Planned books:
- Purity of Heart (Harper Torchbooks) by Soren Kierkegaard
- Living Love: A Modern Edition of Treatise on the Love of God (Christian Classics (Brewster, Mass.).) by De Sales, Saint Francis
- True Spirituality by Francis A. Schaeffer
- Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith by Henri J. M. Nouwen
- The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living: Excerpts from the Works of Father Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O by Thomas Keating
Current books:
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Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin
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The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages (Crossroad Spiritual Legacy Series) by Sister Joan Chittister OSB
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The Art of Christian Listening by Thomas N. Hart
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Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who’s Already There by Leonard Sweet Ph.D
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Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas
Recent books:
- Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- The Delicate Art of Dancing With Porcupines: Learning to Appreciate the Finer Points of Others by Bob Phillips
- The Art of Talking So That People Will Listen: Getting Through to Family, Friends by Paul W. Swets
- Invitation to Biblical Preaching: Proclaiming Truth with Clarity and Relevance (Invitation to Theolo by Donald Sunukjian
- On the Incarnation: De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (Popular Patristics Series) by St. Athanasius
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Can I Trust God for 400 Years…or more?
March 6th, 2010 | 
Author: Further Meditations in Genesis 15
My Comments (jb) …this week has concentrated on dependence upon God, trusting God, and following Jesus. I started the week with Genesis…it just seems fitting to end the week with it as well.
God makes an incredible covenant promise to Abram that included protection, an heir, descendants numbering as many as the stars, “great” reward, land, and a long healthy life… Awesome stuff indeed! But wait; what about the process of getting there, to all those awesome blessings? Abram = Yay! Descendants = not so much. God also assures Abram his descendants will be “slaves” in a foreign land where they will be oppressed for 400 years. Wait for it… Let that sink in a bit… 400 Years.
Sure, they (the slave descendants) had Abraham’s covenant promise conveyed upon them…but people were born, lived, and died without seeing anything but slavery and oppression. I can’t help but wonder if Abraham’s knowledge of the 400 years was passed along to his descendants as part of their “blessing.” In other words, did they know they were going to be enslaved for this long?
400 Years…
Their emancipation was no cakewalk either… chased by an Egyptian army into the desert wilderness, they failed to trust God. An entire generation was “blessed” to die in their “desert of distrust” as part of their reward. Fortunately, we finally see the privileged inheritors of God’s promise walk across the river into land God had given to Abraham… YAY! But wait; these “people of the blessing” who were unskilled in the art of war, knew little in the ways of societal governance, and had little in the way of supply-line resourcing… were going to have to fight/war for every square foot of land that had been “promised” to them.
There’s more to this story, and these long periods of silence from God and oppression of His people have a disconcerting manner of repeating themselves… “Yeah, but that was the Old Testament, back when God was mean and people were primitive and ignorant” Right? Jesus ushered in an era of blessing and brilliance… Right? Of course he did, but not in the context most of us like to think about. Remember, all but one of the “Twelve of Jesus’ Disciples” met violent deaths. Most, if not all, followers of Christ were ostracized, oppressed, persecuted, and often killed because of their “blessed” status. It wasn’t until the fourth century before this level of oppression began to let up.
“Anyone who talks about spiritual things without any experience in them is like a person who is lost in the desert, dying with thirst… If you try to tell me about the Christian life without any personal involvement in it, you will mislead me. You will tell me fictional things, mistaken things.” ~Pseudo-Macarius
…the story continues, but we’re talking about trust, dependence, and following Jesus. What really is the cost, and what really is the blessing? How are these really measured? Can I trust God…? Am I willing to release my own self-reliance and independence to follow the unseen future led by the Invisible God?
“Deliverance can come to us only by the defeat of our old life… God rescues us by breaking us, by shattering our strength and wiping out our resistance. Then he invades our natures with that ancient and eternal life which is from the beginning.” ~A.W. Tozer
The picture I painted of the plight of “God’s people” is pretty terrifying and doesn’t look all too inviting to us from our perspective, but what if we glimpse how God looks at this:
I was always on your side. I destroyed the Amorites who confronted you, Amorites with the stature of great cedars, tough as thick oaks. I destroyed them from the top branches down. I destroyed them from the roots up. And yes, I’m the One who delivered you from Egypt, led you safely through the wilderness for forty years And then handed you the country of the Amorites like a piece of cake on a platter. I raised up some of your young men to be prophets, set aside your best youth for training in holiness. (Amos 2:8-10)
“God who is everywhere never leaves us… Yet He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present.” ~Thomas Merton
What if I’m one of those “400 year” people? What if I’m one of the persecuted, poverty stricken, disease-infested, natural disaster called Christians? Will I follow Him? Will I 
trust Him? Am I willing to depend upon Him?
“To live for the lesser things of life is to risk not really living at all.” ~Joan Chittister
“God says, when I toss My children into the air, terror comes before delight. Put yourself in the place of My people in Daniel’s day. They felt thrown into the air with no safety net beneath them. They couldn’t see their God ready to catch them.” (from 66 Love Letters: A Conversation with God that Invites You into His Story by Dr. Larry Crabb, ©2009.)
Posted in A Deeper Walk, Becoming the Word, Daily Meds, Lent, Meditations, Shaping Me, Spiritual Disciplines, The Liturgical Year | 
Tags: Ancient Christianity, Christ, Christian, disciple, Discipleship, iCrucified, Jeff Borden, Jesus Christ, Joan Chittister, Meditation, Meditations, Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Formation
One Response to “Can I Trust God for 400 Years…or more?”
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Thought provoking content and questions Jeffrey that have spurred my heart to thinking about many things….
What if I’m one of those “400 year” people? What if I’m one of the persecuted, poverty stricken, disease-infested, natural disaster called Christians? Will I follow Him? Will I trust Him? Am I willing to depend on Him?………..
I have been thinking upon these questions for days now since you first posted them and felt a tug to comment the first day you posted them but have instead been ruminating on a response. This morning I was reading in one of my daily devotionals entitled, Jesus Calling by Sarah Young these words below. The format for each day’s devotional is always in the first person as though Jesus were speaking to me……
These are words that I read this morning….
Walk by faith, not by sight. As you take steps of faith, depending on Me, I will show you how much I can do for you. If you live your life too safely, you will never know the thrill of seeing Me work through you. When I gave you My Spirit, I empowered you to live beyond your natural ability and strength. That’s why it is so wrong to measure you energy level against the challenges ahead of you. The issue is not your strength but Mine, which is limitless! By walking close to Me, you can accomplish My purposes in My strength.
Corinthians 5:7; Galatians 5:25
In light of what I read in the WORD and know to be true of what promises are lavished upon me as a child of God and to the degree that I WILL trust in them and remain connected/submitted to Him I would have to say my answer to all of your above questions has got to be an emphatic YES for the VICTORIOUS reasons that Christ in me makes my “YES” response to Him POSSIBLE!
Based solely on what Jesus did for me and in me through the Spirit minus any self-righteous and erroneous thought that I can ever pull this off on my own I respond with a certainty and resounding “YES together in Christ I can” to the questions that you so thought provokingly proposed.
You are absolutely right…the picture you painted (and God’s Word embeds in our hearts and minds) of the plight of “God’s people” is pretty terrifying and doesn’t look all too inviting to us from our perspective, but what if we glimpse how God looks at this….
“I was always on your side….. Amos 2:8-10
In this assurance Jeffrey lies my respite and peace and hope as I know does your as well…to be “wide awake” and not “spiritually sleepwalking” to how God sees all of this, the heart of the Father’s perspective and His “Gods-eye view” concerning these things! For Him to reveal these promises of assurance in a thousand different ways in scripture comforts me to no end!
To these words of promise and many more I will continually hold dearly to for the rest of my earthly life. I stand wholly agreeing with Tozer and his words you quoted. I have no illusions that before it is all said and done in this life I am called to follow for Christ alone there is the sure reality that I will find deliverance through none else than the breaking and shattering of ME over and over again! The first fifty plus years of my life stand as testament to this kind of needful/loving/heartbreaking work of Christ in my life!
Every day that I ask for a fresh filling of the Spirit I am saying, AWAY WITH PNEUMA-SOMNAMBULISM (spiritual sleepwalking)I am desiring to live and move throughout my day in an intentional Spirit filled alertness, exploring and learning to be prepared with a “YES” answer of submission to the questions or circumstances He places before my path.
I’ve read enough and experienced a large enough “slice of life” in my fifty-something years to humbly say I’m not deluded into thinking I’ve been called to a “cake walk” in this life……actually to my ongoing surprise (amid the pain and trials) I am delighted to find something FAR BETTER than a cake walk….. A WALK WITH HIM!!
Thanks for the refreshing reminder Jeffrey here in your posting that we who are in Christ have to reconcile in our heads and hearts the very reality that ours IS the walk of the “400 year” people! Ours is (to whatever extent God wills it to be) the walk of the persecuted, poverty stricken, disease-infested and natural disaster better known as a WALK WITH JESUS!
May we learn from the silences of God in the past and the great cloud of witnesses gone before us who had to WALK ON without the visible blessing of what they were hoping for. May we learn there is no mustering up additional courage, strength, fortitude, gumption and perseverance in our fleshly tatters apart from abiding in our trusting/resting connection to Christ. Just as their faith led them through the years where they could not “see” so will our faith have to carry us through the “400 Years??” we might we be called to walk through like our ancestors who persevered and claimed the VICTORY before us.
To this I say let’s WALK ON and find every reason to sing & dance & weep & travail & let JOY win out all along the way just as they showed us CAN BE DONE!
Because the SAME POWER that conquered the grave lives in us we can defy this worlds evil and woes with our very lives “LIVING OUT LOUD” speaking for us saying….
JESUS = LIFE FOREVER… A THOUSAND HALLELUJAHS”
THIS WORLD = NO CAKEWALK
FOLLOWERS OF JESUS = PRESSED BUT NOT PINNED = ETERNAL LIFE (2Corinth. 4:7-12)
“We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God not from ourselves.
We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. WE are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.
Yes, we live under constant danger of death because we serve Jesus, so that the life of Jesus will be evident in our dying bodies. So we live in the face of death, but this has resulted in eternal life for you.”
For sure it seems like a “dangerous submission” from our perspective to think we are called to live like “400 Year People” but so thrilled to have a God who hasn’t remained silent in his words to us about His perspective and promise…..
“I was always on your side….” Amos
Today I am finding and experiencing an even fresher inner resolve within me as I pondering the fact that my God says He is for me than who can possibly stand against me and win over my God! 400 years or more….whatever it takes He is with us!
Bethly
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