Inception

   The movie "Inception" is about a world where people figure out how to get into other people's dreams and dive down deep into their sub-conscience and plant an "idea" into them that will propel them to do what they want them to do.

   The concept that an "idea" is very powerful tool is absolutely correct.   Ideas have changed societies, built H-bombs and created things like the Holocaust.  But at the the individual level they also have effects as well.  Our minds are open fields for good and for bad ideas.   Ideas that sometimes seem to come out of nowhere.  

   Let me illustrate.   When I was trying to decide whether to be an engineer or a pastor I consulted lots of different people to help me see which way I should go.  All gave me their opinions but nothing seemed to point the way.   Then I saw the movies "Chariots of Fire" where the main character, Eric Little. is talking to his sister about his conflict between running in the Olympics and being a missionary.   He said, "I know God has made me for a purpose!  But he also made me FAST!  When I run I feel his PLEASURE!".   It was at that moment I decided to be an engineer.  Because I too felt God's pleasure as I studied my math and science.   Those were abilities he gave me to use.  A thought set my course in life.

   Another illustration I like to use is how I met my wife.  I had just moved out to New England area for my first job and I sat in Mt Calvary Lutheran church for the first time (just 2 weeks after moving out to the area) and I saw this beautiful girl with the most gorgeous head of strawberry blonde hair and I heard a voice say (in my brain) , "You are going to marry that girl someday!".  It was such a strong thought I looked around to see if someone was playing a joke on me.  3 years later we were married.  A thought brought me my wife.

   Thoughts can be Powerful!

    But thoughts can also be destructive.   Look in Genesis and see Eve talking with Satan about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.   He plants thought in her that says "Did God really say that?"  You see Eve was not around when God told Adam to not eat of the tree.  She was not created yet.   She had to trust that Adam was telling the truth.   Satan's question to her, "Did God really say 'You will die'?"  is not a question directed about God, but instead what Adam told Eve that God had told him.  Doubt can be a seed that grows and spreads like a weed in a persons life. 

- Does he/she love me?

- Did they do that on purpose?

- Can I trust him/her?

These doubts about other people in our lives ruin relationships and drive us away from others.  Marriages are destroyed.  Friendships are lost.  Churches are torn apart.   

    Maybe the most destructive thought to a believer is simply, "Am I saved?".   Doubt about ones salvation begins as one doubts their own internal goodness.  We may at some level, even though we know we are sinners, still harbor some idea that we have some internal quality that God likes and wants to preserve, but when that quality is removed (or we don't see it as enough in God's eyes to be worth much) we begin to doubt our value in God's eyes.   Even though we know God's love is for all.... somehow we feel we fall through 'the cracks' of God's love into hell itself.   It's for THEM....but not for ME.   We may feel that God can forgive the sins of our youth...but not our adulthood.  We may feel he can forgive the sins of ignorance....but not the sins of willfulness.  King David says to the prophet Nathan after he is confronted with his adultery and murder, "I AM UNDONE!".   He was basically saying: "I am naked as Adam before God!"   Nathan proclaims to David the good and bad news that he is forgiven but that his sin (that everyone knew about) will have ramifications and will cause a division in his own household.  This will later hold true as his son Absollem will take advice from other people that HE should be the King of Israel since his father has committed 2 horrible sins against God).  

   Satan knows about our doubts of ourselves and our feelings of being unworthy and he plays on them all the time.   

- IF God loved you he would have kept you from doing that!

- IF YOU loved God you would not have done that!

- NOW you have gone TOO FAR!  

- This is who you REALLY are!  Give up!

Satan knows that our limited minds have problems with "infinity".    We are finite and therefore God must be finite as well.   If we have limited love ... God must have limited love as well.   Paul tries to express how wrong this thinking is when he says in Ephesians, 

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 

    We cannot fathom how infinite God's love is for us.  Our doubts about ourselves are really doubts about what God has told us about himself and his relationship to us. He calls us "His children" yet we doubt our "belonging".   He dies for us and yet we doubt his love for us.   He raises from the dead and declares "Peace to you!" and we feel he is out to get us for our sins.  He forgives the disciples for their abandonment and their disowning him and we doubt his forgiveness for our willful sins of abandonment and disowning. 

   So the real question to each of us know is simply this:   Which thoughts are you going to entertain and listen to?   God's spirit that tells us we are loved and accepted for who are are right now?  Or the satanic thought that you are not "good enough" or that God has forgotten you.  

Exception

ex·cep·tion

ikˈsepSH(ə)n/

noun

1. 
   

   a person or thing that is excluded from a general statement or does not follow a rule.

   "the drives between towns are a delight, and the journey to Graz is no exception"

   
   

   synonyms:

   anomaly, irregularity, deviation, special case, isolated example, peculiarity, abnormality, oddity;  misfit, aberration;  informalfreak;  bad apple "this case is an exception"

     Depending on the situation we either LOVE or HATE this word with very little in between.   We LOVE this word when it benefits US and we HATE this word when either it benefits someone we dislike or leaves us out in the cold.   Just take time to look at our tax laws and you will find it filled with EXCEPTIONS.   Recently I was doing my taxes and noticed that people living in the Washington DC area get a "First Time Homebuyers Credit".   It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that got inserted into our 1040 forms.  If you live in DC, you love this law.   If you don't live in DC, you hate this law.

In our Christian Faith we fall victim to exceptionalism as well.   There are 2 forms of "exception-ism" we see in play in our lives.   The first has to do with our relationship to God's law.   Some flaunt that the law doesn't apply to them anymore... they are an exception.  This isn't just within the church but can be found in the world as well.   Take for example, two people living together.   We insert an exception to the 6th commandment that isn't there.   That exception is :  We love each other.  Love is often used today as an exception clause for just about anything under the sun today. 

We love each other.... so we are having sex
We love each other.... so we are living together.
We love the children...so we are getting a divorce.

     But in reality these are not exceptions, instead they are excuses for why we want to disobey God.   There are no exceptions written into God's laws.   There are no "if  X then the law does not apply".   We are all guilty of breaking it.

     Another form of exception-ism we can fall victim too is even more deadlier than the former version.   This form says that I am exception to God's love and grace.  Even though the Bible is chuck  full of stories of horrible people having their sins forgiven, we tend to view ourselves as somehow worse than them and an exception to God's grace.   Here a just a few of the Bibles "sinner-saints"

Noah       - alcoholic
Abraham - idolater,  liar , adulterer (has sex with his wife's servant and later abandons Ishmael)
Sarah       - doubts God's promise, gives her servant to Abraham and then has her sent away
Jacob       - liar, extortionist, cheater
Moses      - murderer (kills Egyptian slave owner with his own hands)
Rahab      - a prostitute who helps them take down Jericho and becomes a ancestor of David/Jesus
David       - adultery, murder, lying (and he was supposed to be a man after God's own heart)
Solomon  - over 1000 concubines who lead him astray to worship other gods
Woman caught in adultery - Jesus forgives fully
Samaritan woman - Jesus forgives though she is married 5 times and is living with a man
Peter        - abandons Jesus and yells down curses on himself when question by a servant girl
Disciples  - all abandon Jesus and run away and hide
Thief       - the thief on the cross next to Jesus who Jesus gives certainty of eternal life with him
Paul         - formerly called Saul who went after Christians and murdered them in God's name

     Many of these men even "knew better" when they committed their sins against God and God forgave them all their sins out of his grace and mercy.   Yet somehow we think we are worse than them.   We have somehow found the one sin God cannot forgive.   Out of the BILLIONS of BILLIONS of BILLIONS of sins committed since time began which God can forgive, we have found the one EXCEPTION that he cannot forgive.  We believe we are an exception to God's love.

ISN'T THAT RIDICULOUS??

   This is why God chose these people in the first place.   To show US his boundless mercy.  Paul writes in Romans,

"Where sin abounds ... GOD'S GRACE ABOUNDS MORE!!"  

    So you think you have sinned too much?   God has a message for you; You haven't!  A problem with us humans is that we have a problem with grasping the idea of infinity.  Scientists talk about the ever expanding universe.  But "Expanding into what??" we ask.  It boggles the mind.   Maybe God made it that way to show us just how immense his grace is!   His grace is ever expanding like the universe...swallowing up whatever sins we might have committed in order to show how great he is!

   Yes, of course, this does not give us a "license to commit sin" (like 007 has a license to kill), but it frees us from the fear of God's retribution and being frozen in our tracks from living for him.   We can live in complete confidence that we are his children and nothing can take us from his hands.

NO EXCEPTIONS!!

Grace Mercy Peace!

     In studying Romans I noticed how often Paul uses these 3 words: Grace, Mercy, Peace.   These are not words we hear used much today.   They seem foreign to us.  You almost expect to see them removed from the dictionary from their lack of use. 

   Grace is hard to define.  I once heard a pastor say, "Grace stands for, God's Riches At Christ's Expense".   That is nice and simple,  but is that all?   Is it just how God treats ME??    How do I live a life of Grace?   We are able to offer grace to others, but usually on a temporary and need-to-have basis.   Some one is being a jerk because they lost their job or a death in the family... we extend grace to them.   Someone is having a bad day at work.... we extend grace to them.   A person in line at a grocery store with 1 item in hand and we have a cart full of food.... we extend grace and let them go ahead.  That kind of grace is passive in nature.   I don't really have to do anything but let you by and have your way.   God's grace is not just passive.... it extends to action.   Mercy is the active form of Grace.  It doesn't just step aside, but it steps forward to help and to save.

   I was watching a TV show about "Horders".   These are people who are living a life of misery in the filth they have accumulated over many years.    One woman was helping her sister clean her house and as she walked upstairs she was astonished to find the upstairs carpet littered with dog feces.   It was literally everywhere you stepped.  She asked, "How do live like this?"  and her sister replied, "I don't go up there anymore!" .   She has a 2 story house but only lives on the first floor.  She didn't even smell the stench anymore.

   Jesus comes to our doors knocking.  Asking to come in.   Not to have tea, but here to clean up our sin-hording-lives.   We, like that woman, have horded our sins and collected them for so long we are either too ashamed to let people in or we don't even notice them anymore.   At first those sins were small and controllable we felt.  But somewhere along the line they took over.   Like those dogs who took over the woman's upstairs and had crapped all over her floor, our sins made a mess of our lives.   They are our "pet sins" we don't want to get rid of.   Jesus comes and kicks those dogs out and picks up the sin-feces that is all around us and halls it away to the cross for us.   That is MERCY.

   Finally, through that MERCY we can have PEACE, not only him but also with each other.  Our cleaned up homes/lives are not a sign of how great we are but how great he is.   But Jesus doesn't just come to clean your home.  He wants to come and have life with you in you and He wants to clean everyone's home.  He wants us to be on mission with him to help others using the same GRACE, MERCY and PEACE he has extended to us.   How do we do that?

    At the end of the TV program they would show the BEFORE and AFTER pictures of the home.   The people whose lives have been changed often say how they could not have done this on their own and how they owe a debt of gratitude to the people who stepped in and helped.  Other people who watch this show are compelled to call in and ask for their help.   They want what those people have.  We must be willing to show others, like in the TV show, our before and after pictures.   We must be open to allow others to see what Christ has done for us and continues to do for us because, you see, our hording natures have not been deleted.   We get lazy. We get side-tracked.  We get lured back into allowing "the dogs"  back into our homes only to have Christ kick them out again when we call out to God, "Lord have MERCY on me a sinner!"

GRACE, MERCY and PEACE now have new meanings to us. 

Suffering can be Merciful.

  How many of us pray for a quick and speedy death?  I know I sometimes do.  I don't even like going to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned (I do anyway).   When a person dies from a car accident or being hit by a car while walking often hear people say, "Well at least they died quickly and did not suffer much".   As humans we hate long painful deaths.   We want it over quickly and painlessly.  Even for horrible criminals in prison who are on death-row we give them quick and painless ways of dying. No one likes pain.   We avoid it all cost. 

   But pain and suffering are sometimes God's only tools to pry open our hearts to him.  Take for example the thief on the cross next to Jesus.   In one Gospel account it says that BOTH criminals mocked Jesus and hurled insults at him.   But somewhere in that 6 hour ordeal one of them had a change of heart.  One of the criminals in his own agony saw that the one in the middle was different.  He did not treat his mockers with hatred and animosity but instead called out to God to forgive them.  The Holy Spirit used the suffering he was undergoing to lead him to faith and ask Jesus ,in affect, for forgiveness by asking him to "remember me when you enter your kingdom".     That is all.. just "remember me". 

    Had God given the thief a quick and painless death he would have missed out on the opportunity to meet Jesus.   Suffering was the most merciful thing God could do for him. 

    Some refer to these as "death-bed-conversions".   We often question the "sincerity" of the conversion, but not God.  We may inwardly roll our eyes at stories of people who come to faith this late in life but God doesn't.  Did Jesus question his sincerity?   Did he mock him by saying, "Really??? Now you want to follow me?  It's a little too late for that!".    No.   Instead he gives the man assurance of his salvation.   In fact, he is the only person in the Gospels Jesus ever gives this promise to directly.  Was it a coincidence that this man could do NOTHING to earn or prove his love of Jesus?   I don't think so.   Jesus is showing to all that it is literally FAITH ALONE that saves.   Faith in a loving God that remembers us and pulls us from hell itself .

   Of course there are always many who are like the other thief on the other side of Jesus who continue to curse God up til the very end.   The "good thief" chastises the other thief on the cross when he says, "DO YOU NOT FEAR GOD??"    He goes on to testify for Jesus to his fellow partner in crime when he says, "We are getting what our crimes deserve, but THIS man has done nothing wrong!".    How did he come to that realization?   We don't know.   Maybe it was what he heard the Pharisees say about him when they said "He saved others but he cannot save himself!"   Note they did not say "He pretends to save others" , but that "He saves others".   Later these same men tell Jesus "If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross and we will believe you!".   Inadvertently they profess the Gospel without knowing it to the thief on the cross.   Maybe also it was the large group of women who came to the cross and weep for Jesus that struck a nerve with him?   What women would weep for a criminal or scoundrel who deserves death?   Maybe it was how Jesus cared for others even in his own pain as he reached out with words to his mother.  Whatever it was, the thief's heart was changed.   Like "The Scrooges" heart that was "2-sizes too small"  so also this mans heart was opened for Christ the King to enter in and make his throne. 

   I like to think that this thief died with a smile on his face to the dismay of the Pharisees and soldiers below.