The renewal of our mind
Dr. Roberto Miranda
(Audio: Spanish)
SUMMARY: In Philippians 3:12-14, the Apostle Paul talks about the transformation of our thinking and how to overcome our past to become what God wants us to be. He emphasizes that the Christian life is a journey of knowing God intimately and becoming more like Him, and that we never truly arrive. We must have a degree of desperation for God to transform us and let go of the past. Paul says he continues to strive towards his goal of knowing Christ and urges us to forget what lies behind and reach out to what lies ahead. The Christian life is a process of continual renewal and growth.
In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of leaving behind mental habits, attitudes, and practices that hinder our sanctification process. He advises naming our giants and presenting them to the Lord in prayer and fasting. The speaker also stresses the need to renew our minds through the word of God, positive confession, and times of worship. He reminds us that the Christian life is a long-term journey that requires patience with ourselves and forgiveness when we fail. God uses all the materials of our lives, including tragedies and failures, to form us according to His specifications. The speaker shares a personal conversation with a young lady going through a difficult time, emphasizing the importance of seeing the potential for good that can come from suffering.
God can take advantage of the suffering and struggles in our lives to prepare us to be agents of His grace to others. He wants us to be complex Christians who have experienced a lot and can understand and relate to others in any situation. God is not picky and wants strong, realistic Christians who are not scandalized by anything. He wants us to know Him in all facets of His life and personality, including the sufferings. Through our experiences and struggles, God is forming us into beautiful and complex people who reflect the complexity of the Father. We should pray for God to take us to new levels of knowing Him and form a beautiful and complex community.
In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of leaving behind mental habits, attitudes, and practices that hinder our sanctification process. He advises naming our giants and presenting them to the Lord in prayer and fasting. The speaker also stresses the need to renew our minds through the word of God, positive confession, and times of worship. He reminds us that the Christian life is a long-term journey that requires patience with ourselves and forgiveness when we fail. God uses all the materials of our lives, including tragedies and failures, to form us according to His specifications. The speaker shares a personal conversation with a young lady going through a difficult time, emphasizing the importance of seeing the potential for good that can come from suffering.
God can take advantage of the suffering and struggles in our lives to prepare us to be agents of His grace to others. He wants us to be complex Christians who have experienced a lot and can understand and relate to others in any situation. God is not picky and wants strong, realistic Christians who are not scandalized by anything. He wants us to know Him in all facets of His life and personality, including the sufferings. Through our experiences and struggles, God is forming us into beautiful and complex people who reflect the complexity of the Father. We should pray for God to take us to new levels of knowing Him and form a beautiful and complex community.
The word Philippians, Chapter 3. I want to conclude the meditation that I began two weeks ago, this is the third week, on the transformation of our thinking, the transformation of the mind, how to overcome the past, how to transcend the personal history that many times it grabs us and prevents us from entering what God wants from us.
And I'm going to start again with the same word that I've been using in Philippians, Chapter 3, starting with verse 12. If you have your Bible you can also go to verse 8 and from there because it's all part of the same word. . But where the crux of the situation lies is there in verse 12 through 14.
Again, what I want to do on this day, as I did this morning, is to compile, summarize, visit some points that are well worth reinforcing again, because they are truths that deserve insistence, and return to them to complete this meditation. There are many things that stuck with me but I don't know if I'm going to be able to cover them all. What I want is to describe a process that we have to go through in order to become what God wants us to be.
And you know that the Apostle Paul is a man of processes. Pablo, your biography is very vivid in your writings. He is a very personal man, very honest, very transparent and we can see his trajectory through his writings. He is a man who lived an agonizing life, in the best sense of the word. He was not a saint created overnight, but we see his trajectory, and that is why he can speak to us as well. He had to transcend and overcome many moments, many things in his own life. And he talks about his past, and how he had to forget about his past, although one obviously doesn't forget the past, but he did have to leave many things behind in order to go towards what Christ had called him to achieve and grasp. .
And he talks in the first few verses, he talks about his great passion to meet Jesus. I liked that hymn that Kathy used for her dance, “I want to meet you.” And that should be the desire of all of us, to know Christ and become what Christ wants us to be. Now, to get to that image of what God has for us, you have to go through a lot of difficult, demanding territory, with a lot of texture and many moments of difficulty.
So Paul talks about his desire to know Christ, and that's what I talked about on Wednesday. In verse 10 he says that “…he struggles in order to know him, to know Jesus, and to know the power of his resurrection and to share in his sufferings and to become like him in his death.”
So, he talks about the image that God has for him and also for us. God's desire is that we come to know him. Do you know that God wants to be known by you? God, unlike many other religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, which tell us about a distant God, even Islam has a lot of that distant God. These religions are very passionate and very dedicated but they do not know that God in the intimate way that Christianity allows us to know God. Even Judaism, which is our matrix, when the Lord speaks of the Father as Aba, was something totally unusual, it was something that the Pharisees could not understand because they saw God as something so holy, so distant, that they could not access him.
But Jesus brings a new image of the Father, of a Father who loves us, treats us intimately, knows us and wants to be known by us. So much so that he became human so that we could consume him. They made it our custom. He came down to our level for Him to know us better, because as He is God, He knows everything and knows our humanity and knows every aspect of our life, but He also wanted to experience our humanity which He couldn't really because He is God and we knew in theory. But he really wanted to know us and that is why he became a man to live what we live.
And Jesus knowing us in this way, says the Bible, that now when He intercedes for us, He intercedes like no priest of Judaism could intercede for us, because He intercedes for us knowing what we are. He sympathizes with us and can intercede in a very personal way. God wants to be known that way by us.
And that is what Paul is talking about here. When we know God as he wants us to know him, it revolutionizes our life. Many people are religious but have not had an absolutely personal experience of the Father. And that is what Christianity offers. So, Paul says, "I want to know him, that's what I live for."
But then in verse 12 he complicates things and says, “…not that I have already reached it.” He reminds us that he is still in the process of knowing God, in the process of becoming what God wants him to be. Again, the Apostle Paul lets us know that it is a trajectory. It is a journey. The Christian life is a journey, brothers. The Christian life is a journey that never ends, we never truly arrive.
And I believe that one of the things that we have to learn about the Christian faith is that it is a trajectory. Since we enter into the knowledge of Christ, we enter into a journey, and that journey only ends when we die. And I believe that having that knowledge of the Christian life as a journey should transform our experience. Because many people enter Christianity as if it were an arrival. They accept Christ, they come forward, and then the lives of many Christians become simply religious. It is not something dynamic.
And I believe that for you to truly become what God wants you to be, it is important that you understand that your life is a journey and that God calls you on a wonderful journey of knowing Him and that He loves you… He loves you. wants to know you too in a different way.
One of my favorite verses these days, these months, has been – and I think I have shared it with you – one of the psalms, it says, “I will make you understand,” God speaking to the psalmist, “I will make you understand and I will teach you the way you should walk. Upon you I will fix my eyes.”
And I love those passages of Scripture that suggest to us that the Christian life is a journey of knowing the Father, it's a thing of intimacy with Him, it's a thing of getting to know Him more intimately. It is a trajectory. Don't impoverish your experience of God by turning it into something passive and static. Enter the Gospel knowing that God wants to have love with you. God wants to make your life a process of intimacy, of getting to know him more thoroughly.
And that's what Paul says, “…Not that I have reached it already.” Imagine, this man wrote two thirds of the New Testament. He had experiences in Seventh Heaven, he says, and heard things from God that he says he wasn't even given permission to share with other human beings. At that level of experience he had with the mysteries of heaven. And yet, this man says, "Not that I've already achieved it, nor that I'm already perfect."
You know brother, you never arrive. No one can go so far as to say that I no longer have anything to learn about myself or about faith, about Christ. The Christian life is a life of perpetual renewal.
You will remember that verse that also serves as my life motto, “For the path of the righteous is like the light of the dawn that increases until the day is perfect.” And when I think of that I think of an arrow traveling endlessly through the sky, through the atmosphere and never quite reaching its target, but it goes up, it goes up, up, up. And so it is that you have to see your life.
Wherever you are, remember that there is still much more to learn, much more to know God, much more that He wants to be intimate with you, more holiness, more surrender, more service, more improvement, more letting go of things from the past. Fall in love with the day. Fall in love with the journey because there is much of the excitement, the enthusiasm and the passion of the Christian life.
He says, "Not that I have already achieved it, nor that I am already perfect." But what does Paul do? Do you despair because you can't get where you want to go? No, he says, “…but I go on.” Again, the Christian life is a continuation, it is a walk to reach what God wants for your life. And why does he continue? What is he looking for?
He says, “…To see if I can catch.” Grasping is a very strong word, think of a pincer that grabs something. For us to get to know Christ we have to have a degree of despair. If you are not desperate at some point in your Christian life, you are missing out on a great opportunity.
And I have said perhaps with you, I don't know if with the ministry in English, that for us to get where we need to get, we have to be desperate. We have to come to a moment of urgency. Moses said to the Father, "Lord, you have given me many things, you have blessed me, you have allowed me..., but I want to see your face, I want to know you."
The Christian life has to have a degree of despair. And many people in the Gospel are very happy and very comfortable where they are. But we have to be desperate. One of the things that should make us desperate, certainly make me desperate, is all that God still has to do in my life, work in so many ways, on so many things that I have to leave behind, so many layers that I have to let go of. my life.
If you are not desperate for God to do something greater in you, if you are not absolutely horrified with who you are right now, in light of everything God wants to do in your life, you are missing out on a great experience. Christians have to be desperate for God to change us, transform us, take us to new levels. We have to be desperate with our own sinfulness.
The Apostle Paul himself, I believe it is in Romans:7 where he says, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?" It is this man who has written a lot about the Gospel, there comes a time when he gets frustrated.
Brethren, many of us do not achieve more in the Christian life because we are not desperate enough. I know that much is said about trusting in the Lord, about letting go of the Lord, and that does have its place. But I like agonizing people, because I am agonizing, I fight and suffer, and I agonize for God and for many other things. And I like people in agony, I like the characters in novels and literature who fight. Jacob wrestled with the angel and told the angel, "I'm not leaving you until you bless me."
How many of us feel this way in our walk? That we say, "Lord, I am not going to let you go until you complete your work in me." And we feel passionate. The Bible is full of dying people who received their blessing because they were desperate. Until you despair with your condition and with your need to have more of God, you will not achieve. God likes people like the woman with the issue of blood, who went into the crowd knowing that she was violating Jewish law, that she was ritually making everyone around her unclean, slipped into the crowd and she stole healing from the Lord, because she touched him without him knowing that she was going to touch him. He didn't ask permission. I was so desperate.
Think of the friends of the paralytic who broke the roof of a house to get their friend in and forced the Lord, okay, they put him in front of him, now what are you going to do? The Lord sees that rope coming down and a stretcher and there's this man. And what could the Lord do? I had to heal him. Blind Bartimaeus cries out to the Lord, "Lord, son of David, have mercy on me." And there are all the disciples, “Shut up. Don't bother the Lord. Leave him, he's too busy." "Lord, son of God, have mercy on me." And the Lord stops because He had a need.
The Bible is full. The Syrian Phoenician woman, her demon-possessed daughter, approaches the Lord, "Lord, my daughter is demon-possessed." And the Lord dismisses her with an almost insult. "It is not lawful to give the children's food to dogs." "Yes, Lord, but the little dogs still eat the crumbs that fall from the table." And the Lord laughs and says, “You got me. It's okay, your daughter is healed by that word right now."
Brothers, we do not receive more because we do not agonize. We don't ask. Ask the Lord to take you to that red hot spot where if He doesn't visit you and do something with your life, you're going to die. Right now, God knows my longing, the requests that I have before Him and if He doesn't do something, I don't know what will happen because I want to get to know Him, I want to have more dealings with Him.
So, he says, “…it is not that I have reached it or that I am already perfect, but that I continue to see if I can get hold of that for which I was also caught by Christ Jesus.”
And he emphasizes again, “…Brothers, I myself do not claim to have reached it, but one thing I do, certainly forgetting what lies behind and reaching out to what lies ahead.”
He knows that the life of sanctification and growth in the Lord is a life of leaving many things behind. The life of the Christian is a perpetual dying. Many things have to be abandoned. I was saying last Sunday that sometimes we have to leave very good things. Not everything that the Christian has to leave is necessarily ugly, bad, sinful. There are things that simply in light of what you know God wants to do in your life, in his call, of your desires for holiness and greater surrender to the Lord, are not convenient for you. For others it may be fine. An athlete who wants to play basketball on the courts in his neighborhood is not the same as one who wants to play in the big leagues of the NBA, or one who wants to be an Olympian. Maybe the other one can eat all the sweets he wants, because he's going to play in the neighborhood, but an Olympian needs to exempt himself from many things. And so it is with us.
We are called to live a life of complete surrender to the Lord, of consecration to Him, and that is what we have to ask of Him. But we have to understand that the level of life to which God calls us is one of total surrender, of complete consecration to Him. And we have to leave many things behind.
He says, "One thing I do certainly forgetting what is behind and reaching out to what is ahead."
And that is what I want above all in the minutes that I have left, to talk about the transformation of the mind. Much of what we have to leave behind is within us. They are not outside things. They are mental habits, attitudes, ties, practices that require the renewal of our brain, our mind, to be concrete.
Paul says, "Do not be conformed to this age but be transformed by renewing your understanding, your mind."
And what we call the process of sanctification sounds very spiritual, it is actually the process of renewing the neurons of our brain, our understanding, the way we interpret life. There are many things that bind us and hold us back, holding us back to the sanctification that God wants us to experience. And that requires a radical change in our way of seeing the world.
And one of the things that reminds me is, first, I believe that we have to form a vision of what are the things that we want to transcend. I really believe in naming our giants. I am a big believer in naming and declaring a specific vision.
What are the areas that you need to change in your life? What are the things that are preventing you from reaching a higher level? What are mental ties? What are the habits of mind? What are your temperament traits?
Look, write those things down. I am a big believer in writing down our visions and putting them down in a way that we can see them. Habakkuk says, "Write the vision." And we have to name our giants. I advise you that one of these days you stay one morning in your room or in your living room, take a pet, something to write with, and in prayer and perhaps fasting, spend those four, six, eight hours, from 7:00 a.m. the morning at 12:00, let's say, and spend it meditating, reading the word, asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten you.
And then let the Holy Spirit tell you what are the areas that you must change in your life, what are the relationships that you must change, what are the habits, what are the traits of your temperament. Write the vision and I assure you that it will transform your life. We have to name our giants, because many of us live an indefinite life and so we don't know… We know but we haven't specifically named the areas, the goals that we should follow.
Paul had a very clear goal, it is to know Christ as He wants to be known. And that was his goal. And then, many times we have to take a general vision and disassemble it into its constituent parts because to say, for example, I want to be pleasing to God. Well, what does that mean? In what areas of your behavior, of your character traits? The vision must be disassembled into its constituent parts and then, proceed to carry them out one by one throughout life, and that will be your agenda. That is the request that you are going to put before the Lord. That is your giant that you are going to bring down. That is a machinery of evil that you are going to dismantle piece by piece throughout your life.
And the Lord loves people who are concrete and who present to the Lord traits of character, thoughts that are ties to the past, mental habits, personal relationships, work, everything. Name that and then present it to the Lord and say, “Father, that is what I want you to do in my life.” And then proceed throughout your life to destroy one by one those strongholds. Your mind has to be renewed. God wants us to renew the way we think.
And another very important thing is the following, is that you have a lot to do with that transformation. It is not only God who is going to do it. Sometimes we give more, I don't know what to call it, more assignments to God than He wants to take on. You know that you are responsible for a good part of the things that happen in your life. God does not do everything. God does not open the lid of your brain and start manipulating your neurons, but He expects you to do your part too.
It amazes me how seriously God takes us and how much He expects us to participate in our own sanctification process. There are things that if we do not cooperate, God is not going to do them. Because? Because He respects us, He treats us like adults.
When God created Adam in the Garden of Eden, he gave him incredible authority. He told him, “Rule over the world.” He gave man tremendous authority. And God did not revoke that authority when man sinned. God treats us like adults. And many of us who want to give God a lot of credit, want to acknowledge his lordship, his sovereignty, go too far and forget that God likes to work with us. God does not turn us into puppets. We have a lot to do in our sanctification process. That means that you have to cooperate with the Lord.
For example, one of the things is... we can use our mouth to confess good and positive things that God wants for us. We have to change our vocabulary. Many people are full of negativity. There are people who still in this congregation, years of knowing him, "How are you, sister?" "Well, there, you know fighting, pastor. The Lord this and that." And they are always in negativity and in struggle. And that's fine on the one hand, but the truth is that you also have to confess good and positive things.
One of the things that strikes me about David is that he never lingered on a negative confession, he always found a way to say something positive as well. He speaks, for example, “…as a servant pants for the stream of water, so he pants for you.” And he talks about his crisis and his need, so he also says, “Why are you downhearted, oh my soul? Wait on God because I still have to praise him, my salvation and my God." So, David used his tongue, his mouth to confess good things that God wanted to do.
We also have to use the word. Many Christians do not know the word. They have not been impregnated, they have not been filled with the word. And we have to cooperate with our sanctification by filling our minds with positive things. The Bible says, "If there is something good, if something worthy of admiration, think about it." Brother, you have to know the word.
I had a conversation these days with a person who has been in León de Judá for some time, he comes and goes, he is not completely delivered either, but his lack of understanding about the word regarding a situation that is confronting in his personal family life. And I realized how raw this person is in terms of the word of God. Obviously if he knew the word he wouldn't be in the positions he finds himself in or processing his crisis as childishly as he is. Obviously this person is a novice, a neophyte in the knowledge of the word of God.
If you want to live a life pleasing to the Lord you have to soak up the Bible, you have to become a fan of the Scriptures. And you have to do it in the New Testament and in the Old Testament. Because there are many people who only focus on the New Testament because they believe that the Old Testament has nothing to say anymore. No, the Old Testament is just as important as the New.
I admire how much it teaches me. What's more, I think that sometimes apart from the importance of Christ in the New, I personally like the Old Testament more than the New. But you have to know the word. If you want to be transformed in your life, learn something and that is that you have to use the word of God to renew yourself. It says that “the word of God is living and powerful and more piercing than any two-edged sword.” And it penetrates deeply until it divides the thoughts of the heart, of the spirit. She helps you, she gives you discernment.
The Bible is a tremendous ally in giving us understanding about ourselves. So you must know the word, you must speak positive things, you must have times of worship. Worship cleanses the palate. It's like a good wine taster who needs to clarify his palate to taste something very subtle. Worship prepares you to hear the word of God.
When we adore, what we have done today is so important, brothers, to take time. I was thinking here, wow! So many things that we are doing, how long the time of intercession was, but you know what? I understand that those moments of worship and rapport with the Holy Spirit are worth more than many preachings. When people bow down before God and people cry and have a spiritual catharsis through worship, that's worth 20,000 sermons many times over. There are things that God does when you come forward that no preacher will.
So I know the importance of worship. And if you want to transform your life you need intimacy times with God. Take time to be in the presence of the Lord. Fight for those moments of devotional life, because that will help you transform your mind as well.
It is important that you participate in what God wants to do with your life. Another thing that I think you understand is that as Paul says here, you see that the Christian life, as he said, is a long-term journey. It never ends. It is important that you arm yourself with this thought, that the Christian life is a dynamic process and that sometimes it takes a long time to get to where God wants to take us.
That means you shouldn't get discouraged. When you fail in your aspirations, when the wait becomes too long, when you get frustrated with yourself many times because you thought you were further along than you now discover that you are in your walk with God, when there are those moments of defeat, of falling, of failures, of waiting, remember that the Christian life takes time and that God delights in the process and that you must also learn to be patient with yourself and know that there is a process that God wants by which you must pass and that this is going to include zigzags, setbacks before going forward and that God is taking advantage of all this process and you yourself are also going to take advantage of it.
So don't get impatient with how difficult the journey is. And I think it's important to understand that because sometimes we believe that the Christian life and the process of sanctification is something that happens instantly. God touches us with a magic wand and we are already super saints. It takes time, even at the best of times. There are people who are very devoted to the Lord, and I understand that sometimes they exaggerate what they have really gone through in their own lives because they still do not realize how far they have to walk or that they are impatient with others because they have not reached where they should go. .
So, I think it's good to understand that God wants to bring you to an end, but that end is going to take you a long time and you must be gentle with yourself as well. Forgive yourself many times. If you find yourself failing the Lord, settle accounts, ask for forgiveness, confess and get back on the horse and move on. Because the Christian life is long and God is going to use those moments of process to strengthen you and to form the man or woman that He wants to form in you.
So, He is going to use all the materials of your life. He is going to use the tragedies, the losses, the failures, the arrests, the deserts, He uses them all to create a man or a woman to his pleasure and according to his specifications. I believe that if we understood this about human life, about the Christian career, we would be less discouraged.
I was talking to a young lady on Friday, we had a lovely time with the young people. By the way, keep praying for the youth. León de Judá has a youth, children of 16, 14, 13 years. God is doing beautiful things and we had a wonderful anointing time here last Friday. I was talking to a young lady, I don't want to give you too many details, that was before the service started. She was going through a difficult time and… I don't want to give away too much, but it's a crisis that no girl her age should be going through in her life. And her mother had told me about her situation and we were talking. I told her about the importance of her understanding that God could bring something good out of this great tragedy that she is experiencing, that God can take advantage of this suffering. It is not that God causes it, but God can take advantage of it, but it all depends on how she sees that moment that she is living.
And I would tell him, “Look, some of the things that I believe God can use through this crisis that you are going through, God can draw you closer to you and you to Him. You can use this time to know that no one can enter that territory where you are, but take your burden to the Lord, talk to Him, cry before Him, talk to Him as if He were your psychiatrist or your father, and let Him then complete His work in your life. What you are going through may make you more compassionate towards others one day. You will be able to better understand the people who are where you are.”
The Bible says that God sometimes comforts us so that when we are comforted we can comfort others with the same comfort with which He has comforted us. Many times the crises in your life, the suffering is God preparing you so that you can then be an agent of his grace with others. The suffering, the sufferings, the struggles, the reverses of life, allow us to better understand those who fail and those who suffer, and we can then be more understanding in how we advise them. They can prepare us to be pastors, to be counselors, to be evangelists. The sufferings of life make us more humble, we understand our failures better, etc.
God takes advantage of all the things that are happening in your life. Everything that is working in your life is to bring you to a level. The deserts of life... Elijah, a man equally powerful as the Apostle Paul, I don't think there is a prophet who has done more mighty miracles than the prophet Elijah, and yet on one occasion God took him into the desert. And Elijah reaches the point where he wants to die, he says, he is already tired of the ministry, and he asks the Lord, "Lord, get me out of here because I have no more strength than my peers." I would say he got depressed. He had a very deep depression. And the Lord used that to renew his ministry. God made him walk 40 days in the desert and took him to a cave and there he showed him an aspect of his person that Elijah did not know, the maternal aspect, the nourishing and generous aspect of God.
Elijah only knew fire, brimstone. He had just killed 400 prophets of Baal. A rajatablas Pentecostal, right? But the Lord wanted to make him a true shepherd who knew that part. And it brought him to the point where, when confronted with his limitations, when he reached the end of his life, he was able to understand that other part of God, the maternal aspect.
And so God is going to use your experiences and your struggles to give texture to your life. He knows that many times for you to be a rich, complex, and encompassing person in your personality, God has to torture you many times. God has to twist you in incredible ways.
I was telling the congregation this morning, speaking on my own intimate terms. An image that I have of my life when I become an old man, which I hope I will, is to be like one of those crooked trees that one sometimes sees that have been, through decades of existence, exposed to the elements. , exposed to cold, wind, heat, rain. Their trunk twists a bit but they're beautiful in a weird way because they have a different beauty, because they've been through so much. And so, these hundred-year-old trees have a beauty that a 10-year-old or 15-year-old tree does not have, because it has been exposed to many experiences and its beauty is an ugly beauty, so to speak, it is a counter-intuitive beauty, because it is complex.
And I believe that what God wants most from us is complexity. God does not want superficial Christians, God wants Christians like Christ, complicated, complex. He knows that everyone claims the Lord. The Pharisees call him Lord, the liberals call him Lord, the sensual call him Lord at this time, those on the right claim him, those on the left claim him, scientists claim him, ignorant and uneducated people claim him. Because? Because the Lord is elusive. He is all. He is the Son of Man. He can be claimed by all human beings, because all human beings recognize themselves in Him, because He is extremely complex as only God can be.
He wants us to be like that too. God likes Christians, complex children who have experienced a lot, have seen a lot, have suffered a lot, have suffered a lot, have failed a lot, and therefore reflect the complexity of the Father. What God likes best is a complex believer.
God is not that picky. Sometimes we believe that God is so delicate that if you touch him he breaks. God is strong. God likes strong churches, strong Christians, who are not scandalized by anything.
I was talking to a person running an errand on the phone. And look how people are, for some reason they knew that I was a pastor. She's an American and she's spelling out a code for me that she wants to give me. You know people sometimes use the letter, D for David, A for Ana, etc., and in one he said W for whisky. And then he said, “Oh, pastor, forgive me,” he says on the phone, “excuse me, I didn't mean to use that word.” “Girl, if I don't get easily shocked by anything. I do not care. Thank you for the respect you have for me, but that doesn't take away or give me."
Because people sometimes believe, and that sometimes happens on airplanes. Sometimes I don't like people to know that I am a pastor because the conversation freezes right away. We are talking as well as possible, and the moment they say to me, "What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm a shepherd." End of conversation. They think one is... and they don't know one.
So, God wants realistic Christians, complex Christians, Christians who smell like sheep. Because those are the people that God needs. Picky people and holier than Saint Paul are not good at communicating the Gospel. And I believe that realistic people are people who have lived a lot, have suffered a lot, have suffered a lot, have failed a lot, have seen God in different ways. And that is what God aspires from your life, that you be a man, a complex woman, a son of Man. That you know that no emotion is alien to the Father, and that people see in you a person who is capable of communicating in any situation because you know where they are standing.
The Bible talks about Christ having compassion. He is a high priest who sympathizes with us because He was where we are. And I ask the Lord that León de Judá be a congregation of people, and a community of accessible people, normal people, people who are not scandalized by anything, because they know what the human condition is.
The Bible says that God has compassion on us as the father of children has compassion because He knows our condition and remembers that we are dust. God is going to allow your spiritual trajectory to be zigzagging at times, but that is to make you like that log. If there is something I want to keep in your mind from all this message that I have already concluded, it is the idea that you want to be a complex tree, a tree not with the beauty of a stamp, of a birthday card, but rather a somewhat sinister tree, so to speak, full of complexity, texture, through experiences that God wants to pass on to you.
God wants your life and your Christian walk to be something wonderfully complex, strong, strange, rare, intriguing. And ask the Lord for that, to let you live and know Him as He wants to be known. May you know him in the tragedy of his cross, in the sinisterness of his nails driven into his hands, at the moment of sweating drops of blood in Gethsemane, at the moment of seeing the Holy Spirit descend upon him in the form of a dove, at the moment of taking the whip and whipping the money changers in the temple, at the moment of being a baby like any other, doing his needs, the Son of God at the moment of seeing his mother suffer from the cross and see her agony and not be able to assist her.
That is the Christ that God wants us to know and for us to become like Him in His sufferings. Because that's what Paul means, "I want to know him in his sufferings." There are people who only want to meet Jesus on the Sunday of the Resurrection, but what about the Friday of the crucifixion?
So ask the Lord. We are going to ask the Lord to make us complex Christians. Stand up for a moment and pray with me, and I say with myself because I myself am going to be here with you praying so that the Lord helps me to know him better and that God makes the León de Judá congregation an exemplary church, made of men and women who they have experienced their own crucifixion and have entered the journey of the Christian life with all its complexity.
Oh, Father, we ask this afternoon, our longing is to meet you, Lord. Get to know you in all facets of your life and your personality. Make this congregation an enigma for humanity and the city in which we live, something that provokes in them curiosity, that when we walk the streets of Boston and Massachusetts and New England, people see crucified men and women. Men who are in the process, men and women, families who are being treated by your spirit.
We want to reflect the complexity of Christ Jesus. I pray, Father, that this afternoon this people will be inspired to reach new levels of knowing you. I know, Lord, that you know each one of my brothers and sisters and you know what they are going through right now. You lean from your throne and you look down on each one of us. You know the pain that many of us are going through. You know the agony and suffering for our children who are on their own trajectories.
You know the loneliness of many, you know the anxiety of others. You know the pain we feel for not being more like you want us to be. You know those who are struggling with a relationship that they know is not the one you want them to have. You know the one who sells things that shouldn't be selling. You know the businessman who knows that his job prevents him from getting where you want them to go.
You know the mothers who grieve for their children, the husbands or wives, who fight for their marriage. You know those who bleed because they remember that they did something they shouldn't have done, offended someone, hurt someone, violated some confidence, violated some loyalty.
Father, we are living stories. Each one of us is going through a problem, a pain, a fear, an anguish, a depression, an anxiety. We have been diagnosed with chronic diseases but you see all that stuff and you are fixing your eyes on each one of us. And you are going to use all those sufferings for something good, noble, beautiful that glorifies you.
I declare, Father, that this people that embraces you and clings to you as Jacob clinged to the angel, will not be disappointed. You are going to do something wonderful in their lives and you are going to be using everything.
Brothers, I can tell you right now that God is watching over you and is seeing every process that you are experiencing. Each one of you is important, each one of you right now, God has his eye on you and He knows your struggle. He knows your sleeplessness. He knows the desires of your heart. And He pities you as the father pities his children. And God is using all aspects of your life to form a man, or a woman that at the end of his career, He says, “That's my son. That's my daughter. I feel proud of him or her.”
Although we are not complete and perfect, but by loving you so much and by fighting so much to please you, you will like us. So, Father, form a beautiful, complex community, beautiful in ways that we cannot explain. On this day we thank you for being part of the family, Lord. And we ask you to take us to new levels, in the name of Jesus and the people of God say, amen. God bless you, my brothers. Amen.
And I'm going to start again with the same word that I've been using in Philippians, Chapter 3, starting with verse 12. If you have your Bible you can also go to verse 8 and from there because it's all part of the same word. . But where the crux of the situation lies is there in verse 12 through 14.
Again, what I want to do on this day, as I did this morning, is to compile, summarize, visit some points that are well worth reinforcing again, because they are truths that deserve insistence, and return to them to complete this meditation. There are many things that stuck with me but I don't know if I'm going to be able to cover them all. What I want is to describe a process that we have to go through in order to become what God wants us to be.
And you know that the Apostle Paul is a man of processes. Pablo, your biography is very vivid in your writings. He is a very personal man, very honest, very transparent and we can see his trajectory through his writings. He is a man who lived an agonizing life, in the best sense of the word. He was not a saint created overnight, but we see his trajectory, and that is why he can speak to us as well. He had to transcend and overcome many moments, many things in his own life. And he talks about his past, and how he had to forget about his past, although one obviously doesn't forget the past, but he did have to leave many things behind in order to go towards what Christ had called him to achieve and grasp. .
And he talks in the first few verses, he talks about his great passion to meet Jesus. I liked that hymn that Kathy used for her dance, “I want to meet you.” And that should be the desire of all of us, to know Christ and become what Christ wants us to be. Now, to get to that image of what God has for us, you have to go through a lot of difficult, demanding territory, with a lot of texture and many moments of difficulty.
So Paul talks about his desire to know Christ, and that's what I talked about on Wednesday. In verse 10 he says that “…he struggles in order to know him, to know Jesus, and to know the power of his resurrection and to share in his sufferings and to become like him in his death.”
So, he talks about the image that God has for him and also for us. God's desire is that we come to know him. Do you know that God wants to be known by you? God, unlike many other religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, which tell us about a distant God, even Islam has a lot of that distant God. These religions are very passionate and very dedicated but they do not know that God in the intimate way that Christianity allows us to know God. Even Judaism, which is our matrix, when the Lord speaks of the Father as Aba, was something totally unusual, it was something that the Pharisees could not understand because they saw God as something so holy, so distant, that they could not access him.
But Jesus brings a new image of the Father, of a Father who loves us, treats us intimately, knows us and wants to be known by us. So much so that he became human so that we could consume him. They made it our custom. He came down to our level for Him to know us better, because as He is God, He knows everything and knows our humanity and knows every aspect of our life, but He also wanted to experience our humanity which He couldn't really because He is God and we knew in theory. But he really wanted to know us and that is why he became a man to live what we live.
And Jesus knowing us in this way, says the Bible, that now when He intercedes for us, He intercedes like no priest of Judaism could intercede for us, because He intercedes for us knowing what we are. He sympathizes with us and can intercede in a very personal way. God wants to be known that way by us.
And that is what Paul is talking about here. When we know God as he wants us to know him, it revolutionizes our life. Many people are religious but have not had an absolutely personal experience of the Father. And that is what Christianity offers. So, Paul says, "I want to know him, that's what I live for."
But then in verse 12 he complicates things and says, “…not that I have already reached it.” He reminds us that he is still in the process of knowing God, in the process of becoming what God wants him to be. Again, the Apostle Paul lets us know that it is a trajectory. It is a journey. The Christian life is a journey, brothers. The Christian life is a journey that never ends, we never truly arrive.
And I believe that one of the things that we have to learn about the Christian faith is that it is a trajectory. Since we enter into the knowledge of Christ, we enter into a journey, and that journey only ends when we die. And I believe that having that knowledge of the Christian life as a journey should transform our experience. Because many people enter Christianity as if it were an arrival. They accept Christ, they come forward, and then the lives of many Christians become simply religious. It is not something dynamic.
And I believe that for you to truly become what God wants you to be, it is important that you understand that your life is a journey and that God calls you on a wonderful journey of knowing Him and that He loves you… He loves you. wants to know you too in a different way.
One of my favorite verses these days, these months, has been – and I think I have shared it with you – one of the psalms, it says, “I will make you understand,” God speaking to the psalmist, “I will make you understand and I will teach you the way you should walk. Upon you I will fix my eyes.”
And I love those passages of Scripture that suggest to us that the Christian life is a journey of knowing the Father, it's a thing of intimacy with Him, it's a thing of getting to know Him more intimately. It is a trajectory. Don't impoverish your experience of God by turning it into something passive and static. Enter the Gospel knowing that God wants to have love with you. God wants to make your life a process of intimacy, of getting to know him more thoroughly.
And that's what Paul says, “…Not that I have reached it already.” Imagine, this man wrote two thirds of the New Testament. He had experiences in Seventh Heaven, he says, and heard things from God that he says he wasn't even given permission to share with other human beings. At that level of experience he had with the mysteries of heaven. And yet, this man says, "Not that I've already achieved it, nor that I'm already perfect."
You know brother, you never arrive. No one can go so far as to say that I no longer have anything to learn about myself or about faith, about Christ. The Christian life is a life of perpetual renewal.
You will remember that verse that also serves as my life motto, “For the path of the righteous is like the light of the dawn that increases until the day is perfect.” And when I think of that I think of an arrow traveling endlessly through the sky, through the atmosphere and never quite reaching its target, but it goes up, it goes up, up, up. And so it is that you have to see your life.
Wherever you are, remember that there is still much more to learn, much more to know God, much more that He wants to be intimate with you, more holiness, more surrender, more service, more improvement, more letting go of things from the past. Fall in love with the day. Fall in love with the journey because there is much of the excitement, the enthusiasm and the passion of the Christian life.
He says, "Not that I have already achieved it, nor that I am already perfect." But what does Paul do? Do you despair because you can't get where you want to go? No, he says, “…but I go on.” Again, the Christian life is a continuation, it is a walk to reach what God wants for your life. And why does he continue? What is he looking for?
He says, “…To see if I can catch.” Grasping is a very strong word, think of a pincer that grabs something. For us to get to know Christ we have to have a degree of despair. If you are not desperate at some point in your Christian life, you are missing out on a great opportunity.
And I have said perhaps with you, I don't know if with the ministry in English, that for us to get where we need to get, we have to be desperate. We have to come to a moment of urgency. Moses said to the Father, "Lord, you have given me many things, you have blessed me, you have allowed me..., but I want to see your face, I want to know you."
The Christian life has to have a degree of despair. And many people in the Gospel are very happy and very comfortable where they are. But we have to be desperate. One of the things that should make us desperate, certainly make me desperate, is all that God still has to do in my life, work in so many ways, on so many things that I have to leave behind, so many layers that I have to let go of. my life.
If you are not desperate for God to do something greater in you, if you are not absolutely horrified with who you are right now, in light of everything God wants to do in your life, you are missing out on a great experience. Christians have to be desperate for God to change us, transform us, take us to new levels. We have to be desperate with our own sinfulness.
The Apostle Paul himself, I believe it is in Romans:7 where he says, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?" It is this man who has written a lot about the Gospel, there comes a time when he gets frustrated.
Brethren, many of us do not achieve more in the Christian life because we are not desperate enough. I know that much is said about trusting in the Lord, about letting go of the Lord, and that does have its place. But I like agonizing people, because I am agonizing, I fight and suffer, and I agonize for God and for many other things. And I like people in agony, I like the characters in novels and literature who fight. Jacob wrestled with the angel and told the angel, "I'm not leaving you until you bless me."
How many of us feel this way in our walk? That we say, "Lord, I am not going to let you go until you complete your work in me." And we feel passionate. The Bible is full of dying people who received their blessing because they were desperate. Until you despair with your condition and with your need to have more of God, you will not achieve. God likes people like the woman with the issue of blood, who went into the crowd knowing that she was violating Jewish law, that she was ritually making everyone around her unclean, slipped into the crowd and she stole healing from the Lord, because she touched him without him knowing that she was going to touch him. He didn't ask permission. I was so desperate.
Think of the friends of the paralytic who broke the roof of a house to get their friend in and forced the Lord, okay, they put him in front of him, now what are you going to do? The Lord sees that rope coming down and a stretcher and there's this man. And what could the Lord do? I had to heal him. Blind Bartimaeus cries out to the Lord, "Lord, son of David, have mercy on me." And there are all the disciples, “Shut up. Don't bother the Lord. Leave him, he's too busy." "Lord, son of God, have mercy on me." And the Lord stops because He had a need.
The Bible is full. The Syrian Phoenician woman, her demon-possessed daughter, approaches the Lord, "Lord, my daughter is demon-possessed." And the Lord dismisses her with an almost insult. "It is not lawful to give the children's food to dogs." "Yes, Lord, but the little dogs still eat the crumbs that fall from the table." And the Lord laughs and says, “You got me. It's okay, your daughter is healed by that word right now."
Brothers, we do not receive more because we do not agonize. We don't ask. Ask the Lord to take you to that red hot spot where if He doesn't visit you and do something with your life, you're going to die. Right now, God knows my longing, the requests that I have before Him and if He doesn't do something, I don't know what will happen because I want to get to know Him, I want to have more dealings with Him.
So, he says, “…it is not that I have reached it or that I am already perfect, but that I continue to see if I can get hold of that for which I was also caught by Christ Jesus.”
And he emphasizes again, “…Brothers, I myself do not claim to have reached it, but one thing I do, certainly forgetting what lies behind and reaching out to what lies ahead.”
He knows that the life of sanctification and growth in the Lord is a life of leaving many things behind. The life of the Christian is a perpetual dying. Many things have to be abandoned. I was saying last Sunday that sometimes we have to leave very good things. Not everything that the Christian has to leave is necessarily ugly, bad, sinful. There are things that simply in light of what you know God wants to do in your life, in his call, of your desires for holiness and greater surrender to the Lord, are not convenient for you. For others it may be fine. An athlete who wants to play basketball on the courts in his neighborhood is not the same as one who wants to play in the big leagues of the NBA, or one who wants to be an Olympian. Maybe the other one can eat all the sweets he wants, because he's going to play in the neighborhood, but an Olympian needs to exempt himself from many things. And so it is with us.
We are called to live a life of complete surrender to the Lord, of consecration to Him, and that is what we have to ask of Him. But we have to understand that the level of life to which God calls us is one of total surrender, of complete consecration to Him. And we have to leave many things behind.
He says, "One thing I do certainly forgetting what is behind and reaching out to what is ahead."
And that is what I want above all in the minutes that I have left, to talk about the transformation of the mind. Much of what we have to leave behind is within us. They are not outside things. They are mental habits, attitudes, ties, practices that require the renewal of our brain, our mind, to be concrete.
Paul says, "Do not be conformed to this age but be transformed by renewing your understanding, your mind."
And what we call the process of sanctification sounds very spiritual, it is actually the process of renewing the neurons of our brain, our understanding, the way we interpret life. There are many things that bind us and hold us back, holding us back to the sanctification that God wants us to experience. And that requires a radical change in our way of seeing the world.
And one of the things that reminds me is, first, I believe that we have to form a vision of what are the things that we want to transcend. I really believe in naming our giants. I am a big believer in naming and declaring a specific vision.
What are the areas that you need to change in your life? What are the things that are preventing you from reaching a higher level? What are mental ties? What are the habits of mind? What are your temperament traits?
Look, write those things down. I am a big believer in writing down our visions and putting them down in a way that we can see them. Habakkuk says, "Write the vision." And we have to name our giants. I advise you that one of these days you stay one morning in your room or in your living room, take a pet, something to write with, and in prayer and perhaps fasting, spend those four, six, eight hours, from 7:00 a.m. the morning at 12:00, let's say, and spend it meditating, reading the word, asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten you.
And then let the Holy Spirit tell you what are the areas that you must change in your life, what are the relationships that you must change, what are the habits, what are the traits of your temperament. Write the vision and I assure you that it will transform your life. We have to name our giants, because many of us live an indefinite life and so we don't know… We know but we haven't specifically named the areas, the goals that we should follow.
Paul had a very clear goal, it is to know Christ as He wants to be known. And that was his goal. And then, many times we have to take a general vision and disassemble it into its constituent parts because to say, for example, I want to be pleasing to God. Well, what does that mean? In what areas of your behavior, of your character traits? The vision must be disassembled into its constituent parts and then, proceed to carry them out one by one throughout life, and that will be your agenda. That is the request that you are going to put before the Lord. That is your giant that you are going to bring down. That is a machinery of evil that you are going to dismantle piece by piece throughout your life.
And the Lord loves people who are concrete and who present to the Lord traits of character, thoughts that are ties to the past, mental habits, personal relationships, work, everything. Name that and then present it to the Lord and say, “Father, that is what I want you to do in my life.” And then proceed throughout your life to destroy one by one those strongholds. Your mind has to be renewed. God wants us to renew the way we think.
And another very important thing is the following, is that you have a lot to do with that transformation. It is not only God who is going to do it. Sometimes we give more, I don't know what to call it, more assignments to God than He wants to take on. You know that you are responsible for a good part of the things that happen in your life. God does not do everything. God does not open the lid of your brain and start manipulating your neurons, but He expects you to do your part too.
It amazes me how seriously God takes us and how much He expects us to participate in our own sanctification process. There are things that if we do not cooperate, God is not going to do them. Because? Because He respects us, He treats us like adults.
When God created Adam in the Garden of Eden, he gave him incredible authority. He told him, “Rule over the world.” He gave man tremendous authority. And God did not revoke that authority when man sinned. God treats us like adults. And many of us who want to give God a lot of credit, want to acknowledge his lordship, his sovereignty, go too far and forget that God likes to work with us. God does not turn us into puppets. We have a lot to do in our sanctification process. That means that you have to cooperate with the Lord.
For example, one of the things is... we can use our mouth to confess good and positive things that God wants for us. We have to change our vocabulary. Many people are full of negativity. There are people who still in this congregation, years of knowing him, "How are you, sister?" "Well, there, you know fighting, pastor. The Lord this and that." And they are always in negativity and in struggle. And that's fine on the one hand, but the truth is that you also have to confess good and positive things.
One of the things that strikes me about David is that he never lingered on a negative confession, he always found a way to say something positive as well. He speaks, for example, “…as a servant pants for the stream of water, so he pants for you.” And he talks about his crisis and his need, so he also says, “Why are you downhearted, oh my soul? Wait on God because I still have to praise him, my salvation and my God." So, David used his tongue, his mouth to confess good things that God wanted to do.
We also have to use the word. Many Christians do not know the word. They have not been impregnated, they have not been filled with the word. And we have to cooperate with our sanctification by filling our minds with positive things. The Bible says, "If there is something good, if something worthy of admiration, think about it." Brother, you have to know the word.
I had a conversation these days with a person who has been in León de Judá for some time, he comes and goes, he is not completely delivered either, but his lack of understanding about the word regarding a situation that is confronting in his personal family life. And I realized how raw this person is in terms of the word of God. Obviously if he knew the word he wouldn't be in the positions he finds himself in or processing his crisis as childishly as he is. Obviously this person is a novice, a neophyte in the knowledge of the word of God.
If you want to live a life pleasing to the Lord you have to soak up the Bible, you have to become a fan of the Scriptures. And you have to do it in the New Testament and in the Old Testament. Because there are many people who only focus on the New Testament because they believe that the Old Testament has nothing to say anymore. No, the Old Testament is just as important as the New.
I admire how much it teaches me. What's more, I think that sometimes apart from the importance of Christ in the New, I personally like the Old Testament more than the New. But you have to know the word. If you want to be transformed in your life, learn something and that is that you have to use the word of God to renew yourself. It says that “the word of God is living and powerful and more piercing than any two-edged sword.” And it penetrates deeply until it divides the thoughts of the heart, of the spirit. She helps you, she gives you discernment.
The Bible is a tremendous ally in giving us understanding about ourselves. So you must know the word, you must speak positive things, you must have times of worship. Worship cleanses the palate. It's like a good wine taster who needs to clarify his palate to taste something very subtle. Worship prepares you to hear the word of God.
When we adore, what we have done today is so important, brothers, to take time. I was thinking here, wow! So many things that we are doing, how long the time of intercession was, but you know what? I understand that those moments of worship and rapport with the Holy Spirit are worth more than many preachings. When people bow down before God and people cry and have a spiritual catharsis through worship, that's worth 20,000 sermons many times over. There are things that God does when you come forward that no preacher will.
So I know the importance of worship. And if you want to transform your life you need intimacy times with God. Take time to be in the presence of the Lord. Fight for those moments of devotional life, because that will help you transform your mind as well.
It is important that you participate in what God wants to do with your life. Another thing that I think you understand is that as Paul says here, you see that the Christian life, as he said, is a long-term journey. It never ends. It is important that you arm yourself with this thought, that the Christian life is a dynamic process and that sometimes it takes a long time to get to where God wants to take us.
That means you shouldn't get discouraged. When you fail in your aspirations, when the wait becomes too long, when you get frustrated with yourself many times because you thought you were further along than you now discover that you are in your walk with God, when there are those moments of defeat, of falling, of failures, of waiting, remember that the Christian life takes time and that God delights in the process and that you must also learn to be patient with yourself and know that there is a process that God wants by which you must pass and that this is going to include zigzags, setbacks before going forward and that God is taking advantage of all this process and you yourself are also going to take advantage of it.
So don't get impatient with how difficult the journey is. And I think it's important to understand that because sometimes we believe that the Christian life and the process of sanctification is something that happens instantly. God touches us with a magic wand and we are already super saints. It takes time, even at the best of times. There are people who are very devoted to the Lord, and I understand that sometimes they exaggerate what they have really gone through in their own lives because they still do not realize how far they have to walk or that they are impatient with others because they have not reached where they should go. .
So, I think it's good to understand that God wants to bring you to an end, but that end is going to take you a long time and you must be gentle with yourself as well. Forgive yourself many times. If you find yourself failing the Lord, settle accounts, ask for forgiveness, confess and get back on the horse and move on. Because the Christian life is long and God is going to use those moments of process to strengthen you and to form the man or woman that He wants to form in you.
So, He is going to use all the materials of your life. He is going to use the tragedies, the losses, the failures, the arrests, the deserts, He uses them all to create a man or a woman to his pleasure and according to his specifications. I believe that if we understood this about human life, about the Christian career, we would be less discouraged.
I was talking to a young lady on Friday, we had a lovely time with the young people. By the way, keep praying for the youth. León de Judá has a youth, children of 16, 14, 13 years. God is doing beautiful things and we had a wonderful anointing time here last Friday. I was talking to a young lady, I don't want to give you too many details, that was before the service started. She was going through a difficult time and… I don't want to give away too much, but it's a crisis that no girl her age should be going through in her life. And her mother had told me about her situation and we were talking. I told her about the importance of her understanding that God could bring something good out of this great tragedy that she is experiencing, that God can take advantage of this suffering. It is not that God causes it, but God can take advantage of it, but it all depends on how she sees that moment that she is living.
And I would tell him, “Look, some of the things that I believe God can use through this crisis that you are going through, God can draw you closer to you and you to Him. You can use this time to know that no one can enter that territory where you are, but take your burden to the Lord, talk to Him, cry before Him, talk to Him as if He were your psychiatrist or your father, and let Him then complete His work in your life. What you are going through may make you more compassionate towards others one day. You will be able to better understand the people who are where you are.”
The Bible says that God sometimes comforts us so that when we are comforted we can comfort others with the same comfort with which He has comforted us. Many times the crises in your life, the suffering is God preparing you so that you can then be an agent of his grace with others. The suffering, the sufferings, the struggles, the reverses of life, allow us to better understand those who fail and those who suffer, and we can then be more understanding in how we advise them. They can prepare us to be pastors, to be counselors, to be evangelists. The sufferings of life make us more humble, we understand our failures better, etc.
God takes advantage of all the things that are happening in your life. Everything that is working in your life is to bring you to a level. The deserts of life... Elijah, a man equally powerful as the Apostle Paul, I don't think there is a prophet who has done more mighty miracles than the prophet Elijah, and yet on one occasion God took him into the desert. And Elijah reaches the point where he wants to die, he says, he is already tired of the ministry, and he asks the Lord, "Lord, get me out of here because I have no more strength than my peers." I would say he got depressed. He had a very deep depression. And the Lord used that to renew his ministry. God made him walk 40 days in the desert and took him to a cave and there he showed him an aspect of his person that Elijah did not know, the maternal aspect, the nourishing and generous aspect of God.
Elijah only knew fire, brimstone. He had just killed 400 prophets of Baal. A rajatablas Pentecostal, right? But the Lord wanted to make him a true shepherd who knew that part. And it brought him to the point where, when confronted with his limitations, when he reached the end of his life, he was able to understand that other part of God, the maternal aspect.
And so God is going to use your experiences and your struggles to give texture to your life. He knows that many times for you to be a rich, complex, and encompassing person in your personality, God has to torture you many times. God has to twist you in incredible ways.
I was telling the congregation this morning, speaking on my own intimate terms. An image that I have of my life when I become an old man, which I hope I will, is to be like one of those crooked trees that one sometimes sees that have been, through decades of existence, exposed to the elements. , exposed to cold, wind, heat, rain. Their trunk twists a bit but they're beautiful in a weird way because they have a different beauty, because they've been through so much. And so, these hundred-year-old trees have a beauty that a 10-year-old or 15-year-old tree does not have, because it has been exposed to many experiences and its beauty is an ugly beauty, so to speak, it is a counter-intuitive beauty, because it is complex.
And I believe that what God wants most from us is complexity. God does not want superficial Christians, God wants Christians like Christ, complicated, complex. He knows that everyone claims the Lord. The Pharisees call him Lord, the liberals call him Lord, the sensual call him Lord at this time, those on the right claim him, those on the left claim him, scientists claim him, ignorant and uneducated people claim him. Because? Because the Lord is elusive. He is all. He is the Son of Man. He can be claimed by all human beings, because all human beings recognize themselves in Him, because He is extremely complex as only God can be.
He wants us to be like that too. God likes Christians, complex children who have experienced a lot, have seen a lot, have suffered a lot, have suffered a lot, have failed a lot, and therefore reflect the complexity of the Father. What God likes best is a complex believer.
God is not that picky. Sometimes we believe that God is so delicate that if you touch him he breaks. God is strong. God likes strong churches, strong Christians, who are not scandalized by anything.
I was talking to a person running an errand on the phone. And look how people are, for some reason they knew that I was a pastor. She's an American and she's spelling out a code for me that she wants to give me. You know people sometimes use the letter, D for David, A for Ana, etc., and in one he said W for whisky. And then he said, “Oh, pastor, forgive me,” he says on the phone, “excuse me, I didn't mean to use that word.” “Girl, if I don't get easily shocked by anything. I do not care. Thank you for the respect you have for me, but that doesn't take away or give me."
Because people sometimes believe, and that sometimes happens on airplanes. Sometimes I don't like people to know that I am a pastor because the conversation freezes right away. We are talking as well as possible, and the moment they say to me, "What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm a shepherd." End of conversation. They think one is... and they don't know one.
So, God wants realistic Christians, complex Christians, Christians who smell like sheep. Because those are the people that God needs. Picky people and holier than Saint Paul are not good at communicating the Gospel. And I believe that realistic people are people who have lived a lot, have suffered a lot, have suffered a lot, have failed a lot, have seen God in different ways. And that is what God aspires from your life, that you be a man, a complex woman, a son of Man. That you know that no emotion is alien to the Father, and that people see in you a person who is capable of communicating in any situation because you know where they are standing.
The Bible talks about Christ having compassion. He is a high priest who sympathizes with us because He was where we are. And I ask the Lord that León de Judá be a congregation of people, and a community of accessible people, normal people, people who are not scandalized by anything, because they know what the human condition is.
The Bible says that God has compassion on us as the father of children has compassion because He knows our condition and remembers that we are dust. God is going to allow your spiritual trajectory to be zigzagging at times, but that is to make you like that log. If there is something I want to keep in your mind from all this message that I have already concluded, it is the idea that you want to be a complex tree, a tree not with the beauty of a stamp, of a birthday card, but rather a somewhat sinister tree, so to speak, full of complexity, texture, through experiences that God wants to pass on to you.
God wants your life and your Christian walk to be something wonderfully complex, strong, strange, rare, intriguing. And ask the Lord for that, to let you live and know Him as He wants to be known. May you know him in the tragedy of his cross, in the sinisterness of his nails driven into his hands, at the moment of sweating drops of blood in Gethsemane, at the moment of seeing the Holy Spirit descend upon him in the form of a dove, at the moment of taking the whip and whipping the money changers in the temple, at the moment of being a baby like any other, doing his needs, the Son of God at the moment of seeing his mother suffer from the cross and see her agony and not be able to assist her.
That is the Christ that God wants us to know and for us to become like Him in His sufferings. Because that's what Paul means, "I want to know him in his sufferings." There are people who only want to meet Jesus on the Sunday of the Resurrection, but what about the Friday of the crucifixion?
So ask the Lord. We are going to ask the Lord to make us complex Christians. Stand up for a moment and pray with me, and I say with myself because I myself am going to be here with you praying so that the Lord helps me to know him better and that God makes the León de Judá congregation an exemplary church, made of men and women who they have experienced their own crucifixion and have entered the journey of the Christian life with all its complexity.
Oh, Father, we ask this afternoon, our longing is to meet you, Lord. Get to know you in all facets of your life and your personality. Make this congregation an enigma for humanity and the city in which we live, something that provokes in them curiosity, that when we walk the streets of Boston and Massachusetts and New England, people see crucified men and women. Men who are in the process, men and women, families who are being treated by your spirit.
We want to reflect the complexity of Christ Jesus. I pray, Father, that this afternoon this people will be inspired to reach new levels of knowing you. I know, Lord, that you know each one of my brothers and sisters and you know what they are going through right now. You lean from your throne and you look down on each one of us. You know the pain that many of us are going through. You know the agony and suffering for our children who are on their own trajectories.
You know the loneliness of many, you know the anxiety of others. You know the pain we feel for not being more like you want us to be. You know those who are struggling with a relationship that they know is not the one you want them to have. You know the one who sells things that shouldn't be selling. You know the businessman who knows that his job prevents him from getting where you want them to go.
You know the mothers who grieve for their children, the husbands or wives, who fight for their marriage. You know those who bleed because they remember that they did something they shouldn't have done, offended someone, hurt someone, violated some confidence, violated some loyalty.
Father, we are living stories. Each one of us is going through a problem, a pain, a fear, an anguish, a depression, an anxiety. We have been diagnosed with chronic diseases but you see all that stuff and you are fixing your eyes on each one of us. And you are going to use all those sufferings for something good, noble, beautiful that glorifies you.
I declare, Father, that this people that embraces you and clings to you as Jacob clinged to the angel, will not be disappointed. You are going to do something wonderful in their lives and you are going to be using everything.
Brothers, I can tell you right now that God is watching over you and is seeing every process that you are experiencing. Each one of you is important, each one of you right now, God has his eye on you and He knows your struggle. He knows your sleeplessness. He knows the desires of your heart. And He pities you as the father pities his children. And God is using all aspects of your life to form a man, or a woman that at the end of his career, He says, “That's my son. That's my daughter. I feel proud of him or her.”
Although we are not complete and perfect, but by loving you so much and by fighting so much to please you, you will like us. So, Father, form a beautiful, complex community, beautiful in ways that we cannot explain. On this day we thank you for being part of the family, Lord. And we ask you to take us to new levels, in the name of Jesus and the people of God say, amen. God bless you, my brothers. Amen.
