special extras.

He loves each one of us like that, and He is just waiting for us to connect in that way, to come to Him with expectation, so He can show His kindness.

When "Stuff" Happens

Job was a man who lived during the time of the patriarchs of Genesis. The richest man in his territory, he was also described, even by God, as a man of complete integrity (Job 1:8, NLT). Then God allowed Satan to test him, and in the space of a few hours, Job’s extensive herds of oxen, sheep, and camels were all wiped out and his seven sons and three daughters died. (When we think we’re having a bad day, we should compare ourselves to Job.)

Through all this, he kept his trust in God and did not blame Him for what had happened.

In the second round of testing, Job’s health was taken from him. He was a miserable mess. This time his wife told him to shake his fist at God and lie down and die. Job simply told her not to be foolish. His whole stance is summed up in Job 13:15: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” Since the first time I read that scripture, many years ago, it has stayed with me, burned in my heart, and it has challenged me to learn to trust God like that. A few years ago, He gave me a vivid metaphor of that kind of trust.

I have a dear little cat named Muppet. She’ll be 16 this year. She lives outside, along with Antonio the Siamese. She’s half wild, jumpy, neurotic, and not given to affection unless her radically cycling hormones throw her in that direction for a short period of time. She does love me in her own way; in the summer when I’m working in the garden, she like to sit beside my little stool, and there we quietly enjoy each other’s company. But mostly we live quite independently of each other, and we both like it that way.

She used to have a batch of kittens almost every summer. Especially when the kids were still around, it was fun, and the kids made sure the kittens got handled plenty enough to be well tamed and socialized by the time they were ready to go to their new homes.

But times changed; the kids grew up. Rachel, the youngest, was the real cat lover, and when she moved out, new kittens didn’t get enough attention. I soon discovered that if the kittens grew up feral, they would be impossible to settle in homes. They don’t ever really seem to tame unless they’re tamed early on. If they grow up wild, they have to be destroyed. And that is not a happy option.

It was a few summers ago that Muppet raised her last batch of kittens. I had managed to keep her calm and contented enough that she was caring for them in the little cat house on the back deck instead of hiding them somewhere. I tried to handle them regularly. But around the time that the kittens were starting to frisk around on their wobbly little legs, Muppet found a breach in the barricade that keeps her from getting under the front deck, and she moved them all under there.

Several days went by. The kittens were very happy; they had no cause to ever come out, as their mother showed up regularly to nurse them. And while they weren’t afraid of me, they weren’t about to come when I called.

I tore off some of the lath and crawled under the upper deck, but the kittens had migrated to the smaller space under the lower deck. Eight inches of clearance was lots for them, but it wasn’t nearly enough for me.

There was only one solution, as far as I could see: I would have to starve them out and then re-barricade where they had got in. I placed Muppet in the carrying kennel, with my apologies and generous rations of water and kibble. But she was so frantic at being locked up, her long coat was soon a mess of water and soggy kibble. By morning she looked much worse, because she had had to relieve herself in between freak-outs and now she was covered in “stuff.” The poor thing! She had no idea why I was doing this to her, this seemingly random cruelty. She had no way of understanding that this temporary trial would save the lives of her kittens.

By early afternoon that next day, the kittens were plenty hungry enough that they came romping to a bowl of milk as I called. I took them and the milk into the house and quickly set about securing the barricade. Now I had to deal with cat kaka before I restored Muppet to her family.

I gathered mild shampoo, a big pot of warm water with a dipper, and towels out on the back deck where everything could be hosed down later. Muppet, when I released her from the kennel, was no longer half wild; she was full-on feral. She is not a cat you would ever try to shampoo at the best of times; now I was adding insult to injury and indignity.

As I knew it would be necessary, I caught her by the scruff of the neck. And then I began lathering. There were four sets of claws going in all directions and she looked like she was going to turn herself inside out. “I’m sorry, kitty, I’m sorry,” I kept saying.

Two or three lathers and rinses later, I figured I’d got her as clean as I could. Her belly had been difficult to get at, though, with all those flailing claws. I was also concerned that there would be shampoo remaining deep down in her coat. It might be irritating, and it sure would not be good for her as she groomed herself.

Again, I saw only one solution. I picked her up, avoiding the claws, carried her to the pond, and threw her in. Just as I knew she would be, she was back out in a split second. Not nearly enough time for a good rinse. She ran a few metres, shook hard to expel the majority of the water, and crouched there, looking confused and miserable. She didn’t try to run; she held still as I came up and ruffled all her fur to stir up any deep-down soap. I threw her in again, scrubbed her coat again with my hands, and threw her in again, apologizing in a soft voice all the while.

Then I gathered her into a big towel and held her while I rubbed her coat half dry, and then I set her down to find a warm place in the sun while I went off to get her kittens.

Once I had finished cleaning things up, I sat down in the love-seat on the deck just to have a little rest. Now, the cats absolutely know that they are not allowed on the deck furniture, and although they will sneak up there when no one is around, they would not dream of jumping up when we are right there. Neither is Muppet, as I indicated earlier, one to come and offer affection.

But this dear little cat saw me sitting there; she came up on the deck and jumped right up beside me, lay down with her chin on my leg, and began to purr as loudly as her little body could manage. In the purring, I heard her saying, “I love you anyway. I have no idea why you did what you did to me, but I trust you. And I won’t hold it against you.”

And then I heard God in my heart quoting Job’s words, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust Him.”