Mark Folk

God wants to give us everything. God intended and designed life as abundance “As it is in heaven”. The sad truth of the betrayal in the garden is that mankind has to live in the midst of decay and death. Now abundance has to be sought and experienced through muddy waters. Satan knew heaven, knew what it was to be close and intimate with God. As an angel he knew what it was to hear the laughter of the trinity. So now as our enemy he knows what a special place we hold in God’s heart and he hates us. In his hate he wants to see us share his fate. Eternal separation from God and a life full of death and decay. But Satan is not God and is no creator so his only hope is to drag us into his filth and to distract us with counterfeit life. He will try to attract us with seemingly shiny objects and hope we respond like a child with ADD. He twist and imitates every good thing so we will be distracted from the blessings of our Father. One of his strategies is to have us become pleasure seekers. He knows the deep yearnings of our hearts for heaven, he has it to. Satan hates God enough to hate us ,his look-a likes. And against his image bearers he is making war. Twisted pleasure is his weapon. Envy, selfishness, judgment, lust, addiction and self gratification are his traps to keep us from experiencing God filled lives. Satan would have us scratching and scraping the ground for scraps so as to keep our eyes from seeing the feast God has set for us.Satan is no creator, he is a liar and master manipulator. The truth is that we can become partakers of heaven through Christ’s works of the cross, resurrection and ascension.

Seek God, love God and an ever increasing joy will fill your life and enlarge your vision to see and pursue a life full and overflowing. Don’t be fooled by shiny objects at your feet. Look up and see what God is offering.

   The banquet meal is ready to be served: lamb roasted, wine poured out, table set with silver and flowers.
Having dismissed her serving maids, Lady Wisdom goes to town, stands in a prominent place, and invites everyone within sound of her voice: “Are you confused about life, don’t know what’s going on? Come with me, oh come, have dinner with me! I’ve prepared a wonderful spread - fresh-baked bread, roast lamb, carefully selected wines.
Leave your impoverished confusion and live! Walk up the street to a life with meaning.”

Proverbs 9:2-6

Your brother and servant in Christ,

Mark Folk

“God gives what he has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not.To be God-to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response— to be miserable—- these are the only alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—-the only food that any possible universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.”   C.S. Lewis: The Problem With Pain

People are starving. Take a look around. What other conclusion could we come to. The devastation taking place before our eyes is the response to wrong nourishment. God is the source of life giving nourishment. Anything else is empty calories, anything else is eating and drinking death.

 I call Heaven and Earth to witness against you today: I place before you Life and Death, Blessing and Curse. Choose life so that you and your children will live. Deuteronomy 30:19

What nourishment are you taking in?

Your brother and servant in Christ,

Mark Folk

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

When I was 13 my best friend (Carl) and I decided we were going to build a submarine. We came to the idea one summer when we came across an old oxygen tank in his family’s hosiery mill in Hilderbran, NC. At that age Carl and I dreamed of being ocean explorers and we spent one summer training for our imagined expeditions by swimming in an unused concrete pool the mill had used in the past to collect water from a small spring. We would fill up the pool, which was only a few feet deep, put on cheap diving mask and explore every crack and crevice as if we were exploring the ocean floor. So when we came across that tank somehow we decided we could build a small submarine. I remember as Carl and I sketched out a design for our submersible how excited and determined we were. We had very intention of building that submersible, but intentions did not make us submarine commanders.

Over my forty-nine years I have had many good and noble intentions. Unfortunately I have more than a few regrets over good intentions unfulfilled. Isn’t this true of us all? We are all driven by deep desires to somehow do better things or be better people. None of us set out to be poor, unhappy, or selfish. No we intend to be better at managing our time, or our money. Fathers intend to spend more time with their children or to get involved in the men’s ministry at their church. Women intend to spend more time reading their Bible’s or to find an older Godly woman as a mentor. Intentions alone though do not make any of us submarine commanders do they?

For I know the plan  I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  Jeremiah 29:11, NIV

What of God’s intentions? Is that a consideration when we make our New Years resolutions or decide to do or be better? In Jeremiah 29:11 God declares to Israel that despite the fact that they are enslaved and in exile that His intentions are that they will be prosperous, happy and will live with joyful expectation.

What if God spoke to you today and told you he had a plan for your life? A good plan laid out before you were born. If you will listen to me, follow my advice you will have a life beyond all your good intentions. If God offered such a life to you would you listen? Would you take Him up on his offer? Sure you would. I would. We would have our pens out ready to sign our new resolution to be better, happier, prosperous members of God’s army. We would actually feel a sense of relief  that we no longer needed to guess at how to find the life that deep in our hearts we know we are meant for. As we excitedly put pen to dotted line we sense God telling us that we need to handle our money better. We agree, most definitely. Get out of debt, yes of course. Tithe, Oh yeah, give God the first fruits. We know these are good things, Godly things and with our new sense of purpose we feel positive about following through and we begin to imagine the benefits of such changes in our lives. As we warm to the imaginings of the new life that lies before us God lovingly prompts a thought. An addiction that He wants to heal us from. It may be cigarettes, pain medication or T.V., and we know this is God because He is right, but…….

God’s intentions for us are perfect. His plans are good and will bring us great joy and contentment but those plans will be a disruption to our comfortable lives. God will ask us to give up the good, the bad and the ugly in exchange for his very best and we will have to trust and obey him to move beyond intention and imagination.

 Carl and I never built that submarine. We started out good with the best of intentions. We collected books, talked with our parents and came up with a plan involving chicken wire and fiberglass. In the end though we were lured away from all the hours of hard work by the rest of our summer vacation. I wish we could have followed through on our intentions. I would have made a good submarine commander. It would have been fun.

Your brother and servant in Christ,

Mark Folk
 

 Then Elisha prayed, “O God, open his eyes and let him see.” The eyes of the young man were opened and he saw. A wonder! The whole mountainside full of horses and chariots of fire surrounding Elisha!

A matrix. That is actually what our physical lives are. In the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, he tells of a group of people visiting Heaven on a bus from hell. When the bus arrives in Heaven the visitors can hardly stand the brightness there. Some never depart the bus and the few that do complain that the grass is too sharp to stand on. Reality is a veil pulled over our eyes.

How many of us are blinded by religious trappings and never look and see what Elisha saw when he witnessed the armies of the Lord surrounding the enemies of God. It is difficult to live in reality because we only learn to see with our physical eyes. We learn to interpret with our mind and emotions. Jesus tried to show his followers what he saw but they could not grasp the words. Our flesh wants flesh and bone, it settles for food that passes from hand to mouth. Our bodies crave physical comfort, pleasure and an imitation of Heaven on earth. Deep down we know and feel the truth that things are not as they should be. We know there is more, yet we are never satisfied.

What is real? It is beyond our physical reach. To find it we must see with new eyes and new hearts.

As a pastor’s son I have had more than my share of Bible teaching. My earliest memories are of sunbeams, Sunday school and vacation Bible school. Also as a pastor’s son I had the special privilege of listening to thousands of sermons, and hundreds of revival preachers, all this before I was even a teenager. When I was five I even helped my dad study for Greek and Hebrew by holding his flash cards as he carried me to school in the mornings. As a teenager I read the Bible all the way through a few times. I loved the Psalms and Proverbs and developed a real liking for the beatitudes. By the time I was eighteen I would have to say that I  knew more about the Bible than I did about any subject in school. Now don’t get the impression that I was a Bible toting preacher kid ,I wasn’t. It was just the backdrop of my life. I lived in a preachers home and I wanted to be a good preachers kid. But I was a kid and I read the Bible like a kid. There were parts I really liked and some that just didn’t interest a fourteen year old boy.

In 1982 I began college as sacred music major at a baptist college. Well one tour through Old Testament theology and I lost my desire to read the Bible. So I quit reading my Bible. I couldn’t even read to prepare for Sunday School lessons. Honestly I knew all the stories so why bother to read.  As a matter of fact it wasn’t until 1998 that I began to read the Bible again, some four years after my first child was born. And even then I was only looking for the tips and formulas to be a good dad. I knew Proverbs could help me there. I also knew that facing the daunting task of raising a daughter in a post Monica Lewinsky culture I needed to prepare to properly tackle any “It” questions my daughter might have one day. You could say I was scared into mining the scriptures for good fathering advice. That same year I took part in the study “Experiencing God” by Henry Blackaby. It had an impact beyond my expectations . Blackaby pointed out in the first lesson something that rattled me. He said that when we sat down to read the Bible we were really sitting down for a conversation with Jesus. He also pointed out the truth of this in the Bible.

1. The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God, 2.
in readiness for God from day one.

John 1:1-2  The Message

I had not thought of this. I had read the Bible many times looking for advice, life lessons, and inspiration but the idea of sitting down for a conversation with Jesus by opening up the Bible had never occurred to me. I had been reading my Bible for years as just a narrative, eyewitness accounts of people who knew and heard from God and Christ. To sit down with Christ himself by simply opening my Bible was a new paradigm for me. Of course I saw the truth of it right there in my Bible. I began to read my Bible again excited about interacting with the WORD made flesh. Since that revelation my relationship with Christ has taken on an intimacy that never existed before. It’s amazing how a conversation with God changes you. I imagine now what it must of been like for Adam in the garden walking and talking with God.

If like me this truth is a new idea for you let me make a suggestion. Buy about six legal pads, a few good pens and start reading your Bible expecting God to share some words you will definitely want to write down.

Your brother and servant in Christ ,

Mark Folk