I grew up in a time when church frequently included special gospel meetings that featured a guest preacher imploring over the course of a week to get right and reap the rewards of heaven or certainly go to hell. Night after night the message and volume would escalate until a satisfactory number had responded to avoid the punishment of hell.
As a result, my upbringing most of my Christian life has been spent figuring out what “get right” means. My relationship with God was shallowly based on a set of rules based more in the tradition of my recent ancestors than the Word and Spirit. It took a couple of family tragedies and a tour to combat for me to reevaluate and search for a deeper foundation [Christ] for my relationship.
The struggles of my God relationship search came flooding back as I read Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us in which he presents a compelling case for a deeper method of personal, peer, and subordinate motivation. I was struck with how closely the history of motivation parallels the Bible story and my story.
My dearest cousin’s husband is dying. How odd that phrase when , in fact, we are all dying, just at different times. For an atheist the idea of death must be one of great loss and despair. To have as your only hope, “like the little dog rover, when you’re dead you’re dead all over,” would not be extremely comforting. I suspect most atheists don’t remind themselves of death very often. Yet, we are surrounded by it. Every day the local paper reports them in the “obit” section. I am very happy to report that my cousin’s family are not atheists and have a comfort available to them that is not the case for people that prefer to “go it alone” without God. There are days when my cousin’s husband just wants to go on and leave the old shell behind, but he lingers. Even in asking, “why,” we know, if we’re honest in our quest for the answer. I believe the answer is the one given by one actor to another in a movie I saw once. One asked the other on the occasion of leaving this life for the next, “It’s hard to let go isn’t it?”
Physical life is precious, it’s a gift of God, yet, eternal life is so much more a gift. The transformation from one to the other is a great mystery. In his great novel, “If Winter Comes”, A.S.M. Hutchinson describes how a young man named Freddie Perch who had just been killed in the war (WW I) came back to help his mother die. He was the type of son that would never allow his mother to even cross a road without him. And here he was to help his mother cross the greatest road in her life.
She was moaning…. That inhabitant of her body had done its preparations and now stood at the door in the darkness, very frightened. It wanted to go back. It had been very accustomed to being here. It could not go back. It did not want to shut the door. The door was shutting. It stood and shrank and whimpered there….. It was old Mrs. Perch that stood there whimpering, shrinking upon the threshold of that huge abyss, wide as space, dark as night …
Picture God in your mind…
If you’re like most of the people I’ve asked, you probably thought of some combination of a man in a gray beard floating on a throne in the clouds or a scowling judge glaring down from his judgment bench. Both are totally wrong. God has a presence in the world today, and how we see Him will determines how we see ourselves and how we see others.
Before we can establish how to see God today we need to explore how he was seen in the past. Bible accounts paint a picture of a God who made himself visibly present; initially for His benefit an eventually for ours.
“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day….” (Gen 3:8 NIV). I love to imagine what it was like in the garden of God when He physically walked among and enjoyed the beauty of his creation. To think about enjoying the presence of my creator in the unsurpassed beauty of his newly created earth is overwhelming to me.
In the garden that day Adam and Eve could not be found because they were hiding from God. They knew they had disobeyed and were ashamed of themselves and their appearance. This was the moment that separated us from God, but also set into motion a plan to redeem his creation and reestablish the perfection of His dwelling place. From that moment on God manifested Himself in various forms.
Recently I discovered a wonderful poem entitled “ The Universal Prayer” by Alexander Pope. In the tenth stanza Pope writes:
“Teach me to feel another’s woe, To hide the fault I see; That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me.”
Perhaps Pope was inspired by Luke chapter 18 which mirrors his poem.
“ To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable. Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ’God I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ’God have mercy on me, a sinner. I tell you this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God” ( Luke 18: 9-13 NIV)
We should be very careful how we interact with our fellow travelers, for we are interacting with the personification of Jesus. How we treat others is how we treat Jesus. “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Col. 3:13).
Weighed in the Balances
By Lou David Allen
He fed the hungry,
Visited the sick,
Gave his money,
For a great cause.
But warm works
Came from a cold heart,
That would not
Forgive the sins of another,
And so he barely registered
On the Angelic Applause – O – Meter.
“And he measured its wall,
seventy-two yards, according to
human measurements, which are also
angelic measurements.
Rev 21:17
Lost, a terrible word. Rhoda, my lovely wife, was separated from her parents years ago at the Madri Gras parade in New Orleans. Years later, that memory is still poignant. If you have ever been lost, you will never forget it.
Bob Berman, in his column in the October issue of “Astronomy”, relates “A dozen cool facts.” One of them is that a neutron can live for more than 10 billion years as long as it stays in its place snuggled deep within its atom’s nucleus. But if it escapes, it will vanish in 10 ½ minutes, not even a blink compared to 10 billion years. Bob said one lesson that might be learned from this “cool fact” is that kids should stay home with their parents so they will never be lost. That’s pretty good advice, but I think there is more solid advice gained from this example. As God’s children we are safest when we stay close to Him no matter what happens in life. “Busting loose” from that safety net is not a wise thing to do. We will surely be lost.
In 1898 Lelia Morris wrote a beautiful hymn, “Nearer Still Nearer.” Her hymn speaks to staying close to God:
Nearer still nearer close to Thy heart
Draw me my Saviour, so precious Thou art;
Fold me, O fold me close to Thy breast,
Shelter me safe in that haven of rest,…
Nearer still nearer, while life shall last,
Till safe in glory my anchor is cast;
Thru endless ages, ever to be
Nearer, my Saviour, still nearer to Thee…
Why would we want to be anywhere else?
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. James 4:7-8 (NIV)
Photo by Chicago’s North Shore Conventions & Visitors Bureau.
“Jesus wept.” (John 11:35)
The shortest and perhaps one of the saddest verses in the bible. The occasion was the death of a dear friend, beloved brother of Mary and Martha. Weeping for a friend – the human face of the Master – like us – grieving when death deals its horrific blow. In this case, though, Jesus knew He would raise Lazarus from death shortly. So why did He weep? Perhaps He was touched with Mary and Martha’s grief. Perhaps He was sad that His friend had to suffer through the pain of the death process. Perhaps He knew how happy Lazarus was, and He didn’t want to call him back to earth, far and away from Paradise.
Whatever the reason, Jesus was so moved that He mourned, deeply, for awhile. Even Jesus, with the universe at His beck and call suffered a period of deep, unfathomable grief. Grief of that magnitude cannot be hurried, cannot be wished away, can only be lived through. When grief becomes our lot, our friends, because they love us, want us to be whole again – like we were. They honestly think they know what is best for us, and sometimes it’s not. They want us back like we were before, and not only that, they want us back as soon as possible. What is difficult for those who haven’t taken residence on “Grief Mountain,” is that they have a hard time understanding that what we were before has forever changed. We do not have it in our power to return to what we were. We are different people, and eventually stronger for the Mountain we have ascended, but different. This difference is the by-product of an event we would never have chosen for ourselves, or even an enemy. We will be back, but not exactly the same, and it will take time, more time than some are prepared to invest is us. And that’s ok; we understand and love them anyway.
Please, and I hope you do, enjoy a poem I recently wrote that considers the foregoing thoughts.
THE JOURNEY
Good friend,
Please do not interrupt my flight,
For sometimes I alight
On leaves of loneliness,
Sometimes, on twigs of tears.
And please,
Do not try to catch my wings
As I try to pass,
For somewhere,
In the great Sometime,
I will alight again,
In a sweeter place, on better flowers.
And then I will be again, alright,
If you, dear friend,
Do not interrupt my flight.
Photo by LiebeDich http://www.flickr.com/people/liebedich/ used under Creative Commons agreement
In past years the dinner table at our house frequently rang out with the words “eat your peas!” We had the same plea of parents everywhere for our young ones to eat healthy food. Things changed on the occasion my youngest daughter Chera flat out refused. We spent the next hour proving our dominance over her by forcing her to eat them. We left the experience exhausted and emotionally drained. Then it occurred to us, the intent of our plea was to set a habit of good nutrition, it really wasn’t peas themselves that were the issue it was the benefit of the peas. Life-long devotion to health was our primary goal, how nutrition was delivered was secondary. We determined that it was impossible to achieve our primary goal if we forced the secondary.
Those who read scriptures from an “eat your peas” point of view find that God wants us to obey his commands (John 15:10). So we immediately start looking for a command checklist of do’s and don’ts to obey. Then we add traditions as commands to our checklist. We rationalize that if we force ourselves and others to obey everything on our checklist we will find the peace and love we seek.
Many of our church traditions today have adopted something similar to the original system of laws given by God to the Israelites. Under that system of laws I understand that 613 laws were commanded including 248 dos and 365 don’ts. The result of this system, generations of Israelites who couldn’t keep the commands and were not devoted to God. They were forced to “eat their peas” and despised it.
Jesus fulfilled the old law and placed a new law “in our hearts and in our minds” and made a new promise to believers. “By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear. Hebrews 8:13 (NIV)
Like Angie and I did as young parents, if He wanted to, God could establish his dominance over us by forcing his commands. But we would likely leave the experience despising Him more than loving Him. By focusing on the secondary outcome of our love for God, that is, obedience to HIS commands, we risk missing the power of our primary goal lifelong whole-hearted devotion to God.
- Because God loves us, we love God
- Because we love God we do what pleases him
- Because Christ’s sacrificed for us we sacrifice for Christ
- Because we don’t HAVE to, we want to
The early church was dealing with this situation as Jews who became Christians were having trouble leaving their checklist of laws and traditions. The church in Galatia was struggling to place relationship with God over rules, so Paul wrote this to them:
You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself….”So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. Galatians 5:13-17
So what does God want from us? The closest to a complete checklist under the “new law” is this:
- Love God more than anything else
- Love other people unconditionally
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:36-40 (NIV)
I want to be very clear to all Christians or those seeking the peace found in God through Christ. Putting love of God above all other things does not give us the “freedom to indulge the sinful nature” as Paul put it. He went on in the next sentences to give a test to discern if a life is lived “by the Spirit.”
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Galatians 5:19-25 (NIV)
The message is clear, if we love God with all our hearts there will be no room for things that are contrary to that love; the fruits of the Spirit will outflow from our hearts and we will bless those we love (everybody). Not because we have to, because we want to with all our hearts.
See also 2 John 1:6, John 14:2, John 15:10, 1 Corinthians 7:19, 1 John 2:3
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