Amazing Grace

Towering introspection is often the product of failing to reach certain invisible but tangible expectations we have of ourselves, others and life in general. For Christians, many still live with 'Law Consciousness' as the means of measuring their worthiness without truly understanding that 'Christ was the end of the Law' and has opened up a 'new and living way' through the finished work of the cross!
Unhealthy degrees of introspection based on 'point scoring' (or 'own goals'!) against some performance code we imagine God to have, leads to a privatised outlook on life that is bereft of sowing ourselves into the 'field of the world' as the 'good seed' that Jesus the 'sower' has declared us to be! Dizzying degrees of self-analysis, God questioning and the vacuumous effect of introspection are right where satan 'the enemy of our souls' wants us to be! They produce man-consciousness rather than God-consciousness and narrow vistas of small thinking that renders faith like a box of wet matches.
The drive for 'success' has been instilled in us from infancy. Society is built upon it. From prize-givings to beauty pageants to the selection of teams in PE class, all of us have at times felt the need for affirmation and 'success' crushed, leaving us feeling like 'also-rans'
Until the last number of years, much of Christian ministry was also founded for me on the faulty foundation of worldly success psychologies, that is until God allowed me to experience a sense of 'failure' often enough and 'delay' long enough to know that something was not right here in my 'cause and effect' lens for the Kingdom of God. Surely if the inputs were high enough into the systemic nature of ministry that sub-consciously we had understood then the outputs would role down the production line. Not so.
It has only been experiencing the sheer power of God's Grace and love inspite of my weaknesses and sins that has taught me that its less about us than I had at first understood.
The connection between our achievements and perception of success can be a self-limiting factor that sets the barometer for our inner world. If we are accomplishing and doing great then we feel all the more loved, but when we aren't we can feel alone and unloved. Experiencing failure may seem like a horror show when it happens but on reflection I am learning to see that there is something much more precious at stake than the performance based litmus test. Failures in and through our lives can be the door to experiencing and dispensing new levels of God's mercy and Father's heart - and all that inspite of us!
When you experience a sense of failure, as I have often done, please understand that God does not reject you. Thats what puts the 'amazing' into Amazing Grace (how sweet the sound that saves a WRETCH like me!) So often we have thought if only I could be better, do more, have more to show for my effort THEN I would be valuable and significant. Dear friend, that is not so. The cracks in our squeeky clean and 'together' lives are testament to the fact that we are not the finished article nor should be spend our lives expecting to be either. That is too exhausting. Grace will lift you. Our need of God is based on humility. Humility deveops through failures and delays along the rough-road of life. As His light shines through those cracks in the armour of our not-so-perfect lives then let Him love you anyway, because that love was never based on your virtue in the first place. Its Amazing Grace.
JS

God's remedy for the worry and anxiety prone

Ireland in 2011 faces a huge uphill struggle on a few fronts. Unemployment, rising levels of debt, negative equity, marital disharmony and breakdown, depression, Governmental failures, to name but a few. However, even in good times it seems like circumstances are not the only factor that affects one's outlook on life.
Sniffing out as yet non-existant potential pitfalls or negative outcomes on the horizon is a common characteristic of perceived wisdom amongst some of types of people. Some make a career out of squashing almost any shred of hope or glimmer of possibilitarianism out of life. Even when things look bright and rosy its almost as if this mind-set refuses to enjoy the moment, seeing it as weakness given the looming dark shadows of expectation that always seem to overshadow the present. With this mind-set a constant restlessness exists from the uncanny knack of turning positive situations into a bitter struggle for survival, a 'battening down of hatches' approach in case we 'get ahead of ourselves' and end up more disappointed in the end. A sorry way to live life.
Not all the worry prone are so dramatically negative though! Others just live with a low grade and ongoing gnaw of stress and anxiety. In this type of mentality there is no deep-seated negativity just a deficit emotionally that comes from feeling overwhelmed by the barrage of plates that need spinning, bills that need paying and expectations we place upon ourselves (or live under) of how life is supposed to be, and the sinking sense that we are not quite 'making it' or must always be 'doing more' to succeed - a vacuumous demand upon the human soul.
The portion of Scripture below was spoken by Jesus to teach us that there is a Father in Heaven who is NOT detached and discompassionately removed from His children here on earth. God sees and knows whats going on in our hearts and the practicalities of our lives. Not only that but He wants to Father us through this situation as a God of immense love. He sees the pain of the mother with an autistic child, He is touched by the pain of a bereavement, the loneliness of a divorcee, the helplessness of the indebted and poverty stricken and the agony of the sick and infirm. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ, having lived amongst us but now ascended to the Right Hand of the Father (a position of honour and authority) is also 'touched with the feelings of our infirmities'. He is touched by your pain, confusion, worry and whatever else that describes the turmoil of the human heart and mind at any given moment. Touched!
Jesus provides a simple but radical cure to the disease of worry, stress and anxiety. It involves getting to know God as your Father, not only as some 'Higher Power' amongst the clouds! Jesus was speaking to His disciples and interested parties about the key of logical thinking. He describes how His Father looks after the sparrow and clothes the lily of the field and rebukes them for their lack of understanding and TRUST for imagining that He would treat them, His children, any less than one of these. This was a common ploy of Jesus. He uses here an argument from the lesser (sparrow) to the greater (us) to show the folly of imagining that He as our Father would desert us or withhold the provision of a loving Father!
Worry and stress by and large comes from a lack of trust in God. It means we have not yet learnt about His faithfulness, or have perhaps forgotten it. In many of us there is a default setting that tends us toward worry and anxiety as part of a 'coping mechanism' Unfortunately this is a reversal of how God intended for us to cope, by relying upon him and letting Him achieve in us and through us what we could never do in our own strength. This is NOT a vote for laziness or carelessness, that is not what is intended here by me, or by Jesus. This is about really believing in and relying upon our Father in Heaven for our lives here on earth.
Why not test this out? Allow God to reset your worry default (if you have one) and learn to live by faith and not by mere natural instincts. That is the way of PEACE and the fruit of handing over the ultimate control and provision for our lives and hopes to the Father!
Any comments?

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Mathhew 6 (Jesus Christ)