Victor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher and author who was also a survivor of German concentrations camps in World War II.  In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that the difference he saw in the men who survived the camps and those who didn’t, was the central issue of “meaning.”  Those who found no meaning in their suffering, succumbed and died.  Those who could find some meaning for what they were experiencing, some redeeming purpose for their suffering, survived.  I would argue that our greatest need today is still to find meaning for our life and our experiences.  Having suicide rates at all-time highs in a nation still prosperous and full of opportunities tells me that people, young and old, cannot find a reason to go on when life gets hard and disappointment dims their dreams.

Before coming to Christ, I struggled with depression as a college student.  Even in my 20’s, I already sensed a futility to life.  The idea of simply working for 75 years to bring home a pay check and then to die, was a very unfulfilling view of my future.  I had no sense of who I was or why I was or of any purpose beyond the moment. The thought of the rest of my life feeling that way was debilitating.  Discovering Jesus changed that. Jesus and the destiny assigned to me in heaven, gave my life purpose – not just for the years I have in this body, but for eternity.  When I began to discover who God had made me to be, I found fulfillment in the path laid out for me.

Satan loves to blind us from our purpose and the meaning that every experience has for our destiny.  One of his primary strategies is to make us feel disqualified for anything beyond disappointments and failures.  He takes those setbacks and whispers to us that we are unworthy of anything more and that our lives will simply be a series of failed attempts to find love and happiness.  

Paul says something interesting in his second letter to the church at Corinth. He wrote, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Let me highlight a couple of truths from this passage and then tie it into the concept of “meaning.”

First of all, we will all experience troubles – failure, loss, hardship, betrayal, and pain.  It is the fabric of this world. If we believe that God has promised us a trouble-free existence then we haven’t read the Bible carefully and we will experience a great deal of disappointment. The fact that we suffer is not abandonment by God any more than pain and injuries in a football game are the coach’s fault.  It is simply part of the game and the price you pay to participate. Expect it.  Prepare for it.  Deal with it. Like all top athletes, you will have to play injured at times,  but God does promise that we win in the end.

Secondly, it is in the midst of trouble that we most clearly experience the hand and comfort of God if we will receive it. Remember, God did not keep Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego out of the fire.  He simply joined them in the fire.  It is when we struggle that we truly discover God in our lives if we are open to the discovery.

The other great truth in the passage is that whatever we receive from God in our suffering and even failures, we are to use to help others who are coming down that same dark road behind us.  

After years of ministry to hurting people, I have clearly seen that true healing only comes when we use our own pain from the past to comfort and direct others.  That ministry to the broken and the hurting gives our own suffering meaning.  It redeems our pain so that it has value. If we can find no purpose for what we have gone through or are going through, we inevitably blame God for being unfair or of betraying us.  We will then wither like those in the Nazi concentration camps who could find no meaning in what they were going through.  However, when we see God’s purpose for our suffering or have faith that he will use it for something significant, we can become partners with him in overcoming evil.  

Let me quickly say that God is not the cause of our suffering, but he will use it so that what we have gone through has redeeming value. The devil tries to convince us that our losses, abuse, and failures have disqualified us from our destiny –  that because we have failures in our past, God will not or cannot use us. He tries to convince us that our losses and failures determine our identity for all time. That is not true.  Those things that brought pain and even shame into our lives actually equip us to minister to others.   Those are actually the very things that make us qualified. 

I have served in full time ministry long enough that I have known several church leaders whose lives seemed to have been charmed.  They grew up in great Christian homes, had amazing careers, had “perfect” kids, and simply had no history of abuse, divorce, failure , or besetting sin that I knew of.  They were great people, but in every church the people I worked with – the abused, the divorced, the single mothers, those struggling with addictions -would never have gone to those men and women for counsel.  They not only feared being judged, but more than that, believed that those “charmed” individuals would simply have no empathy or understanding of their situation.  In order to be a perfect High Priest for us, Jesus had to be tempted in every way as we are. We need to be able to tell others that we have been down the same muddy roads as they are travelling now.  Our own hurts, betrayals, losses, and sin give us the wisdom and the credibility hurting people need when God has led us out of our own pain and shame.

I love Elevation’s recent song, Graves Into Gardens, as it speaks of how God redeems even death and turns it into something full of life.  He can do that in our own lives as we find our own meaning in Him and the destiny that Jesus has purchased for us.  The key is not to let out past define us, but to let the lessons we have learned in Christ, prepare us to pass God’s comfort on to others who also have a destiny in him. 

Have you ever considered the “impossibility” of successfully living out the commands of Christ in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) on a daily basis? In this sermon, beginning with the “blessed are’s,” he shifts the standard of judgment from behaviors to the heart and our thought life.  He says that instead of murder being the standard, if you even remain angry at your brother, you are in danger of judgment.  Instead of physical adultery being the standard, lusting after a woman in your heart is just as sinful.  He commands us to love our enemies and to pray for those who are intent on doing us harm.  He warns that we must not judge another or we will be judged with the same judgement.  Participating in gossip is a form of judgment.  Considering myself more righteous than another is judging.  Having a critical spirit and accusing others of not measuring up is judging. We could go on, but Jesus set a very high standard for holiness in the courts of heaven.

 How do we get through the day without violating these commands in some way?  Those commands define the standards and the goal.  Thankfully, grace makes up the difference.  But if we ever think we are doing well spiritually, we only need to read those three chapters in Matthew and hold them up to our own hearts objectively to see how much we need Jesus – every day.

One of the beatitudes (blessed are…) that always catches my eye is, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt.5:8).  In a season where the church is crying out for the presence of God in our worship and manifestations of God in our lives, I wonder how much a lack of purity hinders our ability to see God.  If you read the Psalms of David, there seems to be a real sense in which he had vivid visions of God in the temple.  Perhaps, they were occasional, but his songs reflect a true hunger to see God again, to take in his majesty, and to be overwhelmed with his glory.  I think we are crying out for those same things again, but I wonder if our standard of purity has become relative rather than biblical.  

We are surrounded daily by a tsunami of illicit sexuality, profane language, graphic violence, blatant and bold dishonesty, and perversion.  By cultural standards, Christians avoid the worst of those things, but by heavenly standards I suspect we carry much more impurity than we want to acknowledge. What we become calloused to in our culture, what we normalize, is still highly offensive to the Holy Spirit.  For instance, the apostle Paul commanded, “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people” (Eph.5:3). 

 All I have to do is look at Face Book pages of believers I know, to understand that our standards for modesty, environments we hang out in, and even language don’t come close to biblical standards.  And yet, we must think that God is good with our standards or we wouldn’t post some of those things all over the internet for others to admire.  We must remember that we’re are not graded on the Bell Curve against how others perform, but we are to be judged by the pure and holy standards of heaven that never change.  

In 1939, the famous movie Gone with the Wind was released.  This “classic” nearly did not make it past the movie censors because Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara that he didn’t “give a damn.”  That kind of language in a movie was shocking and outraged those who were concerned about America’s moral climate.  Think about what we now consider normal and acceptable in movies and television in terms of language, nudity, sexuality, adultery, and so forth.  Our standards have fallen so far, that we typically would push back against those censors as being archaic and prudish rather than questioning our own standards of morality and purity.  

I have to monitor these issues in my own life, so I know how subtly we can become calloused to the sin around us and lose our sense of shame and outrage when our culture not only offends God, but boasts about the sin and recruits others to join in.  We can’t control the world around us, but if we want to see God, as we claim we do, purity – by His standards – is something we must consider.  

We cannot lower the standards of God’s holiness but must ask him to give us his sensitivity to sin once again in our own lives and hearts so that we are constantly recognizing the compromises in our soul and pulling those weeds from the garden where we want to meet with God. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

There are a lot of great thinkers and writers in the world…especially in the Christian world.  When I read something that is noteworthy or that resonates in my spirit, I like to share it with you.  Stephen Mansfield is a New York Times best selling author.  He is a pastor, an historian, and an expert on leadership development.  I want to quote from a recent piece he wrote in his blog Leading Thoughts.

Stephen wrote, “One of my favorite words is ‘legendary.’  Today it means merely something that is famous enough to be celebrated in our time. Yet it comes from the Middle Latin word that meant something worthy to be written down and remembered for generations. I love that idea.  Lives and deeds that are worthy to be written down and remembered. People who live in such a way that they inspire generations.  Frankly, I want to live like that.  I want you to as well.  

A great leader is meant to inspire greatness in others.  He or she is in place to awaken largeness and nobility and an epic vision in the souls of people … Yet I have to tell you that many leaders wrap themselves in the aura of the legendary.  This, I’m sorry to say, is particularly true among people in Christian ministry. They have some challenges.  They achieve some victories. Good things come of it.  Then, unfortunately, their vision shifts from making others legendary to presenting themselves as legends to be honored … Here is the core truth.  You might be a legend one day.  I hope you will be.  I’m here to help.  Yet don’t become legendary by assuming that you are and presenting yourself as such.  You become legendary by enabling other people, empowering them to rise to the greatness possible in their own lives.”

For those of us in leadership or that aspire to leadership, I think this a great reminder of a core biblical truth.  Jesus taught his disciples, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” 

Many ministries that have begun to bear great fruit have been damaged by leaders within the ministry that begin to use the ministry as a platform for their own significance.  The old healing evangelists of the early 1900’s had a term for it.  They said, “Don’t touch the glory.”  What they meant was to never take credit for what God is doing.  Give him the glory rather than yourself.  Historically, those who forgot that maxim ended poorly or even tragically. Spiritual pride is not a quality of Christ, but of Satan. It was spiritual pride that caused Satan to lose his place in heaven. We need to guard against that quality springing up in our own hearts or in the hearts of others that lead with us.  

Pastors, especially, have been given to the church in order to equip others for service in the kingdom.  The Passion Translation puts it this way, “He has appointed some with grace to be apostles, and some with grace to be prophets, and some with grace to be evangelists, and some with grace to be pastors, and some with grace to be teachers.  And their calling is to nurture and prepare all the holy believers to do their own works of ministry, and as they do they will enlarge and build up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11-12). 

As leaders, we are to equip others for the good works prepared in advance for them.  We are to launch them into fruitful ministries of their own with a vision for achieving great things in the kingdom of God. If the ministry is about our significance, we can never let others accomplish more than ourselves because, then, our significance would be diminished.  If we seek the applause of men, we will find ways to limit what others do who serve in our ministries so they cannot outshine us.  If we seek the applause of heaven, however, we will launch as many as we can who will be even more effective in ministry than we have been.  We will encourage and launch them to develop greater gifts than we have known personally.

In talking to pastors in other churches, it seems that ministries in which “miraculous gifts” are up front, are very susceptible to spiritual pride.  Like the miracles of Jesus, these ministries tend to draw a crowd and may get more notoriety than most other ministries in the church.. Gifted but immature believers looking for significance in the church are often drawn to these areas and want to “shine” in the eyes of others. If not mentored well, they may grow into leaders who want to be legendary in their own eyes and in the eyes of men rather than heaven.  

I have had conversations in which senior pastors did not want a healing or deliverance ministry in their church because of an experience in the past with such a ministry in which the leaders felt spiritually superior to those who didn’t operate in “the gifts” or engage in spiritual warfare.  The self-assigned legendary status of some leaders created divisions in the church.  These senior pastors had no desire to go down that road again.

All this is to say that we truly need to guard our hearts and the hearts of others who serve with us so that our true desire is to develop and promote others far beyond ourselves.  Jesus humbled himself so that we might be lifted up.  If we will do the same, God will bless our ministries and our leadership…and our “legends” may grow in heaven.

Grace

Most of us remember the story from Matthew 18 of a servant who owed his master more money than he could repay.  When the master called in the debt, the man was helpless to repay so the master decided to sell the man and his family into slavery to recoup part of his losses.  The man fell on his knees asking for mercy and the master, in a moment of compassion, forgave the entire amount and continued to keep him on as a servant.   Immediately after receiving the incredible gift of grace from his master, he ran into another servant who owed him a few dollars.  He demanded his money and when that servant couldn’t pay, he had him put in jail until he could get his money.  When the master heard what had happened, he was furious and put the man whose debt he had forgiven in jail, rebuking him for not showing others the mercy he had received.  Jesus finished the story by saying that God will deal with us in the same way if we don’t forgive others their wrongs toward us, because God has forgiven our unpayable debt through his Son.

The question always arises as to why the servant, who was forgiven the enormous debt, was so unbending toward the one who owed him a small debt.  Of course, he could have just been wicked and perverse.  Once he escaped punishment, he still felt the entitlement to demand from others what was not demanded from him.  Some people whose hearts are hard are just like that.   But there may be another reason that we all need to consider.

In the story, when his master demanded payment, the servant cried out, “Please be patient with me.  If you’ll just give me more time, I will repay you all that is owed’ (Matt. 18:29).  When the master completely forgave his debt, the servant may have understood the forgiveness to simply mean that he had extended the note, but would still require payment later.  If that were the case, the first servant would be desperate to collect all he could as soon as he could from others.

The idea that someone would simply forgive an enormous debt without any expectation of repayment is actually hard to get our minds around.  It seems like one of those “too good to be true” offers that will come back to haunt us later.  For many believers, grace has the same feel.  Many of us still live before God thinking that somewhere along the line, our salvation our security, and his blessings will be based on being better than others.  It’s like college entrance exams…only those in the 90^th percentile will get in.

When we slip into self-righteousness, we have slipped into a kind of “meritorious salvation.”  If I believe I only get the favor of God by being better than most, I will be invested in pointing to my own good qualities and good works while zealously pointing out the failures and flaws of others.  That is the nature of judging others and placing them in a psychological category of being less than me. When we can’t be generous in how we deal with the weaknesses and failings of others, we have missed the meaning of God’s grace.  If I know that I have been forgiven much, based totally on the goodness of God and the full payment of my debt made on my behalf by the blood of Christ, how could I not extend that generosity to others?

If we are quick to judge, condemn, criticize, and gossip…we probably have not yet taken hold of the true meaning of God’s grace.  The belief that we have to prove ourselves better than others to deserve love and favor from God is a huge open door for the enemy. We may want to begin to meditate on grace and ask the Holy Spirit to give us a true revelation of that grace in our own hearts.  It is very freeing to know how much God values me without the need to devalue others.

In the third chapter of Revelation, Jesus writes to the church at Laodicea, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev.3:20). This is a familiar passage to most and most have seen the painting by William Hunt depicting Christ standing in front of a heavy wooden door knocking and waiting. The painting symbolizes Jesus knocking on our hearts.  It’s interesting to think that the one who has all authority in heaven and on earth does not command the door to open but waits on our permission, our invitation.

Permission is a powerful thing.  We need to be sure that we issue constant permission and a constant invitation to Jesus to enter our lives and our hearts. We need to make sure that there aren’t places in our lives and hearts where we deny him permission to enter.  If we aren’t careful, a denial to Jesus becomes an invitation for the enemy.

Satan has permission to tempt those who are in Christ but cannot enter to kill, steal and destroy unless we or those who have had authority over us, give him permission. The “sins of the fathers” give Satan permission to attack the blood lines until those bloodlines are cleansed by Christ and that cleansing depends on our request, our invitation.   Where we personally have unrepented sin, ungodly relationships, or unforgiveness in our lives, that agreement with Satan constitutes permission.

Even when ministering deliverance, we need the one being afflicted to no longer extend permission to the enemy through half-hearted commitment to the Lordship of Jesus or half-hearted commitments to holiness. Any secret sin the afflicted wants to hold onto or leave unconfessed, gives the enemy permission to stay and deliverance becomes a much greater task.  

Both Jesus and the devil are always standing at the door and knocking.  We need to be very sure about who we are inviting in.