Essence of a Warrior

When I first saw the movie Saving Private Ryan I was shocked.  I was moved, I was proud and I was so very thankful.  Through that movie I discovered how inglorious war really is because up ‘til that point, no other film had laid out all the small ironies that place the outcome of life or death on such a razors edge.   Soldiers (and civilians) died in that war having missed their chance of surviving by inches, seconds, the smallest mistakes and most of the time, poor fortune.  And so it is with Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) who rises above this reality and in the face of death, does what he has to do to achieve success in his mission.

After surviving the beach invasion at Omaha Beach on D-Day, Miller reports to the radio control area to see the newly arrived military operations personnel relaxing, drinking hot coffee and eating large, meat-filled sandwiches.  He stares at his most comfortable surroundings with an emptiness suggesting disdain, knowing full well the horrors he and his men had experienced over the past few days in order to take the beach and set up the camp.  However he says nothing.  He is quick to think and very slow to speak.  And as soon as his superior officer calls his attention, he engages with his role again as soldier, leader and warrior.

What is it that makes these men the warriors they are?  They are on an entirely different level.  They are focussed on what’s important and have no time for the incidentals in life.  No time for the little things that tick us off.  Jesus is the greatest warrior that ever lived.   His words “Get behind me Satan” is exactly the approach we should take when things get up our nose, because chances are, Satan is the one who put them there.  All the greatest warriors in history have defeated their enemies with a mindset of ‘can do’.  They obviously new they could do it as they did it, but no doubt they were afraid too.  And this is what makes a warrior stand out.  They have a level of uniqueness far above everyone else.  And it all has to do with their mind and heart. We can choose to either be like the masses, or standout from everyone else.  But to do so we must give ourselves over to the Holy Spirit. In full! God is the only one who can create such a change in us that can lift us from normality and beyond.

This transformation will happen over time regardless of how we live our lives as long as we remain in Christ. But if we choose, we can die to ourselves through surrender and speed up the process. While we are on Earth, we should be in battle, so we are in effect a warrior for the Kingdom of God. If we are not waging battles in our mind, we may be just a little too lukewarm.  We live our lives the best when we can avoid distraction from the enemy, after all, that is his method of attack. To do this well we must re-prioritise, rethink and reform. The battle isn’t won through increasing physical abilities, but spiritual ones.  The little things that people don’t notice, except through our overall nature.  So generally, we are not trying to impress anyone by this, except God as those who standout above everyone else through their behaviour and demeanour attract a curiosity that can always be attributed to his work in us.   “What is it about them?”  “They are a Christ-follower!”  That’s the gossip we want people to speak of when they talk about us.

Jesus promises us time and time again throughout the scriptures, that this transformation brings us peace, then joy and life as it should be.  And beyond all this God is sovereign, so we really ought not to worry about too much other than striving for those attributes which will make us into a worthy spiritual warrior. So let the fleshly aspect die along with its desires and expectations.  Along with its reactions to the little things that the enemy and his dominions throw at us daily.  This must be the new default self.  Present in every moment of everyday.  This is the new creature God is after.

Will you allow him to make you unique?  One who stands out?

Make everything count (even the bad)....

We all have a story to tell.  Unfortunately a lot of our stories aren't great and involve heartbreak, failure and epic mistakes of all kinds.  Where God is the great "I am", we are too often the great "I shouldas".  "I shoulda done this or I shoulda done that."  But this allows for God to reveal the way he has created things in that second chances are always possible with him.  Pain can become joy, tears can turn to laughter.  And when you come from the valley to reach the mountaintop, it just means so much more.

This concept of reversing the trend has been spoken about at lengths in sermons, seminars, workshops, meetings and anywhere else you can think of.  It really is something that is undergirded by healing.  And through God’s providence, we all have available to us the resources necessary to turn life situations around.  God created time and I don’t know if you have noticed, but from the big bang on, time is an infinite resource.  It is something we are never going to run out of.  If you can think eternally, which should come easily with faith, you can relax knowing if you want to do something, you have an eternity to do it, as long as it is fruitful of course.  God also created us with the ability to heal.  And coupled with time, we can always return from the abyss of disappointment.  But we actually have to actively leave it.  And beyond that, we can be determined to achieve, next time, what ever we didn’t achieve the previous time.
And I believe, in fact I know, that God will allow you to fail in order to have you call on him and together, partake in the journey out of failure and into success.  Unfortunately, this is where the greatest spiritual growth happens.  No pain, no gain.  Pain is your enemy, yeah!  Well we need to love our enemies.

Speaker and author, Michael Hyatt, has written a blog post on this subject referring to it as composting your failures, which is a great way to describe getting growth out of a healthy historical perspective.  But we have to remember to keep most of our focus on the goal ahead, but use the past as a tool to get there.  That is why the rearview mirror is so much smaller than the front windscreen, as to go forward you need to see more of the forward and less of the behind.  Rocky Balboa did it all through the Rocky series.  He’d get a whooping, get the eye of the tiger and then come back and give a whooping.  He used his failure to go forward.  This is where we can all be warriors.  And that is exactly what God has called us to be.  So no matter what it is that has left you in a rut, you can get out of it.  And when you (and God) turn your fortunes around, there is no better experience.  It’s ten times better than if you had of achieved it the first time without failure.  One outta two can be better than one outta one!

Personally, I saw this happen with my football.  I began playing senior football in 1995 and played in my first senior grand final in 1997.  I wanted nothing more in life at that time, than to win a premiership so when we lost by 10 goals, I was gutted.  Two years later in 1999, we again made the grand final and lost by a point.  This time I was more than gutted.  I was inconsolable after the game and haunted by the result for months.  The next year, 2000, we made the grand final again and hadn’t beaten the team we were playing that year, however this time, against the odds, we won by two points.  And I know God had his hand right in the middle of it because the final score was 99 to 97, the previous years we had failed.  And this is how faithful God is because I wasn’t even saved yet, but he still gave me this gift and an invaluable lesson 8 years before I would give my heart to him.  What an amazing God!  With him we can reverse any trend....

A Thing....

Everybody has a thing. A predisposition. A weakness. An Achilles heel. It’s tucked away in a dark alleyway of our life and has likely come from past experiences, most often bad ones. It manifests in behaviour. Sometimes sinful. It is something that we cannot change until we are aware of it. How often do we actually ask “why do I do that?” Every now and again you might catch a scene in a movie where a character has an outburst and another character will ask “where did that come from?” It’s a great question.

Every tyrant or villain through history is infamous because of their behaviours. But those behaviours arose out of a heart darkened by some past experience or an upbringing that was less than desirable. That is why murder suicides are so dire. The answers as to why the killer did what they did, or from what past experiences there fatalistic behaviour arose will never be fully known. Our thing is an unconscious position of our heart, which is connected to our thoughts, which is connected to our behaviours. The heart bone’s connected to the thought bone, the thought bone’s connected to the behaviour bone. The behaviour bone’s connected to the life bone.

So what do we think about others? What do they do around us that gets in the way of our relationship with them? This is where judgement arises. And this is why instead of judging we need to connect what a person does with what they are thinking, regressing to what their heart feels, regressing back to how this came to be. And the most important thing to remember is that you have a thing too. Other people have their things and you have your thing. That is why we must love the sinner and hate the sin. Remember the scripture about a log in your own eye, speck in theirs. Well that’s very easy to clarify: your thing = log, their thing = speck.

If you can help people with their thing do it, but you gotta tell them about your thing first so you can come alongside them and not over the top. This is how testimony works. So we all have a thing. Sometimes the best way to deal with that thing is to combine your thing with someone else’s thing and deal with them together. Place yourself on the same level as the one you are trying to help. In fact, place yourself lower. This can promote two important tools in dealing with our heart issues, accountability and fellowship. When we have darkness in our heart, our fleshly response is to isolate ourselves. Retract from society and any potential sources of help. The enemy plays a big part in this also. Opening up about our thing to someone brings healing power. It brings light to the dark places of our heart and starts to bring new perspective. Having someone elses input also brings extra perspective. We start to realise that this thing of ours isn’t the big bad monster we thought it was. Soon enough, wounds get examined, diagnosed, treated and then healed. God gave us the analogy of medicine to reveal that the structured process that heals the body reflects the structured process that heals the soul. You can see a healed body through its activity and function. You can see a healed spirit through its activity and function. This is a life full of fruit.

So we must constantly be thinking about our judgements on other people. We must always be hosing them down and remembering that we are no better. This will grow that compassionate mercy muscle within you and help you become more forgiving. If you can place yourself below those you need to forgive and concentrate on your thing and not theirs, your human enemies won’t seem to be all that nasty, rather wounded and volatile. And when we can forgive completely, our prayers have more power, not to mention our souls having more peace....

So Close.....

Following on from the last blog concerning music I realised something for the first time a few days ago which brought God further into my world of tangibility.  I hold strongly to the Lord being sovereign and that as we walk with him, he will reveal himself to us more and more.  However, like anything, we can often be too excessive in searching for God’s revelation and perceive nearly everything we experience as a sign from the Almighty.  And because of our human nature, we are usually looking for God to grant us a sign that he is going to deliver something to us such as a relationship, a job, financial gain or some other advancement in our life.  We are selfish, impatient and discontent by default.  So we want, want, want, want!  As Mark Driscoll used to say, we can often treat God like the “Great Piñata” in the sky, whacking him with our prayer stick until all the goodies come out.  

In my walk, I have been guilty of this, big time, and it’s something that snuck up on me and caught me unawares.  This was until I heard the song “Feel so close” by Calvin Harris multiple times in the space of 24 hours and felt God trying to communicate something through it.  I had, up ‘til now, a perception that when I had experiences in my life like this, God was giving me a sign that he was about to do something for me.  “Oh, start rubbing the hands together, that’s the third time in a week I‘ve seen that.  God’s definitely telling me something.”  And I was right.  He was telling me something.  That I was being a goose and the repeated instances were completely irrelevant to my situation.  I had a false expectation.  Instead of walking with Father God, with Abba, with Dad, I was waiting to see if he was off to the store to buy me something.  It was all about something for me.  Me!  I am selfish, impatient and discontent by default.

Even though God’s in the picture, my line of thought placed me in the centre.  But as we all know, God must be in the centre, right?  Right.  This realisation, I have to say, is somewhat of a breakthrough for me, because what I’ve come to realise is that maybe Father God is happy, even delighted, even ecstatic that I am pursuing him on a deeper level.  Maybe he’s telling me that he feels so close to me right now.  After all, He’s a person right?  He’s personal.  He knows the number of hairs on my head.  Not even my parents know that.  And He loves me like a dad, so why wouldn’t he express his love to me in a funny way that I would recognise when our relationship starts to flourish?  So next time you see a sign, don’t think “ok, what’s God doing for me here?”  But believe that he might just be saying, “I’m here my child, and I love you.”  And in time you’ll get the sign you want.  When whatever it is you want the sign for, is in your lap.  So don’t expect something to happen tomorrow, but just expect it to happen.  Then you can concentrate on searching out your heavenly Father more.  Peace and contentment will be yours.  And mine...... (Hahaha, just as I finished this, we had a big earthquake, in Melbourne) Gotta be a sign!!!

It's a Process. Be Patient.....

On a flight back to Melbourne from Prague, I watched the movie Moneyball and loved it. I really enjoyed Brad Pitt’s character and the soundtrack to the movie. I’m one for emotive compositions which accompany parts of a film building the atmosphere to ‘grand finale moments’. Where all seems lost and then, as if riding on the back of the musical flow, our hero or heroes inch toward triumph. So Moneyball roped me in. As I mentioned before, Brad Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, was fantastic to watch. He had an expectant faith about him. He was patient. And he believed in something that went far deeper than what the world would present to us as reality. He stripped back all the glitz and pomp, and concentrated on specific talents, bringing them altogether systematically to function in their role as part of a team. Like Jesus and his church. Many body parts, one body. All equally important to the team function.
I was listening to the stirring soundtrack and wondered why it connected with me. I tried to process the fact that God had created me that way, and my enjoyment of music was not only a gift, but a way in which God could love me, inspire me and communicate with me. I could envisage the Lord’s voice sounding like a powerful musical score. As the best composition of the soundtrack played on my stereo I looked at my iPod to see what it was called; “It’s a Process”. And then the movie plot hit me. Right there, in that moment as I was driving to work under a glorious morning sky featuring dark clouds bathed in gold from the rising sun. It’s a process. I felt God telling me his work in me is a process. So be patient. Be like Billy Beane. Let God’s mysterious works evolve me. It will take some time, and failures. But eventually, a victory will become a string of victories and all will come together. Like it did for me in the car on the way to work when God was there in so many ways. Like it did for Billy Beane. Be patient......

A song of old, still relevant today......

"Ye Who Are Warriors of God" (a 15th century Hussite war song)...
Ye who are God's warriors and of his law,
Pray to God for help and have faith in Him;
That always with Him you will be victorious.
Christ is worth all your sacrifices, He will pay you back an hundredfold.
If you give up your life for Him you will receive eternal life.
Happy is he who believes this truth.
The Lord commandeth you not to fear bodily harm,
And commandeth you to even put your life down for the love of your brothers.
Therefore, archers, crossbowmen, halberdiers of knightly rank,
Scythemen and macebearers from all walks of life,
Remember always the Lord benevolent.
Do not fear your enemies, nor gaze upon their number,
Keep the Lord in your hearts; for Him fight on,
And before enemies you need not flee.
Since ages past Czechs have said and had proverbs which state,
That if the leader is good, so too is the journey.
Remember all of you the password which was given out.
Obey your captains and guard one another.
Stay sharp and everyone keep formation.
You beggars and wrongdoers, remember your soul!
For greed and theft don't lose your life.
And pay no heed to the spoils of war.
And with this happily cry out - saying, "At thee! Have at thee!"
Savour the weapon in your hands and shout, "God is our Lord!"

Dare to Dream......Please!

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. - T.E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph