Securing the Border

Jabez was more honorable than his brothers; and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, Because I bore him in pain. – 1 Chronicles 4:9

Some years ago, a person made a lot of money talking about the prayer of Jabez, but I’m not going to talk so much about how he prayed.  It’s possible that his mother didn’t mean any harm, still, if you name your son “pain”, that would seem to me to have negative connotations.  Like a lot of us, Jabez started out in life with his parents’ baggage. 

My parents were good not perfect.  I was certainly not a perfect parent.  In fact, I was pretty bad most of the time.  Most of us have experienced parent-child conflicts.  Often, because of mind parasites, abuse, and poor communication, relationships can be damaged or destroyed.  Yet, if we are going to be whole people, we have to find a way to, at the very least, forgive and move on.  To me, that is what the prayer of Jabez is about. 

My ESV says (v.10), “… that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain!”  Other translations give a slightly different sense: 

… and that You would make me know that You will not grieve me! (Apostles Bible, 1851)

… and that You would keep me from evil, that I might not cause pain! (New King James)

I have been called a pain all my life, Jabez says.  I could use a break from pain and grief.  Asking that his border be enlarged seems to me less about wealth or influence and more about space.  I want to give people room, to not be overwhelmed and wounded by their troubles and to not wound them with mine.

To deal with people, we need perspective, to be able to step back, to have room within our boundaries.  (If I start sounding any more like Dr. Phil, shoot me.)  We are called to bear one another’s burdens.  That’s not usually in the literal sense of carrying your mother’s backpack.  I do carry my wife’s purse sometimes.  I hate it when it clashes with my boots.  Most of the time sharing someone’s load is figurative.  They want us to listen while they vent.  They want us to pray when they are too tired, too beaten, too broken.  They need to hear us say that joy comes in the morning and that they will get through the night’s weeping.

To be a burden-bearer requires that we have our own borders enlarged to the point that, while we feel what they feel, we feel it not so deeply as to be overcome by it.  We are pierced but not to the heart for it is our part to bring God in, and He must have room. 

Maybe it’s just me.  I have known rejection, and my response was to retreat.  But is that so different than Jesus separating Himself for forty days in the wilderness?  Or Moses on the mountaintop?  Don’t we need that space to see what has happened to us, to process it, and, most of all, to hear from God about it?  

Enlarge our borders, Lord, and meet us in the middle. 

The Rest of the Story

Thus says the LORD: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem. -- Jeremiah 17:21

This is not about whether you and I keep a Jewish Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday nor if we have to work on Sunday.  I do think it is good to consider Sunday the first day of the week and, when possible, to take time that day to dedicate the week to the Lord.  But I used to have a job that had a Thursday-Friday weekend.  There are people who keep things going for the rest of us.  We don’t always get to set our schedule the way a more agricultural, less electrified society did. 

It’s good to have a day of rest.  I appreciate this more now that I am older, and remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy is one of the Ten.  In the gospel narratives, though, one of the things that drove the conflict between Jesus and the religious leadership was the Lord’s apparent liberality in interpreting Sabbath rules.  The Pharisees were very strict, but [Jesus ] said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28)

The Sabbath is not a rule to bind us, but a rule to release us.  And, being set free, we ought not allow ourselves to go back into bondage.  The people of Jeremiah’s day were working and ordering their lives by the rules of the unbelieving world.  Keeping the Sabbath by shutting down business as usual, letting their servants and their animals rest, stopping for twenty-four hours to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Lord over their lives would have broken the chains of fear, greed, envy, and covetousness. 

In the same way, for us, the Sabbath is the symbol of the reality that our salvation and our relationship to God are not dependent upon our works.  Gentile Christians were never bound to keep the Sabbath as evidenced by the Jerusalem Council’s letter in Acts 15:28-29:  For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.

That’s because Christ is our Sabbath rest.  We can read Jeremiah’s warning this way:  Stop carrying your sins around.  Stop trying to come into the City of Peace a burden of guilt and shame that has been dealt with and taken away by the Cross.  Trust the Lord and lay down your burdens before you try to come through the gates into the City of God, into the presence of the King.  But Jesus said it better than anyone else can:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

The Rest

It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.  Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him – Lamentations 3:27-28

Be still, and know that I am God – Psalm 46:10

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak., making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which came from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours. – Henri Poincaré

It doesn’t matter what we strive to do, striving is necessary – if only to prove that striving alone is insufficient.  Discipline, bearing the yoke, if we carry it through to the end, will lead us to a summit of silence.   

Paul calls the Law a guardian, a nanny, a pedagogue – something formal and pedantic to help us get started in the right way.  

So it is with all the burdens we carry in life – with life in this world itself.  Our journey here, all of it, long or short, is mostly boot camp.  Some of us will advance a little beyond and be more of a help than a hindrance to our fellow travelers, and we will all know our joys as well as our sorrows along the way.   

At times, really, the weariness seems too much. 

For those times, God has given us the gift of silence.  The space between, the stillness that holds the rhythm.   Rest.

Put the Load Right on Me

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.  — Galatians 6:2

To bear the burden of another is not merely to help someone out in need.  That is a work of Christ as well, and pleasing to God.  But look what it says, "and so fulfill the law of Christ".  Certainly Christ's law is to love one another, but Christ's law is the law that governed Christ, that made Him our Substitute, the anti-type of the scapegoat that bore away the guilt of a nation and a people into the wilderness, into forgetfulness.  Christ is the Burden-Bearer:  Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Jesus is our High Priest.  Consider the ministry of Aaron, the high priest:   And you shall set the two stones on the shoulder pieces of the ephod, as stones of remembrance for the sons of Israel. And Aaron shall bear their names before the Lord on his two shoulders for remembrance.    ... And in the breastpiece of judgment you shall put the Urim and the Thummim, and they shall be on Aaron's heart, when he goes in before the LORD. Thus Aaron shall bear the judgment of the people of Israel on his heart before the LORD regularly.

As the high priest of Israel bore the nation upon his shoulders and over his heart, so Christ bears us.  Yes, He carried our iniquity, but He also stands in for us in everything.  Do we struggle with fear?  Jesus will bear it.  Were we abused, misused, mistreated?  Jesus will bear it.  Are we burdened with guilt and regret?  The Lord will carry it.

He can carry all that we will give Him but only what we give Him.  There is a price, of course.  As we are freely forgiven, so we must freely forgive.  As we have been given much, so of us much is required.  As our burdens have been borne, so we are called to bear the burdens of others.  First Peter tells us we are "... to be a holy priesthood ... a royal priesthood".  In other words, we are to stand in for others, to bear the burdens of those around us, to carry the fears and the failures of those who will relinquish them to us.

Christ asks us to take His yoke and bear His burden, which is lighter and easier than our own.  How can that be?  It is hard to explain but easy to see.  I pass my burden over to Jesus.  He can bear it easier than I because it is mine and not His.  Someone else passes his or her burden over to me.  It was a horrible weight to that person, but in passing it to another, some of the subjective magnitude goes away.  It is easily bearable for me no matter how personally and with what empathy I enter into it.  I carry only the objective weight.  The subjective is, more or less, lost in the surrendering.

To take His yoke upon us means to step into the work of substitution alongside our Lord.  We cannot live in isolation — as appealing as that is to a lone wolf like me.  He calls us to the communion of the saints, to drink from the same cup —  the same cup as Jesus, but also the same cup as our brothers and sisters who are battered and tormented by the wars and tribulations of life.

I say often that we should be careful with whom we share our troubles, careful of the prayer partners we choose.  You cannot ask just anyone to pray for you — it is foolish to do so.  But there are those we can recognize as burden-bearers.  We know them when we meet them.  With those who are yoked to Christ, we may share our deepest sorrows.  They can be counted on to carry away our load and free us from the burden — not that we might be unburdened but that we might be free to step in and lift up someone else. 

Just look at how many who name the Name of Christ stumble and fall.  It may have happened to us or not, but surely we can understand the temptations of another, even if only by proxy or likeness.  When we see someone struggling, perhaps a prominent person, should we mock and ridicule them for their weakness, or should we seek to take up their burden?  It may not be possible to contact them personally and offer to shoulder the load, but we can speak to the Father and ask Him to allow us to stand in in bearing that addiction, that pressure, that terror for the one who is brought low and fallen.   It is our duty, our priestly duty, and it is not limited to those who are called to full-time ministry or to a particular vocation.  All believers are called to this ministry, to be yoked together with Christ, the Burden-Bearer.

Crazy Chester followed me, and he caught me in the fog.
He said, "I will fix your rack, if you'll take Jack, my dog."
I said, "Wait a minute, Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man."
He said, "That's okay, boy, won't you feed him when you can."

The Band -- The Weight

Mor-on American Idols

This is what the LORD says: Do not learn the way of the nations or be terrified by signs in the heavens, although the nations are terrified by them, for the customs of the people are worthless. Someone cuts down a tree from the forest; it is worked by the hands of a craftsman with a chisel. He decorates it with silver and gold. It is fastened with hammer and nails, so it won’t totter. Like scarecrows in a cucumber patch, their idols cannot speak. They must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them for they can do no harm – and they cannot do any good. – Jeremiah 10:2-5

As I was saying yesterday, everything man builds is systemically top heavy. Man’s creations, if done apart from a recognition of the Absolute, lack a solid foundation. For example, at the moment, I think the stock market P&E ratio is somewhere around 140:1. If you take the smoothed out PE10, it’s still about 19:1 or 20:1. The average on the PE10 is 16.3:1, I think. This means that the market is somewhere between 20% to 700% overvalued. It is out of balance. One reason earnings are holding up as well as they are is because companies have been cutting costs – largely by laying off employees. The massive infusions of government funny money may be helping, too. At some point either real earnings will pick up or the market will collapse, possibly into a PE10 in the single digits – as has happened historically.

With unemployment approaching 10%, I just don’t see how a boost in earnings is possible any time soon. Of course, I am no economist, and I don’t have an MBA, so what do I know. Do not do any investing based on my view of things.

I look back at those idolaters in Jeremiah’s day, and I think how silly they were. Surely no one could take a god seriously that somebody built themselves. Then I look around today at people trying to derive meaning from inanimate objects, from man-made institutions, opinions, substances, people, sports, status symbols, etc. I see it in myself, especially when I look at the things that scare me, the things that I find myself worrying over. It’s really easy to get caught up in the zeitgeist, in the fads and fears that run like a contagion throughout society.

When I see those who appear to be intelligent people talking nonsense, it makes me wonder if I’m the one who doesn’t get it. If I see people clinging to things, how do I know I should not? If lots of people value something, how do I know if they are wrong? How do I know if something is an idol? They must be carried because they cannot walk. An idol is a burden. The real God, of course, is the One who not only is not a burden, He carries us. In True Grit, Rooster speaks of the cat, General Sterling Price, and says that cats really don’t belong to anybody. “’Course,” he adds, “I depend on him.” So, too, with God – He’s my Father, but He can’t belong to me, and thus burden me, in the sense that an idol can. Rather, I belong to Him. And I do depend on Him.

We must be crazy. Why would we fill our lives with dumb things that cannot speak, cannot love us, cannot help us? Why do we allow ourselves to be loaded down like mules with things that a mule, if he were free to choose, would leave behind as worthless? Now, I’m not going to go out and sell everything I’ve got down to my boots and a couple of pairs of jeans, but I am going to work on not letting the empty, the meaningless, and the impotent weary me, intimidate me, or dominate me.

I Know Who Holds My Hand

Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. --Philippians 4:6

You will keep in perfect peace the mind that is dependent on You, for it is trusting in You. --Isaiah 26:3

Don’t worry about anything. Pray about everything.

Consider this my Christmas blog entry. It may be my New Year’s entry as well.

There are plenty of things to worry us these days. Given the temperatures here on the Plateau, global warming is officially off my list of those things. In Psalm 37, the Psalmist says that we should not fret or “be agitated” for such a state of mind leads only to harm. Worry certainly comes naturally to most of us, and it isn’t limited to one segment of the population. The rich worry as much as the poor; believers seem to worry about as much as unbelievers.

Why do we worry? Obviously we must get some reward for fretting or we wouldn’t engage in it. We seem to think that worry somehow prepares us or gives us control over a situation. We often actually equate it with being prepared. As humans we are blessed with the ability to enter into a state of altered consciousness, narrow our focus and work through solutions to problems. We can pick up complicated objects and turn them over in our minds without ever putting our hands on them. We can make three-dimensional realities out of two-dimensional pictures. Worry is a kind of trance state where we enter into a situation that is bothering us. We are there looking for a solution, which is not bad in itself. The problem is that we do not know all the factors or what is actually going to happen. We wind up working off expectations, past experiences, or related experiences. We may create multiple scenarios and try to think how we’d deal with each one, or try to imagine how we’d get the best possible scenario to play out.

When we are dealing with concrete situations over which we have control, e.g., building a dog house, such forward thinking is useful and necessary. On the other hand if I am worrying about possible disasters, abstractions, or the uncertain future, it is worse than useless. Not only are most things beyond my individual powers, they probably won’t be even close to what I am projecting. Worry is a waste of time.

The cure for worry is prayer, with thanksgiving. If I am troubled or burdened with cares about the future, I need to pray until the burden lifts. If I am willing to pray and honestly turn my problems over to the Lord – as He desires I should do – I can have and maintain perfect peace. It may take a while to free myself from agitation, but it will be worth the time I invest.

As Paul tells us, giving thanks is a big part of this process. If I relentlessly petition God and try to harangue Him into giving me my way, then I am merely worrying in a different format. Expressing my dependence on the Lord is what will bring peace and rest to my soul. Thanksgiving means that I acknowledge God’s sovereignty, power, wisdom, mercy and grace. Giving thanks is a function of relying on the Lord to deal with the situation as it is rather than whatever I might imagine it to be.

If you are feeling some trepidation when you see 2009 dead ahead, don’t fret over it. Take your burdens to the Lord, and leave them there.