What testimony do we give?

In recent weeks I find many of the things that I have thought about and looked at in the past seem to be changing rapidly as “new” ways of looking and thinking come across my path. Sometimes it means looking at something with hindsight and seeing it through new a new mindset.

Recently we watched the movie The Nun’s Story with Audry Hepburn. It was not the first time I watched it and at least I knew that much! Other aspects of the movie were seen fresh through the lens of my current thinking. In the movie, the young girl who worked as a lab technician/RN for her father, who was a well known doctor, decides to go into the convent. She’s a very independent thinker who has been a successful nurse and lab technician and longs to serve on the “foreign field” where people so desperately need medical help. Throughout the story she is determined to do what is asked of her at the convent and in other places, to make the sacrifices of obedience to routine and ritual that are expected of her. As she goes out to do nursing in a Catholic compound in the field where there are many casualties of WWII that are now accumulating, she finds that being interrupted treating a sick patient by the “bell” that says it is time for Mass is very frustrating. Similarly many other “rules” don’t allow her to really care about the people in her life but put her in some kind of artificial status which she understands might be fitting for those in the convent but not for those working out in the public in the midst of human need. Over and over she works to “conform” and ultimately finds that she is always “making mistakes” according to the catholic “rules.” The harder she works to conform to those standards the more she realizes she can’t and that it inhibits her from truly loving and caring for people. Eventually she decides she just can’t live up to the standards and expectations of being a nun and leaves the order...end of story.

My heart ached throughout the movie, seeing such a travesty of the truth of Jesus Christ portrayed in a “christian religious setting.” There was no “rest” in Christ. There was no “identity” in Christ to be received. It was conform and perform to be acceptable and if you didn’t you went to confession and did penance. And the end...hopelessness and alienation.

This story isn’t so much different from the story of a Hindu man who was well motivated to excel and was a high caste person in India who would become Brahman. No matter how hard he tried, he could find no solution to the ongoing problem of “not being able to be perfect.” The Hindu teaching only encouraged him to work harder but offered no solution to his “sin problem” any more than the Nun’s Story offered any solution (salvation) from her inability to not make mistakes and not be perfect.

The Hindu man heard some Untouchables one day singing about Salvation from sin, and it stirred his heart as he had no way to get rid of his sins. His Hindu gods offered no salvation from sin and failures. Just more punishment. Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses and all other psuedochristian practices offer no more hope than the Hindu man had or the nun.

Yet, how often do we who call ourselves Christian also fail to realize and I do that I can’t do anything with my sin nature.. But there is something He did with it when The Lord Jesus died once for all for all sin and all sinners. And the exciting thing this: it is a reality whether we receive it or believe it. Jesus paid the price for our fallen human nature and through his resurrection, released the Holy Spirit to put His Spirit in us, restoring us to the status we had in Christ, in God before the fall of man often referred to as the foundation of the world. It is there in all that such a relationship offers just waiting for me to “see” and be a part. What good news!!!

In a conversation just this morning, a friend and I were discussing the way many of us thought about these things in the past. Lord, here I am, please use me!! And we do want Him to use us to share the gospel. But my friend and I realized together that this is not God’s plan. God is the ultimate authority. He is in control of everything! What He has invited us into when we received His Holy Spirit to indwell my human spirit is to have a relationship with him...not “be used by him!” He uses ALL THINGS because he is GOD.

I was a little hard headed and self-driven thinking being used of God was the ultimate, Some of this has radically changed during this last election cycle as never before I have come to see the error of that thinking seeing how my God is in charge of ALL! He is the authority over ALL. NOTHING happens outside His plan and purpose or else he isn’t God Almighty. When we were invited to be “in Christ” and “Christ in me” I was as the scripture speaks of it, now in a position to “co-labor” with Christ. It isn’t about being used...it’s about being a part of what HE IS doing. That is part of the reason we have been invited to be in relationship with Him. To participate by His Spirit in the works which Christ is doing here on the earth. Those works were laid out before the foundation of the earth for us to walk in.

Oh how this changes the mind set. First of all it means I can’t just say, Here I am Lord, use me. Because he was already using me to accomplish whatever He was purposing. Whether I was a co-laborer with him or not is another matter. He wants me to participate in what He is doing...not Him “using me” because I bear His name..........which He of course is doing whether I bear his name or not! But unless I am in relationship with him and know at least by faith what He is doing, am I not out doing “my own thing” to please the Almighty God. Don’t I miss all the “benefits” as King David once wrote...all the benefits of being a child of the King who is at work..peace, joy, power, courage? Co-laboring means that as I am in relationship with the Lord, open to his voice, a student of his word and in conversation with Him, I find out what He is doing and in obedience walk in those footsteps.

Throughout the recent election season I sought to rest in the Lord and sought, as I still do, to come to some measure of understanding of what He is doing and desiring to accomplish and what my part is. In increasing measure, I find my part is to rejoice and be thankful and offer up the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for all He is and all He is doing whether I actually see it clearly or not. Secondly when He does show me what his heart is caring about to participate in what He is doing by speaking forth His word that he’s quickened into the situation, sometime in person, sometimes in what I could call prayer, but from heaven into earth. If I am seated with Him in heavenly places I will be his hands and tools to carry out the love that he is showing and has shown throughout eternity.

For most of my adult life my walk with God was more about “doing what I thought was right” than listening to Him to see what He was doing and being identified “in Him.” Loving people was usually stratified on a scale of “how to love best” rather than seeking the Father’s heart and seeing what He is doing and realizing He aligned me with Him and that I can speak that alignment into the circumstances of my life knowing what He has already done and accomplished at the cross and in the resurrection. What a relief it is...what rest!

At the end of the Nun’s story I could only think of how the Israelites failed to enter into the Rest that He had planned for them since they sought conformity to the law rather than seeing the law as the means by which we are convicted of our total need for His grace...the impartation of his power in us and through us.

The Hindu convert came into the knowledge of the Kingdom of God seeing that there was no ability in mankind to be saved from his own nature’s inability to be perfect and no way to cleanse himself of his “sins and trespasses.” We easily say, There is Salvation in none other” but we fail to realize that statement is only true “in Christ.” My freedom comes as I am found “in Christ and Christ functions in and through me.” And this free to all who would receive such a gift, bought and paid for by the blood of the Lamb.

Kingdom of God.........I used to throw that term around as if I knew what it meant!! Until we really have some grasp of the King and our relationship to the King which comes as Christ is in me, we won’t know what it means to have a Father that is the King of Kings...or a Saviour that has already conquered death, hell, and the grave and that I am invited to participate in the fulfillment of the plan of God of the ages, NOW.

How could I live for some many years and not know these things? Because my eyes weren’t open and I was so busy trying to be a Christian and do what we Christians are supposed to do, I missed who I was and who He is in me.

In recent days I’ve been freed to consider some things from the past in light of the present “mindset” regarding the Kingdom of God. And as a result, I have gotten a fuller awareness of His grace and mercy in days past. For many years I lived in a state of trauma first with a husband who was a peeping tom and then a husband who was an alcoholic. Reading recently that it takes two years for the human brain to “reorganize” after a period of trauma, I can look back and easily say, I did really crazy things during those years and also in the ensuring couple of years realizing I was thinking with a brain still not functioning healthily from trauma. I have been healed and I can’t attribute disorganized thinking today to previous trauma in my life. But what it has afforded me, is the ability to understand those in my world who are in the midst of trauma and who aren’t thinking straight. And what I can see is that God isn’t focused on their screw ups. He doesn’t hold them to the standard of “right thinking.” Instead just as he was with me, he is walking with and working in those caught up in the web of trauma and as I co-labor with him I can see now how he is dealing with them, just like he did in my “crazy” days.

I used to say through various traumatic episodes that I “came through” but that it wasn’t by my faith. And as never before today as I watch dear friends going through traumatic things., it is clear that it is the Body that is upholding them as they continue to make poor decisions, sometimes worsening their trauma. But HE is still in control. When our friends aren’t thinking good enough to allow us to even be of any “assistance” to them, I can now see how my Father is patient with them,, covering them, working on their behalf even when they are half crazy!! And my testimony is often the only hope of them ever getting a glimpse, if indeed the Lord allows them to hear. For in my testimony of God’s faithfulness in my crazy times and telling of some of my goofed up thinking come the assurance that HIS hand still working in me because of who He is.. Our testimony or our “story” often allows us the power to touch another life without bumping into their crazy thinking because we aren’t talking about them, but about God’s faithfulness to me and everyone else that doesn’t change.

In closing......when I read a majority of “political” posts by Christians in this day, I see very few who are speaking forth the Life that is in them. Anyone can pick out what is wrong. Anyone can look at me and pick out something wrong and I can do that with others also. But it takes being conformed to the heart of the Father and having my mind being renewed in its spirit to the mind of Christ to be able to speak forth that God IS in the middle of any set of circumstances. And learning of Him to have wisdom and understanding takes time before Him and with Him as we live in Him.

And they overcame by the word of their testimony, the blood of the lamb and they loved not their lives unto death.

What testimony do we have when we post on face book or write in blogs or share when we visit over a cup of coffee? Anything we share though it be from “another source” or news article...is some kind of a testimony...what will it be?

Meri Ford