I am second

I am Second small groups are designed to connect people with one another and with God through an authentic, action based discussion group. You are here for a reason. We all have needs and could use some help. I Am Second is designed to help people discover their purpose in life. Have you discovered yours? The stories shared at I Am Second provide insight into dealing with typical struggles of everyday living. Find the hope, peace, and fulfillment that others have found. Be Second.

Let your faith be like a shield, and you will be able to stop all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Ephesians 6:16 (CEV)

Please join St. Mark’s Lutheran Church as we launch the first I Am Second small group meeting today at 6 p.m. at the Java Creek Cafe in the Boyson Road plaza, Cedar Rapids.  We will view a video and then have a discussion about it. Everyone is welcome, you need not be a member of the church, just have a open mind to discover your purpose in life through Jesus Christ.

https://www.facebook.com/events/399936116688949/

Lords Prayer

When you are feeling lost, alone and needing help all you have to do is ask the Lord for help.  One of the best and most known prayers is the Lords Prayer and if you don’t know what to say, just say the Lords Prayer.  Matthew 6:5-13 teaches us how to pray the Lords Prayer.

“When you pray, don’t be like those show-offs who love to stand up and pray in the meeting places and on the street corners. They do this just to look good. I can assure you that they already have their reward.

 When you pray, go into a room alone and close the door. Pray to your Father in private. He knows what is done in private, and he will reward you.

 When you pray, don’t talk on and on as people do who don’t know God. They think God likes to hear long prayers. Don’t be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask.

 You should pray like this:”

Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.

Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth,
As it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,
The power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.

Amen.

The Impossible

“Unsinkable ships, sink, unbreakable walls, break.
Sometimes the things you think would never happen,
happen just like that.
Unbendable steel, bends, if the fury of the wind is unstoppable
I’ve learned to never underestimate the impossible”
~ Joe Nichols The Impossible (Unsinkable Ship)

On April 10, 1912, the RMS Titanic embarked on its maiden voyage, sailing from Southampton, England, to New York City. One of the largest and most luxurious passenger liners at the time, the Titanic was also considered by many to be unsinkable. On April 14, however, the ship struck an iceberg, and early the next day it sank.  On the morning of April 15, 1912, the sinking of the RMS Titanic the previous night shocked the world. The year had dawned bright with promise and the maiden voyage of the Titanic was a symbol of the advances mankind had made in the last few years. When the Titanic embarked on her maiden voyage the world was filled with hope and awe. In just a few short days those emotions turned to horror and grief.

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which  you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

We never know when we might face fear but when we do we must stare it in the face and walk through the fear and do the impossible. Because if you don’t, the fear grows. And it can grow so big that it becomes a gargantuan monster that will require the whole town to band together to destroy it! When something unexpected happens, your belief in yourself can waiver. This is exactly the moment you must not give up. You must face your fear or it will immobilize you.

Joe Tye writes in his book, Never Fear, Never Quit: A Story of Courage and Perseverance that “Fear is the most toxic of emotions. In today’s challenging and uncertain world, Courage and Perseverance are at a premium. Never Fear, Never Quit features a systematic exploration of the cornerstones upon which these values are built”.

Never Fear

Cornerstone 1: Diagnosis
Give fear a name and it becomes just a problem; it’s easier to solve problems than it is to conquer fear.
Cornerstone 2: Transformation
Metaphorical Visualization sparks the alchemy of anxiety, fear, and worry into catalytic energy for constructive change.
Cornerstone 3: Action
The Janitor in Your Attic and other practical action steps for confronting fear of rejection and failure.
Cornerstone 4: Connection
Fear is contagious but so is courage; strategies for cultivating empowering relationships.

Never Quit

Cornerstone 1: Preparation
It’s not if but rather when bad things happen to good people — strategies to be ready when they do happen.
Cornerstone 2: Perspective
How a simple change of perspective can transform apparent disaster into real opportunity.
Cornerstone 3: Toughness
Using the 3-Ps of Perseverance (Purpose, Passion, Patience) to cultivate mental toughness and emotional resilience.
Cornerstone 4: Learning
The 4 cardinal benefits of adversity, and how they combine to make you stronger and wiser.
(http://www.joetye.com/never-fear-never-quit.html)

Never Fear, Never Quit teaches that miracles are worth working for, that we each have the power to create the person we were meant to be and to give that gift of knowledge to others.

Whether in business, your personal life, or even in the pursuit of following your dreams, it is likely you will face fears. It’s a natural human condition. It’s part of every person’s evolution. Every challenge is an opportunity to conquer.

So the next time you feel fear holding you back, breathe, look fear in the face, and step forward with courage.

Believe you are brave, and you will be.

The Secret Is

If you believe Rhonda Byrne, author of the bestselling book The Secret, “The shortcut to anything you want in your life is to be and feel happy now!” According to Byrne, this has to do with something called the law of attraction. If you think only about things that make you happy, she says, happy things will be attracted to you.

Sounds easy enough.

However, the Bible says that “the secret” to life is something very different. It has to do with “the law of the Spirit of life” that sets us free from “the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2), not with the “law of attraction.”

According to the apostle Paul, the most important thing to know is “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). To those who are concerned with happiness now, this is indeed foolishness (v.14). They do not recognize the power of God in what appears to them as weakness.

The Lord created us with a desire to know what is secret. In His wisdom, He kept certain things hidden in mystery for a time (v.7). But now, through His Holy Spirit, He has made them known. And the secret He reveals has nothing to do with having happy thoughts in order to obtain happy things; it has to do with having the mind of Jesus Christ (v.16).

The Seven Last Words

The Seven Last “Words” of Jesus Christ from the cross are actually 7 short phrases that Jesus uttered on Calvary that serve as an excellent holy week meditation.  To find all of the seven last words of Jesus Christ, one must read all the gospels since none of the evangelists records all 7 last words.  The sayings would have been originally uttered by Jesus in the Aramaic language, but only one of the last seven words of Jesus is preserved for us in the original Aramaic, namely “Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani” or “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” which is actually a direct quote of the opening verse of Psalm 22.

The First Word
When they came to the place called “The Skull”, they nailed Jesus to the cross there, and the two criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Jesus said “Forgive them, Father! They do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:33-34)

Meditation on the First Word
“They do not know what they are doing”
They do not know? They …who killed Jesus?
Who is “they”?

It is so easy to name others, to blame others, the Romans, the crowd, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas. They all played their part and conspired against Jesus or simply followed orders to maintain the peace to keep Jesus’ kingdom from infringing on theirs. And yet where are we when Jesus’ kingdom infringes on ours? On our peace and our order? On our prosperity and our security?

Where are we when the victims of our peace cry for justice?
When those disenfranchised by our order call for compassion?
When the hungry and the lonely beg us to share our prosperity, our security
our power? Where are we when Christ is crucified among us?

Surely he should have raged at the sinners who nailed him to the tree. Surely he should have raged at us for the evil we do, the evil we do both knowing and unknowing. Yet compassion is there in the first words that he utters, He intercedes for us before the Father,

“Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing”

The Second Word
One of the criminals hanging there threw insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” The other one, however, rebuked him, saying: “Don’t you fear God? Here we are all under the same sentence. Ours, however, is only right, for we are getting what we deserve for what we did; but he has done no wrong.” And he said to Jesus, “Remember me, Jesus, when you come as King!” Jesus said to him, “I tell you this: Today you will be in Paradise with me.” (Luke 23:39-43)

Meditation on The Second Word
How much are we like the first thief?
Full of anger – because we are not rescued from our sin?
Full of hate – because we suffer because of the sins of others?
How much do we want God to snap his fingers and make right what we have made wrong?
What we have allowed others to make wrong?

How easy it is to cry “save us” and to rail against God when there is no  magic cure, no miraculous recovery no legions of angels to take away pain and bring wholeness. How easy it is to scorn the Messiah, to mock the goodness of the world and condemn the light of the world because we are unwilling to face what we we have done? Yet there is goodness, there is a cure for sin, a cure that does not promise magical solutions but promises that the pain of sin is not the end, that when all this is over when the suffering is finished that the final word is not torture and defeat but life — life springing out of the ashes, life transformed and fulfilled in Paradise.

To the compassionate thief;
To the one who could still recognize the good in the world;
To the one who tried to comfort and protect that good;
To the one who sought good, comfort was given.

“Today, you will be in paradise with me.”

The Third Word
Standing close to Jesus’ cross were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. Jesus saw his mother and the disciple he loved standing there; so he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that time the disciple took her to live in his home. (John 19:25-27)

Meditation on the Third Word
Who can grasp the grief of Mary watching her son suffer?
The grief of Mary watching Him die?
And who can grasp the grief of the son?
The son who must see his mother mourn?
What gift can a man give his mother?
What can he offer when he is gone?
How can he help her, hold her, comfort her and honor her?

Here is one I love, to love you, and for you to love. One who knows me
One who is my brother and who can speak of me. One Who can hold you,
comfort you, and honor you; One who shares your grief. “Here is your mother” here is one I love, for you to love, and to love you. The one who taught me, the one who fed me, the one who wiped away my tears the one who hugged me, the one who grieves with you.

“Women, behold your children; children, behold your mothers”.

The Forth Word
And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Elo-i, elo-i, lama sabach-thani?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33-34)

Meditation on the Fourth Word
Of all the agony of that tortuous day
The lacerations of the scourging
The chafing of the thorns around his head
The convulsions of his tormented, dehydrated body as it hung in the heat all the day
Nothing reaches the depth of this anguished cry of desolation
“My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Jesus, who found his purpose and strength in the presence of God who was sustained by the immediacy of his relationship with God and who endured all by the tangible power of God always at work within him, always a centre of vitality and peace, found himself totally alone on the cross. Jesus, whose very being was God, found himself utterly, absolutely, despairingly, cut off from all that gives life. Jesus himself plumbing the depths of the human condition to walk in the place of the utter absence of God, in the place of sinners in the place of those who reject God.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”.

The Fifth Word
After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfil the scripture), “I thirst.” (John 19:28)

Meditation on the Fifth Word
There is a kind of timelessness about hanging on a cross.
It is not a quiet death, over in an instant in one glorious moment of martyrdom like being torn apart by lions.
A cross is as much an instrument of torture as it is a gallows from which to hang

And as the day wears on seconds stretch into minutes which stretch into hours until there comes a point when time can no longer be measured except in the gradual weakening of the body and its ever more insistent demands for that substance which is so vital to life so foundational to all living things so basic to existence as we know it… water!

Water to moisten a parched mouth, water to free a swollen tongue, water to open a rasping throat that cannot gasp enough air. Water to keep hope alive
to keep life alive just a few moments longer. Water, to a crucified man, is life. “O God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee as in a dry and weary land where no water is”. Who can tell if these words from Psalm 63 went through Jesus mind but a thirst for water is a thirst for life and a thirst for life is a thirst for God who promises streams in the desert mighty rivers in the dry land and living water to wash away every tear. Here, at the end of it all those promises seem far away, distant. And yet Jesus – forsaken by God still clings to the memory and the hope of life.

“I thirst.”

The Sixth Word
A bowl was there, full of cheap wine mixed with vinegar, so a sponge was soaked in it, put on stlk of hyssop and lifted up to his lips. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished”. (John 19:29-30)

Meditation on the Sixth Word
What a sigh of relief!
What a cry of deliverance,that finally,after seemingly endless pain
and gasping torment, it is over at last.
The suffering is ended.
The ordeal is finished and nothing remains
but the blessed peace of the absence of all sensation.

When all there is, is pain its ceasing is the greatest blessing of all even when its ceasing comes only with death. But Jesus’ cry is more than just welcoming the ending of pain it is more than joy at the deliverance death brings. He does not merely say, “it is over” he says, “it is accomplished,
fulfilled, achieved” Jesus’ cry isn’t a cry of defeat and despair, it’s a cry of success and triumph even at the moment of death. That the race has been run, that he has endured to the end, that the strife is over and the battle is won. Jesus’ cry is a cry of relief to be sure but it is also a cry of victory: “The work I came to do is complete” there is nothing more to add!

“it is finished”

The Seventh Word
Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46)

Meditation on the Seventh Word
It is the end, the very end of the ordeal,
the end of the suffering and Jesus alone on the cross tortured,
exhausted abandoned by his friends forsaken by God
gasps for a last breath and gathers the strength for one final cry.

Why would he choose to speak so close to the end?
Why would he muster the last energy he had to cry out with a loud voice?
Couldn’t God have heard his thoughts?

Unless God wasn’t the only one intended to hear. Unless his voice was pitched loud so that we too might hear this final dedication of his soul. A dedication made despite the pain, despite the mocking, despite the agony,
despite the sense of horrible lonesomeness he felt. A dedication made to God before the resurrection, before the victory of the kingdom, before any assurance other than that which faith could bring. Jesus entrusts his spirit, his life and all that has given it meaning to God in faith,even at the point of his own abandonment when the good seems so very far away he proclaims his faith in God, the darkness cannot overcome it.

“Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit”

In times of suffering, when all seems dark, when discouragement and sadness overwhelm us, do we turn to God and surrender ourselves into his loving care? Do we really believe that he reserves great things for us? Why not put our lives in his hands today? He wants to bestow his favor on us and bless us. So why wait? Here is what you could say to God in prayer:

Lord God, I recognize my faults. You could have condemned me because of them but you chose to condemn Jesus in my place. Thank you for his sufferings and his death on the cross. I pray that you forgive all my sins. Give me your Spirit, and enable me today to start a new life in fellowship with you. I want to follow you, to be attentive to your voice and to please you. Without waiting, I now put myself in your service. Amen!

The curtain

During the lifetime of Jesus, the holy temple in Jerusalem was the center of Jewish religious life. The temple was the place where animal sacrifices were carried out and worship according to the Law of Moses was followed faithfully. Hebrews 9:1-9 tells us that in the temple a veil separated the Holy of Holies—the earthly dwelling place of God’s presence—from the rest of the temple where men dwelt. This signified that man was separated from God by sin (Isaiah 59:1-2).  Now here is the opportunity to see another picture that God painted. We know that there was an obstacle keeping people out of the throne room where God was, the Holy of Holies. It was a heavy curtain called “the veil.” Throughout the course of history, only a few men, the high priests, could get around behind the veil for a short time, but none of them could stay in there.  In the days of the Old Testament, a handful of guys were allowed to come around the curtain.  Men like Ezekiel and Isaiah were allowed behind the veil, invited in for a short time to see the throne of God in heaven. But they couldn’t stay there – they could only take a glimpse and exit again.

The veil was created to keep the Israelites, God’s chosen people, and even the regular priests who ministered in the temple away from His Holy Spirit.   Only the high priest was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies behind the veil. This special entrance occurred only once each year on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16:2ff; Num. 18:7; Heb. 9:7). On this day the high priest would pull back the edge of the curtain and enter the most holy place with the blood of sacrifice for himself and the people of Israel; then, he would sprinkle it on the mercy seat and before it. Under the old covenant administration the approach unto God was very restricted and this approach involved dread and fear. If any mistakes were made in the prescribed ritual whether intentional or not the person involved would be struck down by God. There is one legend that the high priest had a rope placed around his leg and if he were to die in the Holy or the Most Holy Place, his body could be dragged out with the rope.

The temple was 30 cubits high (1 Kings 6:2), but Herod had increased the height to 40 cubits, according to the writings of Josephus, a first century Jewish historian. There is uncertainty as to the exact measurement of a cubit, but it is safe to assume that this veil was somewhere near 60 feet high. Josephus also tells us that the veil was four inches thick and that horses tied to each side could not pull the veil apart. The book of Exodus teaches that this thick veil was fashioned from blue, purple and scarlet material and fine twisted linen. The size and thickness of the veil makes the events occurring at the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross so much more momentous. “And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom”.

While the Day of Atonement pointed to Christ, the veil signified no admittance. The special approach to God was very rare and limited. To everyone (except the yearly approach by the high priest) the veil said stay away; do not enter. God is holy and you are sinful and polluted. “The time when the high priest entered into it, it was indeed turned aside; whereon it immediately closed again and forbade an entrance and a prospect unto others.

“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body …let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith.” (Hebrews 10:19-22)

When Jesus died on the cross, the curtain in the temple was torn in half, from the top to the bottom. Only God could have carried out such an incredible feat because the veil was too high for human hands to have reached it, and too thick to have torn it. Furthermore, it was torn from top down, meaning this act must have come from above. As the veil was torn, the Holy of Holies was exposed. God’s presence was now accessible to all. Shocking as this may have been to the priests ministering in the temple that day, it is indeed good news to us as believers, because we know that Jesus’ death has atoned for our sins and made us right before God. The torn veil illustrated Jesus’ body broken for us, opening the way for us to come to God. “And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:50-51)  He was indeed proclaiming that God’s redemptive plan was now complete. The age of animal offerings was over. The ultimate offering had been sacrificed.

What significance does this torn veil have for us today? Above all, the tearing of the veil at the moment of Jesus’ death dramatically symbolized that His sacrifice, the shedding of His own blood, was a sufficient atonement for sins. We can now boldly enter into God’s presence, “the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where Jesus, who went before us, has entered on our behalf.” (Hebrews 6:19-20)

Jesus Christ, through His death, has removed the barriers between God and man, and now we may approach Him with confidence and boldness.