O, Lord, how can I rightly see others until I rightly see You? How can I understand myself until I understand Your call on my life? How can I interpret the times unless I acknowledge Your involvement in Your creation? How can I pray for anyone or anything unless I allow the Holy Spirit to guide me?
Lord, I too often found myself not taking time to spend with You yesterday because I was so busy with other things. Children of God who want to please God keep their priorities straight and refuse to do things that could distract them from what is really important
In order to grow closer to You on a daily basis, I’ll have to avoid some of the distractions and entanglements of the world. I need to be less focused on the stresses and cares that come up over the course of each day because they distract me from Your will and purpose for my life.
God loves me and wants to be in relationship with me. I can’t let the entanglements of the world keep me from enjoying daily fellowship with Him.
You can find unusual people in offbeat places who serve as spiritual partners. I have an African American spiritual guide named Ricco in the Wright County Jail. I look forward to our visits when I come into the jail Monday afternoons as a chaplain. We share our spiritual insights, but I think I learn more from him than he does from me.
Here’s the insight he gave to me yesterday that I want to share with you. “Pat, you need to be careful with the words you choose when interacting with other people. The power of the words you use battle what else is being said. The words that come out of your mouth can be sweet reflections of God’s grace within you or be swords that cause damage. Choose your words carefully and use them to encourage and educate, not accuse or hurt. Remember always that your words fight for dominance with all the other words that are being said by people who may seek only to promote themselves or their points of view. You need to be different from them. You need to let the Holy Spirit guide you as to what to say and when. Only in that way can you be a reflection of Christ within you.”
I could write a book called The Wisdom of Ricco. Maybe I will.
One of the men at Forging Freedom, a Christian sober house in Buffalo where I conduct a Bible study on Thursday evenings, got married two weeks ago. That may not seem remarkable to you, but it is. You see, Joe had been a meth addict for the past 20 years, up to two years ago when he came to the Lord and embarked on a new life trajectory of sobriety. He had tried to quit many times on his own, unsuccessfully. He needed Christ in his life and the Holy Spirit to stand alongside him. No woman would want to marry a meth addict, unless she were one herself, which Joe’s new wife has never been. Victories in the world of addiction are few, so let’s celebrate Joe’s new life and his new wife. He made it…or should we rather say God made it for him. He now has a house of his own and a new life, and he’s in charge of the two sober houses in Buffalo where his restart took place. I hope to see him in two days.
“How do you see God, Brian?” I asked one of the men I mentor who is a new Christian.
“He’s the Guy upstairs who I follow. He’s the one who created the world and me. He’s the one who died for my sins. I don’t know if I’m answering it the way you want. Why don’t you tell me why you’re asking me that question and maybe I can give a better answer.”
Indeed, why did I ask him that question? Here’s my response. “How you see God, Brian, determines how you see His involvement in His world and your life. Do you see His hand behind everything? Do you live in the truth of Jesus Christ? Do you follow Him and listen to Him and act as if He were there all the time?”
Brian looked at me with a question mark on his face. “That’s why you’re working with me, Pat. Teach me who God is.”
That’s the invite I was waiting for. “Let’s start with Genesis, Brian. We’ll begin with the first three chapters and then move on to Noah and Abraham. That will tell you a lot about God. Then we’ll shift to the gospel of John and that will teach you why Jesus came, how He interacts with us, and what He wants from us.”
“I’m ready,” said Brian. “Lay it on me.”
Just before I stepped up on the stage to give chapel at the Adult and Teen Chapel in Brainerd, Minnesota, yesterday, a guy named Adam stood at the podium and everyone cheered. He was one of them returned. Adam told his story of going through the 13-month program there in the past and had been sober for two years. Then he used again and stopped again. This had happened five times as his story unfolded and now he was back for “renewal” with a short program of 90 days. Everyone cheered for Adam. God had given him another chance. When I followed him to the podium, I threw the notes I had with me to the floor and talked about the God of a thousand chances who was always there to pick these men up when they fell, no matter how many times. I told them Satan would accuse them of failure and hopeless brokenness, but God never would. Everyone cheered that God was so compassionate and understanding.
I have a friend who I wish had been there. You see, he believes he’s so broken that God can’t forgive him or fix him. Satan has such a grip on him that when I sometimes convince him that God loves him, he’ll be joyful for maybe a few months and then fall back into rejecting God’s love and forgiveness and living a truly miserable life of “poor me; there’s no hope for me.” Satan has convinced him not to talk to me on the phone anymore, and so he has told me he’s so ashamed and broken that he can’t talk to me live anymore. He sent me an email that seemed to be his last correspondence to me. I am very sad.
Please, please pray for this man that God will pierce his hopelessness with His overpowering love and will build a hedge around him so Satan can’t relentlessly attack him…or whatever else the Holy Spirit prompts you to pray about for him. Break down his wall with a battering ram of prayer. I hope with all my heart that I can one day report, “Praise God, my friend is back.”
I met with John again a week later. His face looked like he’d just been told his best friend had died. “What’s wrong, John?” I asked.
“That getting rid of all the impurities in my heart and seeking all that’s true is really hard, Pat,” he mumbled.
I smiled. “It’s more than hard, John; it’s impossible. You can’t do it on your own. You can only pray as the psalmist did: ‘Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.'”
John looked at me with the skepticism of a person who has tried to come off drugs eighteen times. “How do I know God will do that for me if I pray?”
Because he promised that in Ezekiel 36:25-26: “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean: “I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
A look of hope gradually appeared on his face. “So, I need to stop trying to fix myself and pray for God to remove my impurities and give me a new heart. That sounds pretty simple.”
“It is simple, John. You need to believe God is good all the time and wants what’s best for you. Then you wait for Him to show you the good He has in store for you. You see, what He’ll do is get rid of all that is not of God in you; those are the impurities. Then you let Him fill you up and give Him your mind to think with, your will to decide, and your emotions to react.”
“Thanks, Pat,” John said. “You’re welcome, John,” I replied. “I pray you put all that in your heart and live it out day by day. Remember, It’s not what you do but who you are and what fills your heart that comes first. The doing will follow.”
I was studying the beatitudes with John, a man in his 30’s struggling with alcohol addiction and freshly out of jail – again. We had reached the 6th beatitude when he asked, “Pat, what does it mean to be pure in heart?”
“What do you think it means, John?”
He had a blank look on his face before a dim light appeared in his eyes. “I guess it means the things you told me I should be doing to stay near Jesus – reading the Bible, praying, being in a Bible study, going to a Spirit-filled church, having Christian friends, and stuff like that.”
I smiled. “Very good, John. Those are things you do if you’re pure in heart, but being pure in heart is more of a disposition than what you do.” His face went back into blank mode and stopped there, so I continued on. “What I mean is that being pure in heart is more about what you believe and who you are inside than what you do. You can’t do out of yourself. The being comes first and the doing comes out of that. To be pure in heart means to rid yourself of all sinful and worldly thoughts and to see yourself and the world around you as God sees it.”
“How do I do that, Pat? Where do I start?”
“You start by getting rid of all the impurities in your heart – problems, premonitions, people, politics, pitfalls, and pratfalls. Then you fill yourself with the things of God, the main one being His truth. Here’s two lines of a poem that will help you remember that.
My heart’s an empty vessel,
Seeking all that’s true.
Our time’s up for now. Think about what’s meant by seeking all that’s true. Search the Bible for answers. Then we’ll talk about that next week.”
Good bye, Pat
Good bye, John.
Some time back I was going through a spiritual dry spell during a time I had taken on two new clients in my business coaching and was editing a book that had almost as many errors as there were sentences in the manuscript (a slight exaggeration). In addition to this were the controversies over wearing masks or getting a vaccine and the chaos of zero-sum politics.
One morning early when I felt like I was walking around in an arid landscape kind of like Death Valley in California, I asked the Lord, “Why haven’t you spoken into my soul for the past three weeks?” I stilled my mind, waiting for His inner voice to answer my question but with little hope it would be forthcoming. And then there it was.
“I can’t speak into a full vessel.” That’s all He said.
My mind pictured a vessel filled to the brim with cloudy, lifeless water and running over the edge. Immediately I saw the dynamics of my state of being. My earthly vessel, which He had created by the way, had no room for His Living Waters, no ears for His voice.
I turned the vessel over and emptied it out. I meditated on the beatitude “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.” I asked myself how I could be pure in heart. Why don’t you ask yourself the same question, and we’ll compare notes next week.
This is a metaphor, based on Scripture. Each person is a vessel, filled either with himself/herself or God. He is the Potter; we are the clay. He is the Creator; we are the creatures. Without Him, there is no vessel. The outer wall of the vessel is the body; the inner wall, the soul. You can see the body directly and the soul indirectly by what one says, does, and feels. We have a choice as to what to fill the vessel with – the Spirit of God or the spirit of the world and ourselves. This is what we call our heart, that which we hold most dear, that which fills us and informs our mind, will, and emotions. When we “invite Jesus into our hearts,” we are asking Him to fill our vessel with Himself. All that’s the background for this short poem.
My heart’s an empty vessel,
Seeking all that’s True.
There’s not much me within it;
There’s mainly only You.