What Is It, Really, To Be Redeemed?

(this image from the blog Na-Da Farm)

What part of you is redeemed by the blood of Jesus? Only the parts you are able to polish up?

When you mix legalism with Gospel, you end up preserving the Gospel as a priceless artifact, instead of living it as the scandalous reality Christ meant it to be. You relegate it to a supernatural idea, or a stern standard. The law cannot vivify anything, and make it leap to loving life.

But grace! Ah, grace is alive with earthy life. We encounter grace in exactly the way we body-bound mortals encounter all of life, that is, by "doing the dishes." We encounter grace in our flesh, through our work and through our relationships.

Ordinary living, when you finally "get" grace, becomes the powerful vehicle that drives the message of the Gospel deep into your consciousness - and not because there is some transcendent secret to be found in cooking, cleaning, crying, forgiving, friending, laughing, shopping, drinking coffee, doing dishes or making love. Rather (in light of the fact that you are the very righteousness of God, in Christ) all those activities simply serve to mediate the mystery to you - namely, the mystery of "Christ in you, the hope of glory".

Christ in you, Christ "as" you, Christ as your wisdom, sanctification, and redemption. Your choices become the fruit of the Holy Spirit, as your mind renews itself to the exact proportion you apply the Gospel to your day, not just your destiny.

No easy road, this. Those who talk of "cheap grace" have never understood grace at all.

Why I Say "Amen"

I am a one-woman amen corner. And it doesn't matter who is speaking, whether it be my husband or someone else, when I hear True Truth, I say (a sometimes enthusiastic) "Amen!"

I feel sorry for anyone too self-aware to speak that simple but powerful declaration in church. It is so much more than a mere affirmation to the speaker. It is so much more than even myself agreeing with what has been spoken. Oh, the Amen is so Biblical!

Let's go to the Principle of First Mention. We first see the Hebrew "Amen" as the required response to the law of God. In fact, first mention is something about the belly swelling and the thigh rotting, and all the women were to declare...."AMEN!"

Then, if you study it out, the "Amen" was significant in the Old Covenant, as the primary response of God's people to what was the Word of the Lord in their time. There was no real "Amen" before the law. And after the law was given, the law was all they had. (That sounds so simplistic, but it is profound!) All God's people had, as a means of relating to the One True God, was Mosaic law...of course they loved it. The law was the mechanism that set them apart from all the other nations of the earth. Of course, the "Amen" was spoken by them in response to what they heard.

That small-but-powerful word, "Amen", in all its Hebrew glory, and in its original form, found its way into the New Covenant Greek. How did this happen? Because Christ is "The Amen". He was the plan, from before the world began.

Look, if you will, at almost every "Amen" declared in the New Testament. You will find it is a hearty response to the Word of the Lord in our time. You will find it is the hearty response to....grace.

The "Amen" is the hearty response to the person of Christ.

No longer is it the hearty response to a list of rules and their blessings and consequences. No longer is it a response to anything we can or can't do, should or should not do.

Now, the Amen is the heart's response to what Christ Has Done. And my gospel-loving-girlfriend, whenever you hear this Gospel being preached, it will do your heart good to declare, "Amen!"

It is plumb powerful. Every time you do it, you are declaring your heart with your mouth, and that can't help but change you, bit by bit, declaration by declaration.

For crying out loud, say it out loud. Don't whisper it. Say "yes!" to the good news!

The way we relate to God has changed radically. The veil has been torn all-two-pieces, all of human history cleaved into two separate epochs, Before Christ, and After Him. The law was given, then Grace came (John 1). In Christ, every word of the law was fulfilled and finished. His obedience has become the Only Obedience - and all our obedience flows as a response to His gift of righteousness. Any "obedience" other than that which is grounded in this belief- and this believed radically - is self righteous sin, it does not flow from faith, and it will not cut muster.

The message of the grace of God - Christ Alone - is all we have. Christ is the Word of the Lord, declared to us, in our time (Hebrews 1). Of course we love it!

My heart throbs with emotion and my eyes well with tears as I say to you right now:

Oh, if David, the man after God's own heart, knew in his day what we know in ours, what do you think his response would have been?!?! Do you really think he would have clasped the law to his bosom, and insisted that he remain, even to the smallest degree, in the Old Covenant? Do you really think he'd not fall to his knees in awe and ceaseless praise at the sight of Jesus, died and risen for his sin? Oh, this was the man who prophesied, "Blessed is the man whose sin is forgiven, whose iniquity is covered - blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute sin!"

What if David were told, "Not only does Yahweh not impute your sin to you, David, He credits to you His holiness!" What if David had been told what he did not yet understand about Yeshua - God coming to earth as man to keep the law in David's place? What if he was told, "Behold, the lamb of God, who takes away your sin, David!" Do you really believe he would desire the shadow more than the Substance?

No, I tell you by the Spirit, David would completely unclothe himself and dance, at this kind of Good God-News. His heart would throb with passion, his eyes would spill with tears, and he would, in our time, say something like this:

"Thou hast commanded us to keep (understand, implement) your New Covenant diligently - O that my ways were directed to keep your New Covenant! Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto the gift of Jesus Christ! I will praise you with uprightness of heart, when I will have learned of your Gift of Righteousness! I will keep this New Covenant - for you have promised you will never leave me nor forsake me. Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Thy Gospel...Jesus Christ have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee. Blessed art thou, Oh Lord, teach me this New and Living Way. With my lips have I declared all this Good News from Thy mouth. I have rejoiced in the way of Your New Covenant as much as in any and all riches!" (a few verses in Psalms 119, reverently paraphrased and transposed into New Testament reality.)

It is all about Jesus, in our time.

At the very least, King David would respond, "AMEN." When we join him and others, in this very ancient and Biblical response, we finally step from our solipsism into True Community. "The Amen" has always been as much a corporate response as it is individual. The "Amen" lets us take our place among the elect of God.

"The grace of the Lord JESUS Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen."

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen."

"Grace be with all those who love our Jesus in sincerity. Amen."

"I am the First and the Last. I am He that lives, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen. And I have the keys of hell and of death."

It's Official - I Am a Geek, Because I Buffer My Tweets

I guess I am forced to admit to being a techno-geek. Because today, I read about a new thing that can buffer my Twitter, and I slapped my forehead in epiphany. It will so simplify my Twitter-existence. And yours, if you follow me.

Yeah. My tweets can get buffered.

And I instantly grasped the magnificence of this. It is an idea whose time has come.

Grandchildren Are a Joy Unspeakable

He is growing so fast. Too fast. As a grandmother, I know this down marrow-deep.
When it comes to this baby, Timothy, I won't pass this way again. I know every grandmother says this, but aw man...this kid is special. He's amazing. (And for the record, I'm not the only one who has taken note of it.)

You better know that I savor these days.

Snapshots of Life Lived In Community

Our friends the "wee Scottish Prophet" Joe Ewen, and his lovely bride Yvonne are here from Scotland. They flew straight across the pond, landed in Atlanta, rented a black Dodge, and drove until 2 A.M. to get here, yesterday morning.

Joe will mess with your idea of a prophet. He is a people-person, down to earth, pleasant, and delivers a spot-on word from the Lord, if the Lord gives him a word for you. He has always "just so happened" to be scheduled to speak at Harvest at pivotal points in our history as a church. Moreover, when he hasn't been with us, he has called us on the phone, from across the pond, on a couple of random occasions this past year or two, because the Lord spoke to him a word concerning us.

If you miss getting to be with us in the morning, to receive from the Jesus who Joe incarnates, don't hate on me for saying it: you really will have missed a blessing.




Today is his bride's birthday, so we felt a celebration was in order...

There is no other way to be truly blessed, than to be part of a local church.

And I do mean a part...not scaffolding, helping to build only up to a point, and then disappearing...I mean a load bearing wall. Integral. Part.

If you think you are blessed, and you are not an integral part of a local church, that is because you have only known a measure of blessing, and you think that what you know, is all there is to know.

There is so much more in store for you, if you'd but let go of the bitterness and pride, and become part of something that actually requires you to stick it out, love past your limits, past your pain, beyond the imperfections you find in local church leaders.

If you could...oh, if you only could become part...you'd understand the privilege of knowing people like this:

The Finished Work of Christ

I say this with decisive confidence, as a student of the Scripture, and a disciple of Jesus Christ: authority will pass more and more into the hands of men who have the courage to preach the "whole gospel", which is the New Covenant gospel...

...and it does take courage to preach it...great courage. When you get the chance, ask Paul the Apostle how much courage it takes. The New Covenant is the completion (and replacement) of the Old - and any gospel that gives greater weight to the law is an incomplete, "unbalanced" presentation.

The man who preaches the Finished Work of Christ will bear authority and rule, because all authority flows from the gift of righteousness we have been given. We have no authority based on our own puny, filthy efforts.

The New Covenant man will rule lovingly and modestly, because wrapped up in the revelation of the grace of God, is a revelation of his own falling short, and the manifold power of the atonement.

But make no mistake - the Grace-man will rule. The fact that anyone may disagree with that observation does not make it not so. Hound dogs always howl at the moon, but the moon is unaffected.

These men (and women) will be able to bear authority with a trustworthiness that far exceeds their self-aware antinomian-legalist friends, because they have taken the trouble to educate themselves in the whole gospel.

Grandaddy and Grandson's First Trip to the Hardware Store

Poppy and Timothy decided to go to the hardware store recently...Poppy is pricing the supplies for a very special project for me...to be revealed in due time.

Said project has the potential to be very interesting, having to do with our ongoing dabbling in urban homesteading! But it might be a 2012 kind of thing, instead of this year - simply because of our schedule between now and the end of the year. We don't have a lot of breathing room. This project will take some research, then the building of it, then the ongoing maintenence. More time for all that next spring, perhaps?

The gist is this: we are developing a clearer and clearer vision for the sort of life we want, in this brand new season called "Grandparenting". After a lot of wisdom-seeking, we are seeing that we will, Lord willing, grandparent babies and young ones for even more years than we parented babies and young ones.

Grandparenting will be vastly different than parenting - we have no desire to hold the place of mom and dad in the hearts of our grandchildren. We don't even plan on being always the default babysitters - our children will have each other for that. We fully plan on having our own good thing going on, just us two. But at the same time, Biblically, we still bear a large measure of joyful responsibility to grandchildren, our present one, and all future arrivals.


We think there will be a wagon load of 'em. Each one, as celebrated as the first.

So we are going to spend and invest a few years(and it will take some time, even though our plans are simple, our time is limited) designing the sort of lifestyle we want to have with them, in hopes that the payoff will last for years, through the childhood of each grandson or granddaughter. It is a big and blissful job, this creating the back-ground against which all their future memories with us will be made.

Our vision is for our grandchildren to one day, when they think of us, to immediately think of church, of church family, of picnics and tire swings, of our cul-de-sac (if we are still here) of tree forts, and maybe three or four urban chickens and one nanny goat, all in storybook cute enclosures, of course. I would have it no other way! We want them, even after we are in heaven, which is not a morbid thought at all, to be able to conjure images of Mimi's flower and vegetable gardens, and her Engldoodle (my next dog - my dream doggie - expensive as all get-out, but I am allowed to dream!)...

(my next dog...huge!)

...of Poppy and his pond, and of his "Tracker Rides" - getting to ride with him in his Barbie jeep to drop the canoe-boat into the lake and go fishin'!

(This is a replica of Poppy's Barbie Jeep - tiny! post-edit: Both the canoe and the Barbie Jeep are no more. We are on the look-out for another one of each. We aren't in a hurry, but if we find a crazy good deal....)

When his present Tracker gives up the ghost, as it certainly will eventually, he will get another - at least that is the plan. But believe it or not, these little cars are becoming collectible, and sometimes it is hard to come by a good one!

And then....inside this home, music always being played by hand, all of us singing for our supper, a supper made of garden fresh beans, potatoes, squash, and crusty loaves of homemade artisan bread. There will be small to medium projects always having to be laid aside for supper...shelves or cubbies inside the house, and out in the garage,with each grandchild's name on it, for storing each little one's project until the next visit, where it can be resumed with fresh eyes and energies. ...we want these tiny little "flesh of our flesh" humans to have a solid sense of all that is simple and fun and hard work but good, here at Mimi and Poppy's.

Once again, as we already have, (and according to the premise this blog was begun on!) we shall prove that no one has to live the rural-McMansion-agenda, to have it all. (I wrote a book on the unsung joys of suburbia in 2004 - this has been a theme of mine for many years...)

We'll have a nanny goat, maybe, and berry bushes, we already have a teeny tiny "catch and release" pond, plus we have more time to enjoy it, and people who are actually always here, who truly visit. We have a very detailed plan (a conglomeration of several books I've read on the subject of suburban/urban gardening) that will allow us to do as much as we want, right here with our 3/4ths of an acre, oddly shaped plot of suburban homestead.



Vision. We set out with a vision when our children were being born. We are satisfied with the results of it - things didn't turn out perfectly. Perfection visits no one, so it is quite a good thing to simply be fully satisfied, so far.



We gave our children a beautiful childhood, replete with read aloud books, music, uncounted nights spent around our outside firepit, woodworking, crafts, and time with mom and dad. And we did it on very little income, at the time. We did it right here, in quintessential suburbia.



Now, we set out with a new vision for the "grands"....those ones we will assist in raising up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but only to the precise point their parents ask for our assistance. Mostly, we'll be here, ready to make a childhood memory, which is what raisin' children or grandchildren is all about.



Our kids are, and will be great parents, so we don't anticipate doing a whole lot of  raisin' - maybe a summer or two, or a weekend, here or there, from time to time. But we want to be ready.


Ninety-plus percent of living is doing the mundane work that prepares the way for mere moments of glory. We want, when our job as grandparent is done, for the suitcase that is in each little heart, to be stuffed brim-ful with quirky, hilarious, serious, moving, and musical memories.



This means we must continue to be vigilant about living this life we've dreamed, being unafraid to tweak it and change it until it looks just like the life we further imagine. What we imagine is so sweet.


Proven fact: people grounded in the doctrines of grace have the ability to project themselves into the future ("For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord!"), and come back with a happy set of blueprints for today, and the optimism to always be working hard - building towards the freedom and joy they see in all their tomorrows.