Category: Movies

Who is Shaping Us?

Posted on by Dorci

I took a slow day recently and sat down to watch a movie. So-so movie. Classic good guy chases bad guy. 

The bad guy, well, let me put that more accurately – the crazed, psychopathic, sadistic killer – enjoys the chase. He’s cocky and thinks he can’t lose. 

He decides to make the game even more fun by coming straight to the door of the good guy, and hits him where it hurts most: his family. 

The good guy internalizes that pain, that grief, and lets it boil inside him until the hatred turns to bitterness in his quest to hunt down and destroy his enemy. 

In one last-ditch effort to mentally manipulate and control from his place of weakness, the bad guy spews to the other, “I…made…you.”

His last words are arrogant, demented, and maybe a little bit true. 

In his quest to fight evil, the good guy gives in to the hatred the evil guy wanted him to. He lured the good guy in until he crossed that line before he even fully realized it. Or worse, he realized it but didn’t care anymore. 

As their eyes locked and he used his last breath to try to control him and reel him in the rest of the way, speaking those domineering, pompous, mind-bending words, I thought about how the enemy of God does the same thing.

There are no new tricks up his sleeve. Oh, they may take different forms, different plots, different scenarios, but it’s always the same.

Slip in undetected in the shadows, gain our attention, come to our front doors if need be and attack us personally where he knows it’ll hurt most, and if he can time it just right, in the wake of some other trial, when we’re alone, when we’re tired, when we’re sick, when we’re stressed, maybe we’ll react in the flesh. 

And if we react long enough, he’ll try to say he made us. He made who we’ve become, from being filled with anger, to unforgiveness, to bitterness, to leaving our faith and the love of Christ behind.  

None of us is immune. Christians are his target, because Christ is his target. 

Even if he can no longer take our eternal souls, he will still try to take our joy, our witness, and as much of our reward as he can.  

But I don’t want the enemy to shape who I am.

I want to be shaped by the Christ who loved us enough to die for us and fill us with His Spirit so that He’s always with us.

I want to be shaped by the One who loves us enough to write His Word, His will, on pages for us to have, to read, to study and pray over, to hear Him speak to our hearts through.

I want every fiber of my being, every molecule, every thought, every word to be formed by the Christ who lives in me.

That can only happen when day by day, minute by minute, we hold onto Christ, giving up our lives for a life of faith hidden in Him. 

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Galatians 2:20

This is the new life we’ve been given in Christ. It is no longer our life, but Christ’s living in and through us. To some that may feel a little restrictive, but in reality it’s just the opposite. 

We are now free of that destruction, that condemnation, that guilt and shame of sin, free from having to believe the deluded lies of the enemy. We no longer have to be lured in by the thief whose desire is to steal, kill, and destroy us.

Instead, Jesus said “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” John 10:10

That word abundant is perissos, which means “in the sense of beyond; superabundant (in quantity) or superior (in quality); by implication excessive; preeminence: – exceeding abundantly above, more abundantly, advantage, exceedingly, very highly, beyond measure, more, superfluous, vehemently.”

In sharp contrast to the life Christ redeemed us from, we’re now free to live a life of forgiveness, hope, love, joy. We’re free to live in and through Christ forever. 

But notice it says that we may have it more abundantly. It is our daily choice how much of that abundant life of Christ’s we want to live. Within those pages, Jesus gave us this to remember:

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23

Daily. 

Daily we must deny ourselves, daily we must take up our cross, and daily we must choose to follow Christ if we want to live the abundant life Jesus died to give us.

We may not have a bad guy to physically chase, but in our hearts and minds we can chase the ones who have hurt us by holding onto unforgiveness and anger and letting it turn into bitterness.

Instead, we can leave the bad guys to God and chase after Christ and His love, joy, peace, hope, and forgiveness. We can choose faith in Jesus, and let Him shape us.


Heavenly Father, we choose to forgive those who have hurt us and leave them in your wise and capable hands. Help us deny ourselves, let go of our “old man” and the world’s ways and abide in you daily so we can be transformed into the image of your beautiful Son and live the abundant life you so desire to give us. It’s in Christ we pray, amen. 

 

Behind Enemy Lines

Posted on by Dorci

I recently watched Behind Enemy Lines again, and there were so many spiritual parallels I had to share what God showed me. 

Even though it’s a 20-year-old movie and surely the statute of limitations for spoilers must have run out by now, I’ll try not to give away anything too important in case you haven’t seen it. 

Owen Wilson plays Lt. Chris Burnett, an American naval flight officer stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Adriatic sea during the Bosnian War. 

For Lt. Burnett, being a soldier, so far, has been a lot of drills, training, exercises, and routine assignments and he resents it. It hasn’t been the thrill ride he thought it would be, so he’s handed in a letter of intent to leave the Navy to his commanding officer, Admiral Reigart, played by Gene Hackman. 

The admiral tries to make him understand the importance of his training, but Burnett’s not impressed. He’s done.

Admiral Reigart decides the lieutenant needs a little discipline, so he assigns him, along with another pilot, to a routine mission on Christmas day, but the situation soon turns into far more than anyone expected. 

The title says it all: behind enemy lines. 

When we look out at our world today we may feel like we’re behind enemy lines. There is warring all around us, fighting, hatred, violence, attacks on the Christian faith. The whole world seems out of control and we feel like we’re in a place we don’t understand and don’t belong.  

And the truth is we are behind enemy lines and we always have been. Much of the world has been experiencing it, and lately it’s become far more apparent to us than it was before. The curtain’s been drawn back a bit and we’re seeing the havoc wreaked by the enemy in the ugliness of the sin in the world on display in our own backyard. 

We’re seeing the spiritual warfare Paul talked about in his second letter to the church in Corinth.

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds…” (2 Cor. 10:3-4) 

And because we’re in the midst of spiritual warfare, an object of the enemy of God, we are soldiers in that war. Paul reiterated that in 2 Timothy and in Philemon:

“You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please Him who enlisted him as a soldier.” (2 Tim 2:3-4)

“…to the beloved Apphia, Archippus our fellow soldier…” (Philemon 1-2a)

If God has called us into faith through Christ, we are soldiers in a spiritual war that’s been going on since the Garden of Eden. 

As soldiers, God’s been training us, preparing us to be strong in the faith, to have courage to weather the battles. We grow from discipline to discipline until we are changed into the likeness of His Son, the perfect soldier, who was our example of enduring warfare.

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

We’ve all read that and maybe, like Lt. Burnett, we haven’t seen how we can have joy in our training, how there could possibly be any purpose in our suffering. We haven’t fully understood that our trials are our testing, our discipline, teaching and training us to be mature in the faith, to persevere in trials, to trust God more and more to give us wisdom and understanding as we face the next hardship, and the next one, and the next… We don’t know what we’ll face, but God does, and He knows what He’s training us for. 

“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.” (Hebrews 12:11-12)

Whatever trials we’ve gone through or are going through right now or will go through tomorrow, don’t let them be for nothing. Let them train us. Let us humble ourselves under our Father’s mighty and wise hand to make us disciplined soldiers in His army, fighting His way with the spiritual armor God’s equipped us with. 

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Ephesians 6:12-13

Let us then, in Christ, strengthen our feeble arms and weak knees. In other words, let us put aside our complacency, any weakness of faith, any unbelief or fear, put on our armor and be strong and courageous as we stand to face our spiritual enemy, knowing we’ve been trained and we are equipped, and in Christ we have the victory. 

The Two Wolves

Posted on by Dorci

 

That’s a scene from the movie Tomorrowland. Of course that metaphor has probably been told a thousand different ways for a thousand different scenarios.  But first and foremost, it’s a spiritual truth:

“So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” Galatians 5:16

Our flesh is always pulling at our shirts, jumping in our faces, snarling in our ears. It doesn’t like to hear no for an answer. And saying no is good, but if we don’t say yes to the Spirit, that vacuum will beg to be filled with something.  

That word walk in Galatians means “…to live, follow (as a companion), go, be occupied with…”

We are privileged to have as our Companion, sun up to sun up, 24/7/365 (or 366 as the case may be), the Holy Spirit. When we walk with Him, follow Him, obey Him, the vacuum will be filled with all things pure, and good, and holy. 

When we feed the spirit inside us with prayer and reading God’s Word, we will starve that beady-eyed, snarling flesh. We’ll start noticing the fear and anxiety has silenced, and in its place is divine fruit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

Light and hope in place of darkness and despair.  Seems like a pretty good deal to me. 

Not only do we need that right now (as always), but that’s what the world needs us to have. It needs to see there’s another, better way.  It needs to see Jesus.