Rescued for Love

04/09/2021

I am loved by God because love gives life and I am dead without God's love. So why should I love someone else? Because we all need life or we perish. How do I know I am receiving God's love? Because I find that I love other people for no other reason than love gives life. No person who receives God's love uses good and moral reasons to destroy another person. If we evaluate people to praise them our love is dead. If we evaluate people to criticise what they do or what they produce, we give hate which produces death. When we love people we take a deep interest in them, feel we are part of them, listen to them, and take absolutely no pride in ourselves.
We must fight hard to not participate in the hatred being taught on a national scale.

04/02/2021

He is risen!!!

Are you living on this side of the Resurrection or before the Resurrection.

11/21/2020

From Morality to Destruction by Way of Indignation
We are witnessing the beginnings of the destruction of a moral society by way of morality. The truly moral life is lived humbly under God who indwells us in His love. Think of it, God who is absolutely moral loves us. How can that be? That is not us. Why are we not condemned? God is the only source of that kind of love. We cannot be perfectly moral which ironically is perfect love. We cannot be God. Assuming the prerogatives of God leads to disaster. We can never be a source of moral perfection and we can never be the source of life-giving love. We need God within. Moral society depends on Him.
When we assume a morality of our own, we do not give love. It is just the opposite. We become indignant and our morality fuels hate, not love. Hate is a terribly destructive force especially when it becomes embedded in society.
Eric Fromm said, “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feelings as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. The “indignant” person has for once the satisfaction of despising and treating a creature as “inferior,” coupled with the feeling of his own superiority and rightness.”
Morally justified hate is a terrible force of destruction. What makes it so terrible is that it cannot be controlled. It is like the cat that is let out of the bag. Once it is out it cannot be caught and soon is no longer your instrument but your enemy. Hate fueled by moral indignation will eventually turn on the very ones who gave it birth and it will seek objects that were never intended. We start out believing that some people deserve my indignation, but that is not the way of the Master.
When half of society is trained to hate only one man it soon grows to hatred for the whole country and hatred for the principles of freedom, law and order, autonomy, and opportunity on which the country was founded. So, it does not matter who you are, if your business is successful it needs to be looted and burned to the ground. People need to be injured and killed. Prisoners set free. Law enforcement curtailed. It will not stop. Long after the first object of hate is gone it will continue until it consumes everyone. It is like burning down one man’s house but setting the whole forest on fire.
We are not defending immorality. We are saying we need the love of God which offers mercy and clear thinking. We need to think about the consequences of hate and treat people with respect. We need to stop justifying our words and action with moral indignation. We need to look past the person and see what is being done. We need to stop listening to people who reinterpret every action as personal immorality and start looking at the real issues. We are fearful that if clear-thinking people do not begin acting out of the love of God that all will be lost.

Tom Minor 11/21/2020

10/13/2020

Islands of Self-Centeredness

We are magnificent personal beings created on God’s wavelength for an abundant life of growth, learning, creativity, productivity, and relationships.

But we are seriously flawed islands of self-centeredness in which we destroy what we are meant to enjoy.

If we will yield our control, moment by moment, God will change our center by the Spirit’s power of love to be more like Jesus, full of love, joy, and peace.

The tremendous power of God’s love can meet our unique personality, knowledge, and experience to produce people living lives completely free in which we are filled with Jesus and are doing what He would do if He were us. God does not replace our personality, knowledge, or experience. So as followers of Jesus we are unique and not carbon copies. What we do comes out of our unique spirit-filled self. It is not a life that is other than us.

Obedience to God is the obedience of character through a moment by moment receiving of God’s powerful lifegiving love. Anyone can follow rules, but without God, our character fails when our ego is expanded or threatened. God is in the transformation business. It is the love received that is the love given. It is never about us; it is about God. Receiving thoughts from God and acting on them is not obedience if we are still on the island of self. The follower of Jesus brings glory to God alone.

07/01/2020

The Wrong Idea of Who I Am

We are not worthless or empty. We do not need to become nothing. We were made to be part of the family of God without becoming anything or anyone else, and that is the greatest idea of who we are. We should be aware of the miracle of our self-life that we can know, and will, and contemplate, and do good or evil. We should be in awe of our created physical abilities. But given all of this, there is a problem. We are created great, but we are evil and in need of God. “But wait; I thought God could fix us once and for all.”

We have all the essential equipment, but we cannot be good without God. Our goodness comes from God. He alone is good (Mark 10:18). When we walk with Him, his great power of love transforms us, and we see the world the way He does. Our evil nature results from self-gazing. We can have a walk with God, but when the difficult situations of life confront us it is easy to turn to self and lose His perspective of love on our situation and lose His power of love to transform the situation. We do not get fixed; we get a relationship.

There is a difference between worldly love and Godly love. Worldly love is what we naturally have. Godly love only comes from God and only while we walk with Him. Worldly love is self-serving. Loving God with worldly love is seeking something like an addictive drug taken to fix our angst. God’s provision of love comes only to a humble self and is manifested in the care of others; not our selves. “As He is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17) The proof is how we relate; not how we feel.

The love of God must be seen in the hard relationships of our life. We selfishly want to be separated from our problems and find a safe place in God, but He sends us back and says my love is sufficient. We must not seek to escape. The evidence of our relationship with God is seen in how we love others. “…If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).

God will not give us the ability to endure people who act destructively. He gives us His vision of their need for His love which we can bring. We do not ask people to change without them first receiving the power of God’s love. In God’s love, we do not need to reprimand.

God’s love is not seen in the “nirvana” of our feelings. God is not a drug that removes us from our problems. He is the power to bring Himself to bear in the most difficult situations. We need to be like firemen and run into the fire as others are escaping.

We are not worthless or empty, but we must be always aware that without Him we are evil. When we are not aware of our selfish selves, we are not aware of our need for God’s love. And though God’s grace is sufficient, we must never be content in selfish or destructive thoughts and actions (Romans 6:1-2).

Jesus is not the way out of the world, He is way in the world. We are most aware of God when we are transparent and bring God to people and the world’s needs.

Tom Minor

05/07/2020

I am discovering that many Christians are not really comfortable with the holy attributes of God. In such cases, I am forced to wonder about the quality of their worship. The word "holy" is much more than an adjective saying that God is a holy God. It is an ecstatic ascription of glory to the triune God. Everything that appears to be good among men and women must be discounted, for we are humans. Abraham, David and Elijah, Moses, Peter and Paul-all were good men, but each had his human flaws and weaknesses as members of Adam's race. Each had to find his own place of humble repentance. Because God knows our hearts and our intentions, He is able to restore His believing children in the faith! So, we should be honest and confess that much of our problem in continuing fellowship with a holy God is that many Christians only repent for what they do, rather than for what they are!
A. W. Tozer Sermon: Ascription of Glory

04/16/2020

Truth
Or
Consequences

Remember the wacky TV game show? More seriously, are there “or consequences” when truth is gone? Is truth losing favor in our society, and if so, what are the consequences?

Isaiah predicted the loss of truth and saw the one through whom truth can be restored.

Isaiah 59:14–16 (ESV)
14 Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. 15 Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. 16 He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede; then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him.

A statement is true if it corresponds to reality. Today there is a loss of truth. By that, I mean that our cultural leaders do not believe there is such a thing as a universal truth or an absolute truth (we have never seen an example of a truth that was not absolute). You may have heard the statement, “It is not true until it is true for you.” You might think, how can that be if we simply say what we know is actually there? The answer is because there is a loss of the knowledge of reality itself. That loss follows from a loss of belief in the revelation of God and the world He created.

We will first explain how the loss of truth follows from the loss of God, and then show the current consequences of a loss of truth in the cultural leaders of our society.

It is a simple concept that if God, the subject, created a physical reality separate from himself, then that physical reality is objective and not subjective. Secondly, if He created humanity to live in this objective reality, He would have given Him the capacity to know it and to explore it. But for us to see that He did it, we needed Him to reveal Himself in words. Modern science was born out of the reformation when the Biblical view was precisely that. Then scientists could labor for days and even years to discover natural laws because they had the faith that the laws were objectively there. Eastern thinking produced technology but not a rigorous science because of their belief that physical reality was an illusion. We are becoming more Eastern.

Even with the leftover (from the Christian world view) belief in the objective reality, the elimination of God still leaves us without a rationale for either the reality or of truth. Alvin Plantinga, in his book Where The Conflict Really Lies, made a classic argument which states that if evolution is true, there is little possibility that we can know that anything is true, including evolution.
So, truth has stumbled in the public square, fueled by the idea that it is immoral to have absolute truth, because that puts down people who believe something different. They missed the point that we can speak the truth without condemnation (Ephesians 4:15). So, for the virtue of acceptance, and no reason to think otherwise, (with the loss of God), truth is gone for many of our cultural leaders.
Now, with a loss of a standard of truth, we can no longer fairly evaluate the merit of what a person says in the marketplace of ideas. Without truth, we resort to power. The only way to win now is to have more power. Instead of evaluating actions and ideas, we must destroy the person. Hopefully, it is a long way off, but the end resort of power over truth is tyranny. There is no freedom without truth.

John 8:31–32 (ESV)
31 So Jesus said …“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

So, now in politics and other areas, everything a person does is seen as posturing for power. So then, to have power, the godless person lies without guilt and accuses his opponent of constant lies because he also must be only interested in personal power, even if that is not the motive. Destruction is the only game left until the most powerful wins.

The consequence of the loss of truth sounds very bleak, but there is a cure. God himself brought salvation when no person could be found. We need a return to God. We have a significant number of people who know the Lord. We must influence the culture to return to truth, as we bring individuals to the love of God in Jesus. We must insist that it is about the truth of the ideas and not about the person because the loss of truth has its consequences.
Tom Minor

04/11/2020

The Moralist
And
The Person of Love

All of us are moralists is some manner when we are not living in the stream of God’s love. A moralist is known by the way they judge other people; put themselves above other people. The vilest of sinners condemn other people and wish them harm. The non-believer judges the Christian as pretentious when they see inconsistencies. But evil’s highest achievement is the “Christian” moralist. They do no obvious bad things and believe that out of their achieved purity, they can condemn other people. They will qualify their “holy” state by saying that God made them pure, but the very act of judging others proves them to be living out of the context of life with Jesus because just as the non-Christian judges and wishes harm on others so do they.
Romans 2:1-11 is about the moralist.

Romans 2:1–3 (ESV)
1 Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. 2 We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. 3 Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?

The “Christian” moralist believes he impresses God and his Christian friends by talking down the failings of other people. He collects evidence of their moral failings. From his righteous position, he cannot understand how they can do such things. We find the “busybody” who knows everyone’s business and tells others in hushed tones. These acts are hurtful and make it that much more difficult for the condemned to ever find in Jesus the pure love that is available.

Life is not about being moral. Without Jesus, the higher our morality, the greater our judgment. Sometimes the non-Christian good friend is more comfortable to be around. Life is about finding the abundant life of fellowship with God. With His love, we love others and stop condemning. All sin is a violation of a relationship, and the moralist is the chief of sinners (see Paul).

We cannot find the love of Jesus until we are aware of our brokenness. We never get to the place where we can be unbroken on our own. We remain entirely dependent on the Love of God. In that state, we see the failings of others, but we do not condemn them. Instead, we identify with the broken as brothers and sisters whom God loves through us until they find Him.

Tom Minor

03/19/2020

Transformation
Not Perspiration

There are two views on love and relationship. Each picture agrees that the end of life is a loving relationship with God and a loving relationship with people that we know or meet. The difference between the two views is who we think is the source of love. To start, both sides of the discussion use the following verses:
Matthew 22:37–40 (ESV)
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
On the one hand, I hear, it cannot be just relationships; it must be about God. I agree that it is about God, but His will, His provision, and the end to which He is calling us is loving God and those we know and meet.
On the other hand, I hear that if you participate in loving others that what you do is the very definition of God at work. In this sense, I agree that it is not about relationships because many see relationships as a natural ability that we can express and see God as what we do and not as a substantial provider. The human default is that life is about me. There is a growing number of Christian leaders who began with the idea that God is unknown and that a personality known as God does not exist and does not control or interact in our daily life. Under this view, they would speak of God and use scripture, but, to them, God is finding godlike qualities within ourselves and expressing the love from within to others.
I understand why they would reject a god who is a destroyer of those who do wrong, but the very definition of God is that He is Love. And I can understand rejecting a saving belief that is merely accepting biblical ideas of Jesus when salvation is to depend on Him alone to supply the love. They have gone too far in distancing themselves from the substantial God and of dependence on Him alone.
The love of Jesus is real. It is not just a good feeling that motivates us; it transforms our whole being to receive His power in love and reflect it to others. We do not make it happen. When we come to the end of ourselves and humbly and prayerfully put ourselves on the mercy of God, the Holy Spirit changes us. It comes as a surprise. We notice that we are no longer impatient, discouraged, angry, and judgmental. We have peace and joy that we cannot account for by self-effort.
In an earlier post, I described how being created in the image of God provides the equipment for love. That alone is not God; it is the way God made us. If all we have is our given ability, it will not work. The reason is that every person from birth naturally lives for themselves alone. No matter how wonderful we feel in loving relationships, we will still hurt other people, and ultimately destroy what it means to be human, made in God’s image. We find life in God alone, and it requires the imposition of the person of Jesus within our soul. Our relational equipment is a miraculous gift, but not sufficient. We find life in Jesus. Without Him, we become the source of suffering and death.
It is not about how hard we work at love and relationships; it is about being transformed from the inside out by the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing the character of Jesus within. Then love in personal relationships is the new norm, untainted by self-serving. The power of the Spirit expresses himself in our love for the real person, Jesus, and we express what is given, to those we know and meet. We will find abundant life in transformation, not perspiration.
Join me in a daily, or moment by moment, dependence on God for love and life.
Tom Minor

03/11/2020

How Being Like A Christian
Keeps Us From A Relationship With Jesus

Many regular church attendees believe that they are good and think that their goodness is evidence that God is in their life.
Goodness can be defined as the necessary quality of life on which relationships depend. It is the quality that does not offend but builds persons in a relationship. We can all approximate it, because we were created with a soul that is uniquely created for relationships. The problem is that for goodness to work, we must be selflessly dependant on a source of love outside of ourselves, and no one has the natural ability to do that.
Every sin is a sin against a relationship. There is no sufficient goodness outside of relationship building. God is the source of this love, and the universal problem is that as sinners in a world separated from God, our inability to have loving relationships keeps us from the perfectly holy God who is the source of that love. Through the cross, Jesus made the way, and to find His love, we must deny self and walk with Him. Relationship with God and others is the whole point of life. Nothing else matters.
Back to the point: Trying to be good without a walk with Jesus not only fails but destroys the relationships that we try to build.
Squeaky clean and pretty much unrelated is not goodness. Without understanding, many active Christians count other things as good. They are as vocal about their moral nature as they are about others who do bad things. They witness to God leading them, speaking to them, fixing their life, and making them great. But, Jesus did not come to enhance our ego; He came to replace it with His nature.
We will look at how our actions and our words can be so good while our life is tainted by self-serving and how that ultimately destroys relationships, especially our relationship with God. We want to show that you can be outstanding without God. People who walk with Jesus do not feel that they are good at all. They feel broken, and they totally depend on their relationship with Jesus. We will discuss how our supposed goodness destroys relationships.
We Were Created To Be Good. Every human being is made in God's image in that we have all the spiritual equipment for good relationships. With our sense of self, we can relate to other selves. We were given verbal communication, which provides many ways to reach other people. With our minds, we can know things and help other people. With our memory, our relationships can carry forward. With our logic, we can reason with people. With our sense of morality, we can treat people right and expect the same from them. All of this is a miracle of God given in creation, and everyone has this equipment without needing to know God. So, we can be as good as we want to be and do many mighty works and still not know God.
Evils greatest trick is to produce moral, serving people who are not led by Jesus. It is not difficult to know who they are if you know what to look for. They are not broken people but proud. They declare themselves as good with talents given by God. They cannot understand why other people are not as good as them. They let you know what Christian service that they do, and they believe that you should do the same. Most of all, they are judgmental of other people, even those close to them.
But the Bible tells us that we cannot perform our way to a relationship with God. It is freely given by God to those who believe in Jesus. It is through Jesus alone that we can be emptied of self that we might live in Him. If we still believe in ourselves, we do not believe in Jesus.
Having higher morals than others is not a sign that I have more of God. Showing love to others is not a sign that it came from God. Doing Christian service, knowing our Bible, or being trained in theology is not evidence of knowing God. Being miraculously healed is not a sign that God is in my life.
The problem is that all the wonderful things that we do in the name of God will be tainted by self if we have not conformed to the image of Jesus. The first evidence of corrupting is that our works become who we think that we are. We are morally upright, but judgmental. We believe that we are good, decent, engaging, knowledgeable, and looked up to by those who wish they were like us. We have no capacity for genuine care. Every good that we do out of self is to enhance our image.
An Example Of Brokenness:
Mother Theresa is seen by many to be one of the greatest self-giving Christians of the 20th century, but that is not what she thought of herself. I am reading the book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. A book of her letters and writings with the author Brian Kolodiejchuk who is the director of the Mother Teresa Center and worked with her for 20 years. Her letters and his commentary show that she had a very broken view of herself as a sinner as she was profoundly and continually in love with Jesus. Her life of compassion was seen by the world as greatness, but she did not see it that way. She would be appalled if someone would want to be as "great" as her and go there to take her place. Everyone who looks up to some people looks down on others. No one who wants her fame is fit for the job.
A walk with Jesus produces brokenness and humility. She did not want to be known and asked that all her papers be burned at her death.
The question is, do we want to know Jesus well enough to abandon our self-project and live in his abundance of love.
Tom Minor

03/02/2020

March 5th Rescued for Love will be meeting
Cafe in the lower level of Riverbend Church
9500 N Tecumseh-Clinton Rd
Tecumseh, MI.

We would like to invite you to join us as 6:30 PM for lite food fare, good conversation and fellowship, then an excellent discussion time.

Our discussion is lead by Tom Minor and our topic for this Thursday is It will be, "How Being Like a Christian, Keeps Us From A Relationship With Jesus."

We finish with a time of prayer and wrap it up by 8:30 PM.

Contact us at yvonneorg
or
[email protected]
if you have any questions or comments.

02/28/2020

Entrenched
Or
Walk With Pauses

In our relationship with Jesus, there are only two states for those who claim to be Christian. We all began life entrenched in self, and most people who claim to be active Christians (86% by Barna study) stay entrenched. They are known by their defense and pride of self and judgment of other people. By contrast, those who walk with Jesus have a profound sense of brokenness and devotion to receiving the love and direction of Jesus, and an internal drive to love people, and live in joy. People often say that no one is perfect, and in that sense, the walk with Jesus has pauses. The pauses are not good and represent a turning to self, and in those moments Jesus tarries on ahead and waits. But when a pause occurs, the person recognizes it for what it is and askes Jesus for the power to overcome. The recognition and the brevity of the cause is part of the total commitment of one's self to Jesus. On the other hand, defending the pause and staying there is to abandon the walk.
When an entrenched person says that no one is perfect they are saying that we Christians work our way to the Kingdom of God through goodness and good works. Failure is accepted as normal instead of an interruption of a walk with Jesus. They tend to major on their goodness and good works. They believe that there is a continuum in our progress toward the kingdom, and they delight to know that other people are not doing as well.
1 Corinthians 13:6 (ESV) "it (love) does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth."
Well, God does not grade on the curve. If every other active Christian has far more faults than me, I am no closer to knowing God. Knowing God is in the walk with Jesus, and the entrenched moral upright and judgers of others cannot be known by God.
God does not give us the patience to endure the characteristics of people that we do not like; He gives us love. Endurance begins with judgment. (God give us patience in life's circumstances so that we can love; not endure.) Patience in Galatians 5:22 is an aspect of love, not judgment. In marriage, instead of asking for the endurance of what we do not like, we must ask for love so that we will hold their characteristics dear.
If a "Christian" has not yet seen the futility of their works, and if they have not a profound sense of brokenness, they are not ready to even began to know the love of Jesus in a walk with pauses.
Tom Minor