Over the past several days (excluding yesterday), I was being really Christian. We had a Bible conference at church, each session of which I attended. I had Christian discussions with my wife and encouraged her about our son and other issues. I wrote two blog posts analyzing some ideas and some scripture, and I would say that they turned out alright.
But I was being a lousy Christian.
Looking back over the weekend, I can see that my prayer life was nearly non-existent. I had my Bible with me at church, but I didn't really read it there or at home. I felt empowered, successful, enlightened, and altogether pretty flipping good about myself.
One of my favorite passages (as of today) is from 1 Corinthians 1. In verses 26-31, Paul says:
For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
I had read these verses before today, but never really took them to heart. But God, in his wisdom, works in his time, and this section of Scripture was on my heart when I needed it today, even though I hadn't read it in quite some time.
Earlier in this chapter, Paul alludes to Isaiah: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart" (1 Corinthians 1:19). God breaks down our conventional human wisdom. He chooses weakness to conquer strength, foolishness to conquer wisdom.
The gospel is "a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23) because it goes against the way that we operate in everyday human life. If you want to carry more weight, you must become stronger. If you want to retire at 50, you must manage your affairs with wisdom. Simply put, the strong are strong and the wise are wise, and their lives typically bear fruit reflective of these truths.
But a world where we rely on our own strength to make our provision is a broken world. In Genesis, God tells Adam that it is "because [Adam has] . . . eaten of the tree of which [God] commanded . . . 'You shall not eat of it,' . . . by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" (Genesis 3:17-19).
Christ came to heal the world. Romans 8:18-25 talks about our hope resting in the eventual restoration of the world (the entire creation!) to what it was before it was "subjected to futility" (Romans 8:20) by man ("him who subjected it" - Romans 8:20). Christ came so that we will one day no longer rely on our own human strengths to meet our needs. And while we must, at present, still toil in this broken world to provide for our families, maintain our finances, and whatever else, we are given a significant foretaste of the glory to come in the person of Christ (the Word) and in the person of the Holy Spirit. The ministry of Christ in the Bible, the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our hearts--there is our strength. By the grace of God himself, we have been given a sort of access to the mind of God, where perfect wisdom is found. And we are given perfect strength in the promise of the hope in which we were saved, to which the Spirit bears witness.
Over the past several days, I have lost sight of all of this. I have found sufficiency and satisfaction in my state of well-being instead of in Christ. The irony is that my state of well-being was because of Christ. How quickly does the devil seize even what is good and pure in our lives and try to pervert it into some counterfeit goodness? Praise Jesus, though, that even in my recent lapse into a Christless Christianity, he is sovereign. Not even my human stupidity can separate me from the love of God in Jesus Christ, and for that I am most grateful.
Man, if that isn't one of the most sneaky ways of putting ourselves before God. With every small victory we experience we're at least as likely to say, "Man, I'm doing pretty good!" as we are to say, "Only because of God."
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, home-dog.