Death to Smitty!

I was musing about my lack of job, and hence finances, when it hit me. A question that we often hear but we seldom really ponder. A question that is so distasteful that it becomes a snap to allow it to breeze out of our minds whenever it enters. The question is, What do you want me to sacrifice to You, Lord?

My first impulse was to deny the validity of such a question. Why, I’ve sacrificed my whole life to Him! I’ve renounced my own selfish ways, the delusion of earning redemption on my own merit, the supremacy of Sin in my life. I’ve abstained from many sensual pleasures, to a greater or lesser degree, out of reverence and love for the Lord. I read the Bible daily. I listen to sermons and attend church virtually every week. I listen to Christian music and attend a weekly small group, sacrificing my favorite TV show to do so. (A sacrifice which, by the way, I don’t think God appreciates enough. I mean, it’s House! Come on!)

My second impulse was to answer the question, claiming that I’ve asked that question lots of times. And I’ve never gotten a clear, definitive answer. If it were movies or junk food or golf (as painful as that might be), then at least it would be unequivocal. But that never seems to be the case.

But the sad truth is that neither impulse is accurate. My litany of so-called sacrifices, while all true more or less, have cost me very little, or else have been things that coincide with my own natural inclinations, when they are even true. I do lots of things that direct my attention towards God, but they are all superficial; or at least, they all have the potential to be. Reading the Bible, attending church or small groups, tithing or abstaining from the Mortal Sins, can all be done out of a sense of self-righteousness and duty rather than in a true attitude of sacrifice and devotion to the Lord. Also, though I’ve never received an audible or tangible directive on areas to sacrifice, there are lots of things I have felt would benefit my walk with the Lord and my life in general to give up, like junk food or certain movies. Besides, the Lord may be waiting for me to prove myself willing to die in small things before He challenges me with the more important tasks that we associate with His ministry to a lost and dying world. 

You might be wondering what the connection was to the original context of the thought, my unemployment. Well, I was wondering to myself and to the Lord why He had not given me a job or finances. And the reply came in the form of the question I originally asked: Well, David, what are you willing to give to Me? It is so easy to regard God as an ATM or a sugar daddy, who is there merely to fulfill our needs and desires without any recompense on our part. But that’s not really how it works. 

Besides, if this is really a relationship I’m in with Jesus, then doesn’t He have the right to expect some quid pro quo? Not strictly an economic transaction, but a relationship wherein someone else has claim on you in some way or another. Someone besides you can alter and affect your will. Which is exactly what God wants of us; He wants our wills to submit to Him. In return, He will direct our wills and make His illimitable resources available to us. "All there is of God is available to the man who is available to all there is of God."

Something else that occurred to me today was the double-mindedness I posses. In discussing my philosophy of teaching I produced for a job application, I mentioned that students have to desire to excel, to learn, if they are going to benefit from classes. I can provide instruction and evaluation, correction and encouragement, but I cannot motivate them to try other than in the most basic sense of punitive measures. As the old adage goes, You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Not, at least, if it doesn’t want to. And while I fully embrace this sentiment when it comes to my role as a teacher, I fail to comprehend or implement it as a student or subordinate in the sense of my relationship with the Father. As I said, if a student really wants to learn the material, then they will learn it; maybe not perfectly and entirely, but progress will be made. And I was struck by the fact that if I really wanted to control my appetites, to discipline my body and mind, then it’s simply a matter of doing it. So the fact that I haven’t done it must therefore mean that I don’t really want to do it, not at the most fundamental level. A discouraging revelation, but potentially life-altering.

And thus we come full circle. Because if I am serious about wanting to be changed and transformed by God into the image of His Son, then He will do it. Not only has He promised to do so, and He is not a liar, but it is also the fundamental reason He created man in the beginning. I have to want it, to desire it more than I desire the fulfillment of my own appetites and needs. It has to be more important to me than anything else. 

So that is my prayer. God, create in me this desire, to see Your will done in my life, to see Your image molded around me. This do I crave more than fleshly appetites or pampered egos. Ridicule me in the eyes of the world if You must, reduce my life to ashes (which seems to be the programme at the moment), consume my self-centeredness and replace my stone of a heart with a living heart, Your heart.

"We're gonna need a bigger..."

We talk about David and Goliath, and rightly so. When he demanded to face the giant, David didn’t rely on his human ability, his strength or prowess. He wasn’t after glory or the daughter of a king. He was enraged that the name of the God of Israel was being defied and defiled by a pagan dog, a blasphemous Philistine. If ever there was a greater contrast, a starker exemplar of the context of God versus the context of man, it would be difficult to imagine. On one side was David, a stripling youth who watched sheep all day. On the other was a professional warrior, Goliath, a giant of a man with tremendous strength when battles were won by having more and superior warriors. David feared the Lord and dedicated his service and his battle to Him. He relied on the Lord to carry the day, to go before him and fight his battles for him. Goliath depended on himself, on his fearful power and successful record. And God uses the low things of this world to bring down the great things. After all the weapons and training and experience, all the odds stacked on Goliath’s size, all it took was a single stone, and faith in God. David looked at God to deliver him from bears and lions and giants, and God was bigger than Goliath. So we justly associate this story with David and Goliath.

However, there’s another element of this: Saul and Goliath. For Saul was the king. And the description of him we are initially presented with is that he was tall, dark, and handsome, literally head and shoulders above everyone else. The people said, “Yes! That’s what a king is supposed to look like! He should be big and strong and winsome. Let’s have him rule us instead of God.” And Saul did his job well, from the people’s perspective. At least in the beginning. He struck the Amalekites and slew their whole army, salvaging only the king and the cream of the crop, in violation of God’s orders. This of course led to God rejecting Saul, since Saul was interested in pleasing himself and his subjects rather than pleasing God. But I imagine that up until this impasse with Goliath, the people were quite pleased with Saul’s performance in office. If you took an approval poll early on the results would have looked good. “What do you think of Saul as king?” “Well, the economy’s fine. Oh, yeah, we really showed those pesky Amalekites what for, didn’t we? Nobody’s going to mess with us while we’ve got Saul leading us, no sir.” “What about God?” “Uh, what about Him? I go to the tabernacle like everyone else. I make the sacrifices. I’m devout. What’s that go to do with Saul?”

Here’s the lesson: There’s always someone bigger. Saul was head and shoulders above everyone else. He was probably a great warrior. When public opinion was skewing toward David, the chant went “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” Obviously this was an example of how the people revered David’s prowess on the battle field over Saul’s, but Saul to have slain thousands (if possibly exaggerated) was testament that he was no mean warrior in his own right. So when Goliath stands before the Philistine army and challenges Israel’s best to come out and face him, the immediate sentiment would probably have been that Saul was the best, and being an Israelite and the king, surely could handle even a dire foe like Goliath. But Goliath was bigger and stronger, superior to Saul in every earthly aspect that mattered. Saul had been relying on his physical attributes, had believed the hype and probably saw himself as every bit the epitome of humanity that the people thought he was. What a blow to see someone bigger and stronger, to the extent that Saul looked puny in comparison.

Whenever you begin to rely on your gifts, the physical attributes and abilities that you were born with or have cultivated in order to cope with life, there will almost always come a moment when those physical gifts will be insufficient. Someone will come along who is bigger, stronger, smarter, faster, prettier, craftier, more skillful or disciplined, more gifted naturally, than you. Or a situation will arise that finds you unequal to the task, that you must come to terms with the painful reality that you cannot handle whatever comes by sheer dint of your training and gifts. What will you do? Will you try to slink away and huddle in your tent like Saul? Will you rail and boast and set yourself up as the end-all, be-all like Goliath? Or will you walk confidently onto the plain with the simple gifts and abilities God gave you, and relinquish them back to Him? Trust Him to use you to defeat the giant? Trust Him to be strong enough to overcome where you cannot?

Grace Message

The basic premise of this understanding of the Gospel is the idea that the Christian life is not something that I live; rather it is something I allow the Holy Spirit to live in and through me. Just like the brain controls the rest of the body, Jesus is supposed to control His Body, and we are members of that Body. We don’t decide what to do or where to go any more than our fingers or toes act independently of the brain. (Or rather, if they do, then something is seriously wrong, and it’s time to call in Dr. House.)

Now, even though every earthly analogy falls short, I particularly like the one in which a child attempts to write words, and the father closes his hand around the child’s so that even though the child is holding the pen and moving it across the paper, the father is actually responsible for what appears on the page. Even so our lives are our own, and we live them, but the Christian has the opportunity, the honor, and the responsibility to allow the Father to live our lives for us, to direct our will and actions and words. But it is much less obvious who is doing what than the analogy makes it seem, naturally. We can only be sure of the Father’s activity in our lives by the results: if the results are capable of being accomplished through our activity and ability, then it stands to reason that we are the originator of it. If, however, what happens is beyond our ability to control or create, if it is truly miraculous, something impossible to orchestrate apart from the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence of God, then we may safely assume that it was God working through us to do His pleasure. Just like, to complete the analogy, a ragged, illegible scrawl can be attributed to the child’s handiwork, while a clear, eloquent and firm script must be the work of the father.

You may ask where this idea is supported in the Bible, and rightfully so. The clearest expression occurs in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” In other words, I no longer call the shots in my life; not my will, but His be done. Or a chapter later, when Paul berates the Galatians: “I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?” (3:2-3). In other words, we were saved completely through the actions of God and Jesus, and we access that salvation by abdicating our will and our lives, our attempts to please God through our own actions. Are we actually saying that, after being saved by faith, by depending upon the work and office of Jesus, that, now saved, we are going to discard Jesus until we get to heaven, we are going to revert back to the pre-Christian mentality of trying to please God through our sweat, blood and tears? Which is why Paul rails against them so much, and why he says in Colossians 2:6, “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him.”

Romans constructs this argument, especially in chapter 5, verses 9-10: “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.  For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” The cross justified and redeemed us, but the resurrection saved us, because we are saved by the life of Jesus. And even as His life is not a single thing but an ongoing process, so too our salvation and sanctification is an ongoing process, not a singular event. If that weren’t enough, the next chapter hammers it home: “Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (3-5). Our sins were buried in His death and entombment, and so our lives were raised when the stone rolled away, that we may “walk in newness of life” right now, on earth. To think otherwise is to say that eternal life begins after we die, after life on earth is over. But the Gospel doesn’t say this; Jesus rose on earth, walked on earth, and concluded His ministry on earth, ascending to the Father only so the Spirit could come down and continue the work in the new way.

Here’s the final confirmation, from the lips of Christ Himself. While preparing His disciples for the crucifixion, He says that “He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works.   Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me” (John 14:9-11).  Or in John 5:19: “Then Jesus answered and said to them, ’Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.’” This is the final example of the Christian life, the life that Christ lived. He did not live His own life, according to His own will, but rather the will of His Father. In like manner are we to live.

And this is why this understanding of the Christian life has so captured my heart and mind. Because I have always tried to do the right thing, to live a good life, to be good. Basically my entire life has been lived as a Christian, and it kills me to look at my past littered with sin and failure. I despair. If there was one argument that might have convinced me of the falseness of Christianity, it would have been this concept that someone can be saved, and see little difference in their everyday life, no matter how honest and earnest their desire to change, to be different. It’s one thing if a person “converts” and then never demonstrates either a change or the desire to change; such a person’s conversion can be seriously doubted. But I have ever longed to please God, to live a life that He could say of it, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” And I have always failed. That has been a greater torment to my soul than my poor self-image based on body image, zero relationships, lack of career, etc. And when I read what Ian Thomas and Bill Gillham wrote, when I listened to Thomas’ sermons, it was a weight falling off my back; the sun switching on in my spirit. At last the Christian life made sense! At last it seemed feasible! At last, a practical application of the words of Scripture! Because I grasped what the problem was: me! I was trying to do my best for God, to live a righteous life on my own steam and out of my own desire. But my own desire to live righteously prove time and again hopelessly inadequate to overcoming the desires of the flesh, the old man that twists and perverts every good thing, every good impulse and healthy ambition. Not to mention the fact that the servants of Hell would hardly allow me free rein to live a righteous life. Even as I was unable to resist my own sinful nature before conversion, so I was unable to dismiss my sinful nature after conversion. And God never expected me to! He isn’t interested in rehabilitating my flesh; He wants to replace it, with His Spirit. He wants me to exchange independence for dependence on Him. To live is Christ, Christ in my living, thinking, working, sleeping, eating, hoping, loving, everything. Christ in me, the hope of glory.

And so, as Paul says in Philippians 2:12-13, “Therefore, my beloved…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;  for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” That is why I am confident in my ability to lose weight, to find a career, to gain a wife, to overcome. Because I’m no longer confident in my ability, but rather I am confident that “He who has begun a good work in [me] will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6). I am His piece of work, and He’s the one who’s going to polish me off.