Re-emerging to Work with Gratitude – Purity 822

 Re-emerging to Work with
Gratitude – Purity 822

Purity 822 08/29/2022  Purity 822 Podcast

Good morning,

Today’s photo of a view of the beach at Rapid Bay
from the inside of a cave comes to us from Dave Baun Photography (https://www.facebook.com/DaveBaunPhotography)
who reports that this location is one of his favorite places to drive to in South
Australia and even know there is quite a bit of cave rock obstructing our view,
we can see enough to understand why.  

Well it’s Monday again and as we emerge from the safe
confines of the weekend to reemerge to the bright lights of the world of the
working, I am encouraging everyone to face the day with an attitude of gratitude
because even though my staycation is over, in reflecting on my “life of work”
this morning, I realize how blessed I have been to be able to work over the
years to provide for myself and my family to bring me to where I am today.  

So even though I suppose I could be facing the day
with a sour puss because my time off has expired, simply reflecting upon the
twists and turns of all the different jobs I have had has me counting my
blessings today instead.  

As much as I recognize the truth that God is sovereign
and is in control, I also recognize that because He gives us free will much of
our lives are the result of our choices and that obviously includes where we
find ourselves on our life’s career path. 

While our eternal destiny depends on our covenant
relationship with God, through faith in Jesus Christ, I believe our professional
lives are a combination of our efforts and God’s providence.    

We can choose to quit. We can choose to never apply.
We can choose to be a diligent worker or we can choose to be less than that and
reap the benefits or consequences of our performance.  So there is lots we bring to our career
path. 

However, for us to believe that we are somehow “self-made”
men or women is to display the heights of ignorance, pride, or
self-deception.  

God made us. God choose when we would be born and
where we would begin our lives.  God gave
us our “able bodies” that allow us to work. 
God gave us our brains to think and store intelligence. God also gave us
our temperament – those inborn talents and personality or attitudinal predispositions
that make us uniquely who we are. And God may have made also all in His image
but He didn’t make us equal or the same in all these different areas, all of
which play a huge part in what type of career we have now. 

Also because I know that God shapes the history of
the world according to His overall purposes, His will be done, I have to believe
that there are also no “lucky breaks”.  Remember
God put you where you were and made you who you are, so you getting the job you
have today may not be a miracle but we would be foolish to think that God’s
providence didn’t play some part in where you are today.  

However, because of our free will to act foolishly
and “miss the mark”, we can’t assume that where we are today is God’s perfect
will for us either.  We may have been
tempted or deceived by some aspect of our career path that led us to do what we
do now.   We may have been tested and we
may have not chosen wisely. 

For instance,

1 Timothy 6:9-10 (NLT2)
⁹  But people who long to be
rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many foolish and harmful desires
that plunge them into ruin and destruction.
¹⁰  For the love of money is
the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered
from the true faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.

Pursuing riches is just one way we could have
possibly wandered from God’s plan for us and may have resulted in “many sorrows”.  

In my path, I resisted working for the phone
company. In my youth, I didn’t want to follow in my mother’s footsteps and I
applied for all kinds of positions without any success.  

I had a heart to help people and became a
residential counselor for the psychiatrically disabled.  I did that for two years and that is where I
met my ex, and no she didn’t live there – shots fired.  But I loved my ex and wanted a family and the
low income I made as a counselor would have meant a life of financial struggles
and so remembering my middle class existence I decided to “go corporate” and
the last 25 years of work for “the phone company” was a result of my desire to
have a family.

And of course, as many know, that had mixed
results.  After 19 years, my marriage
ended in divorce but my kids stayed with me. They are twenty somethings and
struggling with the decision of what to do with their professionally  and we live together in a little house down by
the River. 

My life was tumultuous at times through those 25
years at my job, that was full of changes itself, but I have no regrets.  My job provided the means to house my family,
raise my kids, and have quite a number of wonderful years even though it didn’t
work out like I hoped when I started way back when.     

I don’t regret my career because it was instrumental
in bring to where I am today and while I would never think of it as God’s
perfect will for me, when I go to work today I will give it my best effort to do
a good job. 

Our choices are sometimes regrettable but the good
news is that God gave us free will and if we find ourselves in a place we don’t
want to be we can change it. So if you are dragging into Monday hating your
life, pray and allow God to direct your next steps.  He may call you to endure or He may encourage
to boldly go where you never thought to go.  

When we are in Christ, we are never without hope or
without the help of the Lord. So we follow His path and where ever we go we do
our best to represent Him by doing the best we can and by helping and
supporting the other people we encounter along the way. 

So let’s go to work. Let’s do the best job we can do
today to represent the God who made us and to share His love.  And let’s keep walking and talking with Him to
follow where He would have us go.  

—————————————————————————————————————

Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible
Promise Book for Men”.

This morning’s meditation verse is:

Philippians 2:13 (NLT2)
¹³  For God is working in you,
giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.

Today’s verse encourages us that God is working in us to want to
do and to give us the power to accomplish what please Him.  

Hey, God is with us. If you put your faith in Jesus Christ, the
Holy Spirit indwells you!  The Holy Spirit
will convict us and encourage us to stop doing the things that displease God
and will encourage us to do the things that please Him.  

In discerning the spirits, we need to know that the Holy Spirit is
not a condemning voice. Those would be the spiritual forces of darkness.

Romans 8:1 (NKJV)
¹  There is therefore
now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according
to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

 So the Holy Spirit in us
would encourage us to change from our worldly ways to follow God’s ways but He wouldn’t
beat us up about it. God wants us to freely choose to be with Him and He
likewise wants us to choose for ourselves His path for living.   

God does not have a nagging or condemning voice. He invites us to
trust Him and live according to His ways with love.  We might consider it a “tough love” at times
because of the mess we have made that we have to climb out of but while God
will lead you into a path that doesn’t compromise on holiness and
righteousness, He will never beat you into submission. God knows what’s best
for us and He will encourage us to take a path that may include some suffering
but it will be for our overall good.  

The good news is that, like today’s verse tells us, He not only
gives us the desire and the encouragement to do what pleases Him, He also gives
us the power to accomplish it.  

That power isn’t usually some miraculous sign or wonder, God’s
power in us comes from trusting in Him and asking for His strength and guidance.   His intuitions will lead us to good things
we wouldn’t have thought of. His strength will cause us to endure and overcome
things we never thought were possible.   

So don’t doubt it. God is working in you. He is giving you the
desire and provides the power to do what please Him.

______________________________________________________________________

As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.

Today we continue sharing from Clinton E. Arnold’s
“Powers of Darkness”

As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage all to purchase Clinton Arnold’s books for your own
private study and to support his work.  This resource is available on
many websites for less than $20.00.

15
The Powers and Society

In the Pauline letters
the emphasis is on the threat the powers pose to the individual Christian and
to the church. This threat comes in a large measure from the temptation of the
flesh. It also comes from a larger organized front, which Paul characterized as
“the world.” We will now look closely at the nature of “the world” as Paul
envisioned it and determine how the powers influence the world and work in
conjunction with it to lead humanity astray.

Recent
Interpretations of the Powers

Since
World War 2, there has been a growing trend among scholars in the West to
interpret Paul’s references to principalities and powers almost exclusively as
the structures of our existence. The powers of darkness are “demythologized”
and described in terms of religious structures (especially tradition),
political and economic structures (as, for example, imperialism, nationalism,
dictatorship, socialism and capitalism), the set of values held by a given
social grouping (accepted morality, public opinion and interest, ideas of social
status, concept of justice and so on) and intellectual structures (ologies and isms). All of these structures and values exert a controlling
influence on society. They are also capable of becoming evil (“demonic”) and
may stand in the need of redemption. Many of those who interpret the powers
along these lines emphasize political structures. Responding to the powers thus
becomes a mandate for political activism. In commenting on Ephesians 3:10, for
instance, one writer remarks, “Announcing Christ’s lordship to the powers is to
tell governments that they are not sovereign … to witness in a biblical way to
the principalities and powers is to engage in dangerous, subversive political
activity.”

For many of these
interpreters a major factor that leads them to a “structural” interpretation is
the modern Western world view, which denies the reality of the actual existence
of evil spirits. In chapter thirteen, I attempted to show that there is ample
reason for revising the modern world view to affirming the actual existence of
evil spirits and angels. If this premise is accepted, there is no need to
demythologize the powers in order to interpret their meaning for us. Our task
needs to be focused on determining how the powers influence “the world” in its
variety of expressions; that is, through political structures, values,
traditions and so on.

Evangelical scholars
identifying the powers with structures often express their concern to grapple
with the question of structural evil as part of a quest to develop a biblical
basis for social ethics. This is a commendable goal and one that evangelicals
have neglected. I would suggest, however, that it is erroneous to equate the
powers with the structures. As I will argue, we ought to distinguish between
the powers of darkness and the structures of our existence. The two categories
are ontologically distinct. One is personal, the other is nonpersonal; one
possesses intelligence and the ability to will, the other does not. Truer to
Paul’s letters is to say that the powers exert their influence over the
structures of our existence than to make the powers coextensive with the
structures.

Not all evangelicals
writing on this topic equate the powers with structures. In his book on social
ethics Robert Webber contends that the powers are spiritual beings at work in
the world, that they are nonmythological, and that they have an ontological
point of reference in time, space and history. In the course of his discussion
of the powers, however, their ontological distinction from the structures of
existence becomes blurred. At the end of his analysis he states that there
really is no firm distinction, but rather a dual reference at each occurrence:
“The word powers is used in two
different ways: it may refer to the spiritual powers of evil or to the powers
which we have called ‘the structures of existence.’ ”

For Webber the powers
even have a positive side: “We know that the powers are God’s creation which
serve as agents to provide order, guidance, and meaning.” In this latter
comment he is clearly referring to the structures of our existence, not evil
spirits. But the problem with this view is that he confuses the terminology and
inaccurately identifies Paul’s “principalities and powers” terminology with the
concept of structures. This problem is not just with words; it is also a
conceptual problem. An evil spirit is not nationalism; a demon is not a
tradition; the principalities and powers are not structures. I would contend
that there may be a relationship, however, between an evil spirit and
nationalism, in that an evil spirit may incite excessive patriotism.

The primary practical
danger in limiting our interpretation of the powers to the structures is that
it is reductionistic. It unreasonably restricts how we understand the work of the
devil in Paul’s day and in our day. Specifically it overlooks the direct and
immediate work of an evil spirit in the life of an individual—either through
overt demonization (“giving a place to the devil”) or the devil’s classic work
of directly tempting people to sin.

Evangelicals
(especially Pentecostals and Charismatics) have traditionally had a much easier
time reckoning with the work of Satan on an individual level as opposed to a
societal level. In light of this problem the many recent works dealing with the
topic of the relationship between the powers and the structures of our
existence is a necessary corrective to an individualistic outlook.

In my analysis of
various writers on this topic, I have found two Pauline texts that surface as
crucial to the debate but which are frequently misunderstood. They are
Ephesians 2:2 and 3:10. I offer two necessary correctives to some of the
current discussion about the relationship between the powers to the structures
of our existence.

1. The references to
“air” and “spirit” are not references to “spiritual climate.” When Paul spoke
of “the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those
who are disobedient” (Eph 2:2), a number of interpreters have assumed he was
speaking of something like “the climate of opinion.” Some would go so far as to
suggest that Paul was referring to culture or world view. This view does not
have a long history in the interpretation of this passage. The origin of this
idea can be traced back to an essay written by Heinrich Schlier in 1930, later
translated into English and published as a small book. Schlier explained that
the “air” and “the spirit” of this passage is “the general spiritual climate
which influences mankind.” He said it exercises a control, a domination that
usually begins “in the general spirit of the world, or in the spirit of a
particular period, attitude, nation or locality.… Men inhale it and thus pass
it on into their institutions and various conditions.… It is so intense and
powerful that no individual can escape it.”

This view has had an
undue amount of influence on the course of subsequent treatments on the theme
of principalities and powers. The single greatest difficulty with this view is
that it would have been unintelligible to a first-century reader. I have argued
in detail in another context that Paul is using spirit here in the sense of a personal being. Likewise, Paul
intended air to be understood in a
literal sense; both Jews and Gentiles commonly regarded the air as a dwelling
place for evil spirits. The following lines from various Greek magical papyri
illustrate this perspective:

For
no aerial spirit which is joined with a mighty assistant will go into Hades.

Protect
me from every demon in the air.

I
conjure you by the one who is in charge of the air.

A
first-century A.D. Jewish document aligns itself with this concept: “For the
person who fears God and loves his neighbor cannot be plagued by the aerial
spirit of Beliar since he is sheltered by the fear of God” (Testament of Benjamin 3:4).

In Ephesians 2:2, the
reference to spirit is simply a reference to a personal evil force, and the
reference to air is representative of the common belief that demons inhabit the
air. One simply cannot press the reference to air in this context to find a
precise metaphysical description of the dwelling place of an evil spirit.

2. The church is not
called to proclaim a message to the powers. In Ephesians 3:10, some have seen a
divine mandate for the church to preach to the powers. In this passage Paul explained
that God’s “intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God
should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.”
This passage is not a warrant for raising a prophetic voice against the
corrupted structures of our existence. In the context of Ephesians and of
Pauline theology as a whole, the passage is merely asserting that the very
existence of the church testifies to God’s wisdom. This passage confirms that
God has foiled the wisdom of the demonic powers, who thought they could end
God’s redemptive plans by inciting the political and religious leaders to put
Jesus to death (1 Cor 2:6–8). God raised Jesus from the dead, and he became the
head of a worldwide body of believers who would spread the good news of his
offer of salvation everywhere. As 1 Corinthians 4:9 asserts (as well as
numerous Jewish documents), the angels carefully observe the affairs of
humanity. The evil angels, the principalities and powers, now see Jesus
actively redeeming the lost through the church.

The only message the
church is called to proclaim is the gospel, and that gospel to people all
around the world who have not heard its good news of liberation and deliverance
from captivity in Satan’s kingdom. Both the existence of the church and the continued
evangelistic growth of the church demonstrate to the powers that they are in
fact powerless to impede the redemptive work of God.^[1]

—————————more
tomorrow————————

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