From BobHamp.com

Dallas Willard has described our modern version of Christianity as the “Gospel of Sin-Management”, because of our propensity to think in terms of “what do I do about my sin?”. How do I stop, it? Is it sin if I…? What do I do when I do sin? How do I control my “besetting sin”? All these seem to be the central focus of christian practice. If not preventing or managing bad behavior, we are trying to foster “good” behavior. Read your Bible, Pray more. All these things seem so different from what Jesus seemed to say and do for people. How odd that the religion we named after Him promotes itself differently than He did.

It seems to me that when we go back to God’s original blueprint we might adjust (again) our view of the message and work of Jesus.

God had always intended to cover the creation with His nature, and He has always intended that His method be mankind, re-presenting, or presenting again His nature in the places we inhabit. When Adam and his wife turned the keys over to God’s adversary, God was not confused, frustrated, or shocked. This was all still part of His strategy to achieve His goal.

Part of His nature is that He is a Redeemer and and a Repairer, so to cover the creation with that, He would redeem and restore mankind. In so doing, He could resume covering the earth with Himself. As He re-forms His image in us, we re-present Him as we go. Where confusion has been we can bring clarity. Where fear has been we can deliver perfect love. Where anxiety has been, we can step in and restore peace beyond understanding.

Sure, these things don’t work as well when we are arm-wrestling our own behavior patterns, but winning the behavioral struggle was not the ultimate goal of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The cross allows us to be reconciled again to God, so that He, in us might fill the world with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, meekness, mercy and self-control.

In other words God’s goal was not to straighten out a bunch of misbehaving miscreants, it was to bring sons and daughters back into a relationship in which His life flows through us to the creation around us.

Try hard to be good if you want, but you could just yield to a very effective transformation process, in which God Himself is making you again into the person He designed you to be. Would it make any sense at all for God to make you, and then expect you to be someone other than who He made you to be?

Become yourself.

From Bob Hamp.

“Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  So simple, yet so many ways we can misunderstand.  I think the key to understanding this phrase, is understanding who it is is that spoke it and how He might be thinking.

Men and women who have spent a lifetime, (or even a day) in church are so bent towards connecting Scripture with behavior control, otherwise known as “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”, that almost all our experience and perception comes through that lens.

Repentance is much more about the blind seeing, than it is about bad people trying to be good.

Jesus never really met a man who was not blind.  At least not in light of His way of seeing.  Jesus could see all things, including the hearts and minds of men, and the swirling activity of the spiritual realm around us.  Because He saw clearly, He could look at every man in every situation and see every aspect of both.  Motives, hidden thoughts, fear, and even the spiritual forces lurking within each exchange, all were as visible to him, as traffic signs are to us.  Such was the vista in the Kingdom to which He was accustomed.

Crippled as we are, we try to perceive reality through a singular set of “senses”. Sight, sound, touch, taste, fragrance.  All these are senses which apprehend a single realm; the physical.  Perhaps within this arena we could perceive clues, signs and symptoms of other arenas, but we could not see them.  Like seeing tree branches move, while not seeing the wind that moved them.

Walking through a dark room, we would trip over furniture and obstacles we could not see. Turn on the light, the natural result is a different set of responses. Step around the table, stop and turn when solid objects are in our path.

Repentance is about changing the way we see.  The natural result is a different set of responses.  Repentance is about using a set of senses beyond the physical.  Intuition, wisdom, revelation, faith (yeah, you remeber, the assurance of things NOT SEEN!) Operating by these senses, behavior change is a natural result of seeing clearly, as opposed to the application of will power.  When we try to produce behavior change without repentance (Seeing Differently; with different senses) this is called, “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”

Repent for the Kingdom of the Heavens is at arms reach.

From BobHamp.com

I pulled into the parking lot. What I saw with my eyes was the same thing I saw every day. But something was not right. I could not explain it but I could describe it. Something felt amiss, not right, out of place. A disturbance in the Force if you will. The cars were parked exactly as they should have been, the doors were locked as they should have been. But the more things appeared normal, the more the tension grew inside. What I was seeing with my eyes was not lining up with… with… what I… knew.

I opened the secure door to enter the detention facility and for the first time what I heard with my senses lined up with what I sensed with my… guts… inner man… intuition… okay, call it spirit. The noises coming down the hallway were chaotic and carried a sense of urgency. I moved quickly now to find my co-workers in a restraint situation, but it was more. The whole hallway, and both wings of locked rooms were a mess. Noise and clutter told me that this restraint was not a matter of one misbehaving resident, but a major incident involving the whole facility.

How did I know that something was going on that day at the Juvenile Detention Center? I can probably explain it better today, than I could at the time. It is this sense on which I want to elaborate. We have ways of knowing with which we must grow increasingly familiar.

My friend Alan Smith says that our ways of knowing are like contact lenses (or did I say that…? I forget) We look through them all the time but we seldom look at them. Yet it is these very lenses that either allow or disallow input into our awareness. Not only that but, different ways of knowing allow different types of input.

The way I know quantum physics is not the same way I know I am in love. The way I know about unseen danger, is different than the way I know how to make cheesecake. And the way I know God is different than the way I know good and evil.

If we try to know God in the same way we know good and evil, we are set up for multiple traps.

Knowing God takes place in our Spirit and flows into our soul and body
Knowing good and evil takes place in our soul and cannot access our spirit

Knowing God comes at His initiative and our receptivity and accesses His strength.
Knowing good and evil comes at our initiative and depends on the strength of our will.

Knowing God keeps us rightly aligned with reality and others
Knowing good and evil puts us on a comparison basis where we struggle with either pride or shame

Knowing God is like plugging into a power source outside of us
Knowing good and evil makes us the power source

We can study or even teach the same passage of scripture, even use the same outline, perhaps even use the same word choices, and have completely different impacts because of the above distinctions. God can produce effects that we cannot.

Have you ever had someone who was angry at you, utilize words that portray that they are not angry? Yet their posture, their gritted teeth, the tension of their jaw, and countless other signs tell you that their words and the energy in their soul simply do not match.

This is what happens when we try to use God’s words, but operate from the knowledge of good and evil.

Repentance is the act of shifting from knowing good and evil to knowing God. Change your lenses. You can look again at what you have seen all of your life, and it appears brand new. Change your lenses.

Or as Jesus would say, “if you will have eyes that see”. I am pretty sure He was encouraging us to Think Differently.

It’s a good thing that Cherubim was there with that sword.

From BobHamp.com

I read one more article last night about a pastor who had a “moral failure”. Let’s just say it, a pastor who had sex with someone besides his wife. Sad as this is, it was the advice of the author that made me much more sad. He gave advice to others to help prevent such failures in the future. He suggested four steps, implying that they would help men and women “win the spiritual battle.” Amazingly, it is the same four steps that have been offered for decades. This fallen pastor, and several who have gone on before, probably taught these steps to the men in his congregation. I fear that our propensity to offer these steps to men and women is one of the most significant things we must address in this cultural shift which is the modern church culture.

Jesus had a phrase He used to uproot faulty religious thinking. “You have heard it said do not commit adultery, but I say to you don’t even look on a woman with lust. When you look at another with lust in your heart, you have committed adultery already.” This pattern was used throughout His sermon on the mount to help the people of His day think differently. Many heard this and only thought different, not differently. Jesus was not making a new and harder set of laws, He was trying to shift the understanding of His audience as to where the actual problems resided. The problems were not simply outward behaviors which must be managed, by changing behavior, they were conditions of the heart which desperately needed transformation.

I would like to address these four fallacies; “solutions” we hand each other regularly as if they will really work.

1. You have heard it said memorize more scripture but I say to you learn to let the living and active word of God renew your mind. The first implies that if you somehow exert more memory power, and retain more scriptural data you will be able to act differently. This actually seemed to backfire for the Pharisees, who had the entire Bible memorized but were the number one enemy of the Abundant Life that Jesus offered.

Renewing our mind does not mean replacing wrong data with right data. Paul tells us that the problem with law is that it does not have the power to transform us. Memorizing scripture alone can simply become law, and still leaves the power of transformation in human hands.

When God speaks He is creating. Engage the Voice not just the letter. Don’t just learn the data of scripture, learn to think and see like the Author. Let the words on the pages connect you to the Person of the Kingdom. Allow Him to point out core lies, deception in the deep places of your heart. Deception about Him and deception about you, and about the nature of reality. More important allow Him to tell you truth. Even identifying lies is not sufficient to change our behavior without the corresponding truth coming in to replace the lies.

2. You have heard it said have more consistent time alone with God but I say to you when you are alone with Him practice internal surrender. What happens during your time with God matters more than how much time you spend. Jesus compared two guys, both of whom were praying. One was telling God how glad he was that he was not a bad guy, and sharing his moral resume. Certain that God was impressed, he prayed and spent time with God. The other stood before God, and languished in his need. He unashamedly told God he deserved nothing, and knew that his spritual resume was a declaration of his need for help. Both were spending time with God.

Jesus came to set the captives free, not to advise us about His moral preferences. The restoration of our hearts, not the disciplnes of our flesh, will transform our outward experience. Let Him heal the wounds of our lives, let Him exchange our heart of stone for His heart of flesh. Let Him do His work, instead of telling Him how well you have done yours.

3. You have heard it said practice accountability but I say to you the Holy Spirit comes to convict us of sin and righteousness and judgment, let Him do His job in you. While it is true that Jesus tells us that in God’s economy the opposite of evil is truth not good, (John 3: 20-21) truth sometimes eludes us in our limited sight. Even when we are trying to be ruthlessly accountable we cannot confess to another the things hidden deeply in our hearts that we ourselves have yet to see.

Simply being able to tell another when we mess up is not sufficient to stop us from messing up. And even if it prevents us from behaving badly, it is unlikely to transform the processes of our heart. Fear or respect of another’s probing eyes may hold the beast at bay, but it does not have the power to crucify it. When the Holy Spirit brings to light darkness in us, and shows us that this darkness is no longer compatible with our new nature the darkness is put to death, and the Holy Spirit ignites the righteousness of Christ in me.

4. You have heard it said maintain your integrity but I say to you learn how to take dominion, and practice your authority as a son or daughter of the Living God. Somehow in our recomendations to one another we leave out one of the most siginificant aspects of Jesus framework of thought. He clearly recognized and engaged a whole realm of reality that I will call “the invisible world”. This is part of the creation that Adam was tasked with taking dominion over. This is still our assignement to this day.

I remind us again Jesus came to set captives free. If a man or woman is under the influence of another kingdom and has no idea what Jesus has done to grant us authority in this life, and how to practice this authority we remain under the influence.

In Jesus teachings on the sermon on the mount He was not discarding the first part of the “you have heard it said” statements, He was trying to reveal the hidden traps behind the statements. I am in no way suggesting that we throw out Bible study, time with God, accountability and integrity. I am, however strongly urging us that salvation and freedom are the acts of God in our lives, not the result of us arm-wrestling our behavior, thoughts and emotions into submission. Behavior management has never been the objective, transformation of the inner man, and the restoration of God’s created design in our souls is the objective. To offer the four solutions mentioned above as if they are sufficient for living the life we are called to, is like urging a man to swing on a trapeze, telling him the nets below will catch him if he falls, but neglecting to tell him that the nets are not anchored to their support and therefore will not hold his weight.

God did not send His Son to command us to behave like someone we are not, He sent Him to restore our factory settings so we might behave and think and feel like who He is in us.

I was having lunch the other day with a friend of mine who has recently been struggling through some issues with his oldest child. The teenager had become quite rebellious, even to the point of having run-ins with the law.

I asked my friend what he’s been doing to try to get his son back on track. He said something that has been stuck in my head for days now. He said, “It’s not about just changing behavior, although that can help. And, it’s not about changing the environment, which can also help. Rather, it’s about changing the heart. Changing behavior and environment may last for a season, but a heart change is what he needs.”

The next morning in my quiet time, I started to dissect this concept a bit more. I’ve been struggling through some personal issues in my own life that have plagued me for years. These patterns of behavior have been so hard to break. So, my friend’s words hit me pretty hard. I’ve spent most of my Christian life fighting, wrestling and struggling to change certain behaviors, but with only slight improvement. I’m weary of the cyclic reemergence of these destructive patterns. It’s been terribly frustrating.

As I was thinking through this, I started to dig a bit deeper into the heart. I know that as we come to know Christ, we are given a new heart with new desires and new motivations.

“I will give you a new heart with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony heart of sin and give you a new, obedient heart” (Ezekiel 36:26).

“What this means is that those who become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

As I was talking to God about this, he started to clarify this more:

Son, your heart has been changed. If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t be able to hear me so clearly. So, know that your heart is right. Your heart is good.

It’s your flesh and mind that need renewing. You’ve settled into your old routines, and the way your flesh is wired is that it’s an easy escape. It’s not your heart. If it was your heart, son, you wouldn’t care. But, you do.

Ahh, now that makes sense. My heart was changed when I received Christ. My desires and motivations are towards God. If my heart had not been changed, I wouldn’t care about doing right and fixing some of these issues in my life. But, I do care. I do want this. Then, I remembered a couple scriptures:

“Since you have heard all about him and have learned the truth that is in Jesus, throw off your old evil nature and your former way of life, which is rotten through and through, full of lust and deception. Instead, there must be a spiritual renewal of your thoughts and attitudes. You must display a new nature because you are a new person, created in God’s likeness–righteous, holy, and true.” Ephesians 4:21-24.

“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is.” Romans 12:2.

This last one from Romans 12:2 really hit me. It gave very specific instructions on how to be transformed. Did you catch it? It’s not hard. You simply “Let God…”

That’s it. That’s all the work you need to do. Just let God. It’s not your responsibility to change the way you think and behave. That can be hard for those caught into the grasp of addictions. Your part of the deal is to simply let God transform the way you think.

What are some behaviors you’d like to change:

• I want to stop smoking.
• I want to lose weight.
• I want to be a better father/mother/husband/wife.
• I want to stop drinking or drugs.
• I want to exercise more.
• I want to read my Bible more.
• I want to spend more time with God.
• I want to go back to school.

How hard have you tried to change your behavior? How successful have you been with that? If you’re anything like me, it’s been quite a failed experience.

My prayers this week have simply been this, “Lord, I let you into my heart and into my mind. I let you into my thoughts, my patterns of thinking, my mind and let you have full access to transform my mind, and to renew my thinking. I let you in to change me, to transform me.”