Give Me Who You Are, Today--No Wife-Hug Day

1/6/2007

The point is that there needs to be some brain-washing—washing of the water of the Word—and living our lives together instead of being meeting-based. The meetings are just extra. Where I live, we can go sometimes a month or longer without the whole church being together, and still we’re getting stronger and stronger every day. We’re not “forsaking the gathering of ourselves together.” We were brain-dirtied. We were taught that “not forsaking the gathering of ourselves together” meant Sunday. “Do not forsake the gathering of yourselves together.” Well, who said that was “Sunday”? The one who wanted the tithe said that. But if you look at the Bible, there is no Sunday in that verse. It doesn’t have anything to do with Sunday. What we are doing right now is a “gathering of ourselves together.” Is this profitable, brothers?

Yes!

I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying knowing you and feeling your hearts and trying to work things out. This is a gathering. What day is today?

Saturday.

Saturday?! Oh my, we should save all this for tomorrow! : ) Well, we better stop right now. Tomorrow is the meeting day. Well, NO! “As you rise up, as you sit down, as you walk along the way.” Do you save everything you want to say to your children or wife until some certain day? Or do you just say it when it comes up?

If I read a scripture this morning that just lights a fire in my heart, I don’t wait until there is a meeting to share it with somebody, anymore than I’d wait until a certain day to give my wife a hug. Who would say, “Tuesday is wife-hug day. Oh, this is Wednesday. Sorry, I’ve got to wait a whole week now before I can hug my wife because today is not wife-hug day”?

Share scripture and life and prayer and love like you would share something in a family. It’s the same thing. If I have something to share, if you have something to share, if you have something to share with me, then text-message me, email me, call me…reverse the charges! I want to hear what God is doing in your life, and I don’t care what day of the week it is!

I want to be able to hug my wife every day. I want to know what’s in your heart every day. Don’t bore me with meetings. Don’t just feed me icing all the time. I want the cake! Give me who you are. Give me the Jesus inside of you every day.

That’s right…

There are probably ten more of these stupid, sinful problems that we haven’t talked about yet. There are ten more that you haven’t even discovered yet! (laughter) But I guarantee you that we can resolve these things by committing our lives to each other with no hypocrisy, no fear, and no thoughts of “my territory…

I own this,” but rather with transparency which is a beautiful word. If we’ll live that way and get our brains clean from the dirtying of how we have been taught Christianity was supposed to be, you’ll be amazed at how these problems will solve themselves right before our eyes. They’ll just melt and vanish.

Where did the problem go? I thought I needed to solve it! Well, Jesus solved it, because His life was so present with us that all the roots, all the tentacles, all the tributaries, all the little roots that we couldn’t even find were ripped out. We’d have to be great policemen to find all the problems and solve them. We can’t! It’s too hard. But Jesus just dries up the works of the devil, just squeezes all the death out of them and throws them away when we live the kind of life that He did with the twelve.

“As we rise up, as we sit down, as we walk along the way…” with honesty, with transparency, and with a HATRED of hypocrisy. The Jesus inside of us still hates hypocrisy. No pretense. A true Israelite, according to Jesus, was what? He was a man without guile, a man without pretense, a man without hypocrisy. That’s God’s heart for us to be like Nathanael—to be true Israelites without duplicity or hypocrisy. And if we’ll live as true Israelites with one another and with our families, then satan is pushed back and pushed back. We don’t even know what problems he planned for us, but he couldn’t get close enough to even try to throw those problems at us because of the life and the love of God. It’s like a bonfire driving away the wolves. There’s a freedom in that.

We can still talk again about the specific problems troubling you, but I wanted to at least say this first: you can’t solve enough problems in a day, a week, a month, or a life-time to get rid of the problems IF you’re just trying to solve problems and find answers to problems. There’s no end to the problems. Satan will keep bringing us new ones. Problems which no one has ever heard of before will start falling from the sky…problems…problems…problems. We’ll be so busy trying to solve problems we’ll forget to worship. We’ll forget to love, and then satan wins even if we solve the problems, because we’re so distracted and burdened by solving problems that we’re not free to be worshippers anymore.

But remember, “The life became the light of men…The life became the light of men.” The more of this daily, committed, kind of Life that we can share together, then the more Light gets broadcast outward and solves problems before we even know they’re problems. I think that’s more important to say, in some ways, than to address all the problems. Because if we live this way it’s amazing how Jesus shows up to solve problems that we didn’t even know were coming at us.

•  Give Me Who You Are, Today--No Wife-Hug Day