Keeping the Faith

While recently eating dinner with family, I was reminded of “true prosperity of soul.” Our family time was great and the food excellent. I interrupted our meal and said, “this is abundant life!” Everyone agreed.

For the Christian, Jesus is the source of abundant life. He is our life, joy and reason for eternal hope. He came to give life in fullness, abundance and prosperity — not just ordinary existence.

In John 10:10, Jesus declares “… I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (NKJV). The English word abundantly translates from the Greek word perissos, which means more than enough, excessive, overflowing, surplus and superabundance.

God wants you and I to overflow with His love, grace and provision. But to walk in the abundant life Jesus promised, there are principles to follow.

First, decide to follow Jesus unreservedly. Abundant life begins with surrender to Christ and is maintained through daily relationship with Him. To know His love is the foundation for abundant living.

Paul prayed, “I ask that you’ll know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge so that you will be filled entirely with the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:19 CEB) To be filled with the fullness of God is to understand at a heart level God’s love through Jesus.

When you feel disconnected from God, reach out to Him in prayer and wait in faith for His gentle presence. Jesus has promised He would never leave us nor abandon us ever — He is near.

Give yourself totally to God, He will give of Himself totally to you — beyond measure. To know Jesus intimately and experience His love deeply, is to know abundant life.

Secondly, understand God’s covenant is abundant life. A step toward experiencing abundant life and biblical prosperity is to believe this is God’s highest desire for you.

John prayed, “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” (3 John 2 NKJV) Abundant living is a state of being, rooted and grounded in Christ and His peace and joy.

Proverbs states, “The blessing of the Lord makes one rich, and He adds no sorrow with it.” (Prov. 10:22 NKJV) As you walk in relationship with Jesus, fullness of life and true riches follow, with no sorrow or regrets.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I visited her then 95-year-old Aunt Betty in Florida. She lives in her beach condo, full of life and love, creates wood sculptors of wildlife and helps children with autism at a nearby center. She learned early to trust God in life’s affairs — she demonstrates abundant living and contentment.

God wants us to overflow with His love, goodness and blessing. He desires us to live an abundant life that overflows to bless others (Psalm 67).

Third, learn to be content. Paul learned to live fully and humbly. He learned how to be content in every situation, at peace with what God granted each day (Phil. 4:11-13). Paul told Timothy “godliness with contentment is great gain …” (1 Tim. 6:6 NKJV)

As you walk with Jesus, don’t grumble along the way, be satisfied in every situation as you trust Him. Thank God for every blessing and be content while you wait in faith for answers to your prayers. Complainers lack faith and rarely see mountains move.

While we visited Aunt Betty, I went surf fishing across from her condo. It was a hot summer day, and the fish were not biting. I only caught two small fish, enough for a person to have a meager meal. I knew Betty liked fish, so I brought them to her, a bit embarrassed by my catch. To my surprise, Betty was elated to have these two small fish, she was so thankful and couldn’t wait to have her fish dinner after we left. Betty, like Paul, learned how to be thankful and content in every situation and with every blessing in life.

Jesus promises abundant life to those who chose to follow Him. I pray you overflow with His blessings, peace, and joy as you walk with Him.

As a pastor in the Christian tradition, I am regularly saddened, sometimes baffled, and at times horrified by the words and actions of some people who call themselves Christians.

The Arizona Daily Star recently covered a story about “Christians Against Dinosaurs” who oppose our local Tyrannosaurus rex that brings cheer to many passers-by adjacent to a fast-food outlet. In a world crying out for justice, full of hatred and divisiveness, war and addiction, I am baffled by a group that imagines Jesus would want them to give so much energy to dismantling dinosaur replicas.

More concerning are the many people who self-identify as Christian, but support statements, actions and systems that are misogynist, racist, ableist, violent, white supremacist and just plain old cruel. I think about the line from author Anne Lamott, “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

I certainly honor and respect that there are a variety of interpretations in any religious and spiritual tradition, including my own. However, when people who claim my faith tradition live so diametrically opposed to the way taught and lived by our primary teacher, I am deeply concerned.

Matthew Paul Turner, author of “Our Great Big American God,” curated a website called “Jesus Needs New PR” that shared church signs, bulletins and merchandise that would likely make Jesus cringe. This was his playful way of pointing out the hypocrisy and contradictions too-often at work among people who call themselves Christians.

But I believe he raised an important question with his site: what kind of public relations do the followers of Jesus create for God/Jesus?

I believe similar questions can be relevant to anyone who claims a spiritual or religious path: are we living out the deepest-held values that we profess? Are we honoring our greatest teachers who showed us ways of compassion, inclusion, justice and love lived in service of others?

If you are not part of a religious or spiritual tradition, I apologize for the ways we who claim such traditions, in our fear and confusion, have misrepresented the Divine. I also lift up that there are people and communities who are doing their best to reclaim and live into our best selves and God’s dream for a better world, seeking to receive and share in the power of the Spirit steadfast love, tender mercy, abundant life, healing, hope and ways of justice.

And if we claim a religious or spiritual tradition, I encourage us to dive in more deeply, to engage the work and practices that help us offer integrity, healing, peace, truth, wholeness, and forgiveness.

We are all living in a world of hurt — from pandemic to dirty politics, racial injustice to rage-fueled assaults, science-denying to ecological destruction. The ways of hypocrisy, violence, control, fear and so much of what we consider “normal” have been showing themselves to be failed ways.

We need better ways. We can live better ways. And when we do, we give Jesus, God, Spirit (or however you might address the Divine) good PR, and in this we encourage more people to get in on the good that God wants to birth daily in the world.

In the book “The One Thing You Need to Know,” Marcus Buckingham condenses our universal human fears to five.

One fear can be described as our fear of the “outsider.”

Every culture and subculture distinguishes between insiders and outsiders because it makes us feel safe. We fear those who are different and even blame them for what’s wrong with society.

Republicans blame Democrats and vice versa. Progressives fear conservatives, who also fear them. We suspect illegal immigrants, nonbelievers, LGBTQ+, whites, minorities, Muslims, or the wealthy.

Everyone can answer this question: _________ threatens our way of life.

You may answer it differently than I do, but I bet you have a quick answer to that question.

In short, we tend to be ruled by fear rather than compassion.

Jesus challenges our fear in the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37). A religious leader asked Jesus to define “neighbor” so he could limit whom he loved. Jesus responded with the story of an anonymous, unidentifiable person who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Two highly esteemed religious leaders refused to stop and help. Perhaps they feared a dangerous trap or an expensive hassle.

But a Samaritan showed compassion to the victim at great personal cost, including the risk of contagion, his money, a delay of his journey, and a chance of extortion (from an innkeeper whom he basically offered his credit card).

The Samaritan owed this person nothing but treated him as a member of his family. When Jesus asked the Jewish religious leader to name the person who acted neighborly, the man replied, “the one who had mercy” (10:37). He couldn’t even say “the Samaritan” because Jewish people in the first century hated Samaritans. They were the ultimate outsider and the bane of Israel.

Jesus changed the question from “Whom can I avoid?” to “What does love look like?” He went straight to the heart by making a Samaritan the hero of his story because to first-century Jews, there’s no such thing as a “good” Samaritan.

For those who take Jesus seriously, the message is clear: Loving our neighbor requires us to redefine “neighbor.” Our neighbor includes the outsider — the one who threatens our way of life — who’s in need.

The Gospel requires that compassion — rather than fear — rule our hearts. We’re to conquer our fear of the outsider by loving outsiders when they hate us, being kind when they’re unkind, and treating them as insiders. That’s radical.

In a speech Abraham Lincoln gave during the Civil War, he described Southerners as mistaken human beings. A woman challenged the president and claimed they should be destroyed. Lincoln replied, “Why, madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” Indeed.

What would it look like if your compassion knew no boundaries? What if you considered anyone in need as your potential friend? What if you treated outsiders the same way you treat insiders?

It might help change the broken world we’ve inherited.