16 Jul 2009

Don’t Leave Your Self Behind

A friend of mine tells the story of a group of Gold Miners who hired top notch Indian guides to take them accross the frontier.  In a hurry to find their fortune, the men woke early, rode hard and rode late.

On day four of the journey, the Miners woke and prepared to depart.  They came out to find their guides, sitting, unprepared around the fire.  Try as they might to urge the guides to rise and prepare for departure, the Indian braves would not budge.  Finally one of them explained.

“We have been moving so fast, we left our spirits behind.” The elder guide explained.  “We must wait here until our spirits catch up to us.”

Stop now, turn around and look behind you. Do you need to stop and wait?

(Today’s entry comes from John Sandford)

14 Jul 2009

Why Do my Eyes Hurt?

One of my favorite lines from the Matrix…”Why do my eyes hurt?”, Neo asks. “You’ve never used them.”, Morpheus replies.  If you’ve never seen the movie, Neo has just been released from a lifetime of imprisonment in a computer generated simulation program.  He has literally not used the eyes in his head.

It has been several days since I posted last…instead I have been staring at an indescribable, unending vista of mountains, rivers, cliffs and valleys.  Some of these views are actually too big to take in.  I look.  I scan.  I step back, and take a breath.  I look again.  It’s not that I can’t see it.  I can’t comprehend it.  So I say to myself, “It looks like a movie”.

Really.  That’s what I say, “it looks like a movie.”  Absolutely impossible.  No movie, no camera, no reproduction,can even come close to this view.  What I am really feeling is, it looks unreal.  So beautiful.  So big.  So stark.  The only way  I know to categorize it in my mind is, that it looks like a movie.  A simulation of beauty.  Ironically what I am looking at is more real than what I look at most days.

Freeways.  Buildings.  Sculpted lawns.  Endless commerce.  If only those things looked like a movie, and these landscapes looked real.

Don’t miss it.  Really…don’t miss it. Because my eyes have been regularly looking at synthetic, man made vistas, what is real, looks fake.  Is it possible that what is fake, also looks real?  My eyes have been trained, or perhaps untrained.  My eyes, connected to my mind, can only really take in what they have grown accustomed to, and I call this real.  I find everything else difficult to take in;  my mind calls the things I am unaccustomed to, unreal.

I have used my eyes.  But like all my senses they have become trained.  Unfortunately I don’t even know how trained they have become.  They are the only eyes I have.  Unless, perhaps I have eyes in my heart.  I wonder if they may have been trained as well.  I hope not.

(For pictures, no matter how unreal they may be check my Facebook)

9 Jul 2009
Where Am I?

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Where Am I?

The question rings through the air, like an echo in my heart, that is simultaneously in the wind.  I feel like a child caught and I’m not even sure the answer to the question.  Where am I? Read more…

9 Jul 2009

Where are YOU?

God picked up a ball of dirt and breathed into it the breath of life.  Man became a living soul.  Somewhere between the bright burning life of God on the inside and the outermost layer of dirt, man developed in the image of God.  A mind…A will…a heart…God’s life on the inside, pulsating out through the once-dirt making a creation never before seen.

When man (Adam) disconnected from His source of life, the Tree; he reconnected to his own knowledge.  He became his own annointing.  

Where once the life of God throbbed in the inner man, now nothing…darkness and death.

Man felt dead…feeling dead…feels…dead.  If only he could not-feel-dead.

He began to make a construction site in his soul.  Shaped his mind with his will.  Shaped his will by his emotions.  Brick by brick he manufactured a new almost-him.

God came by and asked where the man was.  Where was the man who had been.  If God being in Adam made him, HIM, then Adam did not know the answer to this question.  Where am I…I can’t find who I was a few moments ago.  

Brick by brick he manufactured a new almost-him. A pseudo-him.  It felt as close to alive as he could muster.

Today all we have in our soul, separate of God, is our pseudo-us.  It’ hard to let go of the closest thing we have to life, for some promise of life abundant.

Let go anyway…the Breath of Life is near again.  Let go of your construction site.  Breathe in again, breathe in the only thing that can make you alive.

6 Jul 2009

Stress: Free!!

Stress is the result of functioning outside of your intended design.

You are designed to exercise authority (take dominion) over creation.

You will have stress if you:

DO NOT take authority over things you are responsible for.

or if you:

DO TAKE AUTHORITY over things you are NOT responsible for.

Relax.  Be who you were made to be. Let everyone else be who they were made to be.

Today’s entry courtesy of: Jackee Hamp

4 Jul 2009

What I DO Believe

I believe humans are created in the Image of God to be His Re-Presentation on Earth.  He intends to, and will accomplish the eternal fulfillment of that design .

I believe that Adam and Eve did more than just sent us off course, I believe that they fundamentally changed our nature and perceptual mechanisms.  What we once knew by seeing, we must now know by “hearing” and trusting (faith).

I believe that when God and His loving powerful, Life-Filled Being is returned to the center and source of our existence, we are born again and restored to our original state.

I believe this is made possible because God, in His AMAZING love reached out to us from His realm, made the cleansing of our souls possible by Jesus death on the cross, and invited us to again have His life resurrected in us, in the same way  Jesus Himself was brought back to life.

I believe that the Holy Bible is a book like no other book, that God inspired humans to write His story as it unfolded, so that God might make every way possible for us to hear and believe, and learn to enter again into our intended design.

I believe Jesus, in His life on Earth, showed us what this kind of life could look like, and then sacrificed His life so that we could have the life He had shown us.

I believe God sent the Holy Spirit to earth to re-fill mankind, restoring the original state of man, as seen when God “breathed into Adam the Breath of Life”

I believe that God, in Jesus, joyfully invited His sons and daughters to again become sons and daughters.

I believe that Satan and the kingdom of darkness would like to oppose the ultimate fulfillment of God’s Big Plan, but can only momentarily confuse and frustrate us, in his attempts to get us to focus on anything except the above truth.

I believe that as we learn to live again as Spiritually re-created beings, we are preparing for an ultimate conclusion of the reality we know, and the commencement of a reality we currently only know by Hearing (faith).

I believe this is a really cool plan!!  C’mon in.

3 Jul 2009

What I DON’T Believe in!!!

As a young man, I would have told you that I was an atheist.  Not the card-carrying, T-shirt wearing variety.  Just the kind of guy who, if you asked me, did not believe in God.  Today, I understand a bit better who I was back then.  The picture of God in my mind, made no sense…so I disposed of my picture.  I thought my picture was God.

Today men and women have movements and meetings, websites and debates built around this belief called atheism.  It means “without god belief”.  ”A”  means without, “theism” is a belief in a god”.  I am amazed at the emotion and organization around a “non-belief“.  Movements stir people to rally about what they don’t believe.  Weird huh?  Here’s what I have learned about me.  My non-belief had more to do with emotions and reactions than it did any kind of faith or non-faith.  Many atheists I hear today, really have been hurt or have perceived an injury from someone or something claiming to represent God.  So they build an entire relational system around what they DON’T believe.    It’s a good thing christians don’t do that.

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Or…wait…what if we do?  What if in our own camp, movements have formed as a response against what we perceive someone else is not doing right?  I mean, we wouldn’t do it on purpose, but we might just try to do it better because we see what we believe someone else is doing wrong.  So a leader might stand up and say, “WE do things this way, here is our creed, and our practice…”  and whether he follows up out loud or in his heart, he might actually entertain the thought that “ahhh..now someone is finally doing it right…not like those people over there”

Worse, what if a great deal of our system is built around how NOT to have church.  You see Paul wrote in the New Testament about a lot of things to NOT do.  So we develop a number of strategies to adhere to the warnings of this great Saint.  We can become the best at not making the mistakes we were warned against.

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It makes more sense to me to look at what Jesus did and said, and try to emulate that, than it does to build our doctrines around the correction of mistakes.

Let’s look at an even bigger picture.  What if we think this whole “Christianity” thing is about NOT sinning?  We shape our whole lives around trying to avoid bad behavior, thinking God designed us to NOT sin.  Certainly He did not make us FOR sin.  But we could avoid sin our whole lives and still never step into the fulness of who He created us to be.  If you become that person…well, it seems pretty natural that you will act like that person.  It would be sad if Christians were known more by what we don’t do, than by the amazing things I see being done by Christ-Followers.

Before we make too much fun of the atheists who organize around what they DON’T believe perhaps we should look at the speck in our eye…or wait…is that a log.

2 Jul 2009

Positve Confession

Words are powerful.  They open and shut doors, and have the ability to steer the course of life.  A very good friend of mine was telling me the other day how much they had exercised positive confession, the practice of speaking positively in any givien situation.  A common thought for us as believers; we need to be careful with our confession.  We want to have a positive confession not a negative one.  I think perhaps that may be the wrong thought.  What if we think differently about confession.  What if positive or negative are not even actual options? To understand what I mean, let’s consider the word “confession”.

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The word for confession in the New Testament actually means “to say the same words”.  For us to “say the same words”  the “words” would have to originate somewhere besides us.  It is built into this definition of confession, that the words originate from God. We hear them and then repeat them.  We have just “said the same words” as God Himself.  Is it possible to say the words of God and the resulting language be negative?

The real option is not to choose between positive and negative but to choose between one of two sources.  If the thought originates from us, it is not a confession, it is a thought. If it comes from God it is a confession.  Not positive or negative.  Simply CONFESSION.

Whether you think positively or negatively, stop…listen.  Don’t let your thoughts be the source.  Listen.  You can only confess, if you first HEAR.  Listen.  It will make you think differently.

1 Jul 2009

Six Keys

Well, bobhamp.com has been up and running for about 4 months now.  Thanks for reading.  I love that, in the privacy of my living room, I can begin a conversation that continues in other venues and other countries.  I looked the other day and saw that I have written a lot of entries.  Ironically, I tell people I only have one thing to say; apparently I just have several ways say it.  My message is simple; you CAN BE  FREE.  

Read enough on this site and you will see some redundancy.  Why?  Because the message itself is really simple, I just look for several ways to say the same things, or several angles from which to view these few simple keys.  For today, I would like to narrow down much of the content of my musings to six simple keys.  In fact many of these keys were elaborated on in my writings in May…check them out.

1.   The Invisible World:  A truly Biblical worldview must include the recognition that what we see with our eyes is not all that is.  We cannot ignore a significant portion of reality and negotiate life successfully.

2.  Have a Spiritual Warfare Paradigm:  Such a paradigm is not intended to provoke fear, but preparedness. We must remain alert to the fact that we have a real enemy.  He should not be our focus, but we should live aware that the battle is ongoing.  Be prepared.

3. God Speaks to Us:  God makes it clear we should be a people who live by every word that proceeds out of His mouth.  His Word brought all things into existence, and holds all things together.  Whether we acknowledge it or not we are dependent on His voice.

4. Discern Spirit and Flesh:  The thing that keeps us stuck is not bad behavior, it is a bad source.  We must learn to recognize, first in ourselves and then in life, what is from God, and what issues forth from incomplete humanity.

5. Prayer Matters: Our prayer life will show how much we truly realize that a significant portion of our life begins and ends with a Person we cannot see, and in a realm invisible to our senses. Prayer is our interaction with that Person and that realm.

6. Plans versus Wineskins: If we see that all the above are true, our calendar will be in pencil, not ink. A plan works with or without God. A wineskin is designed to contain something and is fairly useless without the wine.  Our lives were designed to contain God, not to serve Him. If at any moment we realize He is not where we are, a change of course is in order.

Read these six keys, and then peruse the entries of the last four months.  See if these are not the themes of almost everything I have written, and probably everything I will write.  Could be boring if the Source were not Infinite! I hope you are thinking differently.

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