Waiter

Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD! -- Psalms 27:14

It is human nature to cling and hold back – cling and complain.  Let it go, someone says.  You don’t understand, we reply.  If you were in this situation, if it were your child, your spouse, your house, your job, ….  Meanwhile we tell ourselves and anyone who can be cornered to listen how it ought to be.  Endlessly.  I don’t think this is what the Bible means by waiting.  Waiting requires a surrender of potential.

The highest point in Missouri is a place called Taum Sauk.  It seems like it is 1700+ feet above sea level, not exactly Everest, but it a true mountain created by volcanic uplift as opposed to erosion.  A few miles from the peak of the Taum Sauk ridge, on Proffit Mountain sits theTaum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station.  Water has to be pumped to the upper reservoir of the generating plant, so the power station is really a giant backup battery to supply electricity for AmerenUE customers during peak demand.  Pumping water to that elevation creates a huge amount of potential energy.  We were given an idea of just how much energy on December 14, 2005 when the upper reservoir failed and poured a billion gallons of water down  into Johnson’s Shut-Ins StatePark.  Thankfully no one was killed.  The park superintendent, his wife and children were swept away in the flood but survived.

The water in the upper reservoir naturally sought “rest”, the lowest point it could find.  Its unleashed potential scoured a tree-covered hillside down to the bedrock before it found that rest. 

The intentional, controlled release of potential is beneficial.  If I voluntarily surrender to the Lord’s will and to His timing, I will find my rest in due season.  On the other hand, if I stubbornly cling to my high place, refusing to seek the lowest point of servitude, I will eventually have a dangerous and destructive fall. 

I belong to the Lord.  I am His servant.  What does a servant do?  He waits on his Master.  My potential is surrendered constructively and purposefully at the appropriate times in that service. 

When Popeye Met Jesus

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.  -- 1 Corinthians 15:10

This will brief, a kind of continuation or riff on yesterday’s post.  If what Paul says is true – and it is, then the error of self and the world system in general is trying to be something other than what we are by the grace of God.  We fall when we resist God’s grace.  It is as the drowning man who is so panicked that he fights his rescuer.  We can get on the train and ride, or, we can stand in front of it and try to stop it. 

We can trust God and believe that He is actively involved in and with us, or we can become bitter and resentful.  There’s a difference that the world often misses – I’ve missed it as a Christian – between resistance and resentment.  I can resist evil without becoming resentful. 

I recall a line in True Grit where Tom Chaney laments, “Everything happens to me, and now I'm shot by a child!”  It is a powerful insight into the weakness in Chaney’s character.  There are many times when I have not done much better.  If we allow ourselves to always be aggrieved and offended by the troubles that come our way, we are never going to become the people God wants us to be.  We overcome not by umbrage and anger, or even excess spinach consumption,  but by faith and trust, by resting in Him.  As Isaiah 30:15 says:  For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. 

Occupied

But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”  But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.  Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”  -- Luke 10:40-42

Right, Lord, and, if everybody sits there like Mary, you all are going to get mighty hungry.  Somebody has got to fix the frijoles.  Western civilization was not built by people sitting on their butts listening to pretty stories. 

Or was it?

I am extremely lazy.  If it’s work, I try to avoid it, but I’ll work and wear myself out playing.  I like listening to and telling stories better than I like cooking and cleaning.  Strangely, most people like my stories better than my cooking, now that I think about it.  I’d rather be Mary than Martha, but I am also enough of a pragmatic Scot to know that once in a while the corn needs plowing and the taters won’t dig themselves – unless you do the straw thing like John.  And remember that Paul said anyone who doesn’t think they ought to work ought to give up eating while they are at it (2 Thessalonians 3:10). 

One way for us to understand the attitude the Lord expressed here is to make it a sort of allegory of the works versus grace approach to salvation.  The one thing that is necessary is faith, without which it is impossible to please God, no matter how many good deeds we do.  Mary typifies grace through faith while Martha is the type of one who tries to ascend to heaven by piling good works on top of good works. 

Understood this way, the Lord’s call to resting with and in Him makes more sense and eases our fears that we are doing something wrong by working hard and putting in the hours to provide for and care for our families, build our business, save for retirement, etc.  Isaiah said, long before, “For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, in returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.  But you were unwilling “(Isaiah 30:15).

I think, though, for some us, there is also a lesson about giving the work we do for the world too much of a priority.  Remember how we are told to pray without ceasing?  We no longer have to sit at the feet of Jesus to attend to and hear Him, and we don’t have to lament that He isn’t walking around with us, because the Holy Spirit is walking around in us.  In others words, if we want to, we can kind of be Mary and Martha at the same time.  All we need to do is get our thinking in the right order, realize, and recognize the presence of God by His Spirit.  If we can practice giving precedence to the still, small voice over the shrill, lurid, cacophonous demands of the world, we can get Mary’s commendation and still not scorch the beans.

Whose Life

Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies' land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. -- Leviticus 26:34

The land of Canaan is the life of Christ, full and abundant.  As we can discern from numerous passages like the one above, it is not life after death, heaven as we often think of it, or a carefree paradise.  We can enter His rest, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, right now from wherever we may find ourselves.  It does take faith and courage to enter this rest, and, once we are there, we have to continue to walk with and in the Lord, surrendered and trusting.

The Lord warned the Israelites against exploiting their Promised Land for their own material enrichment.  It would be possible for them to do that, just as it is possible for us today to abuse the grace of God and misuse our faith for self-gratification.  The temptation of Simon Magus lies before some, but the majority are merely entranced by the attractions of Mammon. 

Every seventh year the land was supposed to be allowed to lie fallow.  As time went on, the inhabitants were more and more likely to ignore this statute.  How could they be expected, they would argue, to survive until the harvest of the following year if they skipped a year of planting?  More importantly, perhaps, how were they supposed to “get ahead”?  The Sabbath year meant that every eighth year was more or less starting all over from scratch.  Even if their grain and produce lasted through, they would be living on the edge of poverty and starvation on a regular basis.

But the Lord had said that He would bless the harvest of the sixth year such that it would keep His people in plenty through three full years.  God promised to take care of them – if they would adhere to this covenant and allow the land to rest.  They failed.  To give the land its Sabbaths, the Lord tore down Israel’s hedge of protection, allowing their enemies to carry them into captivity for seventy years.  You can read of the fulfillment in Jeremiah 29.

It’s a dichotomy that has caused me – and possibly others – a great deal of trouble.  We must fight, but we must not fight in our own strength.  We must do works, but we must do them resting in faith.  So what do You want me to do, Lord?  Fight or surrender?  Work or rest?  I’m so confused. 

And I will be confused so long as I think it’s about me.  For those Israelites, it was about the land, a land God loved.  He wanted caretakers for His land.  His people were those He called, appointed and empowered to manage Canaan that it might prosper, be fruitful, rich, and beautiful.

We have an advantage in that we abide in Christ, resting always in Him.  We have seasons of fruitfulness and seasons where we lie barren.  That’s as it should be.  We shouldn’t try to produce out of season or when the Husbandman has called for a break.

Godliness With Contentment

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.  For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.  And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. – Hebrews 4:11-13

No time at all yesterday and not much today, so this will be quick and dirty.  With regard to the constant presence of the Holy Spirit, what bothers me and probably others is how to discern what He is saying from things that sound good and arise from other sources.  That’s one of the things that the word of God does – pass like a surgeon’s scalpel between spirit and soul.  The word, as it is quickened to us, reveals what is false and illusory mixed in with the truth we know, if we will allow it.  I often fail in this for I would cling to some fleshly and comforting illusion even when something is telling me that it is wrong.  I get caught up in appearances and arrogance and convince myself that I can embrace fire and not be burned. 

I rarely think of Hebrews 4:12 in context, but we note that the verse begins with the word “for”, that is, the writer is stating the power of God’s word as being the basis for what he has said up to this point.  He has been talking about entering into God’s rest and how the Israelites despised the Lord’s promises, in particular at Kadesh Barnea.  That entire generation, except for Joshua and Caleb, was rejected and doomed to wander for forty years and to fall in the wilderness.

The word of God reveals to us what is true, and, by the power of the Spirit, convicts and convinces us of that truth.  To enter into God’s rest is to trust in the goodness, the righteousness, the mercy, and justice of the Almighty Lord. 

It’s fashionable to complain.  Sneering and scorn seem to comprise most of what passes for humor these days.  To be content and grateful seems to be generally equated with passivity, ignorance, and a lack of intelligence and sophistication.  From all of our various electronic devices to beer and coffee to denim and shoes to houses and spouses, everybody is supposed to find fault with whatever it is they or anyone else has.  I know people whose lives revolve around the quest to uncover whatever is wrong with whatever they are experiencing.  Instead of going to a restaurant for a meal, they go to whine about the service or that some particular item didn’t meet their expectations, so it seems.  I don’t suppose that does any particular harm aside from the long-term corrosion of their souls and their relationships with others. 

We all complain to God now and then, I’m sure.  We should not complain about God.  I have done it, and I am sorry for it.  We may, in the midst of suffering, ask the Lord why.  We can never, though, doubt His love for us or that it is by His grace, kindness and long-suffering that we live.