The Humble Anonymity of God
One of the things that bugs me, and has bugged me for years, is when people attribute something that I believe is the work of God to someone or something else. Some examples:
- when someone talks about looking for their life’s calling, and phrase it as “what yourlife is calling you to do,”
- when someone talks about listening to “the universe” for answers to a question,
- when someone outlines a process where you describe a problem at one point in time (e.g., in the morning), then at a later point (e.g., in the evening) listen to or read your description and you receive an answer to the problem “because you are really conversing with someone much wiser and saner as you write: your authentic self.”
I don’t want to diminish or dismiss the ability that humans have, the role we play, in creative output of all kinds. I do believe that humans can and do create (albeit in a qualitatively different manner, being a rearrangement of what exists, from God’s ex nihilo creating). But to me it’s a mystery to describe where all new ideas come from. Maybe new ideas are spontaneously (?) generated within the human heart/mind/soul, at least some of the time. But I have to believe that some of the time (how much of the time?) God actually drops ideas, solutions, into our heads. He provides guidance to us. He comforts us, “reminds us of the truth,” leads us in the way everlasting, etc. I don’t know exactly where that ends, and where independent information, creditable to us as humans and not (or at least less) to God’s activity within us.
And ultimately, if there’s an area that is in any way “gray” concerning when we should credit God vs. crediting ourselves, or some semi-anonymous pseudo-entity, I want to err in the direction of giving God more credit.
What’s amazing to me is that God, who is obviously doing far more than we give Him credit for, doesn’t express some displeasure at being ignored in this. He continues to serve us with creativity, guidance, teaching, and love, whether we acknowledge His work or not.
The Affirmation of the Father
My Father loves me.
My Father values me.
He will not stop loving or valuing me, no matter what I do.
He is proud of me when I do good work.
Opposing the Proud, Supporting the Humble
God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. This seems to be a core tenet at the center of understanding everything.
If you are enamored of your own self-sufficiency, awed by your own autonomy, then remember that thereby do you make God your enemy. He will work against you in your arrogant ways.
Conversely, if you work hard to keep a balanced, full, and rich understanding of your complete nature, remembering the image of God woven through your entire being and your desperately broken, fallen, sinful nature, this is humility. And by it, God becomes your supporter and friend, giving you grace, strength, and wisdom.
Building Life
Procreation shows us that building life takes more than just one person. We build life together. Sin alienates and separates us from each other. Separate, we cannot build life abundant.
A marriage is not two autonomous people wandering around following each individual's desires as they ebb and flow. It is the mystery of union, joining dreams and goals together to follow them as one.
Implicating Against Poverty
The idea of implicating prayers says that we must be acting and doing in the world in ways that support and bring to life the words of our prayers. Some who advocate for such prayers also advocate for the government to continue to take the leading role in combating poverty. They don't see the two as being contradictory. Instead, they often see them as consistent with each other. In both cases, they argue, they are utilizing and leveraging the resources they have (personally and politically) to drive resources to the poor.
But that's only true if 1) the government's actions toward the poor were effective in helping the poor, 2) those actions were not significantly wasteful, and 3) doing so was not giving to Caesar what irrevocably belongs to God, and therefore to the Body of Christ, to address and accomplish. I don't think any of these three things is true.
You Are Not Powerless
Jesus wants to challenge your largely unspoken belief that you are powerless to change things. The gifts you have received from Him give you a certain kind and sort of power. You need to know how to exercise that power with love and wisdom, but also with humility. You, and even the power you have, are flawed and incomplete. To let the insights of that power steer and drive you without intentional reflection and restraint would be arrogant and foolish. But to not use the power at all would be a dereliction of duty, an abdication of responsibility, and a genuine tragedy.
Perhaps you can't change very much in this world, but you are not valued or measured by the size of your impact. You are inherently valued by God no matter how much you shirk your responsibility. But somehow He will reward us all for doing what is good and right, and how we rightly handle our responsibility. Obedience to God is the measure we should aim to increase, not clicks or votes or pats on the back.
Hear, Obey, & Be Blessed
When you get a chance to do something that you know is obedient to God, how do you feel? When you approach a time that's set aside specifically for expressing gratitude to God, worshipping Him, are you resentful because it's intruding on or interfering with your time? Or are you thankful for the opportunity? Some of both?
The psalmist in Psalm 122 is overjoyed when he is told that the time has come to go to Jerusalem, the city built just for giving thanks to and worshipping God. What makes him so happy? Why is the thought of worship the trigger for that happiness?
In Ezra 6 we see both King Darius and Cyrus acknowledging that Jerusalem is where "the god of heaven" is to be worshipped. We don't know that they actually revered or worshipped the God who led Israel out of Egypt, but they did give up resources to support the effort of the Israelites' descendants' efforts to build the city where that God was meant to be worshipped.
In the last passage today (Luke 8:19-21), Jesus says, "My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it." Another way of putting this is that those who promptly and practically respond when they hear God speaking are closest to Jesus, are becoming more like Jesus, are blessed.
The challenge for us is to daily remember who God is, in all His beauty, power, and grace, which He generously and graciously offers to us every day. As we grow more deeply in the habit of remembering this, the more naturally we will feel the psalmist's joy when we hear an opportunity to worship and give thanks to God, obey God, and thus become a little more like Jesus.
Progressivism: Coercion over Competition
Progressives prefer coercion over competition. They believe better outcomes will be achieved by a stronger central government forcing everyone to do what that government says is "right" than by a wide variety of solutions being attempted by many different groups to see which ones are more effective.
Progressives generally do not prefer a strong central government because they are truly enamored of strength or strong man, per se. They prefer centralized solutions for society's problems because they genuinely believe that is the best route to a solution to those problems.
Conservatives, on the other hand, do not believe that centralized strength is the most effective way to solve problems. Instead, they assume that solutions will not be obvious, even to well-educated experts. They believe that the shortest and most effective route to effective solutions for societies problems is competition among a large number of potential solutions.
Development, Maturity, and Parenting
The uterus develops into maturity in order to be a fit and appropriate physical place for a child to develop. Similarly, the rest of the person (mind, heart, and soul) should also be maturing to be fit to raise a child, to protect and guide a new person into their own maturity.
Today is Training for Tomorrow
When the time for action comes, when you finally get the opportunity to serve God the way you've always wanted and dreamed, the way you have responded to past temptations will have set the pattern, created the inertia, for how you respond to temptations in this time of opportunity. If you have always given in to temptations that wasted your time, drew your focus into fantasy, and required you to hide those parts of your life from what you share with God, then when you finally have the chance to pour yourself into the work you're called to do, you will carry the inertia of those distractions, those time-wasters, those sins, into the opportunity. And instead of pouring a purified, intensely focused and trained self into the work, you will pour your polluted, distracted self into the work. Your contribution to the work will be less than it might have been; the work will, very likely, be less than it might have been.
Today is practice for tomorrow. What you do in the small trains you for what you do in the large.
Politics
If I comment about politics, it is from the belief that, at its best, politics (which is the pursuit and management of positions of power) gives us a chance to connect or reconcile with other people, to coordinate my efforts with the efforts of others to work towards worthy goals. Politics ideally balances solidarity (standing with and in support of others) and subsidiarity (I don't leverage power to impose a solution to a problem at such a high level of organization and logistics that the dignity of those being helped is lost in the process). It is my intention that Christian/biblical concepts of human dignity guide my opinions on public policy.
Limitations of the Physicalist Worldview
Assuming a physical-only universe, presented with a phenomenon that doesn't seem explainable from within that worldview, we downplay or otherwise explain away the aspects that don't fit in. The assumption is that *everything* has to be explained, everything has to have a physical cause and effect explanation.
The mature spiritual worldview instead expects that there will be phenomena that can't fit within the finite explanatory framework that we are within. Not frustrated by the requirement that everything has to fit within the arbitrarily bounded worldview we're capable of, we can play within the universe. We know that further explanations may arise in time, but we're not less because we don't know everything.
Our Identity, Every Day
God tells us who we really are. He gives us our identity. The world has many ways of determining and shaping our identity. They assault us throughout the day, every day, telling us who they think we should be. And so, we need to be hearing that statement of affirmation and identity from God every single morning of every single day and throughout every day. We need to nail down that foundation of all we do and everything we are before we go out and have the world tell us other things, which are not true, about ourselves.
Through You Together
Every couple that considers getting married should be looking for what God could do through them together. Being a good couple isn't about making each other happy, or accumulating stuff and money, but about working together as a team in such a way that God accomplishes His will, His purposes, for His glory, through the couple, together.
The Movement of Culture
I think about people who habitually listen to the radio. And they just keep listening to it, no matter what the lyrics say, no matter what direction culture moves in. And they themselves are changed by the movement of culture, the changing of the culture. And I want to ask them, is there a stopping point? Is there a static place where things will not change anymore? And of course, the answer is no. The culture will always be changing, because we are alive. But which direction will it be changing in? The current state of our culture and the direction it is moving in do not indicate that there is any appetite for moving in the direction of greater honor or dignity or deep meaning and purpose. Instead, there are always people who are trying to "push the envelope" and move in the direction of deeper transgression, deeper malpurpose, ever deeper commitments to being led around by one's desires.
God Knows You
Your feelings are a broken, poor barometer
For who you are and who you've always been
The Creator of orgasm and laughter
Knows you better than anyone you've ever met
He bows down to serve you in every moment
Keeps every subatomic particle going
Holds out the world for you to savor
Present in every grief and each celebration
So you shouldn't be surprised that He knows you
Knows who you are, what you've done, where you've been
He was right there with you, allowed it to come to pass
He grieved when you turned away, rejoiced when you returned
But He enables it all to happen. He was never not there
Spiritual Calibration
Spiritual calibration means daily adjusting the way you see the world so you are listening more clearly to and more in sync with the Holy Spirit.
Risking Reconciliation Among the "Deconciled"
The world, especially this culture in this era, calls us to creature comforts, to please ourselves and focus on maximizing our own pleasure. God, in contrast, does not give us His presence and power to retreat into pleasure seeking. It is woven into the definition of following Christ that we absolutely will be in situations of discomfort and difficulty. We absolutely will be placed in situations of brokenness and conflict, where the risk of betrayal is real.
It should be natural, is to be expected, that in a fallen world, our own congregation should be divided and conflicted. We live in a "deconciled" world, of which any congregation is a part. Living in Christ means building bridges, reconciliation, being in the chasms of division, in the deep valleys where relationships are dissolved and loneliness rules. God longs to bring life to those valleys, bring connection between the distant and divided. He has not chosen to build those bridges by His disruptive miracles alone. It is inherent to the nature of salvation that the saved, those who have been bridged and reconciled to God, would be the seeds of further bridging, further reconciliation. The work of reconciliation is not a happy hand-holding around a kumbaya campfire. It is more like going into the fires of disagreement and disconnection, bitterness and enmity, and letting God's miracles disrupting division somehow work through our broken, cracked pottery.
If you're a Christian, you can't avoid the stress and strain of being in the middle of conflict without denying the movement and call of God in this broken world.