True Confession Part 2

. . . for we have made a lie our refuge

and falsehood our hiding place.

Isaiah 28:15

Since confession is agreeing with God that we are not living or thinking right, I get the feeling God desires us to get to the root of our problems. Most of us don't set out in the morning saying, I am going to sin today, so searching for the reason we do the things we do will help us find the solution to our dilemma. The verse above reveals one of the main reasons we mess up. When we believe lies they become our refuge and hiding place in place our loving God.

Let me explain. Since the beginning of time Satan has tried to convince us that our worth is dependent on what we do and what other people think about us. Satan's lie has a ripple affect on our lives and messes up our thinking. This false belief convinces us that:

1. We must meet certain standards to feel good about ourselves (this leads to fear of failure, perfectionism).

2. We must be approved by certain others to feel good about ourselves, otherwise know as the performance trap (this leads to fear of rejection and attempts to please others at any cost).

3. Those who fail (including ourselves) are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished, otherwise known as the blame game (this leads to fear of punishment and propensity to punish others).

4. We are hopeless and incapable of change (this leads to feelings of shame and hopelessness).

This totally wrong belief system holds within it the root of most of our problems as Christians and ultimately leads us into withdrawal from the genuine living God intends and loving others (even ourselves).

God counteracts these lies with his truth-Our worth equals what God says about us. What does God say about us?

1. He says that we are justified by faith (Romans 5:1-2). This makes us completely forgiven and fully pleasing to God. We no longer have to fear failure, manipulate others or strive for perfection.

2. He says that we are reconciled by Christ's physical body through death to present us holy in his sight, without blemish and free of accusation (Colossians 1:21-22). We no longer have fear rejection or please others at any cost.

3. He says that he loves us so much that he made atonement for our sin (I John 4:9-10). We no longer have to fear punishment or punish others.

4. He says that we are brand new, changed forever and complete in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). We no longer have to experience the pain of shame.

When we think about why we do the things we do and agree with (confess to) God when we have done them, He will then teach us how to exchange lies for his truth. This great exchange brings liberty and godly richness into our lives. Praise the LORD! Let freedom ring!

A Listening Heart Learns About True Confession

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,

for your sins have brought you down.

Bring your confessions, and return to the Lord.

Say to him, “Forgive all our sins and graciously receive us,

so that we may offer you our praises.

Assyria cannot save us, nor can our warhorses.

Never again will we say to the idols we have made, ‘You are our gods.’

No, in you alone do the orphans find mercy.”

Hosea 14:1-3

Confession means to agree with. This tells us that with God, confession cannot mean making a comprehensive list of our sins and reading them off to him, the way we usually think it should be done. Confession must mean then that we are to agree with God about a certain sin his Holy Spirit has convicted us about. The verses from Hosea above show that we agree with God in three simple ways: 1) Agreeing with God (our sins have brought us down) 2) Claiming his forgiveness (forgive our sins and graciously receive us) 3) Turning to God--repentance (Assyria cannot save us . . . never again will we say to the idols we have made, 'You are our gods')

In my reading and studies, I have been profoundly affected by the book, The Search for Significance: Seeing Your True Worth through God's Eyes by Robert S. McGee. I'm not the only one. Billy Graham said that every Christian should read this book. Mr. McGee describes confession best, he wrote:

Confession does not make us forgiven. We have forgiveness because Christ

died to pay for our sins. Confession is a means for us to experience our

forgiveness, not a means to obtain it. Confession should be done with

an attitude of repentance, which involves turning away from sin and

turning to God. Repentance is not a matter of feeling sorry just because

we got caught. True Confession causes us to reject sin because it grieves

the Lord. Confession enables us to experience our forgiveness and enjoy

our fellowship with God.

In turn agreeing with God can look like this--Turning to the LORD and taking with us words along these lines:

Lord, You are the Potter, I am the clay. I sinned when I ________________. I understand that I am completely forgiven through your precious Son's death on the cross. From your word I know and agree with you that I am deeply loved, complete, accepted and pleasing to you, even though I don't act like it sometimes. I now choose to act like the child of the King that I am. I will turn away from falsehood and turn towards the truth for you are the way and the truth and the life. I will honor your holy name by ______________________.

Stand in Awe of God

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.

Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools,

who do not know that they do wrong.

Much dreaming and many words are meaningless.

Therefore stand in awe of God.

Ecclesiastes 5:1, 7

You probably won't be surprised that whenever I read the word listen in God's word, I always linger a while and mark my Bible in some way. The passage written above is no different. We are to guard our steps when we go to church. Why would we need to watch the way we walk on the way to God's house? After looking closely at the first seven verses of Ecclesiastes 5, I see that they deal mostly with words of advice on proper worship. And since listening in the Old Testament is closely connected with obedience, God must be asking us to check ourselves before we worship. Are you and I walking in obedience or as a fool who worships God without even realizing that he or she has done anything wrong?

In these seven verses on worship we receive simple ways to improve our worship like not being quick with our mouths and keeping it simple--if we make a vow keep it. God is in heaven and we are on earth so let our words be few. So our hearing must be improved when we check our worship, check our mouths and check our steps. That way I hear it, we need to make our best effort to be purposeful when we head to church, not haphazard (like the fool who talks too much and thinks he or she always does it right).

Therefore may we all stand in awe in awe of our incredible God! He deserves pure worship with our ears open and our mouths shut. And maybe we should take off our shoes, too, while we are there (Exodus 3:5).

A Little More on Warfare Praying

The Apostle Paul often uses the language of warfare. When he does, we should pay attention and listen to God's voice through his word because this is where we learn. This morning in my quiet time God laid out three major ways to improve our battle tactics, some new, some old, some re-discovered.

1. Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 13:11-14)
2. Put on the full Armor of God. (Ephesians 6:10-20)
3. Follow God's instructions in 1st and 2nd Timothy. Fight the good fight (1 Timothy 1:18) and endure hardship like a good soldier of Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 2:3-4), desiring to please our commanding officer.

Stand strong. We are more than conquerors through him who loves us.

Warfare Praying

Recently, while studying I ran across the phrase, “warfare praying,” in Warren Wiersbe’s BE (Bible Expository) Commentary. God used that phrase to send me on a new adventure in learning. In Dr. Wiersbe's teaching on 2 Corinthians 10:1-6 he wrote about how he met weekly with three pastor friends and together they united in “warfare praying.” They claimed God’s promise to cast down the wrong thinking that was keeping people from surrendering to God; and God did great things in the lives of many people for whom they interceded. Once the walls in the mind have been town down, the door to the heart can be opened.

I am asking God to teach me all about effective warfare praying. I desire to learn about this for all of you, my family (including my church family), and ultimately for all of the unsaved people who may read this blog, so the doors of many hearts will be opened. This caused me to go on a google adventure to find Dr. Wiersbe and ask him about the way he prayed. I found him at the Sherwood Baptist Chuch in Albany, GA of all places and wrote to him. They have a ministry there to pastors called 2ProphetU (www.warrenwiersbe.org) and have an online bookstore (www.SherwoodBaptist.net). Michael Catt, the editor of 2ProphetU, wrote me back and said Mr. Wiersbe is 79 years old and retired and does not e-mail, but is still writing and would forward my letter to him. He advised me to order the book by Warren Wiersbe called, The Strategies of Satan, which I plan to do.

After I found Dr. Wiersbe at his 2ProphetU Online Ministry, I was led to Sherwood Baptist's Book store that features a lot of his books. He has a new one which I ordered even before Mr. Catt wrote me back. It's called Life Sentences: Discover the KEY THEMES of 63 Bible Characters. What sentence will sum up your life? He spends about 4-5 pages on each character that ranges from The LORD GOD himself to Phoebe (Old and New Testament Characters). He even writes about his own life sentence. He is number 64. He wrote that he is not worthy to be classed with the Bible greats mentioned in his book.

Anyhow, back to my adventure. Within a day of praying to God and asking him to teach me about warfare praying, I received an answer. While reading in the Psalms, God made a promise in Psalm 144:1: “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” I like that he is trains our fingers, because this is how most of God’s ministry is done—through writing sermons, lessons, letters, studies, books (especially the world’s greatest book, The Holy Bible) and online ministries like Dr. Wiersbe’s. “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world”(2 Corinthians 10:4).

I will keep you posted on what I learn about fighting with weapons that are out of this world. Mostly, what he has shown me so far is what I already know: 1. Keep my armor of God in place. 2. Stay alert at all times. 3. Pray without ceasing. I have also found out that you can pray even while Jazzercising. While dancing and jumping around we often do boxing moves, punching and uppercuts. Whenever I punch, I punch out the devil and all of his team--in my life and those I pray for. That would be YOU.

STAND STRONG IN THE LORD AND IN HIS MIGHTY POWER!!

Finding Strength for Today, Receiving Hope for Tomorrow

Struggling with "Blue Mondays" and the issues of life, I went to Sunday School to teach a lesson on crisis that leads to contrition. As God often does, the teacher learned more than the students. As we continued our study on Jacob wrestling with God found in Genesis 32 and compared his challenges with our own, God repeated one of his messages. Last Sunday morning I heard, again, how God desires to show us the "path of life" (see May 13, 2008 blog entry).

When I thought about the many who have gone before, I asked myself, "How does knowing that many have gone before us help us stay on the path? By doing what they did, of course. The Holy Spirit led me to Hebrews 12:1-3 that tells what they did. The New Living Version does a great job bringing it all together.

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd

of witnesses to the life of faith (all found in Hebrews 11), let us

strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin

that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the

race that God has set before us. We do this by keeping our

eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our

faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross,

disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor

beside God's throne. Think of all the hostility he endured from

sinful people; then you won't become weary and give up."

So what is it that we have to do to stay on the path?

1. Strip off every weight that slows us down.

2. Let us run the race God has set before us.

3. Keep our eyes on Jesus, the originator and perfecter of our faith.

4. Think about all Jesus went through--survey the wondrous cross.

If you and I do these things we have the guarantee from God that we will find the strength to overcome weariness and not give up. This promise holds the gift of hope for tomorrow. Can you hear him? He is standing on the sidelines shouting: "I know you can stay on the path!" "Don't ever give up!" "I'm here with you and will never leave you."

". . . He has given us his very great and precious promises"

2 Peter 1:4

Have a powerful day! Amen!

Blue Monday

Hear my prayer, O LORD God Almighty;
listen to me, O God of Jacob.
Psalm 84:8

Have you ever had one of those days where you went from stress to stress instead of from strength to strength (Psalm 84:7)? Going from stress to stress described my day yesterday. It started out with a lot of little things and then ended up with a big thing that just blows my mind.
God has kept me in Psalm 84 for weeks now, which helped me through my blue Monday.

My last phone call of the evening was from my crying brother. His best friend in the whole world had shot himself after leaving a note that said he couldn't take the pain any more. My heart began to break again, not only for my brother but for this precious mother who now has to bury the last of her five children. She has been through so much, I can't comprehend how she can bear it all.

Her first son, was an invalid for years from a rare debilitating disease that destroys every muscle in your body. This horrible condition left him blind, unable to hear, speak, or move. Soon after her first child died, her youngest twin daughters were diagnosed with the same disease. But once this hereditary disease showed up in them, doctors began experimenting with bone marrow transplants and other things to no avail. Both of these beautiful girls died within months of each other. Years later her second son shot himself, because his wife left him, leaving her with her third and last son. Recently, her last son got a strange virus that moved to his heart, almost killing him. He had open heart surgery to save his life and seemed to be doing better, but obviously was still in a lot of pain.

I am thankful that she is strong in her faith, despite her life journey. As I lift her up in prayer, I can't imagine how she must feel after losing all five of her children. She is not much different than Job. In these matters we cannot understand, God asks us to lean not on our own understanding, but in all our ways acknowledge him, and he will make our paths straight.
Even though my mind is boggled, I know I have a choice whether to trust God in all these messes this sinful world creates or not to trust him and become bitter. I choose to trust because God's word promises:

O LORD Almighty,
blessed is the man (woman) who trusts in you.
Psalm 84:12

Be blessed and please join me in praying for this hurting family.