This song is simple and a bit cutesie...

...but I like it and love its message: "Just say Jesus!"

Paul writes in Romans 8:26:

...the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Jesus tells us to pray in His Name, meaning we're to approach God under His protection, His aegis, and in accordance with His will.

I know that most of the time I don't know how to pray as I ought. I don't know what the best thing to pray for may be in many situations. Sometimes, I have the sense I need to be praying for someone or something, but don't know what the needs may be.

But God's Word assures me that when I pray in Jesus' Name, sometimes doing nothing more than lifting up to heaven "the Name that is above all names," the Holy Spirit turns my incoherent longings and my helpless faith into a prayer that moves God, changes the world, and changes me. By invoking the Name of Jesus, I entrust people and concerns to the One Who knows what needs to be done and will do it.

Just say Jesus!

The Christian Creed v. the American Creed

Among the reasons that, for all the lip service given to faith in our public life, Christianity isn't entirely at home in the United States is that the value most highly prized by Americans isn't the highest value commended by God.

If you ask the average American what the ultimate value is, the one thing for which they would be likeliest to fight to the death, I think the answer would be freedom.

On the other hand, though the Christian gospel--the good news of forgiveness and new life for all who believe in Jesus Christ--brings the ultimate freedom to people, setting them free to be the people God made them to be and not what sin, their own or others', dictates, freedom is not the ultimate value of Christian faith.

The ultimate value of Christian faith is love.

Christian love is self-giving love. It willingly divests itself of what the world knows as freedom in order to love others.

This is the love that Jesus gives.

The Christian gospel tells us that Jesus divested Himself of the freedom of being God in order to take on humanity and undertake love's greatest deed: God, unblemished by sin, submitting to death without resistance for His beloved, the human race, then rising to take an eternal kingdom, not for Himself, but for the benefit of all who believe in Him.

Christians are then called to live out the same sort of self-giving love. Paul writes in the New Testament book of Philippians:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:4-11)

Jesus has the Name above all names not because He lived and died for freedom, but because He lived and died and rose for love.

And He calls us to give His kind of love the ultimate place in our lives. 1 Corinthians 13:13 says: "And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

When freedom is your ultimate value, you can become a monster: self-centered, ego-driven, materialistic. Make freedom your ultimate value and you will ultimately be enslaved by the things you chase as an expression of your freedom. You will be separated by a self-constructed wall from God, grace, and other people.

If freedom is your ultimate value, you might love, after a fashion.

But if God's love is your ultimate value, you also will be truly free.

And this brings up another reason Christianity doesn't entirely fit with our American culture. Americans are taught to believe in self-sufficiency, the notion that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and that, if we decide to be loving, or free, or decisive, or whatever, we can make it happen.

But no Christian is taught to believe that she or he can resolve to be loving or anything else. Christians know that resolutions and good intentions won't change us. Only Christ can do that. That's why the apostle Paul writes in Romans: "I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Romans 7:15). And later, "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25) Only the love of God, given in Christ, can set us free to be our best selves.

This applies especially to the ultimate value of love. We may learn over time to be loving by letting ourselves be loved by the God we see in Jesus, by submitting ourselves to no master but Jesus.

We open our wills to Jesus and let Him make us over into His image, including taking His love as the ultimate good in this life and the next. We cling to the words of John:

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 1:10)

There have been Christians imprisoned for their faith in Christ who were infinitely more free than the jailers who held them and had the freedom to go wherever they wanted. That's because freedom is, in the end, not about getting to do what you want to do, it's about getting to be the person the God of love sets you free to be through Jesus.

I love my country. But I'll take "faith, hope, and love" over "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That's because in Christ, happiness has already pursued me. So has love. I don't have to go looking for it. I simply let Jesus Christ in. And that, by the by, brings freedom!

But What is Freedom? (More Thoughts Inspired by the Fourth of July)

The sad truth is that, except possibly for the benefit of close family and friends, we human beings value freedom more than just about anything, more even than we value love. We'd a lot rather have our own way than to ever give way. It's part of our fallen human nature, inherited from Adam and Eve and all the other parents in between then and now.

Love, from the standpoint of God and the Bible, is not an emotion. It's a tough commitment to what honors God and helps others. It’s what the apostle Paul was talking about when he told the first century Christians at Philippi: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

Real freedom resides in being so secure in yourself and your place in God’s kingdom that you don’t need to “look out for number one.” You know that, in Jesus Christ, in His death on the cross, and His resurrection from the dead, God has already looked out for you and will keep looking out for those who repent and believe in Christ, for all eternity. You have the mind of Christ and are set free, as Christ was while He was on earth, to truly live, whether you're living in a penthouse or the big house, whether you're being commended or being condemned. You have the freedom to become the person of steely love and obedience to God you were made to be.

None of us will experience this freedom in its fullness on this side of death. Personally, I admit that I do, say, and think things every day that have me turning to God to ask for forgiveness and to seek the power to live my daily prayer, “Thy will be done.”

But those who follow Jesus Christ have freedom in ways that no Declaration of Independence and no Constitution, no matter how cherished or important they may be, can ever bring.

True freedom--freedom from sin and death, freedom to live this life without fear--comes to all who trust in Jesus Christ, no matter the governmental system under which they live.  I hope that you're experiencing the freedom that comes from Jesus Christ alone on this Fourth of July weekend.

Looking Out for Number One

For Christians, God and others are number one, not themselves.

I really do pray that God will help me live this truth out every day of my life.

A Bit About Jesus' "New Commandment"

In two days, Christians all over the world will celebrate Maundy Thursday. Together, we'll read and hear the account from the Gospel of John about the dinner Jesus had with His disciples on the night of His betrayal and arrest.

In the passage, after washing the feet of His disciples, Jesus says that all His followers--the Church, are to "do as I have done to you." Then, Jesus says, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."

The latter verse, in fact, is where it's thought that the name Maundy comes from. It's the Middle English version of the Latin term, mandatum, in modern English, mandate or command.*

But what's new about this commandment? Isn't Jesus' "new commandment" just another way of expressing God’s will for humanity from the beginning, expressed in the two tables of the Ten Commandments and summarized by Jesus as the Great Commandment: to love God completely and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves?

In one way, yes, Jesus’ new commandment is no different from the Great Commandment that God has always given to us. And who could expect otherwise? God is unchanging in His goodness, strength, and will. In Malachi 3:6, God says, “For I the Lord do not change…” And Hebrews 13:8, says of God the Son, “Jesus is Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” The God Who created us out of love and His desire to give that love away, wills that we not only love Him, but also love all the people He loves. And that’s everybody. So, at one level Jesus’ new commandment isn’t very new at all.

Yet, at another level, it is new. Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet was a kind of visible parable for what He meant when He used the term, love.

For Jesus, love is more than compassion or consideration of others, more than respect or regard. When Jesus washed those filthy feet, He did a menial task which all first-century Judea agreed to be beneath someone hailed by many as a teacher (rabbi) or Lord. In this action, Jesus was just beginning to re-image lordship and greatness, ultimately, deity itself.

Of course, Jesus definitively re-imaged love on the cross. There, He lived a love so passionate that it laid aside dignity as the world sees it, to reclaim humanity from sin and death.

This is what Paul is talking about in citing what many scholars believe was a hynm sung by early Christians, when he writes that "though [Jesus] was in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave...He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:6-8)

This is love as Jesus defines it, a love so great that it willingly dies for the beloved, even when the beloved is contemptuous of the lover. Another word for it is passion, which is why we refer to Christ's crucifixion as His passion.

But, wait. It gets even more difficult and countercultural!

Remember that Jesus says to His followers, "You also should do as I have done to you." Jesus' new command is that we are to love with the same reckless disregard for the reactions of others that Jesus displayed. This is what Paul is talking about when he introduces that hymn in Philippians by saying, "Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus..." (Philippians 2:4-5)

Can Jesus be serious? Can Paul?

When Jesus gave His brand of love to the disciples, washing their feet, it didn't change their actions in the ensuing hours. They abandoned, denied, or betrayed Jesus.

And when Jesus offered Himself as the forgiving, eternity-granting Servant King to the Roman and Jewish authorities, they nailed Him to a cross.

And Paul himself, spending his life to spread the good news of Jesus, ended up on the wrong side of Roman "justice," a martyr for the faith.

Why would anybody want to love like that? What exactly is in it for us?

That last question, one we all ask if we're honest, actually has things backwards. Restating it with its implied premise, it might be expressed, "If I love like Jesus loves, what do I get out of it?"

The answer, of course, is that we don't love like Jesus (or, strive in our imperfect, sin-marred human way, to love like Jesus) to get anything out of it. We strive to love like that because we already have been loved like that, because when Jesus died and rose, He opened up new life and eternity to those who believe in Him. As John writes elsewhere in the New Testament, "We love because He [God] first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

We don't love to get anything. We love because through Jesus, we've already got everything--forgiveness, eternity, hope, purpose, love. The game has been won, the A already been given. Because Jesus went through the cross, even death has lost its sting.

Following Jesus doesn't mean we don't suffer in this world. In fact, we may suffer more than non-Christians precisely because we follow Christ. But we feel motivated and empowered to love like Jesus because in Christ, we're freed to love without regard to consequences.

It's fair for anyone reading this to ask me, "Do you love like Jesus? Do you love without regard to consequences? Do you serve selflessly?"

No, I don't love like Jesus. But I pray and hope that by God's grace that I will grow up as a Christian to do so. I ask God to help me obey Jesus' new commandment.

Thank God we're graded on a curve. The curve is called grace, God's charity, and it belongs to all who confess their powerlessness over sin and trust in Jesus Christ to love them into eternity.

With Christ in your life, even when you fail, you can not fail.

*"According to a common theory, the English word Maundy in that name for the day is derived through Middle English, and Old French mandé, from the Latin mandatum, the first word of the phrase "Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos" ("A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you"), the statement by Jesus in the Gospel of John (13:34) by which Jesus explained to the Apostles the significance of his action of washing their feet." (See here.)