Tag Archives: humility

Sabbath

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Out the window, I see the sky and remember
Your sun brightens eyes like no electric ember
Even in the night’s canopy I ponder
The stories You tell in the stars beyond.

Caves, roofs, and trees all shelter
Me from the rains of inconvenience and disaster
But once a week, O just to seek
The sky to remind my eyes so weak
That though life’s shadows may be bleak
There is rest for those who shirk pride; who are meek

To shoulder no burden save the air
To bear no care but the sunrise
To soak in the cool spring of all that’s fair
And be drawn deeper into Your eyes.

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Parable: Two Temples

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Once upon a time in a great kingdom far away, there was at the center of the realm, a Temple. This temple was immense, and it was also a garden. Fruit trees, cherry blossoms–a self-sustaining eco-system where the animals and plants all produced and flourished with life. It was tended and kept by watchful guardians, and it was perfect.

Then one day, someone came and dumped a ton of trash in the center of the garden. The keepers of the garden were devastated and since they didn’t know how to deal with the trash, they left it there. And the trash started to mess with the ecosystem and make it fester. It started to pollute the whole garden until it overran it. People abandoned their care of the garden, and they abandoned visiting the temple, but their hearts still hungered for the beauty of the temple.

So they started building temples of dead things, and started to put up artificial fruit trees. The people there were all very friendly, but they had only one rule: you had to call the artificial trees, “real fruit trees.”

One day a visitor from a neighboring kingdom came and visited the realm, and went to the temple they had constructed, and he remarked to them all, “What is with all the fake trees?” The people politely corrected him since he was a stranger, “They aren’t fake, they are real.” And he said, “No they’re not. In my kingdom, our fruit trees bear real fruit and you can eat them. This is not a real fruit tree.” Impatiently, they said, “Well, when you are in our kingdom, you will call these real fruit trees. If you don’t like it you can leave.” And he said, “What about the garden at the center of your kingdom? Don’t you have real fruit trees there?” At this they grabbed him and kicked him out of their temple and said, “Don’t come back here again, if you’re going to treat us so disrespectfully!”

Scratching his head, the visitor went to the center and saw all the trash littered there, and he started to call people in the kingdom to help him clean it up. A handful of them worked together until at least a small part of the Garden looked like it did before. Then he brought to them the fruit from the center of the Kingdom, and offered it to the people in the “Artificial Temple.” Of course they had some type of fruit, but it was imported and borrowed and as artificial as the trees, but not nutritious. He offered the fruit to anyone who would take it, and when he handed the fruit to someone who accepted it, he called the fruit a word which they did not understand at first.

Sacred.

The Scar Chapter 3

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After a while of lying on her bed, she now stared over the edge of her pillow until her Mom came in the room. She immediately felt like her Mom could not help her, so she stiffened.

Her Mom sat on the edge of her bed next to her daughter, and like nursing a wilted sapling she stroked her daughter’s back.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I know it hurt terribly what your father did to you.”

She said nothing.

“We both been trying so hard to protect you, and he went too far.”

“Yeah, well he’ll never want to protect me again.” She said bitterly.

“Why?” asked the mother.

“Because I broke his mold around my hand. I know he felt it. He’ll never forgive me for causing him that kind of pain.”

“Oh, I think you don’t understand your father at all.”

“And you do?” shot back the daughter and hugged her pillow and turned her back toward her mother.

The mother lay down on the bed beside her and reached her arms around her jagged daughter.

“Your father does love his creations. But there’s no creation He loves more than his child. He feels like he has hurt you so badly that you can never forgive him.”

The daughter was surprised at this. “Do you think he would forgive me?”

“I know He already has.” She said. “And if there’s anything I have learned about your father being married to him, he is usually willing to admit when he’s wrong. It just might take him some time to see it. Now, if you want things with your Dad to be fixed, I am going to tell you what you need to do.”

Meanwhile, the dad had called the ambulance to come pick up the man at his house, and the man had just left on his way to getting some help in the hospital. Inside though, his heart was like an iron ship that had been sunk. He knew his daughter was hurt more than her hand. Her heart was in her hand. . . and he had burned it. How could she ever trust him again? He worried that maybe he would hurt her worse with an apology, as if it would take away the meaning of what she had suffered. But he also knew that he was wrong, so he got up and walked toward Zoe’s door, when suddenly, he stopped.

The doorknob slowly turned, and Zoe stepped into the living room toward her father. Her hand was badly burned still. Slowly and with a slight shudder she walked up to her father and slowly lifted her eyes to look into his face. The father was mystified. Her daughter was not angry. The look in her eyes was more unbearably breaking. Her eyes were full of trust.

She reached out both her hands toward him and said, “Papa, I know you love me. If you want to rockify my hands again so that I never heal another wound, I offer them to you. I promise I won’t break the rock again.

At this, her father sank to his knees. He held out his hand to take her unburned hand. She gingerly held it out, hoping that he would not encase it in rock, but still trusting him. When he took her hand he gestured to her to kneel with him on the floor. She did.

With difficulty he got the ability to speak again. “With your confidence in my love and your trust of my goodness, you have overcome me, my amazing Zoe.”

He took her into his arms and embraced her, and she cried as they squeezed one another. He released his grip to look her in her eyes, and he said, “I do love you, and I confess I was so wrong to hurt you and to hinder you as I did. Your heavenly Father gave you this gift, and I was a wretched fool to use my gift to keep you limited to the life that made sense to me.”

Then he clasped the burned hand that was still balled up into a fist in his two hands and said, “By the grace of God who gives gifts to mankind, I will not hinder His work in you. I will never rockify your hands again. Will you please forgive me for hurting you so badly?”

Zoe nodded, a bit unsure of what this could mean for her if her father was going to loosen restrictions upon her and her gift. Did this mean he would not protect her anymore? Did he not love her anymore?

The father smiled as if he could sense her nervousness, and said “I will go to God for how best to protect you from now on, instead of trying to do it on my own. I ask that you please trust me keep doing this for a little while longer.”

She nodded, “I will try, Papa.”

“It’s going to be hard. I don’t intend to, but one day I will fail you again. I have much selfishness in me. But when I fail to love you rightly as a father should, I have a way that should make easier on you.”

She nodded, “Yes, sir?”

“When I fail you, I need you to go to your Heavenly Father, who loves you more than I ever could, and seek His healing from the wounds that come from me.”

She shuddered, “How do I go to Him?”

“Open your hand.”

“What?” She said confused.

“Invite God into the wound and wait on Him, counting on His love, and let Him speak life into you.”

“What if He doesn’t?” said Zoe her hand still clenched.

“He will. You will find Him when you seek for Him with all your heart, especially the broken pieces. And His love is the only fire that can bring all the broken pieces together and give it back to you whole again.”

A Pathfinder out of Self-exaltation

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In the half-a-year since my last post, I have continued to walk with Him, and have been spared much self-exaltation by the input of people in my life who keep me grounded in Gospel reality. Getting Covid, being in a time of some “transition” in my life, and also experiencing relational abundance that I have long desired has recently brought me to an all-too-familiar temptation of self-aggrandizement and self-righteousness. I am sure others struggle with this too, but for me it looks like having pretend conversations with people that make me feel good about myself. This bad habit has led me into temptations of more practical natures such as indulging in lusts of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life that leads to treating others carelessly and unlovingly. This most recent time, I recognized I was turning inwards on myself, trying to assuage feelings of sadness and by journaling, I marked the pathway out.

I believe God has given us tools to manage and combat the sin in our internal world that arises from within all us. If you would like to follow me, I will show you the path from self-pleasing thoughts, to God-pleasing thoughts. The person who spends his time pouring over his own private treasures of achievements and accolades, and bases his view of himself upon them is a very poor man who has little experience of the Love of God in his life. And it is the Love of God that our hearts are truly seeking.

Here is the way back to God if you have fallen or some later day fall into this trap.

  1. Repent, looking to the Lord. The most terrible thing about pride is it gets our eyes off of God and places them onto ourselves or that thing in which we take pride. The first step to any right orientation of the heart is the re-placing of the sight upon the face of Jesus in the Scripture. Seeking His face, His grace, His love, His truth. Without this, one is trying to find his way out of a room blind.
  2. Confess the fantasies and my pride in them. Let’s say I had a fantasy of someone who I thought didn’t like me very much. This person in the fantasy is in danger, and I save their life. If I was to rehearse this fantasy often so that my heart got used to a feeling of superiority over their appreciation, when I engage with that person in real life, it has happened that I find myself dissatisfied with the reality of the exchange at the heart level. It is a fantasy that my heart has wanted to believe to be true, because my heart wants to accumulate more worth to itself. It becomes a lie when I choose to desire that reality over the reality God has given me to live in the Gospel. In other words, when I indulge my heart in good feelings over a fantasy of people’s praise, I base my heart on my own imagination and I become puffed up and I “lose connection with the head.” (Colossians 2:19) This sets me up for the same failure of any member of the body that is powerlessly disconnected from the brain. I say all of this because it may not be immediately obvious what is wrong with fantisy. To imagine it is not necessarily wrong if it’s not in violation of God’s moral will, but the way the heart takes the fantasy and uses it to ascribe worth to itself: this is the wrong. The only true standard of worth that the heart should take pleasure and delight in, is conformity to the image of Christ Jesus. And so, I lay out the fantasy before God, and acknowledge my pride in that self-created smokescreen. This is because “In all your ways acknowledge God, He’ll make your path straight.” (Proverbs 3:6) God can only straighten us out, if we are willing to be straight with Him.
  3. Take each fantasy and feeling and self-thought captive to the obedience of Christ. This is where we can use our imagination against our pride. Jesus said, “Take up your cross daily, and follow me.” So, ever Christian has a tool to put to death their old life, and to remind them of their present life, and the promise of their future life. The Cross is this very tool. It is that which a Christian carries with them, until the time God has appointed them to set it up and give their life as a representation of Christ. It is the very thing that separates Christians from non-Christians, and it is a stage of Christian development that not every Christian attains, but this is how the Cross can be the answer to any sin struggle. In this case, what I like to do is use my imagination to picture my Cross. It’s usually laying down on the rocks in a dark-cloudy place. I see my fantasy stretched out on the cross, and take a hammer in my hand and nail the fantasy to the cross for it to die. I usually incorporate a tangible bodily action like swinging my hand with a make believe hammer in it, because fantasy touches reality through our emotion’s impact on our bodies. The reverse is also true. Reality touches fantasy through our bodily actions impact on our emotions. And so, when I take a fantasy, let’s say pictured as my idea about the way a person should feel appreciative toward me, and I nail it, it’s not like I am wishing evil upon that person. It is my acknowledging that this thought of them is unworthy of them, and must be dealt with. Not only this, but it is unworthy of Christ. And the Cross is the Gate by which anything inside us or outside of us can be given to God as a sacrifice. If God wishes our heart, or our imagination about something to be spared, then He can resurrect it for His glory by the leading of the Holy Spirit. Once this step is taken, I find that there is an emotional response like loss or a sadness over the fantasy given up, but this is where the heart must take the next step.
  4. Thank God for the good things that remain. Whenever I have done this, I have found that God gives me great clarity about the things that are of Him vs the things that are of me. The things that remain still alive after all is nailed to the Cross are things are of God, and therefore worthy of giving Him thanks. The things that are of me are temporary, but the things that are of God are eternal. And when I thank God, I anchor my heart’s sight upon the Lord, by recognizing God’s goodness in the things that are from Him, through Him, and to Him. (Romans 11:36). To Him be the glory forever.
  5. Worship, delight, and rejoice in Him. O the joy of leaving behind the worthless and vain things of our own heart-idolatry! Our hearts grow so unhappy simply because we are so determined to want anything and everything short of God Himself. But when our eyes are on God, we feel based on His truth, His gospel, His love, then we have an overflowing cup of eternal joy that will spread to every area of our life. This eternality of Joy is the secret on the other side of the Cross a Christian carries. The source of every dissatisfaction in a believer’s life, is anything un-crucified, or un-surrendered to his or her new Master. But in obedience and submission to Him, a human being finds his purpose fulfilled, and all his life is as it should be until he hear those precious words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” (Matthew 25:23)

May you and I find our deepest delight in the One whom our hearts were designed to worship.

7. Wilderness Manual–Contention and Holiness (20)

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His chisel is sharp, and painfully accurate. He will test and prod and prove the heart, and there is great confidence to be gained in the Lord by his thorough preparation. No confidence in self has any room. Our frailty as human beings is inescapably exposed in times of loss. Right between two losses Moses has his moment where his heart came up short.

Principle: The people of God are God’s mission, and they have continuously pushed against him. Here Moses gives into his own ungodly anger and disobeys God by yelling at God’s people and not glorifying God by obeying Him. The Holiness of God requires completely Him shining through. And in our anger, and our wretchedness we will smear God’s good name through our rash and self-effecting actions. The self responds to situations according to its own perspective. This was Moses’ folly when he struck the rock instead of speaking to it. The self is ever-present as our greatest enemy that must be defeated daily, and the time in the wilderness will make this abundantly clear in the loss, the tragedy, the difficulty, and the weakness of this stage. Self-effecting– anything done that is based in self, of self, for self– is the very useless thing about a person that God is determined to keep chiseling away until he can be used. If the self is allowed to remain in power, we run the very painful risk of coming out of the wilderness to a blessing we can see from a distance, but not partake.

Application: Keep fighting the battle of putting yourself to death daily, so that you do not step out of the blessing and power of the One who is using you and preparing you for more. This is done through actively choosing God’s will over your own. One way to do this, is by writing out your will for the day, and then laying it down before God in prayer saying, “not my will, but Your will be done.” If you blow it, repent and return to God, and see what He will do with you, and let Him be the one to determine the consequences for your action. Beware self-inflicting punishment on yourself for when you blow it. God is holy, He is the best judge for how to make a person useful for His purposes. And every wrong thing that is done will still be woven into His plan. When contention arises, keep the self in check, through prayer and humility. No matter what else may be happening right in front of our eyes, the work of God in holiness is what is at stake, and that is what really matters in every situation. Will you maintain your integrity to God’s holiness despite all the contentions that rise around you?

4. Wilderness Manual–Fear of Failure (13-14)

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Fear of failure is the a deadly two edged sword to the spirit of a man or woman. On forward edge, a person retracts from putting forth his full strength, for fear that he will be utterly destroyed. On the backward edge, the person refuses to accept his failures, for fear that he will miss out forever on what their fear on the forward edge has cost them. Both are edges of the same sword held in the grip of a person who is desperately trying to maintain his own pride in himself. Once, I did sloppily on a musical composition project for school which I believed God gave me to do, because I was afraid I would utterly fail. It utterly failed. My reaction was, “Fine, I’ll do it myself.” and proceeded to fail at getting it ready again until I had to give it up. It remains to this day one of my most shameful moments as a composer, and as a follower of Christ, and it nearly ended my desire to write music ever again.

Principle: In Numbers 13-14 Israel went right up to the promised land, and sent Twelve spies to search it out. Ten said, “It’s beautiful, but we can’t do it.” Two said, “It’s beautiful, and we can do it!” The people believed the Ten, and the four who remained (Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and Caleb) fell on their faces and pleaded with the people, but the people got ready to stone them with stones. Once more God shows up, and he is so angry with his people, he tells Moses that He will restart with Moses, but Moses intercedes, and God relents from what He is about to do. He says this to Moses in Numbers 14:21-25~

So the Lord said, “I have pardoned them according to your word; but indeed, as I live, all the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord. Surely all the men who have seen My glory and My signs which I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, yet have put Me to the test these ten times and have not listened to My voice, shall by no means see the land which I swore to their fathers, nor shall any of those who spurned Me see it. But My servant Caleb, because he has had a different spirit and has followed Me fully, I will bring into the land which he entered, and his descendants shall take possession of it . . . turn tomorrow and set out to the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea.”

It took a different spirit to be allowed to enter fully into the promised land. Because God is seeking for His glory to fill the earth, He cannot allow those who preserve their pride by fear to enter into the blessing of His kingdom. This is why the Lord requires that we follow Him fully, and this is another thing the wilderness is designed to teach us: to follow the Lord fully.

The people of Israel are devastated, and they try to go up and take their possession anyway, but Moses tells them not to because God is not with them. They go anyway and many of them are slaughtered.

Application: You will fail. Let it humble you. Do not preserve your own dignity or pride or self-sufficiency. Do not take power into your hand to do what you need to succeed to do. Instead, Remember what Zerubbabel needed to learn in Zechariah 4:6, “‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ Says the Lord.” Your failures will be plentiful and consequent. Let them strip away your pride, and look to God for how He wishes to accomplish His Victory through you for His kingdom. Only then can you follow Him fully by His Spirit’s power. I am fairly confident that His humbling of you in the wilderness is the only way you can learn this because the Wilderness will prove your sin and utter powerlessness, and God’s unfathomable power.

3. Wilderness Manual–The Siblings (12)

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The Family may be God’s first institution, but since the fall it is far from perfect. My older sisters and I had a pretty good relationship, managed well by my Mom and Dad, but growing up I still felt looked down upon or pushed to the side, or left out. One of my favorite lines from a TV show called “Home Improvement” is where Jill, a psychology student, asks her husband, who claims to be an expert in child behavior, “Okay, honey, what causes sibling rivalry?” Tim, her husband confidently answers, “Having more than one kid!”

Principle: The work of God in the wilderness will go deep into all of the things that have shaped you into who you are: Family being one of the foremost. In Numbers 12, Moses’ two older siblings Miriam and Aaron oppose Moses because of the woman he married. They make a statement which seems totally rational in the realm of Sibling Rivalry, “Has God spoken through Moses only? Has he not spoken through us as well?” The Logic of sibling equality does not work in this stage. Family will not be able to understand what is going on, nor provide clarity as to what God is up to. I believe this is a part of God’s proving realities that run deeper than the blood ties of family and the family’s communal and relational role in shaping a person.

God heard the dispute and called them outside the tent of meeting. Moses had said nothing in response, (according to the writer because he was the most humble person there ever was.) God explained to Miriam and Aaron that Moses was not just their brother, he was also God’s servant. Therefore they should have thought twice before speaking against him. This logic reorients the whole family relationship to what God is doing in each person’s life, instead of what the family thinks is best in relation to itself.

Application: Don’t lean on your family for everything you need in this wilderness stage, and take their advice with a grain of salt. In Deuteronomy, Moses will show that the lessons God is teaching you cannot be learned from the family unit. Instead, be humble: regard each person as those whom God must lead individually, and look to God for His vindication in His timing. Beware the sibling rivalry need to be as special as, or more than other family members. It is a self-trap from which God would love to extricate you.

2. Wilderness Manual–The Elders (11)

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How many of us have cried to God, “Just kill me now.” I say us because you are not alone in this. For me it was when my heart was broken, and a friend told me that he had a premonition I was going to die. Despairing of life is not uncommon in this stage. If that’s you, hang in there. Help is on the way, and you’ve still got a long way to go through this wilderness.

Principle: Moses heard the people complaining, and he cried out to God “I alone am not able to carry all this people, because it is too burdensome for me. So if You are going to deal thus with me, please kill me at once, if I have found favor in Your sight, and do not let me see my wretchedness.” ~Numbers 11:14-15

God answered him. He gave him 70 elders to help him. For a while I thought that the wilderness was meant to be largely gone through alone, but I now see that it can be as large or as small a group as God wishes it to be. Moses cried out for someone to go through the wilderness helping him, and so God did. He gave him 70 others to support him. In the wilderness, he learned He needed God’s help. It was too much for him. He couldn’t quit. He was doing God’s will, and it was too much for him. So, God provided a group of people to help him where he was lacking. Community at its finest. It starts though with a cry for help to God.

Application: Be honest with God, and yourself. God has designed you to be a part of a group, not just on your own. God’s provision may come in the form of people to share the wilderness journey with you. This is part of His teaching you humility, and your design as a part of a group of other people working together. Share the load with them. This is well-pleasing in God’s sight.

“To a Mature Man” Stage 1–Birth

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Jesus

Okay. Jesus, Son of Man, Son of God. The account of His birth ties him to His heritage. Matthew traces it back to Abraham, the Faithful Father of the Promise, the Father of the nation of Israel. Matthew 1, the genealogy which in brief relays the story of the Old Testament. In Jesus’ line there is a lot of mixed-baggage. Here are a few examples:

  • Abraham–Faith, but a cowardly liar
  • Jacob– a God-grappling deceiver
  • Judah with Tamar– self-sacrificing, but ignoble
  • Rahab–God-fearing prostitute
  • David–After-God’s-heart wife-stealer
  • Solomon– Wise man with too many ladies
  • Rehoboam– Just a jerk
  • Jeroboam– Weakling
  • Hezekiah–God fearing naive king
  • Manasseh–baby-killer
  • Josiah– Rediscovered God, but too late for everyone else.

And more. Those are the main ones that stick out to me. Mary’s genealogy in Luke 3 has many of the same names.

At the end of this list is Joseph who has a dream that his virginal bride-to-be is actually going to give birth to a baby named, “Jesus.”

“For He will save His people from their sins.”

Jesus’ name was given before birth, which to me indicates that he was not disconnected from his heritage. On the contrary, he was going to fix the mess that everyone else had made. This baby was born to make good all that was made bad before him.

His birth, though he was of royal blood, was in an animal feeding trough. Humble I believe could be the best way to describe it.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus was driven to Egypt out of the land of Israel, a people who once lost all their new-born kids to the king of Egypt, by the King of Israel who killed new-born kids of Israel. Tragically ironic. Whereas the current King of Israel wished to seize and to slay, this humble king was content to sleep and to lay.

“Out of Egypt I called My son!” Matthew reminds us of the story of how Moses had to stand for God against the King, as God brought His nation out of the womb of Egypt with tremendous birth-pangs. They came out with the spoils of Egypt, decked in all the jewels and gold of the welcome to the world as a new nation with One God.

Christian

You, my dear brother, were born once. I often find that not many Christians (Believers in Jesus Christ) recognize things they have in common with Jesus. Part of the purpose of this series is to help recognize some of these things. After all, according to Romans 8:29, Paul said,

“God foreknew and planned out that Christians would be conformed to the image of his Son [Jesus] so that [Jesus] might be the first born among many brothers.” [and sisters]

If my father read this,  I would tell him, I am not laying any claim on divinity for us humans, as it is true of Christ. We are of the earth, and we are creatures: we cannot be divine in Jesus’ way. Even the on the other side of resurrection, the end of humanity isn’t divinity according to Revelation 22. What I am saying is that the humanity of Christ is human enough for us to relate with him and identify with him as his brothers and sisters. In fact, in some ways He’s more wholly human than we are brokenly. For instance:

  • While you and I have an earthly father and mother, Jesus did have an earthly mother.
  • “Whatsoever is born of flesh is flesh.” John 3:6 “Jesus Christ is come in flesh.” 1 John 4:2
  • He had a real physical body that breathed, bled, lived, died, felt pain, felt weakness, wanted things.
  • He had siblings growing up.
  • He had a community of people around him who knew, cared about, and at first spoke well of him.
  • He had friends.

There is plenty of room in the image God: Jesus, for human you, also made in God’s image, to fit. He’s Humanity 2.0! 😀

“To tell you all of this again is no hard thing for me, and it is a safe guard for you.”

Church

And I want you to be aware that this view of Jesus as Human is not welcome in some churches. Gnosticism is, as my professor Dr. Ryan Reeves at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary said in his video, “Gnosticism and the Early Church,” a trend that affects the doctrines and practices of the church from even before Christ until today. It involves: three fundamentals:

  1. The tangible world isn’t real.
  2. The tangible world is hated or deprecated in value
  3.  One needs an elitist knowledge of how things *really* are in order to be saved.

It manifests in churches that do not value the material world around them, and have beliefs that God isn’t out to redeem the physical world, but rather to deliver our immaterial “souls” from this evil material world, and we need to know the truth that sets us free from our physical bondage to things like possessions, the temple of the Holy Spirit. “It’s an old garment anyway.” they say. “One day I’ll be free of my physical body and get to live forever with Jesus in a spirit-only world!”

Trends like this tend to hurt the church’s witness, because we value more thinking and experiencing than doing or accomplishing tangible results. Furthermore, it’s not in keeping with the overarching meta-story of Scripture. Jesus was just as much human flesh as you and I are, yet without sin. And it was THAT humanness that was the perfect representation of His nature. What’s more, the fact God became a physical tangible human being means that He has tied himself to our physical reality. And just as our bodies will die one day, this world will die one day. As our bodies will be changed, so the earth will be changed. The Spiritual is not at the expense of the tangible.

If however, Jesus was born, and the Church is the body of Christ, then the church is just as much human as it is spiritual, and that’s a good thing.

Pitfalls

In these stages, I plan to share a pitfall for each one, to avoid to ensure your own or someone else’s progress through the stages. At this stage in a Christian’s life, he is being exposed to the person of Jesus Christ, being reminded of true humanity through other Christians. The pitfalls he must avoid are false religion or False gods. Whatever we worship or believe comes to define who we are, and to believe things that are untrue, or fashioned after an ungodly spirit is to cheapen one’s own humanity. This of course presupposes that Jesus Himself is the True Human. If a person comes to believe something about humanity and the spiritual world that isn’t true, it will be a stumbling block and a hindrance toward their growing up into maturity. What a person in this stage needs is Exposure to Christ. To meet a Christian and be struck by their dissimilarity with the rest of the world. This gets a person started on their journey toward Christ. Let him avoid the paths that diverge from the Way after myths, false gods, and false religion.

Application (The part I know you really like)

  1. Take care not to de-human-ize Jesus. It’s really not honoring to him. His humanity was the perfect representation of God as the perfect image of God, and he has reset the Human race on a path to the full actualization of God’s character in the church.
  2. Be human! And base your definition on Jesus: humility. The apostle Luke was intentional to show the disciples of Jesus doing even the miraculous things Jesus did, like raising the dead even! Read Acts! Show kindness to your fellow humanity. Don’t think you’re something special. Be humble.
  3. Render to God what is God’s. Count your very being as a physical image stamped with the likeness of God. And recognize that you were born to represent Him on the earth, even as Jesus was born.
  4. Represent the earth before God. Not only is humankind the representative of God on earth, but the representative of Earth before God. Who better to be a mediator between these two realms of Heaven and Earth than one who smells of both homes.
  5. Avoid the Pitfalls.
  6. Read the Bible as a human. Here’s a logic puzzle:
  • If Jesus is both divine and human.
  • And Jesus is the Word of God,
  • and the Bible is the Word of God,
  • Then Why should the Bible be read only as Divine communication? Should it not be read just as fully as human communication? It was the resurgence of the humanities which helped Erasmus to translate the Greek New Testament, and Martin Luther to get a hold of the Word of God as it was meant. To read the Bible as a human means you read it as an author talking to a listener with pre-understandings and time-less eternal truths living in each of their hearts.

Final point: Every human who seeks to follow after Jesus must start at this point. To be human from birth. In short, a man must be born before he can be born again.

Jesus’ Rule and Human Destiny

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Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale shared last week that one of the fundamental questions to be answered by any worldview is “What is my purpose?” The Bible answers this question by saying that God made human beings to rule and fill the earth. (Genesis 1:28) Their rule was submitted to His rule, but He gave the earth to Adam’s children to rule (Psalm 115:16).

The fundamental loss of this purpose, which happened when Adam sinned, is he disobeyed God to usurp God’s rule over him in order to be his own ruler like God. I find it fascinating how resonant stories of deep meaning in our lives have picked up on this motif of a second in command usurping and supplanting his master by seizing power for himself. For example, STAR WARS has made this as one of the cardinal principles of the Dark side of the Sith. The apprentice always kills the master. Disobedient to authority, eventually leading to deposition of authority. In Antman, the apprentice eventually overthrows and undoes his mentor. This way of usurping authority in rebellion is the classic evil of Satan’s sin against God.

A beautiful contrast of this is seen in the humility of King David. He refused twice to lay hold of the crown for himself: to strike down the current King Saul. In this way, he showed himself to be a man after God’s own heart, and it was his line that was blessed and established for the Messiah to come through.

Go back further, and another example: Joseph. When he was 2nd in command of Potiphar’s house, and though he was tempted day after day by his bride, he said, “My master has entrusted everything to me in this house, save you. How can I do this great wickedness and sin against my God.” (Genesis 39.)

Human kind was made to rule, but the way of rule is not to escape authority, or to crush it, but to submit to it. To stay close enough to the Moses, that He chooses you to be his Joshua.

God desires such to serve Him, and you will never serve a better master than He.