Personal Holiness

Personal Holiness

 ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ is a weekly Sunday post, and the blog history is at dreliatjacobsladder.blogpost.com

This is a Fellowship of the Spirit. It is not a church construct and incurs neither mission, fund raising, nor religious participation. God desires our participation in all of life, and not via the false gospel of corporate and culture formatted selectiveness. This effort pursues Christian growth as human growth. It completes Social Holiness and moves into Personal Holiness. God wills community for all of us. And Jacob’s Ladder will keep on climbing, whichever way it needs to.

Prayer and relationship – what is, what is not, what could be…..

The lines are clear enough; we start with faith and belief, or with belief and faith, or having enough faith to believe; call it as you will…these seem to be the initial elements; but there is one important distinction that must be understood.

Belief in the biblical sense is to accept the reality of something that is, as opposed to convincing yourself that a thing actually is, which amounts to a mental determination of will. We do not create God in our minds. Those who do this go down a path trying to convince themselves, only to end up asking the vexing question of why God sometimes answers prayers and at other times does not. The standard traditional answer is that it comes down to what God decides in the end. It is God’s will. But is it? We cannot oversimplify God!Problem with the why God answers/does not answer position is that we might be asking the wrong question! Perhaps it has nothing to do with God ‘s yea or nay to us but has everything to do with having a relationship with God in Jesus.

What I am trying to get at is, because of the juxtaposition of the terms ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in the New Testament recording and how they are used, the tradition has often chosen to depend heavily upon these two terms as being definitive terms for our understanding of prayer. But the third one, not mentioned and yet absolutely clear, is the most important – it’s the relationship that exists between Jesus and us that provides the basis of the faith and the belief that we claim.

Part of accepting the existence of something is to be able to relate to that something  as being within the reality of our existence. God always answers where relationship exists, but not necessarily in response to what we seek - in shape, form or outcome.

The faith - belief relationship matrix that exists does not create an experience for us but allows us entry into an experience of God. That’s the meaning of the Heb 11:1 text. And then, having discovered the experience of God, we are able to go forward within that relationship. And that is where it all begins. You go back to Abram and God and the symbolism of the smoking pot in Gen 15:12 that is seen as Abram lies in a ‘deep sleep.’ It continues as we saw last week when the question of Sodom comes up - is there a possibility that it may be saved?

Prayer is not asking, pleading, or about a ‘request’ about what we need or think or feel we should have, as we perceive it. Think hard about it. It is often about what we refer to as ‘life and death’ health issues. But relationship with Jesus takes us above these issues, because the relationship is ongoing beyond the death of the physical body. Ask then, why is it that such a great % of prayer requests are about the physical body and its weaknesses etc? Perhaps it is because we are ‘physical body’ bound a lot of the time. Godly spiritual experience can lift us above the limits of bodily concerns into a do not fear state or stage. This is why that strange statement in scripture exists – for me to live is Christ, but to die is gain. It’s not belief that takes us to this point, it is experience. Unless that has not yet happened for us. Then we must seek it. Otherwise, all we have done and are doing is to repeat a sequence of events, call it a ritual and claim it as a relationship. It could be. But it may not be. It depends on us. The Sunday before he died Fred said to me at Lamberts Cove Church service, I’m dying. I said Go with God, Fred, The next week he was gone. Headed off to a Fair and left from there. I loved that man. There was no bs about him.

Jesus is all about the will to power and the power to live in this life and beyond it. Not so much a Nietzschean will to power notion, as various philosophies take different tacks on the meaning and purpose of life. But in Jesus it is always Godly will and Godly power i.e. for good, and good alone. Anything else will deteriorate quickly into manipulative and exploitive evil. Look around you. You can see for yourself.

This is why the world’s notion of priests and pastors who serve for a length of time and then  retire reflects no more than any career path. God is not interested in such limits. In God’s work, the young have a place. And the old have just as much a place as well. The work is always ongoing. Our mistakes are made when we place too much faith in youth and physical strength and looks and so on; or on medicine; or move from one extreme to another. God is about balance. And on God’s good earth all things have their value and place; however, not all things follow the will of God and so while much has value, some perhaps not at all. We must be discerning.

Our societal structures set us up for physical failure in many ways. A lot is asked of us, and not much is given in return, other than a wage. That does not create meaningful human living. This is why TFR suffers worldwide. And we pay the price as we age. It does not have to be that way. But we have to work hard and struggle hard to keep our lives in balance, so we must keep this in mind and start early given the way things continue to be in our world.  Far too many wait for too long and allow a toll to be taken on the body in so many different ways. And there are no quick and easy fixes. And some disease occurrences seem so arbitrary but who can really tell? What is a god given gift must be treated as such from the very beginning. Cholesterol, statins and CoQ10 for example.  Check out the cause and effect sequences and see how these things interact and relate.   

So there are no correct methods! no way to pray, no manner of prayer, no words that work. There is aways only the singular factor of relationship with Jesus.  And we build this as we build relationships with those around us to the degree that we are involved in their lives. That’s all it comes to, and it seems so simple. But God is always a part of it. And how God relates to us depends entirely on how we relate to others. That is what I have found. Does it work? Yes. You share with God what God already knows, and leave it be. It works itself out. Every single day, for every needed opportunity. Quite an amazing thing. But it is simply because God honors the relationship that is offered in Jesus. And then when we take it up and practice it, our capacity grows. Hence Jesus is talking about go make a thing happen. If it honors God and brings good to others it will.

Take one story of Jesus as an example, where the servant of a Roman Officer ( see Mat 8:3; 5-9; )finds healing. The officer says there is no need for Jesus to come and lay his hands on him or some such. Just say the word. It will happen. Jesus says this is amazing faith. Yes. For in that second the Roman officer has made a leap from his reality into God’s reality and accepts it as his. He is able to say I know you now, it does not matter that I did not know you before, but I do now, and I know you can do this. And so it comes to pass. In the end, faith in Jesus is no more than the acceptance of the relationship Jesus offers. If we act on it and enter into it, he becomes part of us, and we become part of him. Nothing stays the same again. Ever.

Some of you are  a great joy to me. I’ve known you for years since our children were all young ‘un’s and now they’re grown. You didn’t just ‘keep the faith’, you kept the relationship! And so you kept growing! As JL grows, I pray that this some of you will become the all of you! Remember -  faith, belief, relationship – is always personal; but it ain’t never private. Live in peace and may the Lord Jesus lead you closer to Him with each passing day! G.