Who Teaches a Canary
Who Teaches A Canary To Sing?……
There are a lot of suggestions in the air today that people, even believers, can easily get discouraged because of the news ‘preached’ to us every day. Most of the news we hear and see doesn’t qualify as ‘good news’ anymore. We live in a huge contrast: so much of what we see and hear bumps up against what we, as followers of Christ, believe.
Life is hard and that’s confirmed as early as Genesis. However, uniquely Jesus taught that His ‘yoke is easy and My burden is light.’ (Mathew 11:30) You really can’t balance the world and the Word, you have to grab the one (prioritize the Word) to experience the life Jesus promised to be peaceful and at rest. Has Mathew 11:30 sunk in? Jesus taught that if we take up Christ’s yoke, we will find Rest not stress! It is true that Jesus did indicate (for sure) we would have a lot of negative to deal with, but be of good cheer (take courage)…He overcomes that world. (John 16:33)
Some days will be heavy and cumbersome. But Jesus indicated that one of His purposes in coming to us was to help us through tough times. Both the tough ones left on our doorstep by others and also the ones that we create for ourselves.
Sometimes, it gets ‘heavy’ trying to do the Christian thing only with our ability. Actually, it was never meant to be with our ability anyway. When we began our Christian walk, Christ became the author and finisher of our Faith. Being made alive unto God, He started a process in each of us. He, with our cooperation, He alone would be the one able to complete it. Jesus is the true vine and without him nothing, including even our best human performances, can produce the Christian Life. (John 15:1)
I have a bird thing. I feed them; talk a little bit about them with family and friends. I’ve written a couple newsletters about this one kind of bird. In those letters the question I raised was: ‘Who teaches a canary to sing?’ My answer is: ‘It just simply sings because it’s a canary!’ God created it to be a canary. No bird singing class was needed. Canaries don’t do anything to become a singing canary. They just are what God created them to be. Similarly, believers are created to do believer things. The only caveat to that believer’s thing being they do them by the Spirit of God (placed within them).
When we are ‘created’ new creatures, the Life (singing) we bring forth can come from simply becoming what God intended us to be all along. Christians don’t bear fruit to be Christians; they bear fruit because they are Christians. As believer’s fruit bearing is located on the inside, we are Spirit creatures; the Spirit will bear the fruit. Jesus only did what he saw the Father doing. (John 5:19) We, being created new, have had deposited within us the ability to become what God purposed in His heart for you before the foundation of the world.
As believers in Christ, we have the opportunity to relax, to trust that God can literally live through us. We can serve God by yielding our lives to His living His Life through us. Laying down our life can simply mean laying down our agenda, letting His Spirit be manifested in our lives. Believers can be at Peace and Rest so that God can use it for His purpose. To me, that’s not measured moment to moment, not even day by day, but more year by year, decade by decade. I try not to let a moment define my Gospel life; His Life through us is to be observed for longer periods of time than that. Jesus had a three year ministry in what could physically have probably been accomplished in much less time. However, it was a season of ministry, not a moment.
Doing the Word became possible when the Spirit of God came and made us new creations. At that moment, everything we needed to live the Christian life was placed at our disposal. He has given unto us all things that pertain unto Life (Gk: zoe, life as the Father would have it for us) and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue (2Peter1:3) Jesus revealed a mystery in John 14:20: the mystery of Christ in you! (The Word lives there, Worship lives there, the Spirit of Christ inhabits there. He is still a small still voice there.)
Just like that canary knowing how to sing without being taught to sing, we can live a Life that’s God-guided and made possible out of our hearts. It’s a life unlike the life we experience without Him. We can sing a new song; we can experience a new way to live that’s natural and designed for us from the first imaginations of God.
Christ wants us to take up His ‘burden’ and discover that they are easy because He is in us; it is Holy Ground in us. Ground is just dirt until God is present. With His presence it becomes a Holy Place. God’s presence in our lives is like that; we can be on Holy Ground.
He is I Am in every moment. God refers to Himself as I Am beginning in Genesis. I Am is mentioned 25 times in the book of John. Most significantly, His declaration of I Am with perhaps the most emphasis is found in Exodus 3:14.
There God told Moses who he should tell Pharaoh had sent Moses, ‘Tell him I Am sent you.’ It’s a name that then and now implies present tense and an active form of the verb ‘to be’. God was telling Moses He was un-changing, constant, un-ending, always present, always God. God is that forever and is right now in our lives. The Gospel didn’t stop moving on the earth with Christ’s resurrection; it continues today in His Presence of the Spirit of God in you.
Canaries don’t go to canary school– they just draw on the song God put inside them to sing. We can experience Him in the very same way. There is a source of Life carried around inside us. It may not always look like it, may not always feel like that’s true, but it is.
We biblically have a treasure placed inside. How we think and act sometimes doesn’t show that. However, practicing that Gospel truth will expose it to you more and more. The Bible says we are being converted into the image of God, much of the time its baby step by baby step.
Our soul (mind, will and emotions) is being saved (Heb. 10:39). It’s learning to prioritize the Spirit. It does that by the soul being rightly divided out from the spirit. (Heb.4:12) Paul called it out to the Galatians, calling them foolish for thinking they could prioritized the flesh to master the spirit. In Paul’s teaching it’s the other way around.
I like this Jeremy Camp song lyric:
‘So many questions, the world is seaching…So many hurting, so many lost.
With all this thriving, who can we lean on?…Creations crying, out from the dark.
You are the answer, to every question…The one solution, to every fear.
You are my helper, where it comes from…Jesus, You are the answer.’
( Jeremy Camp: You Are The Answer)
John 14:5-6: I am the Way (not a road but The road) the Truth (impossible for Jesus to lie) the Life (life as the Father would have it for us)…..And while the world might be moving away from declaring it so, Jesus is the Answer still today! That’s the Good News.