Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday sun. – Psalm 37:5-6 Could you imagine living in a country during an epidemic that killed at least one-third of the population? This didn’t just happen to one country, but an entire continent. No, I’m not talking about an NBC show! In the 14th century, the Black Plague swept across Europe killing millions of people. Historians believe this may have totaled up to two-thirds of the world’s population. If that situation sounds bad, we’re all actually in a worse one. The sad thing is that we just may not be aware of it. We are all infected with a deadly disease that will ultimately take our lives. This disease is called sin. This pandemic will not only claim our physical lives, but will also doom us in eternity if we don’t receive the cure. Before you crazy non-religious people start emailing me about how my hypocritical life is different and apart from your own, let me tell you why Biblical sin is a disease. (When i talk about sin, i’m not talking about violations against moral platitudes). Sin is a disease because when you get infected with sin, you don’t become better by abstaining from it. In fact sin grows and starts to infect other parts of your life. The “cure,” if sin is a disease, is then a matter of “trust.” The Psalmist understands that. However, if you read the rest of this Psalm, he knows that with “trust” comes a burning sensation that makes a way for the future. In fact, trusting God hurts like a third degree burn. That’s the only way it works. The reason it hurts like a burn is because the disease of sin is so deeply rooted in our personas that to trust in anything outside of ourselves in our own sin is like setting it to fire. It makes us hot, then sweat, and after a while, trusting God burns away all the layers of gunk that wouldn’t come off naturally. Back to the plague: in 1666, the Great Fire of London wiped out the homes of 70,000 people. While that may only amount to a city block in New York, that was a lot of the city back in those days. It is said that the fire was so hot that it incinerated everything — even on the outskirts of the city. Nothing was recognizable. This fire stopped the plague that went on for 300 years by killing off the diseased fleas, rats, and people that carried the plague. It took a greater death of fire to stop the death of the disease. Likewise, it takes the death of Jesus Christ to overcome the death of sin. We’ll all continue to struggle with sin, but the power of the cross of Jesus is far greater than the power of sin itself. Trusting in God despite how much it burns as the sin is coming off of us makes our lives that much clearer. The Psalmist says that our vindication will be like the noon skies if we commit to this. Let’s commit to God and bring on a new season of growth and warmth.

No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them. (Joshua 1:5-6) I love the first chapter in the book of Joshua. It reminds me of pirates! The reason why it reminds me of pirates is because pirate ships were historically made up of former sailors and slaves who had been considered to be nothing by the rich monarchs. They were only cogs in the wheel of commerce to be used while able and cast aside when spent. Then they changed the way global economics operated. (Watch a “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie for evidence). Peter Rollins, a philosopher, writes that pirates were called the “Villains of all Nations,” and despised by all powers. He continues by saying, “pirates were the trash of the world who were able to welcome all into their communities.” At this point in history, the Israelites were the trash of the middle east. They were runaway slaves, a group of nomads with no land to call home. The Israelites had no land of their own. In fact, before the Israelites received their promise land they needed to accept the law of God, “to love your neighbor as yourself”– that is to accept the outcast of society into their own. In return God promised never to leave no matter how difficult things would get. God promised that the Israelites would die in the middle of His promise to them, and they did. Going back to the pirate motif, the pirate symbol: the skull and crossbones communicated how they were dead to society, and yet alive. The pirate message cuts across all people and still echoes to us today. This disparate group was made up of those who had been inside society but not of it. Likewise, our symbol, the cross, is a shame, and reminds us that we are dead to this world and alive in Christ’s resurrection from that cross. So too, God empowers us to live courageously strong to inherit what God gives to us in His beckoning call to Him. He did this with Joshua and He does this for us. Do you now see why the Israelites remind me of pirates? Do you now see why we all need to be pirates in the 21st century? If the Israelites can live in this coming from slavery; and pirates can live boldly even when they were considered nothing, then why can’t we? What is stopping us from being a “pirate” (dead to society and alive in Christ) today?

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 ESV) The implications of this passage are massive, both metaphorically and physically. Let me explain. If we are spiritually crucified with Christ on a cross, not literally because that would mean we physically would die, then everything in our souls that were manifested physically in our lives would die the moment we wholly give our lives to Jesus in the act of faith that crucifies us with Him and to Him. At that moment, what we used to be, and how we were does not matter because we would be dead. Now, if we’re dead (our prior selves before being crucified) something else must live. I say this because clearly out physical bodies are still moving and doing things, and I don’t think we are soulless beasts walking around like instinctual zombies. Then someone’s soul must be giving us the intentional queues to act and move physically– that someone is the Spirit of God. He gives us the intentions to live out in a horribly evil world, goodness. So the big question is: what happens when I don’t live up to that goodness and I allow myself to act evil or think malice? We must live believing that the evil and malice will be redeemed by God’s love for us. In essence, we are hoping that through God’s power, our lives will not be defined anything short of the God who makes His place in our hearts and is the source of our souls. Physically, we can live without the stress of guilt, for past wrongs. We can also live apart out of the shadow of who we were. Finally, we can do things with our intention being the godly agape type of love which can never be put out. As believers in Christ, we must humbly tell ourselves and the world that we are not our own.

I titled this morning’s quiet time study, “Burnt Faith” because often times we find ourselves at the end of our wits with our faith and we just can’t help but to feel “burnt” like toast. We feel this way: when a relationship or relationships start going awry; or when bills become overwhelming; or perhaps when our jobs choke us. O Lord, all my longing is before you; my sighing is not hidden from you. (Psalms 38:9 ESV) David, the king of Israel whose own heart was very much like that of God’s, and whose faith in God caused him to worship before God in nakedness before his subjects, was feeling burnt when he wrote this Psalm. He says this about why he feels burnt in faith: “My heart’s about to break; I’m a burned-out case. Cataracts blind me to God and good; old friends avoid me like the plague. My cousins never visit, my neighbors stab me in the back. My competitors blacken my name, devoutly they pray for my ruin” (Vv10-12). We would feel like my faith in God was over and burnt if this all happened to me too. What we must do is wait for God to answer when our faith becomes burnt. We wait for God because our burnt faith always leads to supernatural fire. We wait for God because burnt faith always leads to flaming actions. We wait for God, because nobody else can soothe our burnt faith besides Him. He answers when nobody else will. If you’re feeling burnt in your faith, it’s time to long for God. It’s time to take your sighs and make them cries. It’s time to wait for God and reassure your faith.

He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. – Matthew 16:2-3 When will we ever get the picture? What are we waiting for? Every single day that passes us by as we wait for a sign, we lose precious time to go and do what we were created to do. Some of us have used the excuse of not being called by God for ministry as an excuse to sit on the sidelines watching other do ministry! Can’t you see what you’re doing? I know you can see the world as it is, the funny thing is, you refuse to do anything about it. A lot of us use prayer as a way to do nothing when in fact, our prayers are supposed to give us the resolve to do something we wouldn’t do otherwise. This passage comes from the story of when people asked Jesus to give them a sign even though he was healing, fixing and preaching throughout Israel. Jesus says it in the next verse– it’s the “sign of Jonah.” (No, it’s not why Christians use the fish as their car logo). Jesus was sacrificed for the life of all and swallowed into the depths of he’ll for three days before hell spit him back out into life. This is the greatest sign and the only sign we’ll ever need to go into life courageously with the power of God pushing us through as the Holy Spirit leads us deeper into the truth of reality. 2,000 years after the fact, even after the greatest sign was already shown to us– the resurrection; we’re just like those Pharisees! Some of us are praying for signs that we’ll never, ever see because we don’t want to see them. We don’t want to be responsible to do something with them. All of us know what’s coming, why are we wasting away asking for more signs? Are you ready accept this as a sign and get up to do something? If yes, then Go!

As I get older, the impression I get about the power of prayer becomes more and more clear: If you don’t pray, you lose your way. When you pray, God makes your day. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. (James 5:15-16 ESV) Some people see prayer as a last resort, to be tried when all else fails. Our priorities are the reverse of God’s. Prayer should come first. When praying to God isn’t first, I look like a lost man: I am aimless, visionless and bloated. Moving from one bad idea to the next. Going from one bad situation to another. There is no way I could sustain my life or my lifestyle without God helping me with directions and supply to travel. When we get out of our minds that we have any ability to impact the world around us on our own, then and only then, is prayer the only security we have in life. It starts to become first. When we understand that we start to live and pray in a way that fully submits to God. It isn’t our faith really or the strength of our persuasive prayers that make the difference; but rather, the character of God in whom our faith rests that changes everything. God is pleased to use our prayers to accomplish His purposes and He delights in answering our needs. His power is infinitely greater than ours, so it only makes sense to rely on it. Especially because God encourages us to do so. The Apostle James believed in prayer. In fact, tradition tells us that he spent so much time in prayer that his knees became hard and calloused. God works effectually through prayer. Prayer changes you. And living prayerfully everyday is effectively the only thing you can and need to do for the security of your future.

So last week when I was deathly sick with the flu and strep throat, I began my quiet time in the Book of Numbers– I know, it’s like double punishment– but here’s the curious part: why does God do all the smiting and rage so unforgivingly to His own people. The smiting by God is so intense here 14,700+ people die by God’s smiting in a span of four chapters (I want to say the equivalent of a few days). When you read this, you have to wonder if the God of the Old Testament is really the God of the New. Then you read the following: And the Lord said to Moses, “How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them? (Numbers 14:11 ESV) Then you know God was patient. God was kind. God did provide. Yet, despite all of that, the people of Israel still hated God and wanted nothing to do with Him because the fear within them was greater than their “fear of God.” God struck down hard on the Israelites as a way to purify them and make them holy; that is to erase the perceived fear of the world for the purposes of inheriting the gift of God in His delight. But we don’t want to accept that as discipline– we want to see it as a cruel, uncaring God who punishes and then asks questions later and that is foolish of us to think. You see, we’re often no different than the Israelites that were fleeing into the promise land. We are freed by our faith in God, and we witness God supernaturally intervening on our behalf every step of the way, and yet we fear a potential danger over the God who actually silences those fears– it’s a misplaced and misguided irrationality that needs to be smitten by God. And God does smite those areas of doubt and sinful rebellion from our lives, each time leaving us more raw, but more holy. God has us experience what we perceive as undue punishment to refine us and set our “fears” in order. He doesn’t do this because He hates us or wants to ruin our insignificant lives. He does this to make us more significant and worthy of receiving His inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey (soothing sweetness). The next time we think about how we are being “afflicted” by God, we should focus instead on how this affliction is setting us apart to receive a great inheritance. God faithfully shows us His power in signs and wonders in our lives, it may be time for us to love Him for making us more like Him.

There is a HUGE difference between correcting somebody and making an unreasonable moral demand from somebody. Let me give you an example: when your parent rips off a wooden blind and beats you for hitting your younger sibling, all the while saying that hitting other people is wrong, is the epitome of making an unreasonable moral demand. However, if your parent scolds you and sits you uncomfortably close to the sibling you just hit to cause radical reconciliation, that is correction. And what we want to do is make unreasonable moral demands of people as a way to “correct” them in their behavior, but that’s just not it. A lot of us forget that sometimes. Us religious people, especially. Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.” – Acts 15:10-11 The disciples ran into a quandary early on when the gospel went from just being circulated amongst the Jewish Diaspora to the non Jewish people of the Roman Empire. The quandary was: how do you deal with people who are converting from religion to faith in Jesus Christ. There was no formula “sinner’s prayer” and there was no book of polity or baptism class or confirmation class to guide them. Essentially, the Jewish believers said that the new believer should adhere to the rules and regulations governing their religion, that is to say that the new believers should first become perfect Jewish men and women in order to be liberated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. You can see how this would be a problem. The Jews who memorized the first five books of the old testament and practiced their entire lives couldn’t become perfect Jews and yet that was the bar they wanted others to reach before allowing them the same grace Jesus Christ offered. We put other people through hoops and loops before accepting them. Or we punish them for things we commit in the act of punishing them (perhaps not so violently like my hypothetical example earlier). Yet as bizarre as it sounds to us when we’re not doing so, we can’t help ourselves and it’s like we don’t want to grant others the same grace we receive from God. Peter told the church that they need to open others for the grace of God. Likewise, we need to allow others around us to be transformed by God’s grace and not yoke them to the craziness we can’t even achieve by our own merits. Just imagine how much reconciliation and change would happen if we would just stop unrighteous choke holds.

Don’t secretly hate your neighbor. If you have something against him, get it out into the open; otherwise you are an accomplice in his guilt. (Leviticus 19:17 MSG) Some of us are carrying grudges and are being passive aggressive to people because for some reason we are holding our tongue from saying what is truly on our minds. I’m not talking about holding our tongues when we know the only things that would come our are venomous insults and curses. I’m talking about holding our tongue when we were unrighteously wronged and then then using that as a source of hatred and anger. We do this thinking that this is the moral high road–to eat “it” ourselves and pretend nothing is wrong while acting subconsciously sideways and crooked toward those people. Trust me, this isn’t about you, it’s about us. I am in no way pointing fingers at you because I am equally guilty of this. I say nothing even when I am trampled or blamed for things and events that I have no fault in. Then slowly and steadily because I say nothing, I will allow a grudge to develop, a callousness, a hatred toward that person because I wouldn’t get it out there in the air. This is how and why we start feuds; how rifts in friendships begin; how relationships fall apart, isn’t it? Now, don’t use this as an excuse to go tell each and every person off for hurting you or messing you up. Nor should you use this as avenue to start openly attacking the people who did you wrong. Don’t even think that for a hot second. No, you shouldn’t. Rather, what we are being instructed to do when we are told to get it out there in the open is to speak with our “neighbors” very frankly or in a reconciliatory way. It’s the last thing you want to do considering you hate his or her or their guts; but there is a reason to go about it this way. I know it’s not as refreshing as taking your fists and putting it through the other person’s face. But the purpose isn’t so you feel better. Rather, we get things out in the open so that we can “love our neighbors as ourselves” (Leviticus 19:18b). Get it all out in the open and don’t secretly hate your neighbors. It’s a lot less stress to deal with and much less guilt to bear. Let’s really love our neighbors.

“If you sin by not stepping up and offering yourself as a witness to something you’ve heard or seen in cases of wrongdoing, you’ll be held responsible. (Leviticus 5:1 MSG) Remember how uncle Ben dies in Spider-Man? Spoiler Alert: he gets shot by the same robber that Peter Parker conveniently decides to ignore. At which point, Peter Parker becomes a vigilante superhero for New York City, vowing never again to ignore wrong doing by foiling the plots of evildoers. The famous quote that drives him to this call of arms: “with great power comes great responsibility.” Let’s check back into reality for a moment. How many times have we allowed wrong to be done in front of our eyes and done nothing about it because: a) we just don’t care (callousness); b) we know the culprits personally; or c) we don’t want to deal with the hassle of law enforcement? I can name an instance in all three situations in 2013 alone! Let me point out here that this is not a call for you to snitch. This is a call to reflect on our values. More than that, this is a call for us to influence people and society around us by the measure of our values, assuming that our values are godly and Biblical and not extremist, and not the values that are subjectively determined either– I’m talking about the universal ones that all decent societies have their laws founded on. We often ask ourselves and our friends, “gee, the world is so messed up, this is why we’re all going to be extinct soon….” And you wonder why. It’s because you and I don’t exert the energy to speak up or say what’s up and every time we don’t, that’s on us. When we fail to do what’s right and speak up for what’s right in our lives, we have to answer for that. Doing nothing is the same as being guilty of the act you witnessed yourself. This is something we so easily forget in today’s haste. Peter Parker had the propensity to avoid sticking up for what’s right because he never got a fair shake. Give the people around you a better chance than others gave to you– speak up and do what’s right.