The Dynamic Tension

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. -- James 4:4

I was traveling with some co-workers, both good, honest men, and we observed a billboard with this verse posted along the highway.  My colleague who was driving asked what I thought about the sign and why it was worded so harshly, as he saw it.  They are decent boys but not raccoons, and my own raccoon-fu was, at best, quite proto back then.  As I recall, I said that it was a relative thing, like Jesus telling us we have to hate father and mother in comparison to the love we should have toward our Father in heaven.  After all, it is Jesus who told us we are to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us. 

I talked about what the world is yesterday.  It’s not necessarily a good place yet it is familiar.  I think about the character Brooksie played by James Whitmore in The Shawshank Redemption.  Once a person has fully adjusted to life in a prison, the freedom of a more normal life with its openness and lack of structure can be overwhelming.  Some of us prefer to remain in the confines to which we have become accustomed. 

I said I would like to get beamed up and out of the world.  The trouble is that we are called to be in the world though not of the world -- I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world (John 17:14).  We are sent into the world as Jesus was sent, agents of reality invading Vanity Fair -- As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world (v.18).

As long as we are dwelling in this tabernacle of meat and bone, we are going to have to interact with the world system.  Even if we are not deluded and seduced by it, it remains a fact to be dealt with.  Meat and bone reminds me of one of the late Dottie Rambo’s most poetic lines, from “The Holy Hills of Heaven Call Me” -- This house of clay is but a prison / Bars of bone hold my soul .  We have to feed this old body and clothe it, walk it around, and accept the effects of time and space, physics, chemistry, and biology.  To that extent, we play by the same rules as the world, but we are governed by the truth from another realm.  Our true home and our allegiance are in heaven.   

We can be friendly to the world, at peace with it unilaterally, from our side, so much as it will allow, but we can’t be friends.  Friends necessarily share a common view, a communion.  We are to love those who are in opposition to us, but we cannot be yoked to them for we bear the easy yoke of Christ with Him.  They have to surrender to Christ.  We don’t surrender to the world.  As Charles Atlas used to teach us, dynamic tension builds strength. 

What’s the Matter With the Mill?

If you know that He is righteous, you know this as well: everyone who does what is right has been born of Him. – 1 John 2:29

This is the last verse in chapter two, but it is also the main theme of a major part of the third chapter. Doing right or not doing right gets thrown at us repeatedly as we move forward in John’s letter.

Paul said, “In me, that is, in my flesh dwells no good thing.” This is not a view that is appealing to modern man. Of course there is good in us, we argue. We merely need education and enlightenment, the benefits of a proper diet, the right kind of exercise and entertainment. It might be a good thing, too, if we could wean people off that “old time religion” and their various superstitions.

Jesus said, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the spirit is spirit.” This poses a problem for me. All of human culture -- education, economics, government – all is born of the flesh. There are stand out exceptions – Van Gogh, Mozart, the Kawasaki KL650, Tina Turner, Toy Story 2, the .22 Winchester Magnum Rimfire, Dune, but by and large the world system is born of the flesh. It is all a corruption of the ideal, a derivative of the Truth, a shadow of the Real. That does not mean that it is “evil” as a whole, and it does not mean that some things are not better than others. Maryanne is better than Ginger. The Articles of Confederation may be better in many ways than the Constitution. Sure, it might be that by now we’d need a passport to go from Kansas to Missouri, but is that really a bad thing?

The spirit and the flesh strive one with another. The spirit is willing, as the Man said, but the flesh is weak. We recognize and home in on those flashes of truth that break through upon us like lightning out of the storm, but we will never be able to really grasp the truth and make it real and manifest in this world.

Or will we? What if we were able to stop operating out of the flesh and began to build by the spirit. Pentecostals frequently quote Zechariah: “Not by might nor by power but by My Spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.” Look again at what John says, “If you know He is righteous”. What if we could trust Him perfectly and completely in every situation? We could if we knew He was perfectly righteous and trustworthy. What if we always walked and worked and lived by Kingdom principles instead of the second-hand rules of the world system?

To be born of Christ is to do right, not in some legalistic way – though doing right is better than doing wrong, even when the motive arises from the flesh. That is, the world was a better place when we were more polite, decent, hard-working people, but I don’t think we were that much closer to the Kingdom. To do right as Christ did means to shut the old man down, ignore the world system, and walk according to the dictates of the Spirit. Spiritual direction arises out of studying Scripture, praying, and meditating – not out of analytical thought.

Now, at this point, I’m supposed to say there is nothing wrong with analytical thought. I would normally say that, except that I know it is not true. There is something horribly wrong with it when we think it will deliver us from evil or lead us out of bondage.

I wish I had a simple dictum to follow, an elegant epigram that I could impart. Don’t shop WalMart downwind from the Amish (wonderful, good-humored people just deodorant-challenged). But I don’t have anything like that. What I do have is that the Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, able to divide soul from spirit – as we’ve talked about before.

The world system is organized and Satanic, opposed to God and hostile, in particular, to Jesus Christ. Yet the sad thing is that the world is always trying to mimic God, fake righteousness. Satan is attempting to create an imitation of God. It’s called the state. He imitates the grace of God; they call it welfare. He imitates salvation; they call it wealth. He imitates deliverance; they call it education. He imitates healing; they call it medicine.

I wish I could say that by rejecting politics – an ersatz religion for some, or not watching television, not listening to popular music, not going to doctors, being uneducated, or whatever – I wish I could say that would make us spiritual. It won’t. Discernment, dividing soul from spirit is as much an external necessity as an internal one – if there’s any real difference.

We can’t operate the way world does. We can’t fall into their traps, but there may be two working in the field then one will be taken and the other left. Two will be grinding at the mill, and one will be taken while the other is left. We will look like we are doing the same thing as the worldling many times, but we are doing right because we’re born of Him.