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A Trilogy from Paul, October 12, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

From the Philippians’ lectionary readings yesterday, three things jumped out at me that I wanted to share with you today. First, let me read the passage from Paul’s letter, then we will discuss each of them in reverse in the message and why I think we must address them as individuals and as the church, the body of Christ, today.

 4 Always be glad for what the Lord has done, I will say it again, be glad.

5 Let everyone know that you think kindly of others before yourselves. The Lord is near.

6 Do not worry about anything. Talk to God about everything. Thank him for what you have. Ask him for what you need.

7 Then God will give you peace, a peace which is too wonderful to understand. That peace will keep your hearts and minds safe as you trust in Christ Jesus.

8 Here, my brothers, are some things I want you to think about. Think about things that are true, honest, right, clean and pure, things that are lovely, and things that are good to talk about. If they are good, and if they bring praise to God, think about these things.

9 I taught you, and you learned things from me. You heard the things I said, and you saw the things I did. Do these same things yourselves. Then God who gives peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:4-9 WE)

The topic that I’ll mention first comes from Paul’s last bold statement. Pattern your life after mine, and God will give you the peace he gives me. How many of us tell those coming behind us those words today? Too often, what we hear is my private life is private. Don’t peek into the closet; it’s none of your business what I do behind closed doors. You only need to know what I do in my business, my public life, that’s why you pay me. 

Not Paul. He says, follow me around, watch me every moment of every day and do what I do. Use me as an example of holy living. Let me show you what it means to follow Jesus and his teachings. If you do the things I do, you will be okay when you stand before Him at the judgment.

We might call that overconfident. We might call Paul conceited. We might think him arrogant. Paul lived none of those characteristics. He just knew that if he followed Christ in all his practices, public and private, others could follow him and find their way to Jesus the same way he did. And when Paul discovered him, Jesus turned his world upside down, or should I say, he finally turned Paul’s world right-side up. That’s what Jesus came to do, after all, to make all things right again. 

So, the first point in Paul’s words yesterday, can I say like Paul, follow in my footsteps, and you will be following Jesus? Am I walking so much in the light of God’s word and by the guidance of his spirit, that I can honestly make that statement to others? If not, why not, and what am I going to do about it? 

Second is Paul’s admonition to watch with what we fill our cranial space. God created magnificent computer storage spaces when he created our brains. They operate in ways science and medicine still haven’t figured out. Somehow, memories get stored in the electrical impulses that happened between the cells in our brain, but how and what mechanism recall the right bit of those chemical and electrical impulses to bring back those memories decades later? We still have no clue. 

What we have learned, though, is that everything that goes into the brain is there. Unless some injury or illness destroys some part of the brain, memories find their way in and remain. I might not be able to call them up at a moments’ notice, but they reside somewhere in that mass of tissue, and the right stimulus can bring them to the surface. So Paul says, if that’s true, just like a compute, our brains work on the principle of garbage in, garbage out. If you fill your mind with smut, violence, evil, things contradictory to God’s goodness, that’s what spills out. When you fill your mind with good things, that’s what comes out. 

What does that mean for us practically? The older I get, the more I understand Paul’s words. Think about things that are true, honest, right, clean and pure, things that are lovely, and things that are good to talk about. If they are good, and if they bring praise to God, think about these things. I must admit, I’ve quit watching the news almost entirely. When is the last time you heard any news outlet talk about anything with these qualities? It’s been a long time. Bad news sells. In our broken state, we want to hear the dirt, the lies, the filth, the ugly. We want to know the worst of society to feel just a little better about ourselves in our minds. 

Filling our mind with the worst of society doesn’t let God shine his light on the things in us he wants to change, though. Thinking on the goodness of creation, the goodness of humanity made in God’s image, the goodness of God’s love and mercy, the beauty of the things around us, pulls us out of the world and, for those moments, lets us get just a little closer to the joining of heaven and earth – God walking in the garden with us. 

Yesterday’s scripture reminds us to keep our minds on things that focus on the best of this world. Paul tells us:

Think about things that are true, honest, right, clean and pure, things that are lovely, and things that are good to talk about. If they are good, and if they bring praise to God, think about these things.

Finally, the last thing I wanted to share with you from yesterday’s reading is just a four-word sentence from verse 5. “The Lord is near.” What makes that so important, and why did I want to share it with you today.

Allowing me to read more resulted in a pandemic’s positive effect as it seems the second wave begins to hit many areas of the world. As I’ve read much larger chunks of the Old and New Testaments at one sitting, often several books at a time, I’ve begun to notice things I never saw before. 

I knew Jesus is the Messiah prophesied throughout the Old Testament. Still, I never saw how Jesus became the embodiment of the Israelites exile once again so he could go through it and overcome it. Abraham was exiled in a sense from Ur but failed to bless the nations. God rescued the fledgling tribe through Joseph, but they failed to show God to the Egyptians how they saw Yahweh as the only God of the heavens. God rescued the Israelites through Moses, but they turned back to their idolatry in the land he gave them. Now, after returning from Babylon, still scattered around the world, the Temple rebuilt, Jesus comes to rescue the Israelites and show them what God wants of his chosen people as lights of the world to bring the nations to him. The Pharisees and Sadducees work together to plot to kill him. Use trumped-up charges, break their laws to entice Pilate to execute Jesus for doing good on the Sabbath, and rid Jerusalem of another revolutionary leader – they thought. 

Jesus’ resurrection brought heaven and earth together. Throughout his ministry, his message was clear. Repent, heaven is near. Some will think me crazy, I’m sure. Some will not want to hear the Lord is near. But as we discover the probability of multiple dimensions, I believe that’s where heaven might be. I think heaven is here, just out of sight. Jesus’ resurrected body could pass from one side to the other. Perhaps he could multiply the bread and fish by reaching from one side to the other. Maybe angels can do God’s bidding by passing from one side to the other. 

We don’t understand what physical properties other dimensions might hold because we’ve never seen them or been there. Scientists only assume their probability through mathematical formulas. But suppose it is true and the Lord is just beside you and in this other dimension can be just beside any of us in the blink of an eye where time and space don’t operate the way it does in our dimension. What if Jesus, the son of God, who conquered death and showed his disciples his new resurrected body that comes and goes behind locked doors is right here, now, just waiting for God to say, “Open the curtain.” 

It means in the blink of an eye; all could change. The new heaven and new earth could appear without notice, and suddenly we would be face to face with our Lord as a new dimension, a new earth, a new heaven, a new creation unfolds around us. “Heaven is near,” Jesus said. “The kingdom is at hand,” he proclaimed. Paul tells us, “The Lord is near.” Perhaps he’s even here. How does that change what you do and how you act today.

 There they are: The Lord is near. Think about good things. Follow in my footsteps to follow in his. Three messages that will shake us and awaken us as we contemplate the days in which we live. 

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked WE are taken from THE JESUS BOOK – The Bible in Worldwide English (WE). Scriptures are taken from THE JESUS BOOK – The Bible in Worldwide English, Copyright © 1969, 1971, 1996, 1998 by SOON Educational Publications, Derby, DE65 6BN, UK. Used by permission.

Be Transformed, August 23, 2020

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Today’s Podcast

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

The lectionary this week included these verses from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. 

So, my dear family, this is my appeal to you by the mercies of God: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Worship like this brings your mind into line with God’s. 2 What’s more, don’t let yourselves be squeezed into the shape dictated by the present age. Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable and complete. (Romans 12:1-2 NTE)

Paul has painstakingly taken his readers through arguments explaining the fallacy of the leaning on the law and how it can never help us find right standing with God. It can only point out our flaws. It shows us our wrongs; worse than that, it leads us into temptation by enticing us into doing things we would not have known before. 

Paul takes us through a series of steps to find that place of peace, salvation, redemption from the creator. Often called the Roman Road, it begins with acknowledging our sins, confessing them, and realizing we cannot absolve them ourselves. Then asking forgiveness from God, the one who can make us whole, and acknowledging him alone as God and Lord of our life. 

When we confess him as Lord, that means he rules our life. He is in charge. We don’t use those terms much in our day and age because it brings back memories of the slave trades, masters, and slaves – dark days we want to forget in our history. But the relationship Paul talks about between mere mortals, us, and God fits. He is God; we are not. He deserves and demands our undivided devotion and attention. 

We miss that point in trying to cover up the relationship, particularly with the current crises in our land today. With the turmoil broiling across the country, assuming all whites are guilty of racism and all blacks are protesters and rioters, we refuse to talk about slavery in spiritual terms. We’ve let the world hijack so many words we seldom know what generations talk about anymore. Here are just a few GenZers have taken over – extra, snatched, wig, bet, fire, cap, shade, salty, slay, shook, tea. I’ll let you figure out the new meaning, or just ask your teenager. 

What happens, though, is we talk around each other instead of talking to each other. We fail to understand what each side means when we hear words spoken because what we hear is not what is said by the other person. No communication happens because we speak different languages even though the words sound like English. That’s part of our problem with generational gaps. We try to talk to each other but don’t hear each other’s side.

How do we get back to some common ground, so we fix the divide tearing us apart? 

First, go back to Romans 12. Stop letting the world determine how you live your life and how you think. The media too often shapes what we believe, and various outlets are blatantly biased. And we tend to choose our favored side instead of listening to all the facts and deciding for ourselves. We instead let someone else think for us and blindly follow the rhetoric fed to us rather than spend time researching facts. 

So, don’t be shaped by the world, but let God’s spirit in you transform your mind. Allow him to change you. How do you do that? Spend time in His word. Don’t pick favorite verses or the out of context verses each side uses to prove a point but absorb large sections of God’s word each day to understand what he wants to get across to you. Did you know that just spending fifteen minutes a day reading the Bible, you would read it through in a year? 

That’s about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, so during that next coffee break, open God’s word, and just start reading. Ask him to help you learn from it and how he wants you to apply it to your life today. You will be amazed at what he brings to mind as you go about your day if you really mean those words. You will begin to realize the transformation in your thinking and understand what Paul talks about in knowing God’s will. You’ll see evidence of the change in your life as you see others in a different light. You’ll see with eyes of compassion; you’ll desire others know the truth of God’s word the way you begin to discover it from your time with him. You’ll long to know more of him each day.

Next, make it a point to listen to those around you. But really listen. Don’t just hear words spoken, because we know words have taken on new meanings over time. We can hear words and not know the intended meaning of the speaker because of the changes. Take time to listen and ask questions to make sure you understand. 

I’ve used this illustration before that I shared with officers when they joined my units in the Army. What does it mean to ‘secure the building?’ It depends on your Service. In the Marines, it means storm the building until nothing is left standing. In the Army, it means to surround it with concertina wire, guard posts, and soldiers, so nothing comes near it. In the Navy, it means to find the owner and purchase it. In the Air Force, it means to turn out the lights and lock the doors. 

It’s a humorous illustration, but it points to the fact that misunderstanding a single word in communication between two people can have disastrous results. If, as an Army officer, I gave that command to a Marine without further explanation, I could suddenly find a pile of rubble instead of a heavily guarded building for a headquarters. The same words, but a significant difference in the outcome. 

The same happens in our communications today when we fail to stop and listen, ask questions when there might be some confusion in our understanding. Ask the question, what do I have to believe about that person to think he or she would say or do what I think they said or did? 

Stop and think about that just for a minute, we hear the leftist decry Presidents Trump and Bush constantly. We also hear the right blast Presidents Obama and Clinton the same way. But why would anyone want to become president other than to help the country? Since President Regan, every president always wears a bulletproof vest outside the White House. Secret Service surrounds them constantly, so they have no privacy – ever. The press hounds them as much or more than any Hollywood celebrity. Their opponents take apart every speech and look for any slight to use against them. Worse, statements are edited and twisted to make even the point opponents would agree on turn against them. 

They give up lucrative positions to become prisoners to impossible schedules. Yes, we see them on vacations and golf courses, but what we don’t hear during those “vacations” is the rest of their calendar. The round of golf is sandwiched between hours of briefings, meetings with governors, senators, and other leaders in the area, mounds of paperwork that came with them. We never hear about the fourteen- and sixteen-hour routine they face every day.

Who would want to be president? There are reasons why after eight years in office, a past president looks twenty years older than when they took the oath. The stress and pace of leading the nation take a toll only someone dedicated to making the country better would want. Each party looks at different ways to do that, but the man in the office has the same ideal, make America a better place for the next generation. So, before blasting the person, stop and think. What do I have to believe about him to think he would say or do what is reported. You’ll probably figure out reports are half-truths at best, and if you read transcripts or full reports instead of the snippets from any mainline media, fake news might be a pretty good description of what happens today on both sides.

The Democratic National Convention just ended. Political campaigns for the November elections will start in full force now. I suggest whenever a campaign ad comes on, you mute your radio or television or whatever you might be listening to at the time. Whenever the news talks about something political, I recommend you mute whatever you’re hearing. Whenever someone on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter start a political rant, don’t read it, just skip it or block it. 

“… don’t let yourselves be squeezed into the shape dictated by the present age.”

Instead, do some homework. I know, it sounds like school. But that’s okay. Our country’s future is at stake. When you hear about a speech, find the whole speech, and read it, don’t listen to someone’s abstract. When you hear about legislation, go find out what it says and how your candidate thought about it. If they are in office, why they voted the way they did. Did they vote no because of amendments tacked on to the original bill? We often don’t hear about that, but often, those amendments cause the problems in whether bills pass or not. 

Find out what candidates believe, find out what they say they will do, not what they think about their opponent. Then think hard about whether what they say they will do is realistic. A candidate can promise a lot, but everything costs money, and who pays for it? When they say a corporation will, that sounds good, but corporations aren’t people, they are businesses that make money by selling things to us. We pay their taxes by purchasing their goods. When their taxes go up, their prices go up. We pay their taxes. Free health care sounds good, but someone pays for it? Who? How will promises be kept? Find out about the fine print as you think about the candidates you choose. 

You have time to consider. Do your research. Don’t be stuffed in a box. Don’t just follow the crowd. Don’t pull a party lever. Know the reasons you choose the person and the character behind the person. Mostly, spend time with God every day. Let him help you discern your walk in every part of life, even as a good citizen.

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked NTE are taken from the NEW TESTAMENT FOR EVERYONE: Scripture are taken from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011.

What Did We Do? August 3, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

Seven months of this year are behind us. Seven months of events hard to believe could happen as the year began with the dropping of that crystal ball atop the tower in Times Square on New Year’s Day. We’ve experienced a pandemic with more than 16 million cases of COVID-19 resulting in more than 650,000 deaths worldwide, so far. It’s not slowing down. Scientists tell us we haven’t started the second wave of the virus yet. That still faces us this winter and spring. We’ve had locust plagues across Africa that destroyed crops. 

Racial tension erupted in our country causing billions in damages and dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries in our major cities. The tensions spread across the western world into Britain, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia. New threats of violence rise from Russia as they encroach on the Polish borders and launch satellite killing technology into space. China and North Korea flex their muscles and threaten the Pacific rim, posing their ideologies against their neighboring countries’.

Now we have more news about the bubonic plague coming out of China and a new mutation of the H1N1 flu that proved so devastating to the world in the 1960s. So, we wonder what’s next as we brace for the next five month and maybe look forward to this year ending sooner rather than later. Maybe next year will hold a little more promise than this one. But then again…

As I’ve mentioned before, some of the things we faced this year we could do little about. Pandemics and plagues wash through the world no matter what we try to do to stop them. A new virus or bacteria or mutated something spreads from one person to another and suddenly it is out of control. Look back through recorded history and you will find evidence of plagues and pandemics that touched humanity in frightening numbers. This one, in fact, has been relatively mild in terms of the devastation compared to many. We just have much better communication and our news outlets publish only the worst stories they can find instead of the best. Bad news sells much better than good news.

But some of the things we faced this year we caused. And the more I read and try to understand, the more I see the root causes of some of the issue we face within our nation and our world. I don’t agree with the riots and destruction of property taking place in our cities, but we need to stop and listen to the problems. Is there systemic racism in our country? Begin to read. Search out why things are like they are. Discover the disparities among the cultures. Determine why the divide exists between whites and people of color. 

As I have studied more over the last couple of months and tried to listen to the stories of those not like me, I must admit, I wanted to be defensive and give pat answers to the disparities. Go to school. Get a job. Work hard. Anyone can get ahead in America. What I’m finding is that has not been and still is not true in any fair sense. And it is the policies those in authority put in place to distinguish between races. Before anyone thinks it is one political side or another, both sides of the aisle are equally guilty. Study the legislation of both parties and you’ll find laws, policies, and principally budget discrepancies that put money into the hands of whites at the decrement of not just blacks, but all people of color. 

For blacks, however, it began immediately after the Civil War when vagrancy became a crime, but the law was imposed primarily on black males without jobs. Then jailed black men were leased out to plantation owners. So, freed slaves found themselves working for almost nothing on the same plantations on which they had been slaves, but now the owners had no vested interest in caring for them because they were leased labor instead of property. For many, conditions worsened instead of improved as freedmen.

Redlining, a practice the Federal Housing Authority put in place to determine areas in cities at high risk for federally insured loans under the FHA and GI Bills identified primarily urban, black neighborhoods in those redlined areas. So, blacks could not take advantage of FHA loans or VA loans when those programs began in the mid-twentieth century. It wasn’t until 1980, the Realtor licensing codes allowed realtors to actively comingle races within neighborhoods without risk of losing their license. We created the divisions with our policies.

I’ve even thought about our stories lately as I’ve asked you to sit with someone not like you and asked you to really listen. I’ve mentioned before at my grandmother’s funeral, ninety-six of her family members gathered to honor her. I think at the time, twenty-three of them engaged in full-time ministry. The rest participated regularly in church, not just attending, but teaching, singing in choirs, sitting on boards, and so forth. My family descends from three brothers who came to the shores of this country in the 18th century on a mission to spread the gospel in this new world. 

Now listen to the story of someone my son’s age, but not like me. He has been arrested twice. Once for possession of a marijuana joint, and once for resisting arrest when he refused to lay face down in the mud. He his mom about his father asked about his father when he was younger; he’s in jail for possession of drugs. Second offense laws under the Clinton administration allowed for lifetime sentencing. He was one of those hit with that inexplicable punishment. His grandfather was also an ex-con, but he was killed coming out of a bar he cleaned to make extra money – a robbery gone bad. His widow thinks he was on his way home with his weekly pay of less than $40 in his pocket. 

Then his story gets remarkable worse. His great-grandfather worked as a sharecropper. His share of the crop was 30%, the owner took 70%. The family barely survived in the rundown shack with no electricity or running water. His great-great-grandfather was a freed slave under Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation but couldn’t get a job. The vagrancy laws at time said any black man without a job went to jail. The irony is, the plantation owner who owned him as a young slave took pretty good care of him as his property. As leased labor from the jail, that same plantation owner didn’t have much concern for the welfare of his hired “darkies,” he sometimes called them. His family history goes no further. Families split on the auction block or when sold between plantations. Property goes to the highest bidder when slaves aren’t people. 

I can trace my family history back into at least the middle ages with some proud history and a few dishonorable characters in the mix as well. He can trace his family only to the Civil War and no further. His race wasn’t not considered human, so it was okay to tear families apart, sell working aged boys and girls (six and seven) to others so your bill for upkeep wasn’t so high. Most of us can begin to imagine a history like that. We can’t imagine living in an area marked as dangerous and unfit for home loans or even loans for home improvement because someone decided the color of our skin automatically made us a financial risk. 

My baby boomer generation took advantage of policies that brought great economic boosts to almost every city across the country through federally insured loans, cheap education through the GI Bill, affordable housing in the suburbs, and more. But all those policies also had a dark side most of us never knew existed or most of us would have shouted about the injustice. As an example, in Georgia after WWII, 3200 soldiers received GI Bill funding to advance their education – 2 were black. Of the 67,000 total students receiving funding in the first years of the GI Bill, less than 100 were black. More than 1 million black soldiers served in WWII. The disparity in numbers are not because they didn’t want to take advantage of the funds, it was the discrimination in colleges and universities that kept people of color out. 

Do we have a problem in our country with systemic racism? We absolutely do. I have black friends. That’s not what this is about. I invite my black brothers and sisters to anything I go to or anything I enjoy. That’s not what this is about. I’ve worked with and for blacks with no problem. That’s not what this is about. It’s not even about police brutality or George Floyd. We have a problem in our country about recognizing the rights of all people. 

We did not condemn the Italians to the same fate as immigrants to this country. Nor did we condemn Greeks or Jews or Hispanics or Syrians or Swedish or any other immigrants except those with ebony pigmented skin. Those we segmented as lower-class, less privileged, high risk. We did it starting 400 years ago. 

I’m beginning to understand why the Black Lives Matter movement began and the just cause of its original founders. I’m learning about the inequities my race placed upon other people of color in this country, especially blacks, though policies and laws I never realized until I took the time to stop and study their real affects. I’m beginning to realize why other races talk about white privilege and white supremacy because of advantages my race created for ourselves at the expense of others. 

I still condemn the riots and violence. That is not the way to bring a solution to the problems we face. I condemn the Marxist and communist groups hiding behind the Black Lives Matter movement trying to overthrow our government. This is still the best country in which to live and to be able to resolve problems like this one. But it is huge. Not insurmountable, but it will take all of us relooking at our history and understanding what we did to pe ople not like me. We will need to come to the place Paul came when he said:

Now let me speak the truth as plainly as I know it in the Anointed One. I am not lying when I say that my conscience and the Holy Spirit are witnesses to my state of constant grief. It may sound extreme; but I wish that I were lost, cursed, and totally separated from the Anointed—if that would change the eternal destination of my brothers and sisters, my flesh and countrymen. (Romans 9:1-3 The VOICE)

When we begin to feel compassion for each other and understand the role we all play in the life of this country, good and bad, we can begin to find solutions to our problems. As a nation, we are truly blessed. It’s time we find ways to resolve the internal shortcomings we created while becoming the economic powerhouse of the world. We cannot continue to call ourselves an economic answer for the world if we allow our policies to slight a large segment of our own.

I don’t know the answers, but I know if we stop the violence, sit down and debate alternatives, we can find solutions. Americans are known for their ingenuity and inventiveness. Why don’t we put those characteristics to work and solve this great problem before we tear ourselves apart.

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked THE VOICE are taken from the THE VOICE (The Voice): Scripture taken from THE VOICE ™. Copyright© 2008 by Ecclesia Bible Society. Used by permission. Allrights reserved.

Show God’s Grace, June 29, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

The headlines scream about injustice, slavery, equality, and freedom recently. I wish the world could get rid of the first two and understand the last two. I fear we will never do either. We ended our ability to stop injustice and slavery when Adam and Eve decided they wanted to exercise the knowledge of God and found they fell far short. Cain killed his brother for offering a better sacrifice than he. Lamech murdered a young man who hit him. Violence and injustice plagued humankind ever since their rash actions.

Read every account of every nation, and you’ll find slavery rampant in its history. The seven wonders of the ancient world probably came into existence on the backs of slaves from conquered nations. Aristocrats in Greece and Rome had as many as 600 slaves attending their individual properties. Many of those providing sport for the spectators in the magnificent Colosseum in Rome were slaves. The great temples and palaces discovered in South America attributed to the Incas and Mayans were the result of slave labor from captured tribes.

Our nation and the western world owes its success to slaves working in fields and homes. The advances throughout history are principally the result of labor provided by conquered people. Is it right? No. Do I condone it? No. Does it still happen in the world? Unfortunately, it does. The drug and sex trafficking that goes on in the “civilized” world under our blinded eyes is nothing less than slavery. The child labor in certain parts of the world certainly borders on the same. We enjoy the benefits of their work while they live in squalid conditions. We think nothing of their slavery and injustice.

The question is, what can we do about it? Is the redistribution of property and wealth called for in some of the recent protests the answer? Examine countries that have tried it in the past, and you’ll find it doesn’t work. That ideology is known as socialism or communism, take your pick. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China are the best examples of those ideologies. Dissenters of the government policies don’t survive long within their borders. Government officials live in relative luxury compared to the rest of the populace, and even their luxury does not compare well to our upper-middle-class lifestyle in this country. Legislation cannot break the myth of equality we hope to find in our broken world. 

But we have hope. There is a way if we will but take it. We will still be slaves, but we are slaves now. All of us. Paul talks about it in his letter to the church in Rome in these words:

12 So don’t allow sin to rule in your mortal body, to make you obey its desires. 13 Nor should you present your limbs and organs to sin to be used for its wicked purposes. Rather, present yourselves to God, as people alive from the dead, and your limbs and organs to God, to be used for the righteous purposes of his covenant. 14 Sin won’t actually rule over you, you see, since you are not under law but under grace.

15 What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! 16 Don’t you know that if you present yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you really are slaves of the one you obey, whether that happens to be sin, which leads to death, or obedience, which leads to final vindication? 17 Thank God that, though you once were slaves to sin, you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were committed. 18 You were freed from sin, and now you have been enslaved to God’s covenant justice (19 I’m using a human picture because of your natural human weakness!). For just as you presented your limbs and organs as slaves to uncleanness, and to one degree of lawlessness after another, so now present your limbs and organs as slaves to covenant justice, which leads to holiness.

20 When you were slaves of sin, you see, you were free in respect of covenant justice. 21 What fruit did you ever have from the things of which you are now ashamed? Their destination is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and enslaved to God, you have fruit for holiness. Its destination is the life of the age to come. 23 The wages paid by sin, you see, are death; but God’s free gift is the life of the age to come, in the Messiah, Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6: 12-23 NTE)

We are either slaves to sin or slaves to God. He gives us the freedom to choose which we will follow, but we can’t be in the middle. Obedience to him or sin, those are the choices with no middle ground. You say, “I want to be free to do whatever I want.” 

Can I tell you that is not freedom. Obedience is real freedom. It’s like driving a car. I’m free to drive on the wrong side of the road. I’m free to drive off a cliff. I’m free to run into a tree. I’m free to drive 100 mph. I’m free to do all of those things, but I probably won’t live very long or at least will pay a very high price doing so. But if I obey the rules set out by an authority higher than me – stay in my lane, drive the speed limit, obey the traffic laws – I am likely to have a much more pleasant experience and drive my car for years without unpleasant consequences.

It’s the same with the laws God sets in place. We sometimes act like dumb animals and try to stick our heads through the fence to get to the grass on the other side. When we do, we get stuck or shocked, or the barbed-wire leaves horrible scars to remind us of our foolishness. But inside the fence, God placed luscious green pastureland, full of nutritious food. We are free to run and frolic in the field all day with him with no fear.

Why do we push through the fence? Like Adam, we think we are smarter than God. We want what we think is freedom. We want to do what we want to do. That is not freedom. It leads to addiction, pain, suffering, the penalty of sin is death. You can choose who you will follow but think about where real freedom lies. It’s not in breaking the rules, but in following them. It’s not in ridding the world of injustice but ridding my heart of injustice. It’s in making myself a slave to righteousness.

The problem across our country and around the world is not one of inequality and injustice as much as our thinking we can be equal with God. He is God; we are not. When we figure that out and let him be God in our lives, his love will begin to show through us. The violence will stop. The injustice will end. Slavery will no longer exist. Evil will be defeated. Unfortunately, I predict broken humanity will continue to enjoy its brokenness until Jesus returns. Some will follow him; many will not. 

Those who listen to God’s spirit must share his love, demonstrate the kind of humanness God intended from the beginning, show not justice but grace to a world in desperate need of God’s grace now more than ever.

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked NTE are taken from the NEW TESTAMENT FOR EVERYONE: Scripture are taken from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011.

Should We Sin More? June 22, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

What’s happening around the world reminds me of a situation Paul addressed when he wrote his letter to the church in Rome. As I watch the nation tire of the pandemic, people forget the disease has not been conquered. It is still as contagious and as dangerous as ever. The spread has not stopped. 

Federal and state officials gave us some pretty drastic measures to slow the spread, and it worked while we implemented them. We stayed in our homes, and instead of the predicted hundred million infected, we stand at just over two million. Instead of more than a million dead, we are just over 115 million. But we tired of staying at home. We decided we didn’t want to wear masks or keep our distance. 

The number of cases across the United States is showing our dislike of being told what to do. Some are saying the increase in numbers is the second wave of the pandemic. Unfortunately, it is not. It is our failure to do what would stop the disease from spreading. The second wave will not come until late fall, October or November, when the virus will again race through the world with another equally virulent strain, just like a flu season. We understand how coronaviruses operate. This virus is just a new one, more contagious, more deadly. 

In our haste to get out of our homes, we forgot the rules about what keeps the disease at bay. It’s not that we can’t get out of our homes, but we have to do the things that keep us safe. Masks to stop asymptomatic carriers from spreading the virus to the vulnerable in our population who then take it home to the rest of the family. 

Scientists estimate that 85% of those infected, now, are infected by another family member. That happens because someone carelessly goes out without thinking about risks to others and spreads the disease. The unmasked share the virus, and one of them takes it home to their family, and more than half of that family will end up in the hospital. Those are the current statistics.

So why does that careless transmission remind me of Paul’s letter to the Romans? Because there were some, who received God’s grace, his forgiveness, and thought they could just take advantage of it. Here is Paul’s answer to them.

What are we to say, then? Shall we continue in the state of sin, so that grace may increase? 2 Certainly not! We died to sin; how can we still live in it? 3 Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into the Messiah, Jesus, were baptized into his death? 4 That means that we were buried with him, through baptism, into death, so that, just as the Messiah was raised from the dead through the father’s glory, we too might behave with a new quality of life. 5 For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

6 This is what we know: our old humanity was crucified with the Messiah, so that the bodily solidarity of sin might be abolished, and that we should no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 A person who has died, you see, has been declared free from all charges of sin.

8 But if we died with the Messiah, we believe that we shall live with him. 9 We know that the Messiah, having been raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has any authority over him. 10 The death he died, you see, he died to sin, once and only once. But the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 In the same way you, too, must calculate yourselves as being dead to sin, and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus. (Romans 5:1-11 NTE)

The more I read and study Jesus’ words, the more I understand his kingdom is already here. Jesus’ death and resurrection inaugurated the coming of the kingdom to earth. He is the king of the kingdom of God. God invites us into his kingdom as his children when we believe in Jesus as Messiah, the one sent by him to redeem us from our sins. When we ask for his forgiveness, his grace is abundant and he gives it freely, recreating us for his kingdom. 

There will be more to this re-creation to come when he returns. Our physical bodies will be transformed into something we don’t yet understand. We will obtain a physical form like his resurrected form. One that you can see and touch, yet can appear behind locked doors and disappear without warning as Jesus did during those forty days after his resurrection. We don’t understand the physics of how that can happen, but if the early Christians willingly gave their lives for the story of the events, I expect we can believe in their authenticity. 

To those who would say, “It’s just not possible.” I would retort, “Neither was flight 150 years ago. Neither was the thought of traveling to the moon 100 years ago. Dark matter was thought a ridiculous hypothesis when posited by Lord Kelvin in 1884. It almost ruined his career as a physicist. It did no better for Henri Poincaré in 1906 or Jacobus Kapteyn in 1922. And the hypothesis wasn’t taken seriously until the 1960’s and 1970’s when nothing else could explain some of the action of subatomic particles physicists saw in cyclotrons. 

So what else don’t we know about the universe? For one, we don’t understand how creation happened. Let’s assume for argument’s sake there was a big bang. How did the big bang happen? Where did the material come from? Who compressed into a form that made it bang in the first place? Genesis doesn’t say how. It just says out of nothing, God spoke and there was light. We can find as many arguments as there are people as to how things evolved from there. But it seems few want to argue backward from the bang. 

How will God re-create a new heaven and new earth? I don’t know. Will we all “go” to heaven. The more I read, the less I think we will. The more I read, I think heaven will “come” to earth. Remember Jesus’ message? The kingdom of heaven is near. God’s kingdom is near. This is what the kingdom of God is like. He tells us to pray, “Your [God’s] kingdom come, on earth…” 

So what does that mean for us? I think it means we need to prepare for his coming when he will reign in his new kingdom here. Will he remake it and restore it? Yes. But maybe, just maybe those who follow him will be left to help re-create it into God’s original design for his kingdom. And what was that original design? Humanity caring for all of his creation – tending the animals; caring for the plants; helping each other; living in harmony with each other and with God; God walking in his kingdom with humanity. 

I think it also means the more we mess up this place now, the more we will have to clean up when he comes. I’m not sure he will wave a magic wand and make everything go away. Could he do that? Sure. Will he do that? I’m not so sure about that. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” cannot be found in the Bible, but Solomon and Paul imply it. James almost tells us the same thing. It may be that 1,000-year reign Revelation talks about is the time it will take to put everything back the way it’s supposed to be. 

So now that I’ve rattled your theology with some things to contemplate for the next week or month or lifetime, I invite you to read carefully Jesus’ words. Don’t just skim through them the way we usually do because they become so familiar to us, but really read them. I think you’ll find that nowhere does he say his followers will “go” to heaven or his kingdom, but rather the kingdom will “come here.” Think about what difference that makes in how you live day to day.

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked NTE are taken from the NEW TESTAMENT FOR EVERYONE: Scripture are taken from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011.

A Formula for Hope, June 15, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

We will remember 2020. Many said that about 1963, the year President Kennedy was shot. And 1967, the year we Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. And 1990, when the world faced off against Iraq after they invaded Kuwait. And 2001, when the Twin Towers fell in New York City. But this year, wow! Coronavirus has infected two million Americans and seven million globally. More than 110,000 have died in this country, and we are approaching a half million around the world. 

Then the murder hornets invaded the west coast. Shortly after, protests against racial injustice swept across the country, turning violent in too many places, causing millions of dollars in damages and the deaths of innocent people of all colors. The economists already declared a recession. Stocks almost recovered to pre-COVID heights, but only because of speculative trading if you read the tea leaves correctly. Companies that have already filed Chapter 7 and 11 bankruptcy stocks are exploding because uninformed traders think they will bounce back. They probably won’t, which means those stocks look artificially and dangerously high. Those traders are about to lose their investments when the stock market stabilizes in the next few weeks and months.       

Unemployment stands almost as high as during the depression. And this phenomenon isn’t limited to the US. It reaches around the globe because of the pandemic that, except for a handful, affects every country. Suffering is everywhere. You see hopelessness in the eyes of millions. But there is an answer to the desperation that seems so pervasive in the situations that predominate this year. Despite the terrible events that keep piling one on the other, I can assure you; there is hope.

That hope isn’t found in another stimulus check, though. There isn’t enough money in the world to buy hope. You won’t find hope in legislation that brings equality to every race, we’ve tried that. It failed before and will fail again. Defunding police departments won’t stop police brutality, but it will unleash an unbridled criminal element on a defenseless citizenry. Vaccines won’t stop pandemics. Another disease will sweep through the world in a few years just as virulent as this one with devastating effect. 

We can do nothing to provide hope to the world because we created the chaos that plagues us. But we can find hope. The Apostle Paul tells us how in his letter to the early followers of Jesus in the church in Rome in the first century. He writes:

Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness,[a] we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. 3 But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, 4 endurance produces character, and character produces hope. 5 This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

6 While we were still weak, at the right moment, Christ died for ungodly people. 7 It isn’t often that someone will die for a righteous person, though maybe someone might dare to die for a good person. 8 But God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us. (Romans 5:1-8 CEB)

I don’t care much for the formula Paul gives us, but through the centuries, Christians prove it true. Trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. We stand firm on that hope; it doesn’t put us to shame, we know it to be true, we boast in the hope of God’s glory because the Holy Spirit poured God’s love into our hearts.

Let’s backtrack through Paul’s formula in these verses. Despite that fact that we were God’s enemies, sinners, disobedient toward him, he showed his love for us by dying for us. He took my sins and your sins to the cross so heaven and earth could join together at that spot. He died for ungodly people, sinners, us. 

Why? So by accepting his forgiveness, his spirit could live in us and his love could energize our actions and our love toward others. He enables us to love those we could not love without him. The Holy Spirit pours God’s love into our hearts. We see others differently. We love with his love. His spirit enables us to live a life of love and hope for his glory. 

The hope in the Christian throughout the centuries sparked incredible action. Not cathedrals and churches and edifices with stained glass windows, but hospitals, schools, orphanages, shelters for abused women and children, food and clothing pantries, and thousands of other ways men and women help the hurting. Christians run toward the hurting, not away from them. 

Please remember, not everyone who says they are Christian have Jesus in their heart. That is the problem with much of Christendom today. Many know the words to say, but have never experienced his life-changing power. Despite their declaration, they are no more Christian than I am a neurosurgeon, even if I said I am. You certainly don’t want me to open your scalp any time soon. 

God’s love drives Christians to act because God first loved us, forgave us, and pour his love into our hearts giving us hope for tomorrow. People recognize those loving actions as character. It’s not the money given or the legislator trying to get elected or the pharmaceutical company passing pills. It’s the man or woman standing in the breech helping the needy, getting their hands dirty, disregarding what others might think of them for doing so that defines character. 

And helping those in need means getting involved in life and life is messy. It always means endurance. Life is not a sprint, but a marathon. In the church we often remark methods change, but the message never changes. It’s the same with life. Involving ourselves with others is always messy, always emotional, always painful at times, but it is the work God calls us to do if we love as he loves. Imagine if God had given up on you the first time you did something wrong. Where would you be? Can we do any less for those he puts in our path? Endure.

What do we endure? Problems. Trouble. Suffering. Life. We face all the issue of life good and a lot of bad because we, humanity, brought sin into the world and every one of us contributes to that pile. None of us are free from it. Each of us brings our little piece of selfishness to the table and until we give ourselves completely to Christ, we continue to contribute to the mess call life. Even then, our imperfections in this world will cause pain and suffering to those around us. We can’t help it. We will be misunderstood, misinterpreted, abused, maligned. But we also don’t need to complain about it. Jesus went to the cross misunderstood, misinterpreted, abused, maligned. He died for us. 

We have access into God’s grace, his unmerited favor, by faith through Jesus. Because we have access to God’s grace, we have peace with God through Jesus. And because of his faithfulness we are made righteous before God. That is not a small thing.

Remember what Isaiah said when he saw God behind the cherubim seated on his throne? “Woe, I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips.” God put his hand over Moses so he would not see his face and die. He did the same with Elijah. We cannot stand in the presence of a holy God. But because of Jesus sacrifice on the cross, we are made righteous before him and invited into his presence. How awesome a privilege that we should never take for granted. 

2020 is an unforgettable year. Make it so not because of the problems highlighted in the news, but because of a renewed relationship with the King of kings. Meditate on Romans 5:1-8 and remember that “while we were still weak, at the right moment, Christ died for ungodly people. 7 It isn’t often that someone will die for a righteous person, though maybe someone might dare to die for a good person. 8 But God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked CEB are taken from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE (CEB): Scriptures taken from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE copyright© 2011, 2012. Used by permission.

Not a Big Splash, June 1, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

If you are like me, you probably can’t help but read at least some of the news every day about what’s happening around the world with this pandemic. Here we are with over 100,000 deaths in the US. It’s a little hard to believe something like this would happen in our lifetime with all the advancements in medical care, but we face it every day. And the end still reaches out in front of us with a predicted second wave in just a few short months. 

I’m encouraged by some of the news, though. I read a few stories about celebrities giving hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars to feed those less fortunate. Those left without jobs as a result of businesses closing to stem the tide of the viral spread. It’s great to see those stories sneak into the overwhelming number of bad news articles of gloom and doom that bombard us every day. 

What I find most fascinating from today’s news, though, is the almost total absence of the little things that neighbors and strangers do in small ways to help each other in this crisis. We tout the big splash people we don’t expect to share their wealth when they do so but never talk about the millions of those who generously share every day, easing the suffering of those around them.

As an associate pastor, I get to watch the actions of my church and its members as they share their lives. A food pantry serves almost four hundred families a week with dry goods,  produces, and baked items for a family of four. Hopefully, we will be able to again open the clothing pantry, job assistance, and life skills classes like GED completion when some of the social separation restrictions ease. 

I see stories of members making meals for shut-ins, providing contact and comfort for those who have lost friends and loved ones, and cannot grieve as we could before the COVID restrictions in hospital and funeral settings. I hear about drive-by birthday parties and graduation celebrations. I watch zoom groups connect just to share with each other and make sure we are all okay mentally and physically throughout the week. Food at a neighbor’s door. A yard randomly mowed. Flowers left on a doorstep. Cards zipping through the mail. Tokens of gratitude showing up through Amazon deliveries. Dozens of small, seemingly insignificant acts that brighten the day of another person that extends the love of Christ.

Those names will never make the news. Their acts of kindness will go unnoticed by the general public. CNN will not put a camera or a microphone in front of them and marvel at their generosity and splash their picture across the Mega Screen in Times Square. But God takes not of every act we do. Paul enumerates the responsibilities of those reborn in his letter to the church in Rome.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;

Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.

Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.

Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.

Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; (Romans 8:9-16 NIV)

One word sums up our responsibility. Love. Jesus gave us two commands that engulf the rest of what we should do as citizens of his kingdom. Love God and love others. That’s it. He went on to say we can’t love God, who we can’t see, if we don’t love others we can see. 

The unusual conditions we face today present an incredible opportunity for Christians to show what it means to love God. Loving him means we must love others, too. Jesus said it. He understood it and demonstrated it for the thirty-plus years he lived with us. We certainly make mistakes in how we present ourselves as Christians from time to time, but now is an excellent time just to show those around us that we care. 

Find ways to connect. Take a meal to a neighbor and leave it on their doorstep. Ring the bell and go. We don’t need credit for doing God’s work. We don’t need our names in the paper or CNN showing up. All I care about is that my name is written in the Book of Life. But because of everything he has done for me, doesn’t he deserve my giving something in return?

It’s interesting when you look at some statistics. Congress continually talks about wanting to help those in need through legislation and programs. The average income in the Senate is just over $2M a year and in the House, just over $1.5M a year. Yet their charitable giving according to their tax records average less than 2%. So I guess they just want to help with our money, not theirs. Because middle-income charitable giving hovers closer to 10%, I sometimes wonder where our elected officials’ hearts are. Do they really want to help, or do they want to get votes from those with a heart to help? It does raise an interesting question. 

Should we look at Paul’s description of our responsibilities again? Perhaps it will encourage you to be different in this new normal we face. Some things have changed for the better because of our separation from the hustle and bustle of life. Maybe we can focus on what we should do as the body of Christ as some of the constraints lift in the coming days. Listen again and let Paul’s words settle not just in your mind and heart, but in your hands and feet as you daily work as for the Lord.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;

Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.

Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.

Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.

Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; (Romans 8:9-16 NIV)

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked NIV are taken from the NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (NIV): Scripture is taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™. Used by permission of Zondervan

Look for Blessings, May 23, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.
As this podcast comes out, we celebrate Memorial Day in the United States. A time to remember servicemen and women who have fallen in service to our country. But the day has become more of an extra day for sales in retail stores and the day that marks the opening of parks and recreation facilities than a day of remembrance.
Perhaps this year will be a little. Most of the country still suffers under severe economic strain, so we don’t have a lot of money to spend, no matter how good the sales might be. Some parks and facilities could open, but remain closed due to the constraints placed on them. Beaches opened in most places, but many remain empty for fear of viral spread.
This year is different in many ways. Doors stay shut. Everyone remains at double-arms length. Masks are not just a fashion statement, but protection against an unseen enemy.
Perhaps we can take time this Memorial Day to think about those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect us. As we continue to struggle through these uncertain days with the Corona-SARS-2 virus wreaking havoc around the world, thousands stand in the gap for us trying to make sense of the disease and stop the flood of sick and dying.
Memorial Day has always been about the Armed Forces in the past. Still, I don’t think it would be out of line to remember the first responders and medical professionals that work tirelessly to keep us as healthy as possible under these incredible conditions as well. Having served in the Army Medical Department, many of my friends and acquaintances still serve in those most dangerous areas, putting their lives at risk for us. Many of those professionals not only suffered the effects of the disease, but as you know, some succumbed to its effects and passed away. They, too, died for their fellow man, just as soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines.
Peter wrote to early Christians suffering under the hands of persecutors. In his letter, he encourages them to rejoice. He wrote:

Dear friends, don’t be surprised about the fiery trials that have come among you to test you. These are not strange happenings. Instead, rejoice as you share Christ’s suffering. You share his suffering now so that you may also have overwhelming joy when his glory is revealed. If you are mocked because of Christ’s name, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory—indeed, the Spirit of God—rests on you.
And later.
Therefore, humble yourselves under God’s power so that he may raise you up in the last day. Throw all your anxiety onto him, because he cares about you. Be clearheaded. Keep alert. Your accuser, the devil, is on the prowl like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith. Do so in the knowledge that your fellow believers are enduring the same suffering throughout the world. After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, the one who called you into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will himself restore, empower, strengthen, and establish you. To him be power forever and always. Amen. 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 CE

I think the longer we endure this pandemic, the more anxious people become. It’s natural. We want it to be over. We want to believe science can create a pill or vaccine or something that will take this thing away. Aren’t we smart enough with all our genomic studies, our ability to conquer space, our ability to clone a sheep – aren’t we able to defeat this simple virus?
The answer is…maybe. Scientists are working to change a seven to ten-year approval process into a twelve to eighteen-month process. That skips a lot of policies and procedures the government put in place over the years for our protection. I know it sounds like a lot of bureaucracy and a waste of money. Through the years, those precautions saved a lot of lives, though. So we might get a vaccine in a few more months, but I won’t hold my breath.
I think I will listen to Peter’s encouragement. This suffering isn’t from God. He isn’t punishing the world for its evil. We punish ourselves. God is in the business of rescuing us from our sins. He sent his Son for just that purpose. The suffering we endure comes because Adam and Eve introduced disobedience and corruption into the cosmos and disrupted its perfect order. We contribute to that chaos and destruction with every passing generation.
But remember Peter’s words? “… don’t be surprised about the fiery trials that have come among you to test you. These are not strange happenings. 13 Instead, rejoice as you share Christ’s suffering. You share his suffering now so that you may also have overwhelming joy when his glory is revealed. … you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory—indeed, the Spirit of God—rests on you.”
We may not feel very blessed going through the pandemic separated from our friends and those we cherish. We might long for yesterday when we could go about freely and do as we pleased. We might shake our fist at God, asking why this tragedy sweeps around the world affecting so many of his children.
To your questions and complaints, you might hear his still, small voice in the whisper of the wind, “Rejoice as you share in your suffering now, so that you may have overwhelming joy when my Son’s glory is revealed. You are blessed, for my Spirit rests on you.”
In these uncertain times, recognize the blessings that surround you. God holds all of this in his hands and gives us hope even in the face of what may appear hopeless circumstances. Trust him, and as Paul exhorts us, “Rejoice in all things.” It’s not always easy, but in everything, we can find blessings from God. He loves us and has our best in mind, even when we can’t see it.
You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day.

Scriptures marked CEB are taken from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE (CEB): Scriptures taken from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE copyright© 2011, 2012. Used by permission.

Discover God, May 18, 2020

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Today’s Podcast

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of the pandemic news. I don’t think it’s so much the news about the pandemic as it is the debate about who is at fault for the predicament we’re in economically and physically. Here we sit with unemployment at its highest since the Great Depression. That’s understandable with everyone locked in their homes. It’s hard to employ workers when businesses have no income because no one can come to their place of business to purchase goods and services. 

So we try to help, and in so doing, put our economy in another tailspin by doubling our national debt with programs that I’m not sure help much. Bailouts that were supposed to provide small businesses funds for wages ran out of money within minutes. A $1,200 check to most adults barely covers groceries for a month these days—and then what? Democrats blame Republicans for delays. Republicans blame Democrats for delays. Neither party seems to recognize the real culprit in all of this drama is a new virus to which no one is immune. So it really doesn’t matter what either party says or does, we were in trouble from the start. Every decision was a bad decision. Pandemics are like that. 

We lifted Germany and Singapore as the best models of how to avoid the spread of the virus. The spread appears to have been delayed at best. Their numbers have drastically increased in the last few weeks. So, I’m not sure anyone could do anything about what has happened. At best, we could flatten the curve as governors, and country leaders tried to do in various ways, some more successfully than others perhaps, but none have beat the bug. 

The question I’ve been asking myself through these bad news stories is, what good can we find in this pandemic? One important thing I’ve discovered, our priorities changed quickly. Not many ask, “When will I see my football team play again?” Or complain about the dress code at school. Suddenly, those invisible people in factories and hospitals like the janitorial staff become heroes keeping us safe. Teachers and healthcare workers become more important in the eyes of the public than the multimillion-dollar movie stars and sports figures. We find out the researcher behind the microscope is much more important to us than the newscaster in front of the camera. 

In the past, we made gods of the wrong people and the wrong things. In this country, wealth, fame, position, power, became gods to us. We worshipped these without saying so. These became the most valued things in our lives. The pandemic is the great equalizer for all of us, though. Wealth doesn’t keep you safe. Nor does fame or position or power. When the virus decides to strike, it will invade and destroy whomever it chooses. 

Paul visited Athens in his missionary journeys and found the same problem there. The Athenians had more visible representations of their gods, but our worship of things other than the true and living God is no different than theirs. Here is what Paul had to say, recorded for us in the Book of Acts:

So Paul took his stand in the open space at the Areopagus and laid it out for them. “It is plain to see that you Athenians take your religion seriously. When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed, to the god nobody knows. I’m here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you’re dealing with.

“The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn’t live in custom-made shrines or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn’t take care of himself. He makes the creatures; the creatures don’t make him. Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us. He’s not remote; he’s near. We live and move in him, can’t get away from him! One of your poets said it well: ‘We’re the God-created.’ Well, if we are the God-created, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to think we could hire a sculptor to chisel a god out of stone for us, does it?

“God overlooks it as long as you don’t know any better—but that time is past. The unknown is now known, and he’s calling for a radical life-change. He has set a day when the entire human race will be judged and everything set right. And he has already appointed the judge, confirming him before everyone by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:22-31 TM)

Perhaps in this pandemic, we can take some time to reflect on what is most important in our lives. Before we get back into the mad rush of life and everything opens up to a new normal, maybe we can take inventory of our before COVID life and ask ourselves, on what did I focus my attention? To what did I give my allegiance? What was most important to me if someone watched how I spent my time and my money? Could others see that I genuinely worshipped the God of all creation? Did my behavior show that He is more important to me than everything else in my life? 

It’s not too late to figure out God is calling each of us to a radical life change. He wants to renew an intimate relationship with His highest creation. Jesus introduced Him as “Abba,” a close, personal term for father, like Daddy. But He also reminds us that Abba is the creator of all things, the Almighty, the Master of the Universe. 

While we are enclosed in our homes, blocked from the rat race that consumed us before COVID, maybe it’s time to look for God. He doesn’t play hide-and-seek, but He is God and desires us to come to Him understanding who He is—God. When we find Him, when we worship Him, He brings to our hearts an indescribable joy and peace even in the middle of events such as these. Will He remove us from the pandemic? Probably not. We suffer alongside the rest of humanity, but we live with hope, and that’s the difference.

What is your god? Better yet, Who is your God? Discover Him while you have some time on your hands. 

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked TM are taken from the THE MESSAGE: THE BIBLE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH (TM): Scripture taken from THE MESSAGE: THE BIBLE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH, copyright©1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group

Some Things Don’t Make Sense, February 3, 2020

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Today’s Podcast

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

Some things just don’t make sense. Why do most animals in a herd point the same direction in a field? Why do penguins live only in the coldest climate on earth? Why do most whales, the largest animals in the ocean, eat only the plankton, the smallest of sea life? Why is an octopus considered one of the smartest of sea creatures, incredibly ugly, and seldom seen in the wild? Why do some areas of the world get torrential rains while others get only a few inches of rain over decades?

We sometimes call them imponderables, things that have no concrete answers. Science is uncovering some logical responses, but still, we are baffled by the mysteries of the world and the whys that surround us every day. We have learned more in the last 100 years than in the rest of man’s history, but we still have many unanswered questions about the world in which we live. 

We think we’re pretty smart today since we know a lot about quantum physics and how things stay together. We’ve learned about the universe and the fact we are not the center or even near the center of one of several billion galaxies. Our Milky Way seemed so large until we began to compare it to more enormous galaxies around us. We thought we understood the weather until we found we really don’t, and our weather folks still get it right about two-thirds of the time. Yep, we think we are wise today with the trillions of words housed in the Library of Congress on floating around on the Internet. 

Paul got it right, though, when he wrote his first letter to the members of the church at Colossae in the first century. 

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Everyone around him thought they were wise, but compared with God’s wisdom, we are pretty foolish. We don’t know much of anything. Scientists will tell you the more we know, the more we figure out we don’t know. But God is the creator of all things. He knows it all. He’s the one who made all the rules we are just on the edge of trying to figure out. In the 1970s, we sent two experimental crafts called Voyager, to explore the outer edge of our solar system. Forty years later, they found out all our assumptions about the border of our solar system were wrong. Now those two satellites are still headed where no one has gone before but have barely scratched the surface of real space travel. 

Our brilliance turns into ignorance when we see all that is out there beyond the confines of our puny planet. Our greatest wisdom appears as foolishness compared to God’s understanding. And what does Paul use as his comparison? The cross. 

How can we explain why God would do such a thing? We can’t, except that he loves us more than we can ever understand. We disobey him, but he loves us. We run from him, but he loves us. We curse him and do everything he asks us not to do, yet he loves us enough to wrap himself in human flesh and live among us to show us just how much he loves us. 

He died the most horrible death imaginable, crucifixion at the hands of Roman soldiers, after an unjust kangaroo trial. He never did anything to justify the suffering he endured, but he took it, all the same, to show us how much he loves us. Jesus taught radical lessons that said follow a pattern set by a heart filled with love instead of the rules given to the prophets and priests. He said to do two things, and you’ll be in good stead with the creator. Love God and love others. 

He never said it would be easy to follow those two rules, but that’s a straightforward list to remember. It’s sure a lot easier than remembering the laundry list of dos and don’ts most organized religions give us to follow. Just love.

Paul tells us what that looks like, and again, it doesn’t make sense to us. It looks like the cross. Be ready to be hated by the world. Be ready to be misunderstood. Be ready to suffer when you share the good news of what God has done to redeem us from the deceiver who wants to capture our soul. It sounds crazy to those who have not given themselves to him. But for those who have, for those who know his forgiveness, the cross is the answer. The empty tomb is proof. 

Are you ready to let go of the wisdom of the world and accept the wisdom of the one who created all things? It takes faith. It costs everything. God never accepts second place in your life. He wants everything you have and everything you are at his immediate disposal. But God never makes mistakes. He knows how best to bring you safely home. All you need to do is believe and follow him. It’s a good day to start.   

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

Scriptures marked NIV are taken from the NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (NIV): Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™. Used by permission of Zondervan