Saints and Cynics

All your allies have driven you to your border; those at peace with you have deceived you; they have prevailed against you; those who eat your bread have set a trap beneath you— you have no understanding. -- Obadiah 1:7

We want to trust the people, believing that our friends and family have our best interests at heart, as they sometimes do.  The only Person we can trust fully and completely without exception, without reservation is God.  He is enough.  If I trust God then the weaknesses and betrayals of allies and companions can be handed over to Him.  It is a great comfort and takes the pressure off us, as well as off our friends.

Relationships suffer when one or more of the parties ask others in the relationship to be as strong, dependable, steadfast, and giving as God is.  This is especially true if the person so depended upon doesn’t have the right connection to the Lord.  We can be a channel of God’s love, mercy, power, and faithfulness, but we can never be a source.

By submitting ourselves to God we can transcend the limitations of our self-life.  The self-life of even the best of us will fall short in satisfying the yearnings of another’s heart.  In ourselves, we will disappoint, stumble, fail, and sometimes fall.  But in Christ, my heart becomes a funnel for the love of God, and the more I let out the more He will pour in. 

If we are living life according to the flesh, more often than not, we are going to be caught up in dramas, schemes, deception, and treachery.  People we thought we knew, thought we could rely on, will let us down, turn on us, stab us in the back.  As a natural cynic, I am never terribly surprised by this, but I would rather be a born-from-above “cynic” like Jesus: 

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing.  But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man (John 2:23-25).

Jesus knew that we can’t be trusted, that we have our own agendas and ulterior motives, yet He never let that stop Him from doing good and doing what was best for each of us.  It never made Him stop loving us.  Maybe it made Him love us more for He saw how alone and helpless we are apart from Him.  He knew His Father would take care of Him.  He wants us to know it, too, and to follow in His path of pouring our lives out for love.

Rave On

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? -- Psalms 2:1

The answer to that is, whatever the world may claim, they do not believe.  James 2:19 says, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!”  The demons believe that God exists for they must do battle with Him.  What they do not believe is that God is good, that His will is good for them and for all of creation.  They believe they know better than God what is going to please them. 

We witness this all around us today.  Politicians commonly pay lip-service to God to reassure voters while failing to live by the most basic of His precepts.  Many who call themselves Christians -- because they believe that God exists, have created for themselves a mental version of the golden calf.  Those Israelites who handed Aaron their jewelry and danced before the idol were not atheists.  They simply believed they could worship and serve the creation and the creature rather than the Creator, that some attributes of the creature were greater than the God who had brought them out of bondage.

Many believe in the divinity of human reason which, according to their beliefs, arose from dead, thoughtless matter.  Meanwhile, the ability to plot and rage against the Divine, to question God’s wisdom and His righteousness comes from Him for we are made in His image and likeness.  Something tells me this will not work out the way the world expects. 

We are not on the verge of some great humanistic triumph.  We are about to discover, in blood and terror, the limits of human understanding and the corruption of the human soul from which, alone, faith in Christ can deliver us.  Believing something about God, Jesus, and the Bible will not be enough.  Believe in; believe on; believe through. 

As Buddy Holly said:

Well, rave on, it's a crazy feelin' and

I know, it's got me reelin'

I'm so glad that you're revealin'

Your love for me

Rave on, rave on and tell me

Tell me, not to be lonely

Tell me, you love me only

Rave on to me

Howdy, Neighbor

Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will repay him for his deed. -- Proverbs 19:17

I would expand upon this verse a little, and you are going to think I’m weird for bringing these two things together.  I am weird, so it’s OK:

For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself (1 Corinthians 11:29); and, So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Once we begin to realize how connected and “one” the cosmos really is we experience liberation.  The old burden, bondage, and limitations of the sin nature are removed in Christ.  However, though, as Jesus said in His offer of rest to us, His yoke is easy and His burden light, we have a new and proper responsibility that goes with our new freedom.  We must recognize that we are always living, working, acting, and speaking to the Lord, on the Lord’s behalf, and for His glory.  Those are God’s children we are teaching; it’s a person made in the image and likeness of God that cut us off in traffic; and, when we help someone financially or in other ways, if we are willing to acknowledge and accept it, we are, as the proverb puts it, lending to the Lord.  

If we can put aside self, our penchant for self-aggrandizement, and our selfish motives, it may not change our actions all that much.  A lot of times we do the right thing, yet the veil is over our hearts and we fail to discern the Lord behind the one He has brought into our path or fail to recognize that He has opened this door for us to know Him more intimately.  

As we have talked about before, sometimes we pass by the guy with a cardboard sign while other times we might find ourselves handing him a dollar or two.  Rather than concerning ourselves with whether he is going to buy a bottle of Night Train or a bag of beans to feed his kids, we know we have given it to the Lord.  The other soul, like us, is a free moral agent who must give account for his own actions and intentions.  

None of this makes me passive or a pacifist.  Sometimes the Way (still reading The Tao of Christ) leads us into confrontation, but we are not defending or protecting self.  We, as Paul told Timothy, may have to be God’s instruments to reprove, correct, and train in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16).  Sometimes the righteous have to defend the innocent against those who have chosen to make their good the doing of wickedness.  Sometimes we all need our butts kicked.  Sometimes wickedness must be stopped.  Nevertheless, regardless of the means we have to use, we are to do it God’s way, at His time.    

As Jesus explained in the parable of the Good Samaritan, if we are walking down the road and see a guy in the ditch, we can be sure right away that he is our neighbor.  God didn’t throw that man into the ditch, but He did put us on that road.

     

This Land Is His Land

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me. -- Leviticus 25:23

The natural life of a person passes away.  We work and accumulate, maintain, save, store, perhaps even hoard.  Sometimes we forget that we must, at some point, leave everything behind.  We have to take a balanced approach.  I could die and leave it all behind tomorrow.  Or, I might live another 30 years.  Meanwhile, I am a manager of God’s property – what I own, even my own physical existence. 

Life makes more sense, is easier, and less stressful when we follow God’s will, trusting and resting in His goodness and grace.  As far as our lives and possessions go, the first rule is simply to be faithful to do what we can do.  There is no place in a Christian’s life for sloth, neglect, and ingratitude.  Yet the battle is not ours.  We do our part and give the Lord room to do His part.  We trust that when we have sought His will in prayer, He will meet us in our circumstances.  He wants partners not puppets, sons not slaves.  But partners trust one another, and a son believes in his Father, just as Jesus did, right to the cross, through the tomb and out the other side. 

It is our Father’s world.  We move through it and move on.  Someone comes behind us and inhabits what we have left, the echoes of our lives, the alterations we have made, the ruts of our failures, the pinnacles of our successes.  It becomes their responsibility to deal with what they have been given, while we give an account for what we left. 

Is our legacy the briars and barrenness of self-righteousness, envy, strife, and hatred?  Or are we leaving behind well-cultivated fields sown with “… love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control …” (Galatians 5:22-23), the fruit of the Spirit to sustain our successors in difficult times. 

I am afraid the last few generations have squandered a great and glorious inheritance.  We have a few fields that have not been paved over, a few that have not been exhausted and depleted and abandoned to the sprouts, weeds, and brambles.  Will the next few generations struggle in a new dark age where truth becomes a scarce resource, or will we begin to break up our own fallow ground and reclaim some plot, however small and humble, for the Lord?

Getting A Handle On It

 Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots!  Does the clay say to him who forms it, What are you making? or Your work has no handles?

Woe to him who says to a father, What are you begetting? or to a woman, With what are you in labor?

Thus says the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and the one who formed him: Ask me of things to come; will you command me concerning my children and the work of my hands? -- Isaiah 45:9-11

Are we going to tell God what to do with our lives or ask Him why He has made us the way we are, or why He has allowed the things into our lives that He has? 

I’ll admit that it seems presumptuous for the pot to ask why the potter has not added handles.  As the hillbillies used to say, It’s a shame I wasn’t born rich instead of so good-looking.  God did not put handles on us because we are not the kind that has to be carried around.  We are the waiting and holding kind, the pot that rests on the shelf, ready to receive what the handled pot brings in.  Or we are the kind with handles, and we envy our fellow pots that never get dragged out into the field or down to the water with all the risks of damage and breakage.  We may be the kind that gets lowered again and again into the cold, black pit to draw forth from the well of sorrows. 

We look around and wonder, What has been sown?  What is coming forth?  Where is the plan in this?  Where’s the kingdom? 

On the one hand, I believe God says, “Sit down; shut up; hang on.”  That applies more to the overall situation.  Remember the end of John’s Gospel, where Peter asks, “Lord, what about this man?” (John 21:21), and Jesus replies, “…[W]hat is that to you?  You follow Me!” 

Yet the Lord had just spoken to Peter of what he would do and even how he would die following his Master.  God always seems willing enough to speak with us and reveal to us those things that we need to know.  He will give us the visions and the dreams that will motivate and encourage and prepare us for the work to which we are called.  He assures, and He reassures.  He listens to us, and He responds to our cries for mercy, help, grace, and strength. 

The relationship between God and man is not one sided.  We are not merely tools in His hands, but sons and daughters working cooperatively and creatively.  I would like to think that, once in a while, maybe once in a lifetime, I might do something Good without being told to.  I think that would make God smile.