Glory to God For The Me Who Died

This morning I lit a Yartzeit candle and recited the Kahdish prayer which Jewish people do to honor the deceased, though the prayer is really a praise to God.  It was my commitment to the Lord to no longer walk with Him as one who is self-absorbed instead of Yeshua enthralled. It all began when I read on this same day in my journal of last year how I was kvetching and attempting to commit to living as God would have me do, but I see that I was really still trying to fix myself and attempting to do a better job at doing a better job!!  Does anyone relate, or am I the only one?

Well, as it turns out, much of what I was asking God for last year, or at least a goodly number of my prayers in this regard, have been answered and I can see how I am really a (somewhat) different woman than I was last year when I was still victimized by my old nature in trying to get it to act like my new nature.

The reality is we do have two natures within us - God's and Adam's. And the fact is, Adam will never be resurrected into Yeshua. He can't be. He's gotta die! That's all there is to it.  It's really not a fair fight for superiority, is it? I mean the Adam in us and the Almighty who is committed to making us like His Son - He wins, thank God!  And our old nature looses - eventually.  That is to say, the Adam-like nature in us must eventually yield to the Holy Spirit. Actually in Hebrew "Holy Spirit" would read more like "Spirit of (the) holiness."  I like that better. It helps me to remember that the Spirit of God within me, Who helps me with the living of my life in godliness (even in the ordinary things), is in fact "holy!" Some of us are inclined to be a bit too familiar sometimes with the Spirit of God being with and within us so that His presence may seem to blend into the rest of our lives so that we can forget that we're called to live lives in line with the nature and character of God.  Or, again, is it just me?  Either way, me or 'us', allow me to share a Hebrew concept with you that may help anchor your heart in God as a way to live your life.

There is an expression in Hebrew among Jews who are God-inclined that is called Kiddush HaShem.  It basically means holy unto the Lord and is a way of living one's life to the glory of God. Yeshua's entire life was lived in keeping with Kiddush HaShem.  It is a way of living to be conscious that in everything we do, we bring honor to God.  When Yeshua told His disciples that when they pray the first thing on their minds when addressing our Father in heaven, should be, "Hallowed be Thy name" meaning that our relationship with God is best lived when we first commit to Him to bring about honor and glory to His name.  In everything we do, even in how we think, we are most like Yeshua when we are seeking God's 'reputation' not our own.  Yeshua never sought recognition for Himself, but only for His Father.

In his book, Jesus' Gospel: Searching for the Core of Jesus' Message, by Joshua Tilton (Jerusalem Perspective.com) he speaks of Kiddush (Quidush) HaShem as Yeshua's motive, not to make His divinity known in such stories as the paralytic, for one instance, but to call attention to the goodness of God to forgive sins and to restore people. Tilton says that often we misinterpret Yeshua's motive as being one that says, "Look at Me," when His whole life was about making His Father known and to give glory to His name.  There is nothing in Kiddush HaShem that is coercive, Tilton points out, nor an attempt to wrestle people into acting morally or righteously. If it doesn't come from our hearts, its not going to please God anyway.

I heard this past week of a man who has not been walking with the Lord for a long time who now has cancer.  He told his sister that if he came to the Lord now, it would be "fire insurance" meaning to stay out of hell.  But if he was to try and buy that ticket out of hell with a self-seeking motive, he would find himself still outside of heaven's gates.  There is no "fire insurance" policy available from God. He won't be coerced either. Coercion is not part of God's nature in any way.  We come to Him willingly with a genuine heart of repentance and the recognition that we need His mercy and forgiveness. It's the only way.  When we are truly Yeshua's, that will be our experience.  A quest for righteousness and to be at peace with God is not the same as a desperate attempt at eternal self-protection. 

When God created Adam (Adam means human, btw, it wasn't the first male's name though we call him that), He made both humans, Eve included, in His likeness and image. Though they lost that holy likeness when they sinned, we see it again fully manifested in Yeshua.  But God's intention didn't stop there, as we know. Yeshua's total abandonment of self-preservation on our behalf in His work on the cross, restored for those who would come to Him, God's original intention to have a people, a family, formed in His image and likeness. This is now continually being accomplished by re-forming us by His Spirit into the likeness of His Son who lived in complete and loving dependence upon His Father, with the goal of everything He did, said or thought, to be consistent with the goodness, mercy, justice and glory of God. To be Kiddush haShem minded, is to live with this same joyful existence because He will share His joy with you.

That may sound somewhat lofty for us, but as I've seen in reading my journal only from last year on this same day, when we come to the place of letting go of our attempts to "be good" or to "be holy" and instead trust that God is doing a work in us that far exceeds anything we can conceive of, let alone do, we come to resting in Him and in effect, we get out of His way so He can do the work in us.  We call it grace!  Some have misunderstood grace to be the freedom to do what they please and still be "covered by the blood" of Yeshua. Oh, so not so!!  Grace is the God given ability to live a holy life unto Him, not a license to live as He never would have. 

If you will scroll down a few blog articles below or click on it on the right in the list of articles, to the one on "What only God can do" you'll be able to see how that word from the Lord brought me to a place of resting in Him which has led to me lighting the Yartzeit candle today in recognition of the "old me."  Am I entirely like Yeshua now?  Of course not. That won't be complete till we reach heaven or He comes, whichever is first. But leaning on the Spirit of (the) Holiness instead of my own attempts at holiness, has sure brought me a long way into the rest of God He intends to fully bring us into. 

About Challenging God

I met a delightful man recently, a doctor, who was raised in a church denomination not known for its power or sense of the presence of the Lord, at least not since the 1500’s. He goes to church occasionally but boasted that “I don’t make a habit of it.” The only thing he makes a habit of, he said, was “being good.” He had enough church-going in him from his childhood that his idea of being a Christian was that of “being good.”

As our conversation continued I spoke about knowing God while he talked of church and how his family is active in church. “But what about you?” I asked. He then voiced some very real questions about God as to why suffering exists in the world. He is a doctor, after all, in order to help alleviate suffering. “When I meet God,” he stated emphatically, seemingly assured that he would and that he’d have opportunity to speak his mind to Him about why He allows suffering, “I’ve got some things I intend to say to Him,” he said meaning he’d like to tell God that he doesn’t like the way He is running the world.

Many years ago a friend of mine was involved in what she identified as a “philosophically based prison program.” The premise was based upon an eclectic blend of “isms,” of different Eastern philosophies and ideas of god (small ‘g’) which provided prisoners with a new sense of self-identity and of reality that would sensitize them to goodness. Again, the concept of “being good” was presumably the solution, in this case to the criminal mind. She was, with genuine altruistic intent, going into prisons to teach and impart this philosophy.

I had recently become a Believer in Jesus having had my own sense of reality greatly altered when I “met God.” He was nothing of what I thought He might be. As a Jew for one thing, I never expected Jesus to be God! But I also knew I met with a power for “goodness” that was emphatically beyond any ability of my own to “be good.” Upon sharing my new-found faith with this friend, she told me, “If I ever meet Jesus Christ there are some serious things I have to say to Him, eye to eye, on equal footing.” I knew she meant the suffering the Jews have endured in His name, but also of why evil exists at all. But I also knew there would be no “eye to eye” encounter where she would “mouth off” to Him, nor opportunity to let Him know how she felt about Him. She assumed He was no more than a person, albeit one of great influence, than she or anyone else. Where or how she would meet Him wasn’t addressed.

I took her to see the movie called “The Hiding Place” which is the story of Corrie Ten Boom’s life in which she and her sister Betsy are arrested by the Nazis for hiding Jews during WWII. They are sent to a concentration camp where Betsy becomes very ill and eventually dies. Before she dies she affirms her love for Jesus and with His love she forgives the Nazis who have tortured her and so many around her, and for all the evil they were perpetrating, and encourages Corrie to forgive them as well. She forgave them! My friend, who is also Jewish, could not get past that. Knowing that six million of our Jewish people and millions of others suffered unimaginably horrible tortures, and died equally cruel deaths at the hands of the Nazis, how could she possibly forgive them? This was where her “philosophically based program” fell apart for it provided no escape from the impotent rage against such injustice.

We returned to my home after the movie as she and her daughter would be spending the night at our house. I took the babysitter home and then found my friend sitting on the back fence of my house overlooking a pasture. It was quiet, peaceful and safe out there in the early summer evening, quite unlike what we had just witnessed in the movie. In the moonlight I could see she was pensive and deeply moved. All she could say to me was, “I know that in order for Betsy to forgive the Nazis there had to be a power beyond anything I have ever known.” I had shared with her before this evening of the forgiveness and pardon Yeshua offers to us through allowing Himself to be sentenced to death in order to satisfy the penalty for our sins. Those are prison terms she would understand. Until this night it was all meaningless to her because her idea of herself was that of “being good.” What was there to forgive? The next morning she told me she had turned her life over to the Lord. That was thirty-four years ago. She has remained a faithful follower of Yeshua since.

Several assumptions present themselves through these two scenarios of wanting to meet the Lord “face to face” to challenge Him. The first is that God “is,” that He exists, and then that He is approachable, and that we will be able to have an audience with Him. It also assumes that we would have the freedom to speak our minds and to demand of Him an explanation, a defense, if you will, for why He allows evil to exist, or is possibly even the cause of it, considering how much suffering is done in His name, though let it be known that such suffering is far from anything He would do or ever sanction. It is a tragedy that the only picture of Yeshua that some people have is of how others have misrepresented Him.

To read the rest of this article go to Articles at www.sidroth.org.