Rest.

Paul Manwaring's message. Entering His Rest: Recreating the I Am in me.

"I'm putting my boots on." "Those boots are for crushing cancer."

Prosperity with purpose- the supernatural in the wilderness is to sustain us. the supernatural in the promised land is to advance us.

God told Moses, "You will not enter into my rest."

Promised land is the supernatural + natural. The supernatural working with the natural.

Thats what Moses did not enter into. Why?

Two instances of interacting with rock, two actions.

Exodus 17:8 - Hit the rock the first time, water came out. He did what God told him to do.
Numbers 20:8 - Second time he hit it, it caused him to miss the promise land.

"Take the rod, assemble the congregation, TELL the rock to yield its water."

First time he meets God in the burning bush, he encountered the I Am. I am the I am. And God showed the I Am that is in him. The sign that it is I who have sent you. You'll know its me because you'll come back and worship me on this mountain.

That's the place he hit the rock. Serve - you'll worship and serve me at this mountain.
The second time he served himself.
He forgot who he was.
The first time he did what God wanted him to do.
The second time - God said, 'speak to the rock."

Could it be that Moses was commissioned to be the voice? 
"Go to Pharoah. Tell him to let my people go!"
Moses didn't trust his voice. Stammered and asked Aaron to be appointed instead.
Moses asked, "What if they won't believe me or listen to what I say?"
God said, what do you have in your hand? The staff - throw it down and it becomes a snake.

The rod is the fall back for the voice. The voice is the first.
Speak. and they'll believe you.
If they don't, there's the fall back - the rod.

He'd seen this rod work before. The second time, he used what he'd seen before. That's not faith. Not obedience in moving with faith.

That's when we fail to enter into his rest.

Rest isn't inanimate nor stationary. Rest is not a destination. Rest is not a place we arrive at. 

Exodus 4: If they don't believe your voice, use the rod.
"If they will not believe you, or heed the voice of the first sign, they may heed the voice of the latter sign."

If you are striving right now, if life is stressful right now, no rest right now -- you may have forgotten the I Am that's in you. There's the piece of the I Am in you.

Rest is about re-creating. On the 7th day, God rested. He recreated. He recreated himself on the 7th day. ("to give new life or freshness to")

Worship is recreating the I Am in me.

Recreate the I am in us for the next year.

When we lose sight of our promises, then we lean back on what we've seen before, instead of leaning into the unseen.

Hebrews 3:11 - I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.
Hebrews 4:1 - Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. (mixed with faith)
Hebrews 4:8 - God gave Joshua rest on every side. Yet that verse says, "if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on." Joshua knew of a greater Rest.

Rest is not a place. Not an arrival point. Not a kicking back.

Rest is where we take our identity and promises, and we move forward in faith into what we cannot see. When those three get separated, thats when we cannot enter rest.

We need to refresh ourselves in worship, in the sabbath day, in the sabbath experience of looking at his face and looking at the I am in his face that is represented in my life. We need to see that.

We need to be recreated in his presence, then we need to remind ourselves of the promises of what he has said and then we need to step in faith.

Some of us haven't hit the rock. We haven't tested his word, where we do what he said to do and see that it happens.
Some of us keep hitting the second rock with the first rock's instructions. We're frustrated because its not working as for the first rock - we're not entering into rest, and we're confused and not sure why its not working. That's because we've forgotten the I Am that's in us.

The first rock is kindergarten year. When God says something and it happens.
The second rock is where we need to be walking out of who we are and not just what he said. We don't make formulas out of what said once, taking it to the next rock.

I will walk in the identity of who I am.

Joshua did not give them rest though God gave them rest on every side. Joshua knew there was a greater promise land.

Jesus Christ is the beginning of the greater promise land. How sad if we miss it! Or fail to enter it! Walk in faith and enter his rest.

Some of us are tired and weary because we forgot we had an encounter when the I Am said something to us.

The Psalmist said, "One thing I ask, that I may see, that I may dwell and look on the face of God." I don't think that meant living in church every day.
He meant to live in the constant awareness of his presence, to meditate on him, refreshed, rested, recreated by his beauty, in his presence. Its a way of life. Rest and recreation is a way of life.

The next leg of the journey is different. When Moses parted the red sea, God split the waters. They walked through on dry land. When Joshua crossed the Jordan, the priests walked into the waters and stood.

In the next phase, you are called to just stand. Stand in the middle of the water - in the awareness of who you are and what you carry. The priests were carrying the ark of the covenant.

Stand in the knowledge and presence of the I Am you are carrying in you.

Moses with his attitude - he might have been shuffling and trying to figure out what to do.

Priests stood, and the waters parted. That's rest.

All we need to do is stand, and the waters part.

You're carrying I am. When you stand in worship - look for the I Am that is in his face, that is in you.

If you don't carry it, no one else will. It's your piece.

Find your piece of the I Am.

Don't forget it. Don't make it a formula "I'm gonna hit rocks all the days in my life."

Step up to the next level - know that the I am I carry is actually sufficient.

Don't lose sight of the promise. Of the promise land. What is your promise?

Take the prophetic word, and with it, fight.

The prophetic word is the Offence, not the Defence.

It's not just a shield for fear. The prophetic word is your sword.

And, be Obedient.

The tangible being married to the intangible - I have a word, and I need to do something. The doing something ended up with another result. Putting on boots let him be free of cramps and aches.

You don't need love on your honeymoon. You don't need hope when you've won the lottery. You don't need faith when you see it.

You need love for your enemy. You need hope in the wilderness. You need faith when you have an impossible situation and don't know what to do. 

If we're waiting for what we can see, then we'll be waiting a long time.

You'll know its me because you will come back to this mountain. You'll see that I Am happening in your life. See the I am when you worship and serve him on this mountain.

The supernatural in the wilderness is to sustain us. The supernatural in the promise land is to advance us.

The surgeon says, "Holy Spirit, show me where to put the scalpel." That's their I Am. That's them knowing who they are and what they can do. That's them stepping into rest and recreation.

It is the place of convergence in our lives. Where I Am and faith is fully manifested, comes into alignment and we see more than we can ever see.

You may be at a place where you can't find peace, tired. Find your prophetic word. Put your boots on. Do something by faith. Remember who you are.

Mind Walks

Writing is an art form.

It is mine.

I can't always travel, can't always photograph

don't always get to sing

nor draw and paint -

Can't dance to save my life

(even in the embarrassing solitude of my own room)

But I can dream.

My mind takes walks on a frequent basis,

"Be Present" is a particularly difficult axiom to follow

Because if the mind is always present,

where do my thoughts go?

In the utter swirl of recall, memory and postulation -

thoughts leap frog across an entire lily pond before I catch myself.

And the only way to make sense of it, sometimes,

Is to write it down;

the sinking of a thought with a weighted stone

so it can touch the ground.

Distance

How strange, after all this time being silent, to encounter your words- it feels like i'm intruding on your thoughts.

Like i woke up and found myself trampling all over the rice sacks
grains scatter,
and i have nothing to pick them up with.

Contend vs contentment

"You are not better. You are good.
Very good."

(Why do I find it so difficult to see in non-relative terms?)

Conqueror/Slave.

Current Christianity teaches us that we are conquerors. We are above only and not beneath, not behind in any good thing. We have been raised with Christ and are seated in heavenly places. And don't get me wrong, I believe in all that with my whole heart. 

But just as most important truths are grounded in paradox - I've been realizing recently the other side of this story. It all began with reading childhood classics, C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories. In one segment of the Lion, witch and the wardrobe, he notes that Aslan was accompanied by many creatures, one holding his crown and the other his standard. I was thinking, eek! would I want to do that? To have a role prescribed as "armour-bearer" or "flag lifter"? Then I caught myself: would I be unwilling to do menial tasks for the king?

So the other side of the story that hit me was this: I am not used to submitting. I am not used to the idea of service. I am not trained to recognize at a deep, fundamental this-is-how-i-do-life way that just as I have been given authority, I was also placed under authority. If I was, prayer time would be very different. I would be asking in every situation- how can I serve those around me? How can I be the best employee to my boss? How can I bless my pastor and cell group leader? How can I be of help to my colleagues? How do I bless my parents? 

Very often, submission within the Asian culture is taken as suck it up and keep quiet. (And secretly complain to fellow friends/colleagues/inside your head) But maybe submission is not such a bad word. 

Jesus said, "you are my friends if you do what I command." The psalmist noted, "The secret counsel (friendship) of the Lord is for those who fear Him, and He reveals his covenant to them." Nowhere is it promised that friendship with God exists on level terms- and why should it when we are talking about the supreme being who is not circumscribed by laws of time and space but instead created those laws? 

Submission, then, is obedience. It is humility without self-grovelling. It is also stewardship- recognizing that any influence I have comes from a higher source. This is how authority works: through a chain of command where instructions are passed down through persons of different weight. Perhaps the centurion's faith came from this recognition: "I too have people under me, I say go and he goes. Come and he comes. Therefore, just say the word. And my servant will be healed."

It is the power to become a servant- a slave, even, without despising oneself. Because of a deeper conviction that royalty does not mean I am above you. It is a selfhood that is not defined by relative terms but in absolutes. Competitiveness, striving is redundant because there is no game. There is no "one up" to get over another. Help me to remember, Father, that I am your child. In that absolute relation, I find my peace and my(self). 

Keys

Key words of the past year:

1. Covenant
2. Wilderness
3. Hope
4. Peace
5. Calling = Identity
6. Gifting = Ability
7. Anointing = Purpose

Ever felt like you're on the brink, the edge, the cusp of something new?
Can't explain it but I feel like I'm on the edge of a page that's turning.

When I was young I used to listen out for my dad whistling and jangling his keys at the corridor outside our main door. I'd run to the door in glee to greet him, and he'd pick me up by my feet and flip me upside down til I broke out in shrieks of laughter. (I must have been really little) it's the same kind of anticipation- listening out for something round the corner.

These days whenever I step into a space- like the hawker centre, or BCA, or anywhere, really - I feel like I'm gonna bump into someone. It's a strange feeling, but also strangely familiar- like I've been here before. Something unusual happened here last time.

"I'll wake you up when it is time."

Meaningful Conversations

It's not often in the midst of a busy Singaporean week that we have chances for meaningful conversations. So I relish each chance I get.

This week at trolley someone shared with me his testimony. 

He talked about the need for churches to have a purpose beyond just growing in numbers, and having successful pulpit ministries. Rick Warren wrote purpose-driven church before writing purpose driven life. To him, churches that ground themselves in the foundational disciplines of social justice and charity are reclaiming the influence they have in society. How else can we show love if all we do is talk about it while sitting on pews on a Sunday morning? How do we intend to be relevant to our cities if we do not serve it, and spend our lunch breaks complaining about the government?

He griped about pastors who did not know God, and through their preaching actually distanced people from the truth. I acknowledge that is risky ground, as we are to uphold our leadership in prayer. But he made a distinct point: many Christians have a unquestioning attitude towards the truth. It's like telling our friend... "Uhh, yeah this is a Rolex watch la. I also dunno where my parents got it from... But should be lah. They won't bluff me. Hah? No need to look so closely la you haha." 

And because of his doubt or disinterest, presents the watch as a dull lackluster dubious thing. 

But what he should be doing is bring the watch to the watch shop and get it checked out. If it is a fake, throw it out! If it is real, believe in it, and understand its worth! 

Likewise, Christianity does not afford us the option of being lukewarm about it. By Christianity I mean the way in which God has chosen to reveal himself to us, chiefly through the person of Jesus Christ. Reading Mere Christianity by C.S Lewis today, one point sticks. Many people say, "Jesus was a great moral teacher, but I just don't buy the part where he says he was God." But if anyone meets Jesus of the bible, they would know such statements are patronizing nonsense. Firstly, Jesus forgave the sins of men.  He claimed to be God- from God, and with God before creation. Speaking to Jews, that was an enormous claim amounting to, "I am your Creator. Your Yahweh." If he were a normal human being, that would be a preposterous lie. He would have to be either misguided to the point of madness, or a bigoted liar. Yet, none who heard him thought he was insane. They wanted to stone him, especially those whom he preached against, but even the Pharisees did not charge him with insanity. 

That leaves us with 2 options: either he is speaking the truth, or else a liar. There is no middle ground called "great moral teacher" that we can sidle into. 

(Big love for CS Lewis.) Back to the testimony. He said he'd lost his fiancé to a sudden viral attack. She was 23. After that, he sunk into depression and asked why he deserved to have such a thing happen to him. Weren't there meaner people out there? Why'd God allow it? All he ever wanted in his life was a spouse who would love him as he was. (Honestly, his earnestness in sharing this stunned me. I would never dream of admitting such a vulnerable hope to a stranger.) Besides, she was his best friend. One night, before they got together, he had a sudden thought that sickly as she was, she might not get a chance to be loved before she passed on. He prayed for God to send someone to love her, and got quizzed: why not you? He replied reluctantly "ahh... She's not pretty leh. That guy there suits her, no?" (Again, props for honesty?) But the next day when he saw her again, he found himself bioing her and thinking suddenly that she was attractive, and he never realized it before. "So what do you think now?" God asked him. Eventually he won the girl. Through that whole process, he thought God had planned "the one" for him. How quickly life collapses our delusions. 

I asked him how he got over the trauma of it- the mental torture that he did not deserve this. He said that strangely, redemption came in the form of "but I do deserve it." I am not more worthy than anyone on this planet, even the meanest of the lot. If it could happen to them or to anybody, it could happen to me. (Another mental bam here- I'm still wrestling with it. I think the concept of 'deserving' is flawed though. Evil exists in this world because it is fallen, because of the fault that Sin introduced into the system. In a sense humanity is culpable, yet the blame, if any, is corporate and not on any single individual. Things happen not to people who are deserving, they just seem to happen like a jar of marbles violently tossed out on the floor. The messy effects seem to play themselves out with each random bounce strike. Yet wouldn't God protect those he loves from evil?) 

The full conversation was too lengthy to be captured here. But he did move on with his life, and find someone new eventually. Life is indeed never neat. There are endings where beginnings were abruptly halted too soon, and beginnings where endings should have (we thought) been final. 

Hope

Hope in full bloom gives you the eyes to see your promise land, by which you enter into your inheritance. 

Hope is alive- because it is a seed itself birthed through suffering, watered through perseverance and fertilized by the soil of solid character. It shall come to fruition. Your waiting is not in vain. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, until you possess your promises.

Romans 5:2-5
Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (ESV)


1 Peter 1:3-4
..In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.

Deep Quiet

"I believe instead that we all of us have a kind of sacred commission to be happy -- in the sense of being free to breathe and move, in the sense of being able to bless our own lives, because through all our times we can learn and grow, and through all our times, if we can keep our ears open, God speaks to us his saving word...

I have written at length here about the way God speaks through the hieroglyphics of the things that happen to us, and I believe that is true. But I have come to believe more and more that God also speaks through the fathomless quiet... which is beyond the power of anything that happens to us to touch, although many things that happen to us block our access to it, make us forget even that it exists.

I believe that this quiet and holy place in us is God's place and that it is what marks us as God's.

Even when we have no idea of seeking it, I think various things can make us fleetingly aware of its presence - a work of art, beauty, sometimes sorrow or joy, sometimes just the quality of a moment that apparently has nothing special about it at all, like the sound of water over stones in a stream or sitting alone with your feet up at the end of a hard day.

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought."

- Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

KM 09-17/13.

These few weeks have been a plunge pool. 2013 looked set to end in the thicket of the wild, gloomy and restless, and desperately dry. Then there was Kunming.

In many ways it was an awakening, a celebration, a revival. Returning after 7 years, I had no idea what to expect: of a team that was foreign to me and unusually diverse, of a land I remembered to be backward and rural, with faces in my memory that had faded into a type of fossil. Fossils are a sign of life that once was, encapsulated in a singular distant object - its solidity in the centre of your palm is a cold, hard thing. Rather like distance solidified. My old kunming adventures were retold over and over again, until the details rolled off my tongue like oiled marbles. With each recount the stories drifted further, a bright spot in my life that became more exotic, more implausible.

A friend I had not met in 1 year asked me to join her on a journey to 'find God', and I agreed. Perhaps what she sought to do intentionally caught me along unawares, but some time in the middle of that journey I discovered that was what I had to do, too. Find God. I had lost him without realizing it - the way one has no idea which direction one is going because auto-pilot is on, cruising along so faultlessly. I had mistakenly believed myself into complacency - that the growth of the former times was growth enough. That I was 'just fine'. 

The diverse foreigns became, in 9 days, family to me. I had new brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. As we did the common everyday things together, they became fuel for the supernatural, divine things. We sang, we prayed, we ate & travelled. We sought God in the dim hotel rooms, and in the chilly air of the church courtyard. We bounced along mountainous dirt roads en route to villages, singing the silliest songs in rhythm to the tires. And now & then, there would be a flash of something brilliant - that stirred our hearts up for more. A deaf woman would hear. A villager's story would reduce us to tears. A sick elderly man would smile as we put the leather jacket and some hope into his hands. A wheelchair bound man would get up and walk. A lady who suffered a stroke and couldn't open her right hand would see her fingers spreading out. A woman with cataracts could read the fine print in a songbook. The truth just leapt, and leapt, like a flame coming alive. 

Places have a kind of magic. It is that feeling that rushes over you when your senses quicken to something familiar. "I've been here before!", you exclaim. "That was the lane we turned into, where there was a coffee house with a long wooden table, where everyone sat together to eat." In that moment when the old catches up with the new, or rather, the new catches up with the old, there is an inkling that anything can happen. There is a sense of divine fitness & purpose. Your heart says, "I'm in the right place. I'm meant to be here." 

That is why people travel, perhaps. As we keep our eyes and ears, hearts and noses peeled for adventure, for newness, we find something within us as well. We discover anew what it feels like to be curious, to have questions. To respond to the stimulus of the unfamiliar, and turn our minds around fresh challenges. We question our limits, and dismiss our comforts. In all the denying of our selves we unearth fresh soil for our dreams. We let strange family into our selves - and the empty rooms of our hearts are occupied with newfound hope. 

.

What is God saying, now? Could it be that the word he last spoke has expired, and he calls us into something new? A new facet of his being, a new clue to solving an old puzzle? (It's been 6 months, he said. Really? I flip to this blog and discovered, indeed. 6 months since July.) It's cloudy with a chance of fresh manna fall.