Some things don’t mix well, fire and gasoline , coffee and pickle juice, ants and a kitchen, war and peace, lies and a clear conscience, wisdom and foolishness, love and fear, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” 1 John 4:18 (NIV). That’s why violence, abuse, uncontrolled anger, alcohol and drugs, cheating, lying, deceit, manipulation, selfishness, bitterness, and foolishness do not mix with romance, marriage, family, community, and a life with God.When you are constantly in fear of the other shoe dropping, when you are constantly walking on eggshells, when you are always ducking outwardly and inwardly, when you are in constant dread of embarrassment, when words no longer hold water, when it all can blow up any second, when things are constantly out of control, when you are way past the first time, when the not normal becomes normal, when trust is a foreign word, when deceit not surprising, when disappointment is expected, when addiction and abuse have moved in, then you will find imperfect, twisted, perverted, and sick love.Love is meant to beautiful, without fear, free of constant worry of it turning ugly. In the scripture quoted above the New King James Version uses the word “torment” instead of the “punishment.” Real love does not feel like torment, does not live in dread of torment, does not dish out torment. In fact where real love is growing, where real love is pursued fears are growing smaller and fewer, and torment is never a fit description.Our problem is that so many of us are all too familiar with the tormented, sick, twisted, manipulative, and hurtful ways masquerading as love. The sad thing is that we are prone to settle for and repeat that which we know. It is easy to be in and get caught up in this web of love gone wrong, sometimes of no fault of our own, sometimes because of our own decisions, often because of both.The good news is that God did not have the Apostles John and Paul (1 Corinthians 13:4-8) write about love in terms of mere definition or diagnosis. No, God had them write of what is possible, not just of what should or shouldn’t be, but of what can be. What may not be possible on our own is possible with God, “What is impossible for people is possible with God” Luke 18:27 (NLT). It is possible to walk with God and escape cycles and chains of the past. It is possible to walk with God and get out of darkness. It is possible to walk with God and learn from him how to love. It is possible to walk with God and grow in our capacity to love. It is possible!When it comes to loving perfectly I am far from what I want to be, but God has been helping me to grow, especially when it comes to love. I am committed to real love because I don’t like the alternatives, because it is and feels right, and because God “renews my life; He leads me along the right paths for His name’s sake” Psalm 23:3 (HCSB).This Valentines weekend, if nothing else, make a start, be broken and repent of your wrongs, especially in regard to love and those you should love. Address that which is broken and twisted, pour out the full measure of your fears, and then take the loving hand of God to learn love without fear.To God be all glory. Love you, Pastor Hans
With Liberty and Justice for All
If you fail under pressure, your strength is too small. Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to die; save them as they stagger to their death. Don’t excuse yourself by saying, “Look, we didn’t know.” For God understands all hearts, and he sees you. He who guards your soul knows you knew. He will repay all people as their actions deserve. Proverbs 24:10-12 (NLT)70 years ago, on January 27, Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration and extermination camp was liberated. 1.1 million people were murdered there, not because they had been convicted of some crime deserving death but because they did not fit Nazi ideology, and most of them because they were Jews. In order to pull of mass murder on that scale the Nazi leadership had brainwash, intimidate , and silence most all of Germany. Think about it, how else do you slaughter millions of human beings without any large scale opposition? How do you keep it out of the media? How do you manage to keep an entire country from crying out against it? It really is an old play book, cooked up in hell a long time ago.You have to have great slogans, “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (work liberates) hung at the entrance of concentration camps. A little hard work never has harmed anybody, has it? “For God and country.” “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest). “A woman’s right to choose.” What fool would challenge God and patriotism? Who can deny that God is the greatest? Who doesn’t endorse the freedom to choose? Great slogans ease the conscience; mollify the urge to think for yourself. You want people to love the slogans regardless of the truth.You have to intimidate, sow fear to point that people are glad that what happens to others does not happen to them. You have to exploit what every kid learns on the school playground – to be afraid of being laughed at, being ostracized, to be called names, to be bullied, of being hurt. Terror works, fear is powerful. You have to be willing to belittle, shout down, embarrass, defame, lie, betray, hurt, and kill in the name of the cause. Sowing fear can’t worry about being clean, getting dirty, embracing violence, a “few” dispensable lives.You have to be good at stripping real people of their humanity. You want people to think that Jews are categorically bad, the infidels are bad, an unwanted unplanned baby is bad, as are liberals, conservatives, environmentalists, homosexuals and all of the LBGTQ crowd, fundamentalists, Christians, Muslims, atheists they are all bad. And it is okay to dislike bad, to hate bad. Getting rid of bad is not that bad of a thing, in fact it might even be good. The less bad people there are the better; you have to be completely out of touch to disagree with that. Bad also doesn’t deserve the same rights as good, does it? Bad and bad people are really more of an issue to be dealt with, personalizing only complicates things. It is much easier to deal with an issue like the issue of slavery, the issue of the Jews, the issue of abortion, the issue of the Middle East Conflict, the issue of Aids, of Ebola, hunger, injustice. Issues are far easier to deal with, they don’t stare you in the eye, issues don’t have beating hearts.On January 22, 1973 the US Supreme Court legalized abortion, since then 55,000,000 (55 million!) human beings have lost their lives through abortion in the United States alone. They have fallen victim to pills, solutions, suction machines, dismemberment, and the like. Where is the outrage, the disgust, the shame? There has not been one, not a single aborted child that was less than 100% human. There has not been one aborted child guilty or even accused of a crime. The reason they have been so easily and mercilessly killed is that they have been stripped of their humanity (How conditioned have we become to zygote, embryo, fetus as meaning something less than human). They have been called “mistakes,” “inconveniences,” “bad timing,” “accidents,” everything but what they really are – persons, human beings, living images of God. They have been deemed dispensable, we are better off without them than with them. They have been stripped of the most basic human rights and legal protection under the smoke screen of a woman’s right to choose. They have been made into issue to debate rather than people to love.O that there would be “liberty and justice for all.”To God be all glory, Pastor Hans
Your Vote Counts
State wide only 29.7 of all eligible California voters cast a ballot, about 50% of Tuolumne and Mariposa County registered voters voted, and a mere 28.7 % of Stanislaus county did so (according to http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/status/). This means 70% of those who were eligible and registered chose to disenfranchise themselves for this election. They exercised their right not to vote, but they also neglected their democratic responsibility.Of course all of them voted, albeit unofficially. They voted to do something else instead of voting. They voted that nothing on the ballot was important. They gave their proxy to a few. I wonder how many of those who didn’t vote would say that living in a democratic society is important to them. After all the USA is the land of the free, the champion of democracy, and still the envy of millions around the world.Voting is about making choices, including choices we might not like or want to make. Voting is about the privilege of having choices to make. Voting, being involved in decision making is a reality of life. Most of our voting, our decision making is of the unofficial kind, which does not make it any less important. There is not a week that goes by where we are not called upon to vote for or against integrity, honesty, transparency, compassion. Married people vote do not just cast a vote for fidelity at the altar but throughout their married lives. Parents continually face choice and decisions regarding family. Every temptation is a commercial vying for your vote. And all of these choices matter a great deal. Think what happens when enough people vote against integrity, or if 70% decide integrity is no longer important enough to go and vote for it? What happens to a family when one or both parents no longer vote for it? I reminded of what God told Cain, “… sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it" Genesis 4:7 (NASB). “Cain, you have to vote, you have to decide,’ is what God was essentially telling him. Why? Because how we vote, for what we vote makes a difference.One vote that more and more think is entirely optional is the God vote, whether or not to believe in, trust, and follow God by doing his will. Some do not like the choices; there is only one true, eternal, Almighty God, who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, on the ballot. And yes, you have the choice not to vote for him. And yes, making no decision is still making a decision. And yes, this is in the big scheme of things, in the long haul the most important vote anyone of us will ever cast. Joshua was keenly aware of this reality when laid out the God vote in front of his family and countrymen, “If serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD" Joshua 24:15 (NIV).We have to live with the consequences of our voting. Every single one of our votes, official and unofficial, has consequences, some of them lifelong, some of them for generations to come, and some of them eternally. We ought to weigh that before we cast our God vote or decide not to choose at all.To God be all glory, especially in our voting. Pastor Hans
More to Fear then Fear Itself
It had the face of an ugly old man and hung on the wall next to my father-in laws recliner. When you pulled on the string protruding from the bottom that ugly old man head broke out in a wicked laugh and squirted you with water coming from its mouth. The first time Grandpa held his grandson, my son, up to the face and told him to pull the sting it scarred the peediddles out of him. In fact it scarred him so much that whenever we drove to Grandpa’s house all he could think about is “the man” and whether or not he was there. Eventually Grandpa had to take the thing down.Little boys are not the only ones who get scarred, who get preoccupied with fear, who become afraid. Fears abound, parents have lots of them, so do politicians, business owners do, as do employees, healthy people are not exempt, sick people have them, the rich, the poor, the strong, the weak, none of them are without them. Life is unpredictable in so many ways, it is impossible to find a truly save place. Violence, disease, senselessness, injustice, stupidity, disaster, tragedy, evil and the like are relentless, unpredictable, often unannounced, not just a prank, very real, and lethal.Sick as I am I liked scaring my kids, still do, and the grandson had better get ready. My youngest daughter used to just collapse when I would jump out from a behind a tree when she had to feed her animals in the dark. Even now, as a young adult, she is leery to go out and feed them after the sun goes down if I am around, but she no longer collapses to ground instead she has transitioned to punching me, hard (I am kind of getting scarred of her punches).FDR said, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” It was his first inaugural address as president and the US was in the midst of the Great Depression, people were facing hardship and were riddled with fears. He was right in that fear, being afraid, can be utterly paralyzing. I remember asking my aunt why the German people did not rise up against the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler, “You don’t know fear” was her reply. The Apostle Paul reminded Timothy not to let his fears paralyze him, “God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline” 2 Timothy 1:7 (NLT). Solomon reminds us, “If you faint in the day of adversity, Your strength is small” Proverbs 24:10 (NKJV).President Roosevelt was also wrong, we do have more to fear than fear itself, namely God. It is when we fear God that we maintain the right perspective on all of life. It is in contemplating and acknowledging his power, his sovereignty over life, death, right, wrong, and us throughout all of eternity, that we become truly wise, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” Proverbs 9:10 (NASB). Jesus warned, "Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him (God) who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” Matthew 10:28 (NASB, parenthesis mine). And it is when we trust in his love, when we are transformed by his love, that fear is finally defeated, “If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us” 1 John 4:15-19 (NIV).To God be all glory, love you, Pastor Hans