A Life in Parables

By Jack Walton

Are you ready to see life a little differently? What would happen if you could see things from God’s point of view? A heavenly perspective might be just the medicine we need to put some miracles in the commonplace.

This book is intended to aid one in refocusing our vision from ourselves and earthly things to see the marvelous creation all around us and the vital role we have to play in its redemption!

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973630623

Jack Walton

Jack Lamar Walton lives in Helena Alabama where he is married to his wife Carol of 35 years. Jack and Carol have three grown daughters and two grandchildren in Kentucky. Jack currently attends Highlands College in Birmingham and is seeking a certificate of Pastoral Ministry Leadership. Jack attended Auburn University and graduated in 1975 in Electrical Engineering. Jack has worked as a Professional Engineer for 40 years. Jack and Carol presently attend The Church of the Highlands in Birmingham Alabama, Alabaster Campus. Highlands is a spirit-filled life-giving church where Jack serves in many different areas. A member of the prayer team, Freedom Small Group Leader and co-leader, Freedom in correctional facilities and dream team member keep him quite busy. This is Jack’s first book and is a compilation of years of inspiration/revelation surrounding his life in Alabama with family, God and the Holy Spirit. Jack prays that through this book and his new ministry he will assist the Holy Spirit in breathing spiritual life into many people, waking them to the fullness of life God planned for each one.

Book preview

Wake Up or Something!

Have you ever had the experience of driving to work and arriving at your destination without being aware of the route you had taken, whether you stopped at a red light, or whether you slowed down or sped up to merge into traffic? I know I have had this experience many times. It was as if the car knew the route and I was just a passenger. This happened after automobiles had been equipped with GPS, although I am pretty sure the car didn’t know its way either! Have you ever changed your destination and the car still went its merry way home, only you forgot to run an errand, so you must turn around and go back? How many times have we arrived home without the bread or milk we promised our families!

When I look back on my life to date, it seems I have spent much of it on autopilot. Sure, one day leads to the next, and we are so willing to forget the five workdays to have a unique time over the weekend. We set long and short-term goals to help us get through the week, the month, and the year. I work out of town, so I look forward to the process of driving home. This is a coping mechanism I have adopted to make it through the week.

As humans, coping is part of our nature. Don’t get too excited; complaining is another. Just because we are coping doesn’t mean we aren’t complaining. The Bible says we were born into sin. Restated, we were created with a nature that is not helpful in developing our spiritual awareness. We cope by putting our lives on autopilot, by living in the future.

Jesus went to the desert; Moses went to the desert; the Israelites went to the desert. Do we see a trend here? DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DESERT!

We may be on autopilot when we enter the desert, but we won’t be on it for long. Hunger will wake us up! After a while, we would notice tracks in the sand showing the presence of life. That life might be something I could eat, or those tracks may lead to water. I have not spent a month in the desert much less forty years like our forefathers, but I would imagine that two things become very evident:

We cannot sustain ourselves daily by ourselves.

We must seek outside help daily to survive.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16, NIV)

The Bible says we who believe in Christ Jesus have eternal life, not will have eternal life. To experience our eternal nature now, therefore, we need to get off autopilot and start experiencing eternity!

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. (Revelation 3:20, NIV)

Jesus tells us not to open the door to anyone except His voice. Let’s spend time in prayer and the word so we know His voice and open the door to the right stuff in our lives. Jesus tells us He will sup with us, which means He will be in fellowship with us NOW!

If we show up at the Heavenly gate on autopilot, not knowing how we got there, who we merged with on the way, and forgetting to help the poor and needy, do you think this is going to impress our Father? Because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, our offering will always be accepted, and our Heavenly place assured. How great would it be if I could show up in His time, without taking too many detours, merging without forcing others off the road? If I could accomplish most of the tasks given, and most importantly be covered in the redeeming blood of Christ Jesus, a comment of my good and faithful servant from the Father would be priceless.

May we not shy away from entering life’s deserts, and may we find God’s presence for living NOW whether we are in the desert or in the promised land.

Life Is a Vapor

You have heard the term Life is a Vapor or maybe a mist instead.

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that." (James 4:14-15, NIV)

We are here but a short time; therefore, what God our Father asks us becomes most critical. How do we experience God? What if God was like light shining on the ocean? The ocean is beyond measure in concept and design. It encompasses 90% of all habitable space and is mostly unexplored. It covers two-thirds of the earth’s surface; it is enormous and profound. Is it all the same? No.

Look at the effect of the sunlight on the ocean; the light penetrates the ocean surface and heats the water. As a result, life is abundant because plants grow, which convert light and minerals in the ocean into organic material. The fish feed on the plants, and because the food is available animals are abundant near the surface. It must seem the perfect place for the inhabitants. As we go deeper, the water is colder and the activity less, but life still exists because the fish adapt to the chill and the lack of light and make a home even if the living conditions are not that pleasant. The fish could swim anywhere, yet they choose to stay in their environment; maybe they are fearful of all the activity in the upper ocean.

So it is with us as well. Sometimes we are far from the surface, and our habitat is cold and not very pleasant, and it may not be our fault. We tend to adapt to the conditions rather than change our ways or living conditions. How many find themselves unable to swim fast enough in our society to survive? How many are alone and depressed?

To keep this analogy, if we see God as sunlight heating the ocean surface, then those living in God’s warming light are energized by life near the surface. We, of course, have free will and the option of swimming near the surface or in deeper waters. If we do not feel God’s warmth, how do we change our thermocline and start experiencing His abundant life? The longer we are in the deep waters, the scarier it is near the surface. How do we fight the fear of moving into the light? How will we compete with all the activity above?

Through belief in Jesus Christ, we may move between layers of life, even though we may sometimes find ourselves cold and alone. Nonetheless, we have the ability in Christ Jesus to move to the surface and light. Jesus makes all things new when we turn our lives over to His Lordship. With a change in environment, we will begin to adapt to the new conditions, of light, hope, activity, and community. We become nourished by the abundant food supply, and our strength is returned.

Even though we get to decide where and how we live, many of us still prefer the dark and cold. God has provided the light, but we must move to it to change. While we are still living, we can change, but this is a free-will choice only we may make.

If we accept change, we may even decide to move above the water’s surface, for you see Christ has shown us how to move into the vapor of His presence with the Holy Spirit. Yes, it is possible to experience God’s presence before we die. God has sent the Holy Spirit to us so that we may experience eternal life now and later!

There are moments we move above the ocean’s surface when the Holy Spirit is acting through us to change the world. If you think this is delusional, just ask the flying fish that fly momentarily above the surface. Maybe today is a good day to move to a new thermocline, take a breath of fresh air, and rise with the Father in work that He has planned for us this day.

Great Aunt Edith

Everybody’s family has a person who all in the family consider holy, a saint, etc. In my mother’s family, it was her Aunt Edith. Aunt Edith was the product of a long line of maternal holiness that spanned I don’t know how many generations. My great grandmother, Edith’s mother, was a strong-willed woman who used to catch her sons, who had not observed the family curfew, in bed in the mornings and beat them with a stick. This was a woman who said, No lips that touch strong drink shall touch mine. Aunt Edith was a kinder and gentler version of the same faith her mother possessed. Aunt Edith took into her home my grandmother, her sister, my mother Margaret, and her brother Fred during the depression. Times were tough, but family mattered, and Aunt Edith was there for everyone.

Growing up, no one ever questioned Aunt Edith’s sainthood. I kind of kept my distance as I wasn’t sure how one got to be a saint and didn’t want it to rub off on me accidentally. A real observation of this sainthood occurred when she was old and developed throat cancer. She did not get treated because she was quite comfortable letting God take her in His time and not mess with it. Not many people I know would make this decision, and it showed how powerfully she depended on God’s will for her life.

Each of us reaches a point when we must make a life-altering decision. If we have purchased a home, voluntarily changed jobs, or moved to another state, we make life-changing decisions. Our soldiers make life-and-death decisions during their time in battle. Choices are part of our lives. Yet most of us avoid making decisions like we would avoid the plague. We would rather have the world make decisions for us and then complain about the outcome.

Several years ago, I was let go from my employer of 15 years. The company was sold, and I really did not have a future there, but I was going to make them get rid of me, and they did! I learned a valuable lesson from that; I vowed to make a choice, even if I chose poorly. At least if I made the decision, I could live with it. This change in my decision making had some profound results: the world was no longer choosing for me. As I took that control from others, I found I must seek wisdom and seek God’s will for my life.

I don’t know if Great Aunt Edith was really a saint, but at least she figured out how to follow God’s will in her decision making. If we as Christians want to be in the world but not of the world, we need to start with our decision making. Vow today to seek God’s will for your life, and, together with your Heavenly Father, decide to live! Live with the decisions and live life to all the fullness God intended for you. Maybe someday a conscious choice you make will profoundly affect someone like Aunt Edith’s influenced me.

Rosetta Stone

I always thought how great it must have been to have found the Rosetta Stone.

According to Wikipedia, the Rosetta stone was made by an Egyptian in Memphis in 196 BC and inscribed with three languages: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, a Demotic script, and Ancient Greek.

Of course, it was the key to unlocking the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, as it was a pictorial language. Unlike most pictorial languages the pictures stood for letters, not words. This simple new way of looking at the language changed everything and unlocked a lot of the mysteries of Egypt. One of the difficulties of translating it was the Egyptian and Demotic writing was phonetic, so analysis of proper spelling did not add clarity. It took all three scripts to unlock the Ancient Egyptian language, and even then it took more than 20 years. Isn’t it interesting that everyone was looking at the pictures and seeing the forest and not the trees? The real takeaway is that one person in Memphis, Egypt, changed the world by seeking to explain something in multiple languages.

Well, that was in 196 BC, but a few centuries later, the Holy Spirit came and taught about Jesus Christ in multiple languages. It is kind of the same thing although the content was not written down for all to see; only the happenings of the event at Pentecost were recorded. The Bible records that everyone was amazed at the relatively uneducated disciples teaching in languages they had not studied. A truly miraculous event!

So here it is! YOU are the Rosetta Stone for someone! I can assure you that people you know are confused about the meaning of life, their part in it, they’re worth, whether there is a God, who God is, who Jesus is, and guess what? The key to the understanding is inscribed on your heart. You are a living Rosetta Stone created by God, His plan written by His own hand into your very being. You have the current vernacular, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit for inspiration written within you for the very purpose of interpreting God’s Word into the world today.

"This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel

after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people." (Jeremiah 31:33, NIV)

The Rosetta Stone was at one time buried in the construction of a building where no one could see it and at last discovered in 1799 by a French soldier. How long will your heart be locked away because you are afraid to show it to the public? Maybe you can just let someone know it is there and let the Holy Spirit interpret for you. Who knows? You might be the next person to change the world.

"Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ Philip asked. ‘How can I,’ he said, ‘unless someone explains it to me?’ So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading:

‘He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth.’ The eunuch asked Philip, ‘Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?’ Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus." (Acts 8:30-34, NIV)

We may think we do not have anything to add to a conversation, that everyone is smarter or more educated than we are, yet God has given us a unique understanding that may be the exact key to unleashing the power of God in someone else’s life.

The Abyss

If Hollywood has one redeeming grace, it is the ability to help us visualize what might otherwise be difficult.

In the movie, Abyss, a brilliant petroleum engineer, Lindsey, who finds herself deep undersea on a broken drill rig, filled with company employees and a bunch of Navy SEALs, determined to blow up a sunken U.S. nuclear submarine. The explosion would, of course, take out the shipmates and some newly discovered sea life. If you haven’t seen it, then it might make a good movie night.

The newly discovered marine life tries to make contact with Lindsey on the drilling vessel by forming water into a kind of horizontal column and moving in the airspace of the command platform to find her. After moving in and out of different chambers, the column of water finds her in the control room. Next comes the unusual part. The water column changes its surface into the shape of her face. Clearly, this column of water is intelligent and wants to communicate. When Lindsey’s face shows an expression, the water column mimics it. Lindsey reaches out and touches the surface of the water, and it feels just like water. The water column was trying to communicate something. The crew reacts differently to the event. Lindsey believes in the creature even she doesn’t yet understand what it is, how it works, or why it is present. It is enough that it lives for her to believe. Some of the crew doesn’t know what to think yet they do not doubt that they saw something, and the Navy SEALs, of course, see the event as another good reason to blow everything up.

I started thinking that if an intelligent being wanted