Down where we live it doesn’t snow much. When it does, we love it, well, most of us. The kids hope with the snow comes a snow day away from school. Most folks never lose their wonder at snow’s beauty and its nature of covering the most unsightly sights. Even a junkyard takes on a beauty not its own when snow falls and covers the old cars. Snow! Snow is a transformer of the ugly to the beautiful.
Lewis Carroll had Alice in “Through the Looking Glass” describe snow to her kitty this way.
“Do you hear the snow against the windowpanes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if someone was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, and that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, ’Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.’ And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about – whenever the wind blows – oh, that’s very pretty!” cried Alice, dropping the ball of worsted to clap her hands. “And I do so wish it was true! I’m sure the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown.”
We often describe our Christian life as a daily walk, which is an enduring example of how we dedicate every moment of every day to Christ. The good news is we walk in the light near to God which gives a guiding light and illuminates a Spiritual path to the comfort of eternal life. To discover the true depth of this good news we need to focus on things to come. In Revelation the new heaven and the new earth are described by John:
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”….And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Revelation 21:1, 21:3, 21:23-27 (TNIV)
For believers it’s almost overwhelming to think of the day we can walk in the light of the Lord. BUT WE ALREADY ARE!
One day long ago, my buddy and I decided to drive his old car across a dry creek bed. A fun idea turned out to be a bad idea. Half way over, we sunk deep in the gravel. Everything we tried to get unstuck did not work. Idea after idea failed. Our “horse” was stuck, for sure and for certain. Evening was coming on and our options were walking home or going to someone’s house and calling home. In those days there were no cell phones. Both plans were not acceptable to a couple of enterprising fellows like us. Either option spelled defeat. Of course, we were, in fact, completely defeated. By now my mom, who kept close tabs on me, even though I considered that not needful, had dispatched my dad to check on the whereabouts of her number one and only son. And there he was, in his company car, coming over the hill with the radio antenna whipping in the wind. My hero, then and now, and always will be. “What are you boys doing,” he asked. We replied as manly as we could, “We’ve tried everything and we can’t get unstuck.” He didn’t laugh or even chastise us for what we had done as I recall. He had a way of teaching without saying one word. He simply said, “Take some air out of the tires”. We did and Ronny drove out easily. Ronny and I learned a big lesson that day, and it was more than how to get a stuck car out of a creek.
Have you wondered about the guy wandering the highways with the backpack and run down shoes? Where’s he going? Where’s he from? Where’s he spending the night,? Is it in a pasture under a tree? And how does he keep warm in the winter? What does he eat and where does he get his water? Who would chose a life with such self imposed deprivation? Who would chose to be homeless?
But people who would never chose to live their physical lives like that make choices putting them in the same situation spiritually. Jude, verse 13, refers to ungodly individuals who are described as “wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever”. The most tragic thing that can happen to a human being is to disconnect from God, in computer terminology, “disconnected from the network”.
Several years ago I observed men traveling down the Interstate Highway that cuts through our little town and wrote a poem about a fictitious man I called “Johnee”. I hope you enjoy it and see how it describes an absolute disconnect.
Johnee
by David Allen
They found him last night,
wrapped in his sleeping
blanket. Out on the Interstate,
dead as a hammer, stiff as
a board. Died sometime
in the night, all alone, all
by himself.No I.D., only, “ My name
is Johnee”, tattooed on his
chest.Where was he from? Where
was he going?Well, he’s not going anywhere,
anymore. And somewhere, long
ago, someone bounced him on
their knee
and said,
“ Oh, Johnee, you’ll
go far in this world”.But, this, this was too far,
Way too far.
Johnee lost his way. The way home grew so dim he could no longer see it. The darkness overcame him and he died. Johnee disconnected. Are you connected?
Two lessons for Christians today:
1. Jesus DID exactly what he said he would do
2. Jesus WILL DO exactly what he said he will do
…but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).
Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” John 20:11-17 (NIV)
Mary should have known. Jesus had driven out her demons and she was with him to the end and heard what he had said. She was the first one at the tomb the morning Jesus arose and she didn’t even remember His words when the body wasn’t there, thinking instead someone must have moved his body.
“What the Old Man Does is Always Right” is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen which tells of a peasant who trades his horse down to a sack of rotten apples, justifying his trades all the way down. If you can ignore the original moral it can be repurposed as a powerful parable illustrating the sins of attrition, those sins that slowly result in a drift away from a strong relationship with God. We can justify our actions all we want, but if in the end we are left with a rotten relationship our eternal reward is at risk. In an interesting twist, the man’s wife agrees with his actions all the way – showing that our drift can influence others away from God as well. Really, what the old man does isn’t always right. Read the full parable below.
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He was so proud of it. The lines were right, the joints fitted, the wood finished to a glow. The boat drafted better than any other and its beauty inspired use. He could remember it now looking at the vessel before him. Where had the beauty gone? The years had worn it so slowly he hadn’t even noticed. Now weathered, dull and leaking, the boat’s original beauty was only a faint remembrance…
Growing up in the church a lot of time was spent on two categories of sin, namely sins of commission, those things God tells us not to do but we do anyway, and sins of omission or those things God tells us to do but we ignore. These are important categories but with a warning: if we focus on a checklist of things we should and should not do, we by our nature grow to rely on OUR goodness and not on God’s. Jesus clearly stated over and over that his disciples would become children of God and be consumed with a relationship with God through him.
Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ Matthew 22:37(NIV)
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! John 3:1(NIV)
Over and over the Word of God explains Christians are about relationship not rules. Our obedience (omitted and committed) is because we love God and value His presence in our lives. We want to please Him. Because of this, I believe there is a far more dangerous category of sin, attrition. Attrition is any activity that causes a slow drift away from our relationship with God. The dangerous thing is that it can take the form of just about anything, including religion. Sometimes seemingly harmless activities over a lifetime (or less!) lead us to a point we are separated from God and don’t even recognize it until it’s too late.
We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. Hebrews 2:1 (NIV)
Practical Christian application:
1. We have confidence in an eternal reward through Christ
2. It’s impossible for us to fully understand God’s will
3. God wants us to have patience, know that evil will not prevail, and to fully place our trust in Him
Last week we lost a 15 year old family member after a lengthy battle with cancer. Her struggle was featured in a post by her grandfather last month. As I prepared to officiate over her funeral I thought it was appropriate to share on this blog the comfort our family found through God.
Over and over family members and friends in the community asked how God could let something so terrible happen to someone so young. A close friend who had lost his wife in a tragic car accident years earlier had great counsel to me. Part of his word he took from a message Billy Graham delivered on the National Day of Prayer, September 14, 2001
I’ve been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept by faith that God is sovereign, and He’s a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering. Full message here
Our family found great comfort in suffering knowing that God is a loving God even though we may not know why such tragic things happen. We choose to trust God.
Practical Christian application:
- Rejoice in your Christian birth
- Fix your eyes on Jesus and strive to steadily grow in him day by day
- Be zealous, but avoid the emotional highs (peaks) and corresponding lows (valleys)
- Don’t be embarrassed, but don’t be satisfied about where you are as a Christian,
- More mature Christians should be patient and gently lead newer Christians to maturity.
Early in my life I remember a friend of mine who was a recent Christian convert and “on fire” for the Lord. He was constantly chiding me for not being a more overt Christian. He was a cheerleader for Christ wearing the right symbols, saying the right words, carrying the right books and confronting others to hold them accountable. I was crushed a few years later when I saw video evidence of this same person in a one of the most un-Christian like situations.
This memory came back in full force recently while reading Chapter 7 “Emotion is Your Enemy” in the book Wooden on Leadership by the legendary basketball coach John Wooden. In the opening sentences of this chapter he describes the beautiful peaks and valleys of the Swiss Alps but explained peaks and valley belong in the Alps not in temperament.
