March 18, 2011
Before and After
There is a documentary called Drugs and Mugs. The video uses police mugs shots of drug addicts to show the before and after of drug addiction. Each new arrest photo, compared to the first mug shot, shows startling deterioration. Thinking of the reverse, I can just imagine Jesus looking at our mug shots before we became believers…and how much better we look today.
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Gail;
-----Two scriptures have become very fundamental to my prayers and to my feet on the street. First, “...hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matt 6:9b-10) The Lord’s prayer as a template for ours is a thing of beauty, efficiency, and downright good sense. The rest of it aside for other discussion, these three concepts aptly summarize a call upon the Lord for that seed of faith to build from the soils of our lives a living tree. “Hallowed be Thy Name,” is a pronouncement - a declaration of acknowledgement. Then understanding the nature of the One being called upon, all else about the request must correspond to that same nature of holiness. “Thy kingdom come,” is a broad idea. His kingdom is in the church, but it is not entirely the church. His kingdom is established upon the earth fully when He returns, but it is not only then. To you and me individually, His kingdom is inside each of us, but not as fully as it can be. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” combines with the acknowledged holiness of His name to illuminate the basic nature of this kingdom coming within us. Every kingdom has a king who rules it. His will is those rules, and it is holy. Every kingdom has a subject who honors the king’s rule in every choice he makes. His kingdom continues to come within us as we subject more of ourselves to His rule.
-----Paul condenses it out of the ethereal by stating, “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (Rom 14:13) That’s such a nutshell! It’s meaning really turns on when you think beyond the religious connotation of “righteousness”. Righteousness is more than doing religious things. It is merely doing right. And that doing starts in thinking and feeling right, because this must be before you can truly do right by others. Although none of us totally do wrong, none of us totally do right regardless of our desire to think most of what we do is right. So, the more we allow our chase for “what is right” to lead us down rabbit trails having distinctly known characteristics of God’s will and holiness, the more our chasing after what is right becomes His kingdom coming into our lives.
-----The effect of doing right is peace. We can not successfully achieve peace by just pronouncing, “Still my beating heart!” when the pounding is about some worry or a situation gone awry. We must actually do something that establishes a correctness in which the heart will calm. So doing right in your thoughts and feelings draws into you the inner peace that doing right by others establishes with them. Peace must have both. Moreover, because it is a spiritual thing, peace without doing right by God is a loose end tragically left untied. Unless that knot is tied, eventually all peace will unravel since God is the epitome of reality.
-----Now a rightly lived, peaceful life is certainly a joy. It may not always be fun, but fun is not the emotional point. Fun may scintillate upon the face, but joy indelibly writes there. It is the point. Joy is not a reactive emotion; it is an active emotion. As emotions are elemental to drives, so joy is vital to ambitions for doing right. And when this final product of doing right drives us towards doing even more right, the whole process creates a dynamo of the soul for the Holy Spirit to empower. How can it not burst out from the face?
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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