Ken Boa Reflections Ministries

Dr. Ken Boa: Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this time that we can be privileged to meet together in freedom to be able to study your word and have fellowship with one another and build one another up in our most holy faith. We ask that that faith would be expressed in us and through us in Christ Jesus, amen.

Well, we're continuing and we're going to finish this first book, Rewriting Your Broken Story, which is part of a trilogy that we have. They're available, but I don't lug them with me. Sometimes I have people follow along with me and so forth, but we're talking about the whole idea of rewriting your broken story, and we're going to finish it today. The question that it always raises is how do you fix a broken story? The only way you can fix a broken story—and we're all in one—is to embed your story in the greatest story ever told because there's another act coming.

If this was all there is, it would be a tragedy, not a comedy. It's a tragedy to see the loss of loved ones. I have a dear friend who's on death's door even as we speak, a covenant brother of mine. I'm at the age now where I'm losing people left and right; it's happening more frequently. To look at it that way and to consider from that vantage point, if there is not another act to come where he's going to redeem what he allows and actually transmute the lead of our suffering into the gold of his glory, then I would be in despair.

But we do have the resurrection promise so that we will live in resurrected bodies and in a resurrected cosmos, and so all shall be well and all manner of things will be well. It's a way we need to have this perspective. I want to say a few words about some tidying up of things and kind of looking into the whole idea of our relationship with him and walking in intimacy with him. One of the things that we have to recognize when we are struggling in this world is that our sin is not our deepest view; it's not our identity.

That's one principle I really want to emphasize. There is a chapter where we're talking about how sin doesn't define us, but we will be tempted in so many ways. It's really great for us to be brutally honest about the dynamics of temptation and all the ways in which that can occur. Grasp indeed that this is not the deepest you. If you are in Christ, you are a new creation. Sin doesn't define you; it is part of what is the remnant of our old self in Adam. So it's called by Paul the flesh, and it's not the deepest but it is there in our members of our body and waging war against the law of our minds.

But we are deeper spiritual beings who still have this problem of adversity that goes on. So the process of us becoming in practice what God has already made us in position is a critical one. That's really what I discuss. I'm just pulling out bits and pieces. I'm not trying to teach the book; I'm pulling out highlights of things that I want you to hear and I want to convey and reinforce because you have to hear some of these principles multiple times. They slip through our fingers and we just have to continue to review them and renew our minds as well.

One of the things that God's called us to do is that we already are spiritual beings with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. You're seated with him at the right hand of the Father in Christ Jesus. You may not feel that way, but that's what the Scriptures tell you is true. You are a spiritual being having this earthbound embodied experience in a soul-forming world. In this soul-forming world, you will find yourselves pulled and struggling because of the gravity of the world. There's the gravity of the flesh and there's the gravity of the devil.

These things would tether us to this world. So we have to have resources that help us to grasp our call. Our call in this short world, in our few decades in this world, is to become more and more who we really are. You're a new creature in Christ in your spirit, but in your soul, you're becoming more and more who you were intended to be. So you're becoming in your practice who you already are in your position, if that would be the normal Christian life. Understanding that and the repentance when we deal with temptation, King David's a great study.

We have the whole situation with his wrestling with his own sin and acknowledging this, even in Psalm 51 and 32, about how he wrestled with it. He asked God to wash away his iniquity and cleanse him from his sin. The basis of salvation is still the same; it wasn't because of our works, but rather because of the work of God on our behalf. The death of Christ reaches back and actually affects us. The amazing idea of the retroactive work of Christ is that it reached back all the way to Adam and it reaches forward all the way to the last person.

So we have this powerful Gospel that overcomes this downward pull. But when we do sin and when we do stumble—for who of us is there who does not stumble or succumb from time to time—the real issue is to grasp that you are not a dirty rotten sinner saved by grace, but rather you are a saint who occasionally sins, and there's a big difference. To grasp your identity in Christ is to see you have been given dignity. But sin is incompatible with the person you're being called to be. It's beneath your dignity and it's not really who you are.

It's wise then that when we do succumb, perhaps to an outburst of anger or some fleshly response, instead of wallowing in guilt, deal with it, thank him for his forgiveness, and move on. Shorten that interval between the sin and the genuine repentance; the better we are because that way you're not succumbing to that. You can choose, and this is what one of the mysteries that God's given us, the mystery of the grace of God that gives us the capacity to actually serve him and to be able to fulfill the life of Christ by walking in the spirit.

So he's given us the capacity to choose to walk by the spirit at any time, but we can also succumb to walking by the flesh. We must train ourselves to become more spring-loaded to walking by the spirit. One of the ways you do this is when you catch yourself doing something stupid, you immediately acknowledge it, thank him for the grace, and move on. Instead of wallowing in guilt, you thank him for his forgiveness and his redemption and then you move on. Then you become more accustomed to walking in that manner.

It's therefore also regularly wise to ask the Holy Spirit to examine our hearts, but we're meant to hide in God, not from him. Sin, I claim, thrives in secrecy and in darkness. So sometimes it can become, if we're not careful—and people have done this, followers of Jesus even—succumbing to habitual, persistent sins that become a dark area in their life and is not acknowledged by others. It actually grows in that anonymity. Only when it's exposed to the light and when it's exposed and revealed to another person does it lose its power over us.

This is why there have to be someone in your life that you can trust well enough to be able to help you in that process of dealing with this and moving on. I have some people who know my flesh signature, my weaknesses, and I will invite them to ask me good questions and tough questions because I don't want to have any area of secrecy that's hidden in darkness. Otherwise, it'll grow and fester. It's intriguing that you've heard probably the list of seven deadly sins, but actually there was an ascetic monk named Evagrius Ponticus who lived in the fourth century.

He had a list of eight patterns of logismoi or evil thoughts. Then that was modified by Father Maximus of Mount Athos who used these logismoi using five stages. A logismos was an evil thought. In Orthodox thought, they used Father Maximus's five stages, and I find it to be very insightful. I wanted to just mention them to you because there's a clear, growing development of these. There's a progress that's very consistent with the growth of sin in James chapter one, the anatomy of temptation.

Dealing with temptation, number one: it's assault. It first attacks your mind and then you begin to have a dialogue with it as if it was an option. The minute you've taken a thing like that and you make it an optional behavior, you're now in the next stage where you're considering it even as a possibility. You're playing around with it. Then the third stage is when you actually consent to do what that evil thought urges you to do. We'll see this in James 1. Then the fourth stage is if you continue to move in this direction, you become a hostage to the logismos.

You are captive to it. Finally, passion or obsession becomes an entrenched reality within the person's mind. You see how it becomes concretized into action. What I'm suggesting here is these five stages are not a bad way of describing what we see in James chapter one. When he speaks about this idea of trial and of temptation, he speaks about the concept of the perseverance in the temptation. He says, "Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial, for once he's been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love him."

Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself does not tempt anyone. It's interesting though the same word can be used for temptation or it can be used as a trial. But God himself doesn't tempt in this sense. Temptation is a solicitation to evil and God will never do that. Rather, he himself does not tempt anyone as he does not solicit us or invite us to evil. That's what the enemy would do. But he goes on to say each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.

So there is now this logismos, this evil thought that's there. When you give it the possibility of actionable practice, that becomes a problem. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin. There's a kind of a gestation process of sin where it moved from an idea and becomes more and more likely to become a practice. It becomes concretized in action. So you have a possible course of action which can become a real course of action as you continue to go down the line. All of us can do this; it matters not what kind of sin it is, but it has its own pull.

And so it then brings forth death. The process then is it actually gives birth to the action itself and it brings forth death. Don't be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good thing and every perfect gift is from above, coming from the Father of lights. His truth will never ask us to succumb to those interactions. I found that to be interesting to see how there is that anatomy of temptation, as I said in James, and self-deception plays a huge role. Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive ourselves. Do what it says.

Anyone who listens to the word but does not do it is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and after looking at himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looked like. Suppose you see a big splotch on your face and you think "that's interesting" and you walk out. You might as well not have actually looked at the mirror because you see the word of God is a moral mirror. Reading this book is not a neutral act; it actually reveals and exposes you to yourself. It exposes the machinations and it gives us and exposes us to the resources of righteousness.

The very act of reading the Scriptures and putting ourselves before God puts us in a position of a grace-filled possibility of dealing honestly with those downward pulls. The sequences in these verses are first submit to God. When he tells us in James chapter four that you are to wash your hands and purify your hearts, submit yourselves to God and resist the devil. Note the order: you cannot resist the enemy until you've submitted to God first. So it comes down to a choice that you make to submit to God, and then you're in a position to resist the devil.

Never try it the other way around. That to me is the whole idea of submission to God. I talk about this whole idea of seeing through the stages, but there's something about naming a sin aloud that makes it more real to us in addition to providing a measure of accountability going forward. If there's some area of anonymity in that respect, that darkness, pray for a person that you can trust enough to share your struggling in this area. It diminishes its power over you because it's now been named. You name that demon for what it is and it loses part of its power, and I think it's very critical.

He's given us freedom from sin and a room in his house. There's a daily fight that we have. Our battles are first won or lost in the secret places of our will in God's presence, never in full view of the world. When it becomes palpable and manifest and evident to others, it's a long process that was already going on before it had a process of gestation. We want to choose to be people who exercise your will and your capacity for resistance. This is another thing that I've talked to you about before: the expulsive power of a new affection.

Thomas Chalmers in the 19th century described that in a sermon by that name. What he meant by this was that it's much better, instead of trying to avoid sin, to find a better good. Focus on what you want rather than what you want to avoid because it's never a good strategy just to focus on what you don't want to do. It's always better to replace a negative thing with a better good. The analogy I've always used has been when Karen and I were working with people who were in drugs, we never told them about getting off drugs but we told them about Jesus.

Ultimately, what would happen is they would realize that that relationship, when they came to know him, would take care of the other. Having a better affection, it is better to love Jesus than to try to avoid sin. Intimacy: fix your eyes on Jesus and as you do so, the sin takes care of itself. If I'm fixing my eyes on Jesus, if I'm abiding in Christ... I use this little trilogy as you know so frequently: trust the Father, abide in the Son, walk by the Spirit. Those three really help me a lot because I can instantly summon those to mind.

It's a trinitarian formula to trust the Father (it's my role not to understand him), to abide in the Son (draw my life from him, not myself), and to walk by the Spirit (to keep in step with his spirit). They're all pretty much saying the same thing: as I walk in the Spirit, you will put to death the deeds of the flesh. It's very profoundly important, simple but yet profound. But you must want to want him. So the question comes down to the intention of the heart: what do you seek?

Jesus' first question: what do you seek? His second question: who do you say I am? And his third question: do you love me more than these? My answer to what I seek then is to know him and become more like him. I want to want him more than anything else. That to me is really what gives us our vitality and our grace. Any questions on that? It's just a simple quick overview of the anatomy of sin and the pull of temptation because it's never going to go away.

But what you can do is become so spring-loaded toward the spirit that it becomes more and more the real basis of your life and it becomes your natural place of dwelling. The next chapter I'm going to discuss very quickly because it has to do with remaining in community, but it has to do with relationships—the most visible evidences of God's presence and sacrificial love in the world. Relationships: you've never met a mere mortal. Treasuring relationships, treasuring people, and the idea of putting Jesus on display by the way we relate to others.

When you're walking in the Spirit, then you do experience the fruit of the spirit. Remember the fruit of the spirit. The kind of person who manifests love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—those are qualities you want to be around. Those are things that are attractive and appealing, are they not? Therefore it is good for us to actually long to manifest that. The way the Spirit manifests his life through you will be unique to you and no one else will quite be able to do that.

From the very beginning, it's not good for man to be alone. We were called to relationship because God at his core is relationship. If you love him, the more you love him, the more you're capable of loving the people who are bearers of his image. People became alienated from God and from each other at the blast of the fall. Then in the New Testament especially with the new covenant, he gave us his spirit who now indwells us in such a way that his presence is in us.

He's come to dwell in us, guide us, and bind us together. So the Holy Spirit when we meet together is the one who actually provides a unity in that diversity and creates an organic dynamic by which we can love one another and become a witness to a watching world. That's what really comes together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned: "Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone." In Life Together, what he meant by that is that you need to have both.

You need to have solitude which gives you depth so that you can minister out of that fullness of the solitude in Christ in the interior life. But then there's the exterior life as well. I sometimes do this as the idea of the interior and the exterior. What's below the surface is walking in Christ and looking at him; it's intimacy with Christ, rest, calling, solitude—it's the interior life. That is what's not visible to people, but the roots are downward. But then you send the shoots upward and that manifests the interior life.

I claim it should manifest itself in the exterior life. You see how that works: the better your root system, the more you'll be capable in your character and your engagement that's born out of that relationship with Christ rather than just something that we're just trying to do ourselves. We have this common life that we enjoy with one another. In this ministry of being other-centered, we have the dynamics of growth and encouragement, of accountability, and of empowering each other to live out the Gospel.

There are also soul care mechanisms as well. The net of the soul care though is just something like this: there are four degrees of personal ministry. I've had relationship with people on all four of these levels, and I think some of you have done this as well. On the informal, unstructured, or reciprocal side is what's called spiritual friendship, that's an anam cara, a soul friend. We can have those friends. But then we can have people who also are guides to us, where they're helping us and suggesting things to read.

Then mentoring: there are some people who serve as spiritual mentors, another step further. And then spiritual direction: more formal, structured, one-directional. I've had these four roles in different people; different people I've had these different roles, but they're all related to the dynamics of the body of Christ in those relationships that God's called us to pursue. One thing that we have as an exercise I wanted to call your attention to at the end of this chapter: every encounter. Keeping an eternal perspective means seeing every person you meet through the lens of God's grace.

Realizing we never meet someone at random or by accident. I want you to think about that for a moment: the Holy Spirit is the invisible master of ceremonies who puts people together. Sometimes for a one-time encounter, sometimes for multiple encounters. But I have to recognize that whenever I choose to see them, this is a person who is in fact a saint, a holy one, a manifestation of the life of Christ. To treat them with dignity and assume God is working in that person somehow.

Is there some way I can share the love or presence of Christ with that person? I think it's a wise thing for us to do. Even if it's a one-time encounter, see this could have an eternal impact. Whether it's ongoing or not, there's a whole spectrum of this, but I want you to recognize that God never puts people into your life by accident. There are people in your life for a reason. Even someone who delivers something to your door, it may be an encounter.

There have been interesting times when I've been with people and prompted to do something or say something. So allow that to happen; it can be a very profound and meaningful thing. The last chapter, and we're going to finish this up today, is to reimagine life. I love this ending at the end of The Last Battle: "All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page. Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before."

I find myself living there more now. This idea of realizing the best I've ever known are only hints of better goods to come. It's not happily ever after, but actually now when we see Jesus face to face, that's when the real story begins. No one's been able to recount that story, but there are joys ahead that transcend anything that we can know in this world. One of the things I find myself doing a lot more is what I call the slingshot idea.

I take and look at those greatest experiences I've had with another person—experiences of beauty, shared beauty, shared intimacy, or adventure. What are the greatest experiences I've known of beauty, intimacy, and adventure with another person? And then realize that those are hints. I've done this with Karen. We just had a chat yesterday, for example, about some things we'd love to relive when we're younger. Imagine going back to that day or that experience and reliving it with that knowledge we have, but with the energy we had then.

If that was a good day, how much better would it be now? Rather than use that as an exercise for remorse or regret, no, this is what I do with that: I take that real thing that we just shared and imagine that that is merely a pointer to a greater good that's ahead that we cannot yet name. Because you see, you can't imagine what resurrected life is like because you'd have to have a resurrected mind to do so. God is going to give you a capacity that transcends your own.

But it's what C.S. Lewis called Sehnsucht or longing. We all have in us a longing for more than this world can sustain and provide because we were meant for another world. Because of that, then we hear these tunes and messages and hints from something ahead. I claim though that it can be very creative for us to leverage those experiences we've had in the past as pointers to better goods to come. That becomes very powerful and very redemptive. When I'm thinking about the loss of my friend who's on his deathbed even as we speak, for example, it's easy for me to go back to our best experiences together.

I see those and review those as hints of better goods that we will share together in resurrected life in the fields of the Lord. In a resurrected cosmos as well. So that way, it becomes a pointer to something that's coming rather than a regret for what's lost. Does that make sense to you? Try that out because it's an exercise I find is working more and more effectively for me as I go. "Reason is the natural organ of truth," Lewis wrote, "but imagination is the organ of meaning."

This is what I'm using: I'm using my imagination, I'm using my mind's eye. Especially when I'm with another person, we can imagine what were our best experiences. Do you remember that thing we did there? Do you remember this here? It's almost like reliving it. But it's not the thing itself that you're looking for, but rather it's a pointer to a greater good you cannot yet name. The best you've ever known are hints of better goods to come that you cannot name, but you will not be disappointed.

So rather than looking at heaven with a kind of a distant notion and trying to cling to this life, you're actually longing for that more. You're increasing your appetite for your true home because you haven't experienced it yet, but the best you've ever known are the things that he's called us to have. Almost our whole education, he says, has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent inner voice. Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us the good of man is to be found in this earth.

Even now, even believers cling to this world rather than long for the next. But Paul says, "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain." One of the texts that come to my mind is in 2 Corinthians chapter five. Here he says, "We know that if the earthly tent which is our house"—that's his body—"is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. In this house we groan longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven."

We're longing to be clothed with our resurrection life. He says we groan being burdened. "He who prepared us for this very purpose is God and therefore being of always of good courage, knowing that while we're at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord. We walk by faith not by sight. We are of good courage and say I prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord." How many people can say that? Most believers I encounter cannot say that or do not live that.

I think that they're living in a way that's inconsistent with the promises of God because this world is not our home. We're living in a tragedy here, but another act is coming. So I want to amplify my mind's eye. Also, he says we have as our ambition to be pleasing to him and we will be given account at the judgment seat of Christ. And so we persuade men. This is a mindset that I would love to inculcate in you more and more, and in myself as well.

I try to encourage people to make this become a real manifestation of our true walking in Christ. When we become new beings in Christ, we are also becomers in him. Gradually through the spirit's work in us, we're becoming who we already are. That's the idea. There's a scene in The Lord of the Rings when Aragorn, who is a Ranger, actually is told by Elrond: "Put aside the Ranger, become who you were born to be." I like that scene very much. Become the person you truly are and don't embrace a false identity anymore.

But here's the thing about this: your life in this world will largely be hidden; you won't know your impact. But whatever you do is going to have an ongoing reverberating impact in the lives of other people. So we have to realize that God's preparing us for something that's rich, wonderful, and beautiful. Our destiny determined where we fit within God's larger story. If our physical life is a temporary setting for individual life, we see something that's going to be richer and more profound.

Most followers of Christ, I say, have anemic imaginations. Our world is full of imagination killers. Television and the internet being chief culprits in today's world and the dopamine culture as well. Just constantly giving them another rush, but getting more and more away from an analog world to more of an artificial world, and people become addicted to that. After a while, they do not have a sanctified imagination. They don't long for enough; they don't want enough and they're anemic.

But I claim though that we become conformed to whatever we aspire to and long for. What you long for, what you desire, what you imagine as the greatest good, that becomes a thing which you cultivate and so you begin to become more homesick and earth-weary. I think that's the right way to prepare for eternity. So we have a practice tip here: living in light of "well done." When we're before the judgment seat of Christ, the best words we can hope to hear are "well done, good and faithful servant."

While the most terrifying words would be "I never knew you away from me." Living each day in light of the former words "well done." Think of a creative way to remind yourself to live in this way. Maybe it's a note or a picture on the fridge so that you live each day with a sole purpose of pleasing and honoring him. Not other people or yourself. But here's the interesting thing: the more you make him your true aspiration and desire, the more you'll be able to love people, not less.

If you put the love of other people before your love of Christ, you will love them a lot less than if you love Jesus more than them, and that becomes the real way of seeing it. Loving the one thing that's wonderful. He is the source of beauty, truth, and goodness. So that living in light of hearing his pleasure, the divine accolade, is a good for us to pursue. Really living out of the depths and not out of the shallows. I use this analogy of giant oak trees.

I've shown you this before, but I can't resist it. I have my little list of live oak trees here. I have this picture. This was in Oak Alley and it's between Natchez and Biloxi. When Edgar Shaefer and I went there, I still remember it. He's the friend who's on death's door by the way, a covenant friend of mine. These live oak trees, seven on each side, were planted in 1838. They got rather big, didn't they? I look at what's amazing about these oak trees.

In fact, when I went to New Orleans about a month after Katrina, you couldn't take it in. The devastation was so profound. No images were big enough; you had to be there to see it and it was just devastating. But then we went to City Park and the live oak trees were doing just fine. Everything else had been torn down except those—maybe a few branches, but they were there. Why? Because of their root system. Look at this rich system. Look at the root systems.

There's as much below the ground as there is above the ground. That's what gives it substance, rooted and grounded. I took this photo when I was there because I knew I was going to use this as an illustration. You can just see what this is suggesting there. Then by contrast, my friend Frank Bartholomew—he's now with the Lord—but when we were talking, he told me about his experience with this white oak tree that you can see here on the left. It fell one day like that.

What's interesting about this white oak tree is that it had the appearance of fecundity on the top, but look at the root system. Almost nothing. It gave the appearance of depth but had almost no roots. It was not solid; it could easily be knocked over. Ultimately he had to replace it. My point is going back to that image that I showed you before where you're rooted and grounded, you send roots downward and bear fruit upward. You have to be rooted and grounded in that depth of the love of God.

That to me is what we're really looking for: to catch that vision of what it means to be people who train ourselves to live in both this world and in God's kingdom simultaneously. Right now we are still in this world; we're sojourners and strangers and exiles, wanderers, tenants, and aliens. But then we will be at home. The best you've ever known has been only a hint of better goods to come. Become... the more you become world-weary and homesick, the more actually you'll treasure the precious present.

The more alive you'll be to the grace of the opportunity that is called now. You'll become more fully alive when you give yourselves to the vision that God's got in store for us. His vision for us is that the best is yet to come and it's further up and further in. I use my mind's eye to realize what it would be like to be in a world where there's no sin, where the flesh has been overcome at the judgment seat of Christ.

You can't think sin. The world system with its devices and desires will be gone. And the devil and his angels will be finally eliminated from us. And then in addition to that, there'll be no more pain, sorrow, death, suffering. If that weren't enough, imagine a new resurrected cosmos, a resurrected world in which there's no death and glory and beauty. Imagine what it'll be like in your relationships with all things. The best is yet to come, but the hints that you've best known in this world, use those as your imagination for a better world to come and you will anticipate that and live as a person who is an overcomer because we're in a fallen world, but we are waiting for the world to come. Lord Jesus, we thank you for your love for us that you've called us to be people who are overcomers in this world in Christ Jesus, amen.