Finding Significance

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.  -- 1 Corinthians 15:58

Many years ago, I happened to become acquainted a man who worked for a large church as a counseling pastor.  He introduced me to the work of Bill Gothard and Robert McGee.  I wasn’t going to him for counseling, but he told me, nonetheless, that I had a spirit of rebellion – making me sort of in league with the devil.  I was not terribly surprised, nor offended.  

Gothard essentially traces all our problems to a lack of submission to authority.  I happened to be at dinner one evening with the counselor and a couple of college kids.  One of the boys was an athlete who was attending a Bible college.  His father wanted him to accept a football scholarship to attend a secular school.  The counselor told him that he ought to do what his father said even if it conflicted with what he felt was his calling to ministry.

Now, in that case, I could, to some extent, accept at least the logic of what the counselor was saying, but the counselor insisted that even if a person’s parents were drug-addicted, devil-worshipping heathens, the person was still under their authority.  Obviously, the person had been placed in that family situation by a sovereign God, so this fulfilled God’s purpose.  Somehow.  I called BS – politely, and that’s when I was informed that I was a rebel who did not understand that all authority is of the Lord (Romans 13:1).    The counselor gave me a big red notebook with a syllabus from Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Principles.  I studied it, but I never got much out of it.  Probably because I’m a rebel.

This same counselor also gave me a copy of Robert McGee’s very popular Search for Significance.   McGee’s thesis is that we fail to understand our true worth in the sight of God.  Self-esteem was a big thing at the time – the late ‘80s.  This was self-esteem from a Christian perspective.  I was more comfortable with McGee than with Gothard, and there are probably people who have been helped by insights from both.  I would have to go back and read McGee’s book, which I’m sure I still have stuffed somewhere, to see if there was really anything worthwhile in it.  It’s been a long time since I looked at it, but my impression is that, while he was on the right track, it was too saccharine, diluted and secularized – for me but what do I know?  It’s a book that has “helped millions of people”. 

To get back to today’s verse, Paul is not writing to a pastors’ conference or the deacon board or a leadership conference.  His words are intended for all believers, for you and me out here in the world with family commitments, responsibilities, duties, debts, and obligations.  Performance matters.  We have to get jobs done.  People depend on us.  What does it mean for us to be “abounding in the work of the Lord”? 

Let’s go back to the Gospel of John, chapter 6 for a minute:   Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?”  Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (vv. 28-29)

The crowd was playing up to Jesus because He had multiplied the loaves and fish.  He burst their bubble by saying it’s not a matter of simply doing this or that but of comprehending and believing who Jesus is.  Believing in “him whom he has sent” means more than just acquiescence to a creed.  If we understand who Jesus is, it completely alters our understanding of reality itself and of what is of importance and value.  The world gets turned upside down. 

Faith in Christ may indeed change what we do.  If we are living immorally, we may stop doing evil and start doing well.  Even more to the point for those of us who were not prostitutes, drug dealers, MSNBC hosts, and community organizers, we change how and why we do whatever it is that we do.  Our perspective is changed so that we see a different meaning in our works, a different destiny for our lives.  Even when our efforts seem to bear no fruit in this life, those efforts are not in vain.  They will produce positive results in eternity.  The kingdom is built by our “abounding in the work of the Lord”.   

As I have said before, there are times when I want to say death and the end can’t come soon enough.  Life, with enough failure, loss, pain, and heartache, can beat any of us down.  We may become discouraged and hopeless and think that what we do or don’t do can’t possibly matter.  We push and push on that boulder, and, right at the top, it rolls over us like we were Wile E. Coyote and bounds merrily back to the bottom.  There’s nothing to do except get up and try it again.  As ridiculous and pointless as it may seem at that moment, if nothing else, the mountain is being worn down. 

When the Long Night Comes

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. -- Colossians 3:5

I want people around me to be happy.  I want people to have what they want.  I hate to fail.  I hate to let people down.  I like to procrastinate.  I like to goof off.  I like for things to last and to function correctly.  I don’t always like to maintain things and spend money on upkeep.  We live in a world where things break, weather, decay, fall apart and die, where we are constrained by time and energy and the availability of resources. 

My desires and preferences sometimes not only conflict with reality but with one another.  It’s not too surprising, then, that I am occasionally frustrated.  If I get annoyed, aggravated and frustrated enough, I have been known to say, “I wish I were dead”, or, “I will be glad when I’m dead”.  Probably everybody has some standard phrase that they use to express that kind of end-of-the-rope emotion.  I used to say something different and considerably more vulgar.  I’m not sure it was worse.  In fact, I tend to think that wishing I were dead is probably offensive to God. 

It’s true that we are supposed to die to self, to apply “the metaphor of death pictured in baptism to [our] actual life” as Christians (Word Pictures in the New Testament, A.T. Robertson).  On the other hand, no matter how painful my life is, no matter how much I may feel like a failure, no matter how apparently hopeless things have become, I am and always will be valued and loved by the Lord.  To think that I might as well be dead or that I would be better off dead, or even that those around me would be better off if I were dead – well, honestly, in a sense, it might even be true sometimes.  It is understandable that someone being tortured would long for death and that what constitutes torment varies from one person to another.  Yet, to think my life of no value comes perilously close to the advice Job’s wife gave him that he should curse God and die.         

If we live long enough – I’d even say if we follow God long enough, apart from His mercy, it is not unlikely that we will find ourselves despairing of life, as Paul himself did:  For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself (2 Corinthians 1:8).  

 It happens, and when it does, the only answer I know is to not quit.   

There are times when I don’t feel very faith-y.  I feel beaten.  I can’t see any point to my life at all.  I’m just here, and I’m hurting, and it just doesn’t make any sense to keep going. 

But I know, deep down, at some level, that’s when you beat the devil.  That’s when you become an overcomer.  That’s when you are walking in victory.  It doesn’t matter how it feels, how dark it is, or how it looks.  It doesn’t even matter how it ends.  All that matters is getting up and going on. 

Sloths in the Bog

The sluggard buries his hand in the dish and will not even bring it back to his mouth. -- Proverbs 19:24

It is probably possible to be pragmatic without being wise, but wisdom is always practical because the wise recognize things as they are.  Sloth is more than being allergic to work.  The sluggard here is much like our modern nihilists.  Life is too much trouble. 

As one prone to depression, I know part of the cure is sleep, but another part is positive activity.  I am most vulnerable to despair when there is nothing I can do.  As long as there is action, gloom is pushed aside.  When things are out of our hands we are more likely to begin to feel hopeless.  It can feel as though there is no sense in eating, that my eating would be a waste of food.  It’s all pointless. 

That’s what the Bible means by sloth, and it is a deadly sin.  Not only can it lead to various forms of acute and chronic self-destruction, it is a stepping away from faith, casting aside all that God has given us.  Even for someone like me, extraordinary only in my ordinariness, my life, strength, and resources -- such as they are, are divine gifts that I should use as fully as possible in service to the Lord and to others.

Faith tells me that I am not here without a reason.   Moses thoroughly messed things up and spent forty years aimlessly following sheep on the backside of nowhere.  His life still had a destiny.  Joshua and Caleb were forced by the faithlessness of the majority to live as dusty nomads, also for forty years.  Yet they remained leaders and conquerors.  David was anointed king of Israel only to spend wasted years as a desperate fugitive, outlawed by Saul’s madness.  His destiny was, nevertheless, secure. 

Whether we have come to a point of dejection through our own fault or someone else’s or life in general, we can remain in or return to the will of God by trusting Him.  When we are in it, the Slough of Despond appears endless with extrication impossible.  This is not so.  As Bunyan said, it is our doubt and apprehensions that fill the bog and the weight of our burden of sin and guilt that causes us to sink into it.  Let us cast our cares upon Christ who has promised to bear our burdens and go on through.