WITHIN

COMPOSED

If we knew what one has endured, their history, essential details – the ‘one fact more’ – would we respond with compassion? Would we treat others with concern and significant regard for their inherent value? Is it important that we do?  Do we need to know the unknowns before we offer our care?

For some, the ‘one fact more’ is a tragic loss that brought a reign of grief. Or chronic oppression perpetrated methodically, predictably, to groups cast invisibly to the edges of society. Especially harmful and much too often, abuse of warped, twisted affections wrap tentacles of mistrust and confusion around an unsuspecting victim. Satan’s storehouse of torments is full, all designed to perpetuate suffering without relief or hope. 

Unconsciously using emotional survival skills, these torments might be stuffed away into tightly sealed containers, where the contents slowly begin to spoil. Without attention to such root issues, these collections become more and more rancid. Quick fixes aim to soothe these messy conditions that grate against our soft hearts, like a sharp rock in our shoe. Not bothering with the slow work to kneel down, pull off the shoe and extract the pebble, this private ache is ignored and we keep limping forward.

Like a sad collection of carnival attractions, vacant, hollow amusements waste our time and energy, leaving us weary and empty. Heartache, loss, stress and trauma can take over the daily landscape, as obsessive rumination pulls down a shade and shuts out the light. Angst, fear and despair become unwelcome friends who have stayed far too long.

The quick fix is quick, but the long suffering is long, while the unknown festers. 

The outward hides the inward effectively, and it’s impossible to see someone’s thoughts – their internal world would certainly surprise us. Bits and pieces spill out, but the past often hides behind tall disguises, thick border fences mistakenly erected to keep others out. Gates tucked throughout this perimeter are only unlocked from the inside, and the willingness to allow entrance to treasured few. But these portals are heavy and do not swing open easily; it is hard to let others see us as we are. The  ‘one fact more’ is buried. We think we are hiding our pain.

AMPLIFIED

Of course, we do not need to know the unknown in order to offer the healing components of tender care, sincere interest and meaningful action to others. We need only recognize that each one near us, has an undetected story, along with private needs and hopes. Aware of our own silent scripts, it’s safe to assume others have them too. Believing this at the outset might help soften our quick judgments and help us to let go of inner hostility to those who most perplex and challenge us. Compassion surfaces when this sort of thoughtful warmth supplies our outlook.

Perhaps if we first accept the healing we need, we’ll be more aware of how to offer such fitting support to others. At times, it is the impact of our unknowns that we scarcely can detect.  We would never treat someone else the way we treat ourselves, or think about them the way we think about ourselves. If we don’t ‘flip’ these scenarios, we won’t discover such self-defeating, detrimental patterns. To love others as ourselves, we must, apparently, love ourselves, so that we can offer something more than a muddy stream of bitterness and insecurity. Not to be confused with selfishness or arrogance, our self-love needs to be the very type of love worth sharing. 

While we probe to uncover the sources of our internal injuries, the world lies straight to our face about what’s wrong with us and what we need. In a society of so much abundance, these untruths become more and more outrageous. Most significant is the lie that something in the world can supply lasting healing. This dangerous distortion keeps us searching in all the wrong places for ultimate healing. Some practices are good and helpful, others are blatantly harmful, but we risk those harms for short-term relief. To believe that any of these will supply all that we need is one of the devil’s most clever ploys. He wants us to be satisfied with a temporary good – a quick fix – instead of with the One who is Goodness Himself. Satan’s plan for long suffering is long.

It’s important to pay attention to the internal ache that never quite disappears, a noticeable twinge, behavior that comes out sideways. These indicate a continual search for peace, even beyond addressing psychological root issues. And this search will not end until the chasm between us and our Creator is bridged, generating fulfillment and restoration through the One who knows every unknown. Instead of something satisfactory that feels better for a little bit, our inner core becomes inhabited with His complete, lasting sustenance. The remedy of redemption through His Son, brings eternal healing of body, mind, heart and soul.

With the strength of profound mercy, He runs toward us with outstretched arms, risking our rejection. We don’t have to respond, He doesn’t make us come; we are free to spurn His love. It is this stunning, merciful pursuit – reliable, consistent, intimate – that melts our hardness and gives us understanding to respond. With this reliable fountain of life bubbling inside us, His compassion overflows, not just to friends, but to those who trouble, frustrate or irritate us — to our enemies. Inside their hearts, too, is one fact more about which we know nothing.

With gratefulness, we live out His message of renewal with the power of unmerited compassion, not by gritting our teeth, but from the abundance of His strength. With undeserved, transcendent kindness, we offer Jesus’ incarnate, life-changing invitation. We are His outstretched arms. And like the soft, gentle strengthening of a wind chime, perfect pitches ringing on a faint breeze, the breath of His Spirit softly offers the eternal, lasting remedy of forgiveness, peace and clarity, within.

POSTLUDE

“The Gospel of the grace of God awakens an intense longing in human souls and an equally intense resentment, because the revelation which it brings is not palatable…do not humiliate me to the level of the most hell-deserving sinner and tell me that all I have to do is to accept the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. We have to realize that we cannot earn or win anything from God; we must either receive it as a gift or do without it. The greatest blessing spiritually is the knowledge that we are destitute; until we get there Our Lord is powerless. He can do nothing for us if we think we are sufficient of ourselves, we have to enter into His Kingdom through the door of destitution. As long as we are rich, possessed of anything in the way of pride or independence, God cannot do anything for us. It is only when we get hungry spiritually that we receive the Holy Spirit.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, November 28

“...have you ever been afflicted before God at the state of your inner life? There is no strand of self-pity left, but a heartbreaking affliction of amazement to find you are the kind of person that you are.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, June 10

“Jesus says regarding judging – Don’t. The average Christian is the most penetratingly critical individual. …in the spiritual domain nothing is accomplished by criticism…the Holy Ghost is the only One in the true position to criticize, He alone is able to show what is wrong without hurting and wounding. It is impossible to enter into communion with God when you are in a critical temper; it makes you hard and vindictive and cruel, and leaves you with the flattering unction that you are a superior person. Jesus says, as a disciple cultivate the uncritical temper...Stop having a measuring rod for other people. There is always one fact more in every man’s case about which we know nothing…I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, June 17 

“The continual grubbing on the inside to see whether we are what we ought to be generates a self-centered, morbid type of Christianity, not the robust, simple life of the child of God…How long is it going to take God to free us from the morbid habit of thinking about ourselves? We must get sick unto death of ourselves, until there is no longer any surprise at anything God can tell us about ourselves. We cannot touch the depths of meanness in ourselves. There is only one place where we are right, and that is in Christ Jesus.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, June 21

“Either Jesus Christ is a deceiver and Paul is deluded, or some extraordinary thing happens to a man who holds on to the love of God when the odds are all against God’s character. Logic is silenced in the face of every one of these things. Only one thing can account for it — the love of God in Christ Jesus.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, May 19

“God is going to bring you out pure and spotless and undefiled; but He wants you to recognize the disposition you were showing – the disposition of your right to yourself. The moment you are willing that God should alter your disposition, His recreating forces will begin to work. The moment you realize God’s purpose, which is to get you rightly related to Himself and then to your fellow men, He will tax the last limit of the universe to help you take the right road.”  O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, July 1

“...the weaker and feebler you are, the better. The one who has something to trust in is the last one to come anywhere near saying – ‘I will serve the Lord.’” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, July 9

“God never coerces us. In one mood we wish He would make us do the thing, and in another mood we wish He would leave us alone…When we choose deliberately to obey Him, then He will tax the remotest star and the last grain of sand to assist us with His almighty power.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, December 1 

“When you find that a point of view in which you have been delighting clashes with the heavenly vision and you debate, certain things will begin to develop  in you – a sense of property and a sense of personal right, things of which Jesus Christ made nothing. He was always against these things as being the root of everything alien to Himself…If there is one standard in the New Testament revealed by the light of God and you do not come up to it, and do not feel inclined to come up to it, that is the beginning of backsliding, because it means your conscience does not answer to the truth. You can never be the same after the unveiling of a truth. That moment marks you for going on as a more true discipline of Jesus Christ or for going back as a deserter.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, December 29

“It is one thing to go through a crisis grandly, but another thing to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, no one paying the remotest attention to us…The test of the life of a saint is not success, but faithfulness in human life as it actually is. We will set up success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions. Our human relationships are the actual conditions in which the ideal life of God is to be exhibited.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, November 16

“Discipleship is built entirely on the supernatural grace of God. Walking on the water is easy to impulsive pluck, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is a different thing…We do not need the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes.”  O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, October 21

“Are you looking unto Jesus now, in the immediate matter that is pressing and receiving from Him peace? If so, He will be a gracious benediction of peace in and through you. But if you try to worry it out, you obliterate Him…We get disturbed because we have not been considering Him. When one confers with Jesus Christ the perplexity goes, because He has no perplexity, and our only concern is to abide in Him. Lay it all out before Him, and in the face of difficulty, bereavement and sorrow, hear Him say, ‘Let not your heart be troubled.’” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, August 26

“If we try to overcome self-consciousness by any common-sense method, we will develop it tremendously. Jesus says, ‘Come unto Me and I will give you rest,’ i.e., Christ-consciousness will take the place of self-consciousness. Wherever Jesus comes He establishes rest…” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, August 20

“The Sermon on the Mount indicates that when we are on Jesus Christ’s errands, there is no time to stand up for ourselves. Jesus says, in effect, Do not be bothered with whether you are being justly dealt with or not. To look for justice is a sign of deflection from devotion to Him. Never look for justice in this world, but never cease to give it. If we look for justice, we will begin to grouse and to indulge in the discontent of self-pity – Why should I be treated like this? If we are devoted to Jesus Christ we have nothing to do with what we meet, whether it is just or unjust. Jesus says – Go steadily on with what I have told you to do and I will guard your life. If you try to guard it yourself, you remove yourself from My deliverance.” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, June 27

“It is one thing to say ‘Fret not,’ but a very different thing to have such a disposition that you find yourself able not to fret. It sounds so easy to talk about ‘resting in the Lord’ and ‘waiting patiently for Him until the nest is upset – until we live, as so many are doing, in tumult and anguish, is it possible then to rest in the Lord? If this ‘don’t’ does not work there, it will work nowhere. This ‘don’t’ must work in days of perplexity as well as in days of peace, or it never will work. And if it will not work in your particular case, it will not work in anyone else’s case. Resting in the Lord does not depend on external circumstances at all, but on your relationship to God Himself…Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way. Our Lord never worried and He was never anxious, because He was not ‘out’ to realize His own ideas; He was ‘out’ to realize God’s ideas…” O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, July 4

“The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of rules and regulations; it is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting His way with us.”  O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, July 25

“God expects His children to be so confident in Him that in any crisis they are the reliable ones. Our trust is in God up to a certain point, then we go back to the elementary panic prayers of those who do not know God…it is when a crisis arises that we instantly reveal upon whom we rely. If we have been learning to worship God and to trust Him, the crisis will reveal that we will go to the breaking point and not break in our confidence in Him.”  O. Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, August 12

“Watch how we limit the Lord by remembering what we have allowed Him to do for us in the past: I always failed there, and I always shall; consequently we do not ask for what we want. ‘It is ridiculous to ask God to do this.’ If it is an impossibility, it is the thing we have to ask. If it is not an impossible thing, it is not a real disturbance. God will do the absolutely impossible. This man received his sight. The most impossible thing to you is that you should be so identified with the Lord that there is nothing of the old life left. He will do it if you ask Him.” O. Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, February 29

ENCOURAGING WORD

2 Corinthians 1:3-4  Praise be to…the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

Mark 6:34  When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.

Psalm 64:6  Both the inward thought and the heart of man are deep.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18  Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Matthew 22:37  …an expert in the law, tested him with this question: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

John 7:37-39  ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. 

1 Peter 5:6-7  Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 

Psalm 103:2-5  Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits – who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

Isaiah 26:3  You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You.

Psalm 62:8  Trust in Him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to Him, for God is our refuge. 

Zephaniah 3:17  The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing. 

Psalm 55:22  Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you…

2 Timothy 1:7  For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love and of a sound mind.

Psalm 139:23-24  Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

John 6:35  Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. 

Mark 8:34  Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. 

Matthew 12:34  For out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

Ephesians 3:16-19  I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 

Jeremiah 17:10  ‘I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind…’