I’m A Pastor Again!

The worst phone call of my life

A Forever Home For A Dead Dog

Some Reflections From A New Dad (Age 47)

Are You A Maximizer Or Satisficer?

Thankful People Are Happy People

Sanctification By Time Travel

What Do You Do When The Word Leaves You Cold?

How Technology Made Me A Better Christian

I’d Rather Be A Godly Administrator Than An Ungodly Minister

10 Pictures Of Faith In Jesus

The Seminary Of Suffering

I’m Just A…(Fill In The Gap)

Optimism And Faith In A POW Camp

A Modern Parable Of The Talents [Video]

Education And The Digital Revolution

An Alternative To “Meh”

8 Ways To Keep The Cross At The Center Of Your Life

Work, Life, And Guilt: An Interview

12 Characteristics Of The Gospel Call

6 Possible Responses To The Gospel Call

I Get What I Deserve

The Most Disobeyed Commandment In The Church?

Excuses, Excuses

The Power Of The Flying Pink Elephant

The Most Essential Life Skill: Teachability

How Can I Explain The Trinity To A Child?

Exploring Our Inner Universe

God’s Everywhere Grace

God’s Every-Animal Grace

Everywhere Grace Does Not Save But Points Us To The One Who Does

Everywhere Worship For Everywhere Grace

13 Reasons Why Election Is Not Foreseen Faith

10 Ways To Give Constructive Criticism

10 Reasons Why It Is More Blessed To Give Than To Receive

If that’s Christianity you can keep it!

When Christians let us down and get us down

Seeing Christ in the worst Christians

5 Ways To Profit From Christians’ Sins

5 Reasons Why Christians Need To Hear The Gospel

Is There Such A Thing As A Christian Salesman?

10 Positive Reasons To Train Your Kids In Cell Phone Use

Where’s God And What’s He Doing

The F250 Gospel

A Hallelujah From Head To Foot

Biblical Stargazing

Jesus Offers Us His C.V.

The Beauty Of Manual Labor

One Of The Most Powerful Sermons I Never Heard

Foolish Resistance And Invincible Grace

A Womb To Tomb Gospel

The Gospel Has No Small Print

What If Jesus Is Still Dead?

We’re Pregnant!

Parenting Teenagers In Grace University

Six Practical Reasons To Study Eschatology

Riddle: What Stings But Doesn’t Produce Honey?

Economics For Everybody

Presumptuous Or Optimistic Parenting?

King Salmon Taught Me How To Learn

I’d Rather Err With The Baptists

Jesus The Ecumenical Separatist

Meditation: 10 Motives And 10 Step Method

We Will Remember Them

15 Reasons Why The Greatest Suffering Is Better Than The Smallest Sin

12 Reasons Why Public Worship Is Better Than Private Worship

The End Of “To-Do” Lists

Two Helps To Believing The Gospel Of Done

Two (More) Helps To Believing The Gospel Of Done

Saved by 9/11

Forgive my prayers

But what if I’m not elect

How to turn a nightmare into a dream

A Christian tightrope walker?

God and pepperoni pizza

Dear selfaholic

4 reasons to remember your creator in your youth

4 reasons to remember your creator in middle age

God’s two planning departments

You are God’s masterpiece

The most unbelieved 10 letters in the Bible

My chick problem

The solution to my chick problem

And the walls came tumblin’ down

You’re not racist are you? Sometimes

Nine reasons why you may lack assurance

“Death, you shall die”

A summary not a substitute

Why am I here?

What is truth?

The unanswerable question

1 + 1 +1 = 1

The Christian life is not safe

Brandwashing, brainwashing, and Biblewashing

Lessons from the cancer ward

Help, daddy, get me out of here!

My worst and best jobs

Post-prayer satanic whisper

Is parting such sweet sorrow?

Let not the sun go down upon your wrath

O sin that will not let me go?

Two surgeries in one week

Sometimes it’s hard to believe in hell

How to memorize: 10 fast facts

Wilderness university

Looking back and counting my blessings

Turn haters into friends. Ask them for a favor!

I found my lost childhood diary!

Oh No! My wife’s coming home

Serving seniors

Better to worship in the pew than the pulpit?

Before you call, I will answer

Should Christians fast?

The least prayed (most answered) prayer

Holy habits

The benefits of holy habits

You have multiple blood clots in both lungs

God’s been hunting me down

Self-examination for the digital age

Dangerous dollars

Spiritual weedkiller

Seven important men

I can’t stop thinking about this

Three lessons I’ve learned from parenting teens

Violent attack on future king

The world-transforming power of a good conscience

A good conscience is an educated conscience

A good conscience is an exercised conscience

A good conscience is an encouraging conscience

A good conscience is an enjoyable conscience

Why share the gospel?

Gospel-centered obedience

Pumping up the self-control in the age of temptations

The Devil’s calendar

The Fastest Way To Discourage Other Christians

The Volunteer (Lev. 1:3)
In token of this promise, and to seal it to his own conscience, he decided to bring a burnt-offering to the Tabernacle that day. He rose from his knees, went through the tent door, and started walking towards a small pen containing livestock. Every step was full of cheerful willingness. There was no reluctance nor compulsion, no formalism nor hypocrisy – simply the eager happy service of a believer who desired a closer walk with Jehovah. He went to “offer it of his own voluntary will.”

The Value (Lev. 1:3, 10)
Standing by the fence, he surveyed the few animals he possessed. What would he offer to express his devotion and surrender to God? His eyes passed over the handful of doves. “Too little,” he thought. He looked at his one bull. The flesh started lusting against the spirit, suggesting many reasons why he should not offer it this time. “Yes,” he reasoned, “I will reserve my bull for another day.” So, it had to be a sheep or a goat. Again, temptation started getting the better of him. “Remember that old, weak-looking sheep which has not been gaining weight?” suggested an inner voice. “No,” Baruch replied out loud. “If I want this to be a real turning-point in my spiritual life, I will offer my best lamb.” Looking at the possible options, the choice was clear.

The Transfer (Lev. 1:4)
Approaching the door of the Tabernacle, he paused. Turning to the lamb, he placed his hand on its head and confessed, “O Jehovah, I deeply regret my lukewarmness and half-heartedness in your service…I want to be wholly and completely yours…” As his tears began to flow, and his passion for God overflowed, his hand pressed ever heavier on the lamb’s head.

The Killing (Lev. 1:5)
Baruch dreaded this part of the ritual. He looked into the eyes of the lamb he had helped deliver into this world, the lamb he had fed and cared for, the lamb he treasured above all the others. “Must you die for me?” he whispered. As he took the knife and began to cut, he cried out with deep longing, “Oh, for the Lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world…and the need for all these sacrifices?”

The Sprinkling (Lev. 1:5)
Life drained from the lamb, the priest gathered the blood in a basin and sprinkled it on the altar, as Baruch repeated again and again, “Precious blood, precious blood, precious blood…”

The Flaying (Lev. 1:6, 9)
As Baruch dissected the carcass of the lamb and washed the various parts, his trained eye could see the value of each and every part more clearly. He wondered how the value of the ultimate sacrifice for sin would be measured and publicly displayed.

The Burning (Lev. 1:9)
The moment was always awesome and solemn. The priest used long forks to maneuver the body parts into the flames, stoking the fire higher and hotter.  Baruch watched entranced as the life of the lamb was turned to ashes in the fierce heat. “That should be me…that should be me…” he whispered.

The Blessing
As he left the Tabernacle, the image of the lamb consumed by the flames was burned into Baruch’s mind. That evening, he not only prayed for the Final Perfect Sacrifice, but also for what the sacrifice symbolized: whole-person devotion to God, “Lord, make me burn for you. Take all I am and have and use it for your glory” (Rom. 12:1).

We also study Church History. We enjoy tracing God’s providential dealings with His worldwide Church through the years. We’re interested in individual histories too and love to read biographies of godly men and women.

But we not only trace God’s dealings with his people from ancient and more recent times, we love to track God’s hand in our own lives too. We look back on our unconverted days, amazed at God’s preserving grace in numerous dangerous situations. We often ponder the pit we were pulled from, and we meditate on how God’s goodness and mercy have followed us all our days. When together with other Christians we love to hear their stories about the old, old story of Jesus and His love.

So, yes, we plead guilty to our remembering the days of old. But our historical instincts are not academic and merely theoretical. And we look back, not just because we are commanded to (look up “remember” in a concordance if you doubt that). We do so because we sense that these memories help us to live now and to face the unknown future.

And what’s fascinating is that that is now being confirmed by science. Neuroimaging studies have identified areas of the brain that are activated when we are remembering the past. But the most  recent studies (pdf) have found a striking overlap between these areas and brain regions that are activated when we think about the future. At the Harvard Business Review Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske report:

According to scientists, the brain’s memory circuits are not merely for reflecting on the past but are also vital mechanisms for imagining, anticipating, and preparing for the future. In this new view, your brain is a proactive system that integrates past experience to help you navigate the future.

Of course, Jeff and Mark’s HBR article is interested largely in competitive advantage and commercial gain: 

In the business world, it’s a distinct advantage to have a brain that anticipates future demands and negotiates them well. Accurate predictions typically translate to success. Being able to envision future scenarios helps foster strategic planning and resist immediate rewards in favor of longer-term gains. The proactive brain flexibly recombines details from past experiences that, by analogy with your current surroundings, help you make sense of where you are, anticipate what will come next, and successfully navigate the transition.

However, surely the Christian can piggy-back on their research and apply their conclusions to our spiritual advantage and gain. For example, just look at the tips they give us to enhance our ability to benefit from the past:

• Give your brain a rich bank of life experiences. Expose it to diverse environments and situations. Increasing the breadth of your experiences provides richer information for your brain to draw on as it helps you anticipate new situations.
• Let it borrow from the experiences of others by communicating, reading, or interacting with or about others.
• Think about what you want from the future. Take time to reflect on individual and team values and goals, both immediate and down the road. These will help guide your brain as it envisions future scenarios that may best help you achieve your objectives.
• Actively ponder future rewards or accomplishments. Emphasize rich, detailed thinking about long-term outcomes. This reduces the lure (and the danger) of instant gratification.
• Give yourself periods of relatively uninterrupted thought during which you let your mind wander. Doing this gives the brain’s memory system extra time to recombine your prior experiences in ways that can help you envision future possibilities.

Obviously, we can’t take all of this over to the Christian life. But you don’t need to be a scientist to see the spiritual benefits of using the past to imagine, anticipate, and prepare for the eternal future.

51% of the Fortune 500 companies began in a recession (according to the Kaufmann Foundation). This partly explains why Clayton Christsensen, a Harvard business school professor, has claimed that the recession “would have an unmitigated positive impact on innovation…The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That’s when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.” In other words, scarcity can be an opportunity, a boon rather than a bane.

That’s a truth in the spiritual realm as well, and provides the flip side to yesterday’s post about the risk of catastrophic victory. There is the possibility of a blessed “defeat” for the Church or the Christian. We would not have Psalm 51 without David’s spiritual recession. We would not have Paul’s letters to the New Testament churches without their divisions and disasters.

I’ve seen churches lose half their members and prayer meetings come alive. I’ve seen pastors leave churches “in the lurch” but “coasting” elders transformed into leaders. I’ve seen Christians lose their income and grow in grace. I’ve seen Christians lose loved ones in tragic circumstances and grow in love to God. I’ve seen a murderer sentenced to life imprisonment find true freedom in Christ. Spiritual recession, scarcity and loss provide us with opportunity for spiritual breakthroughs and for fundamental re-thinking of our spiritual lives. How can you turn your defeat into a victory, your bane into a boon, your recession into prosperity?

Picture: 2006 © Michael Zysman. Image from BigStockPhoto.com