In despair I thought, I am the exception to the grace of God. It slipped from my heart so gently and disgusted me on reflection, but I cannot deny it. Discouragement was fighting hard to get its paltry grip around me; thankfully, I prevailed over it.
I love the Lord and try hard to guard my thoughts and the words I speak about myself and the course of my life. I don’t want to offend him, the one who acts providentially for me. I understand that he deeply loves me, and my narrow assumptions may be discourteous to him. He cares for me better than I care for myself.
Then, I discovered David’s own testimony: “In my alarm I said, ‘I am cut off from your sight!’” (Ps. 31:22) This is the man after God’s own heart expressing the same unglamorous thought I had. In verse seven, however, he makes a keen observation: “You have known my soul in adversities” (NKJV). This thought consoles me.
We Hurt and That’s Okay
It can be quite contemptible to bear your soul, even to God. I would like to insist that I love the Lord perfectly and never have doubts; that I never struggle with his words or instructions; that I take it in stride when he stands in the shadows and isn’t apparently working for me.
But I am not that guy.
Nevertheless, I have learned that he is not offended by my limitations and brokenness. His opinion doesn’t change about me because I don’t have it together. Moreover, in his acceptance, I gain the freedom to not worry about how others perceive me. I don’t have to appear strong so everyone can think well of me and assume my spiritual fitness.
I hurt at times. I doubt. I freak out searching for God. I get angry with him and wonder why the process cannot be easier. I grow forlorn that things won’t turn out well. All of this is what David means when he says, “You have known my soul…”
Trusting in the Divine Aid
Hear me carefully: God’s love and acceptance is not an excuse for sulking and forgetting our spiritual heritage in Christ. Instead, it frees us to be what we are—human—and fully so. Thereby our burdens and pains are employed to develop character in us by the skillful hand of God.
Also, we must not forget that Christ assumed our humanity and, with it, secured our freedom, and, now retaining it, he who represented God to us now represents us to God.
David continues: “You have not given me into the hands of the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place” (v. 8). Those who trust in the Lord can have confidence that the fears and doubts will not hem them in.
I can be sure that I have never been the exception to God’s grace. He will always give me room to fight and conquer every mental foe and dark power that assails me. God’s power is perfected in my weakness.
I am a booklover. I own hundreds of books and have read just as many. I don’t have a favorite one because their subjects are so diverse and interesting. But the two that stand above the rest for me are the Bible and the dictionary. (Yes, I’m one of those people!) It only follows that I am infatuated with words. I love how words work and grasp that they are important to knowledge.
Like letters that symbolize sound units, words too are symbols for ideas, concepts, and things of concrete reality. They offer information and carry shades of meaning. They possess an inherent ability to raise the level of one’s intelligence. But in order to use words we must understand them, or they must be defined. To define a thing is to make it distinct or clear.
In the New Testament, we discover a spiritual example of this. John states with his very first sentence, “In the beginning was the Word.” John intended to explain the profound reasoning of God spoken into the gloominess of human depravity in the person of Jesus Christ. Hebrews 1:3 further describes Christ as the radiance of the glory of God and the icon, or representation, of the Godhead. This explains what Christ often told his hearers, that when they saw him they saw also the Father. Jesus defines what God is all about.
But words can be problematic, especially when we are not as sure of their definition as we could be. Often, in attempts to explain them, we use alternate meanings that fall short of a true definition. I must confess that faith is a concept for which the definition I am not always sure of as I’d like to be. It is a nebulous essence as tangible as grabbing a chunk of air. Defined enough for spiritual life and relationship, it retains enough of the mystery of God to hold us back in wonder of him and his doings.
Under the microscope of theology, one will observe that faith is a gift: none are born with it. And being a gift, faith is a gift of sight, for it is impossible that a dead soul should raise itself to life or an unregenerate person should think godly thoughts. But God shines his light upon the soul that it might live and, in living, ponder thoughts of him.
Fundamentally faith is belief—in God and the words of God (Rom. 10:17)—and belief is our light by which we spiritually see in a dark world.
The Apostle Paul comments on this in Ephesian 5:14 when he says, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (KJV). He goes on to add in verses 15 and 16, “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
In the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25, the marriage story is told of the bridegroom who was to return and the virgins who had to go out to meet him. Five were wise because they took extra oil in jars for their lamps, and five were foolish because they took no thought to do so. Moreover, what is important to see is that a qualitative decision had been made, particularly, by the wise virgins prior to all the other circumstances (and what they might symbolize) that occur in the text.
Here is a good resting place to discuss the wisdom faith brings. With faith comes the ability to see God and to walk according to his will. We develop tuning our hearts to his words and we learn to enjoy him. Most importantly, we mature to understand God’s motives, to know that he only loves us and wishes us no harm. Thereby, we gain discretion to know what he is doing without seeing the whole picture.
All of this is developed with persistence in the prayer closet. The prayer place is not only a routine the spiritual undertake, but also the believer’s intimate place with God. Prayer should encompass our endeavors to develop spiritual habits and discipline—and with it should be included a catalog of classic disciplines that leave us nothing less than naked before God. In the end the point is simple: personal holiness.
Hence we discover the problem with the unwise virgins and those without spiritual sight. They have not understood the responsibility that comes with a life of faith. To relate it to our first theme, they have critical problems defining faith and have never mastered its language. For many, their view of God has become distorted by indifference, suffering and hard times, offenses, vain philosophies, and other complexities until their spiritual enlightenment has been snuffed back into darkness.
The division between the wise and the unwise becomes very clear where it concerns the practical outflow of faith. How one carries out his or her belief is important. Many claim to be Christians but not all are devout. Everyone is not in the press to live holy. Not all strive against the tide of sin. Not all have in the river turned to swim upstream. In the end, one will abuse and ultimately lose what he or she doesn’t understand. This is why Jesus chastises the religious leaders in Matthew 16 that they were so able to predict the weather but didn’t have the sight to discern the signs of the times.
We cannot criticize the wise virgins as selfish or arrogant because they didn’t share their oil. Their attitude explains to us that forerunners in our spiritual walk can only take us so far in defining faith; to them we may be entirely grateful. But to mature in God will take a conscious effort to follow the way God leads for growth, personally.
The oil in the virgins’ lamps represented their personal conviction and an individual righteousness. It was personal holiness that could not be shared. It was their learnedness and literacy in the things of God—costly, labored for, unsharable, and, in the end, not worth the possibility of missing Christ.
Question: What is anything that indulges our passions and leads us away from God? What is something that claims a greater priority than the holiness and love of God in our lives?Answer: an idol.
God hates idols and abhors them in the lives of his people. They are the start of all kinds of trouble. Morally, an idol represents perversion, and God often refers to it as an abomination, something vile and shameful. I think I know why.
God created humankind in his image (imago dei) and for himself. The problem with venerating a false god is not merely that we bow to it or laud it but that we give it our allegiance and service, which should be reserved for God alone. This is implicit in the first two commandments of the Decalogue.
So when we honor the idol, even if we don’t realize that we’ve provided it a ranking place in our hearts, we symbolically remove the stamp of our Creator (his entitlement of us) from our hearts, or a part of it, and spiritually choose a rival that, although not real by human standards, opens the door to darkness dedicated to our defeat in some way.
Looking even deeper is what we understand about spiritual worship: its nature to transform. I diverge for a moment. Here the worship controversy arises in which some argue that the word worship in the English Bible with today’s connotations incorrectly describes the practice and sentiment of Hebrew culture. In the original languages some of these instances might be more correctly termed ‘made obeisance’, ‘bowed down’, or simply ‘served’.
I hate taking up space about this because I feel that the issue is mostly a defense of the original languages. I think we all can agree that worship is not merely our present-day church experiences of singing songs and lifting hands. Nevertheless, I do believe that the intent of the scripture and ancient worshipers align with our contemporary understanding of what real worship of God is.
Real spiritual worship is done with the heart and should occur with every facet of one’s life, more outside of the church and synagogue than in it. Spiritual worship esteems God and responds to his holiness and love with personal godliness and conscientious righteousness. By it we are transformed into better people, a people of God.
But to open the heart this way to the idol is a grave mistake. It is to ascribe the true God’s spiritual honor to a false god. This is considerably more than merely praising and praying to it, something God mocks in the Prophets. What begins to occur in the heart is the transformation of the soul into the image of the idol. The longer this occurs, the more one will take on its character.
I met a man once with a bizarre attraction behavior that I came to understand only when I learned of the things in which he indulged. After mocking the deficiencies of human-made idols, the writer of Psalm 115 makes a sobering statement: “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (v. 8, ESV). Humankind was created to be mastered by one, God himself, and then only by our willing choice of him. To yield ourselves to any other thing means domination by evil influence and that signals torment.
Paul and Peter occasionally use the expression “slave of Christ.” The analogy is a good one. For if we are not the slaves of Christ, then in our hearts we serve our carnal nature and achieve Satan’s purposes. Simply put, we war with God.
Idols might have been wood and stone and gold once, but their true dark powers are still evident today when they are sex, money, and vanity. In Modern America we don’t erect sacred monuments in the traditional sense to personify the intents of our hearts. Instead, we simply yield to our impulses and impose upon ourselves willful blindness toward any dark motivating force. We indulge our lusts and vindicate our right to have them satisfied.
We possibly have more idolatrous dealings to contend with simply because of the age in which we live. Yet the fight for the human soul is as much the same as it was when Adam and Eve fell in the Garden. Jobs, television, ambition, power, drugs, people, fame, technology, carousing, fashion, time, even our own families—anything—can become one’s idol. We would do well to understand God’s testing Abraham with sacrificing Isaac.
God wants all of us. Yet we must solemnly acknowledge that at any moment we have as much of him as we desire.
One of the best ways to repent is to rely on those classic spiritual disciplines that lift us into God’s light, the light that exposes and restores. Then, and only then, can we be sure that we are centered in Christ and out of the shadows of sin.
Jesus told us, “If I’m leaving to make room for you, then I will surely come back for you” (John 14:3). Who doesn’t want to be with Jesus? My problem is the blockheads around me who tell him, “Don’t bother.”
Okay, this is one of my spiritual peeves—Christians who understand nothing about the words “blessed hope.” It happens during conversations and in church when people, grateful to be alive, remark, “We could’ve been dead, sleeping in our graves” or something like it. Truthfully, we’ve all probably had several close calls, some we knew about and some we didn’t. So, for everybody, Thank you, Lord, for sustaining our lives!
He Shall Never Die
What bugs me, however, is the notion that death is so bad, which urges me to question if life is really that good. When people pipe up with ‘happy to be alive’ comments (and I love life), I sense that somehow this world is all the reality there might be in their minds. I don’t wish to be unfair, but I never encounter those who, like me, cannot wait to be with Jesus in the joys of the life to come.
Before you think me unnecessarily critical, the apostle Paul had to deal with the same kind of people. The Thessalonians must have recently lost some beloved person because it prompted Paul to correct their undue mourning. “We want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died so you will not grieve like people who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13, NLT). He referred to those without Christ who have either no hope or false hopes about their eternal security.
Our bodies will expire; I think we get concerned about sickness, suffering, and pain. I don’t enjoy thoughts about what I might have to endure before I pass on. But though we believers experience physical death, like all humanity, we never die. Our lives before Christ and present clash with sin is the only spiritual death we will ever know. Jesus’s own death usurped sin’s authority, so death, the fullest extent of sin, becomes a grace that makes an end of our dealing with sin—forever.
The Joy of What Awaits
Our future is alive. We immediately go to God, who welcomes us into Heaven—and what that must be like! I’ve heard theology about it, and I’ve heard people who say they’ve visited. It’s all exciting. Is Heaven anything like Earth with vast regions and social systems? And the physics must be mind-boggling! Just think of Christ after his resurrection. Then, there is the New Earth to come.
We will breathe our last here, but we will not die. And Christ’s return will ‘seal the deal’, and these very bodies of ours will be refashioned and made perfect. (The sinner doesn’t get that.) So I don’t dread death or live life ducking. Now I enjoy my humanity and the world around me until it’s time to leave. In fact, that’s my prayer to God: Grant me to live out all of my appointed days. I ask not to die prematurely.
The blind monk in the wonderful documentary Into Great Silence says, “The closer one brings oneself to God the happier one is…the faster one hurries to meet him. One should have no fear of death…it is a great joy to find a Father once again.”
I cannot wait to see God, and I often tell him this. You’re also wrong if you think I have a death wish. So until the angels finish my mansion there…on a splendid mountain overlooking God’s throne…I’ll keep at his will here and send my treasure ahead.
The more I know God the more remarkable to me is his worth. It demands my response. But “What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits toward me?” Who can give him what he already owns? Glory? He dwells in light inapproachable. Honor? We call him God. Dominion? The universe is his. […]
Christian leaders who have the opportunity to address issues publicly should be careful to give accurate explanations for God. Common inquiries range from why evil exists to cultural changes to how God judges matters. Sometimes, however, many in our faith community offer responses that only engender more questions or those to which we default with basic salvation answers—“The scriptures say that if you do not confess Jesus as your Savior, then hell will be your eternal home.” But these responses are wooden and difficult for the un-churched.
I don’t dispute anything the scriptures explain. I do believe, however, that formulated answers to really tough questions may create unnecessary problems for Christians rather than solve them. Besides, being formulaic doesn’t truly represent a deep, coherent theology or the heart of a loving and wise God.
As a seminary student I always felt that theology is rooted in 1) the truth about God as he has revealed to us, 2) faith in God and his character, and 3) a healthy acknowledgement of mystery. Most believers score well on the first two. But our faith in God rests at a deeper level when we can confess that many times we simply don’t understand him and all the things he says and does.
I believe the Bible is God’s revealed Word to humankind, true in its message and perfect in its intent. Yet I also believe that some of that record can be difficult to understand. I acknowledge that God and his ways, other than what has been explained in Christian theology, are incredibly shrouded in mystery.
Mystery fills in all the space surrounding the hard questions of life that century after century have stood as stalwart as when they first troubled the minds of humans. But we allow ourselves to get in trouble when we let our theology nail God down to an exact science.
I must learn to answer many questions outsiders ask with God’s heart. I know what the Bible says and often they do, too. But God is more than dogma and easy answers. He is feeling and caring and loving; sometimes we fail at presenting this side of God. I feel that if the world wants real answers from the Church, we would do well to risk explaining truth along with God’s heart.
For instance, I don’t fully know how God deals with people for whom it isn’t apparent they believed on him before dying, especially people who never knew of Jesus. These are things none of us understand. And, yes, I know that not believing on Jesus as Lord is unforgivable. But what about those who walked uprightly by the light of their conscience and those implications Paul alludes to in Romans 2:11-16? I just don’t know, but I can be honest about the mystery of it all.
So we all struggle with God’s revelation and to interpret scripture in order to know how God thinks about a matter—and I must say that for most things the truth is not hard to figure out. But I deplore those who have all the answers. They often do more damage than good.
What our theology has given us, let us learn well. Let us also do well to communicate it with grace, tact, and the honesty to say “I don’t know.”
I still needed to make my birthday wish. It was five days late, but what could it hurt? So I grabbed the white star-shaped, helium-filled balloon and went outside. There I whispered a prayer to the God of all hopes for three things I desired and really needed to see happen for me in the coming year. Having wished upon a star, I released it into the oncoming night and let it fly to God.
It is the irony of that moment that lingers and strangely satisfies me like a finely textured dish: a wish and a prayer, the star and God, hope and faith, chance and certainty, eagerness and waiting, ease and agony.
The God Who Realigns the Stars
The stars have always kept humans wondering. What were they? Who were they? What power did they possess? They were close enough for marvel but distant enough to perplex. Certainly they were greater than us. Mythologies abounded and still do. Although most of us today don’t give credence to astrology or the power of the stars, we still wish on them, shooting or not, to chance the possibility of favorable outcomes. It’s our human nature.
I find nothing wrong it.
Many approach God, however, in the same frame of mind. If some of us would honestly explain ourselves, we would disclose a faith not unlike the talisman or amulet. We’d describe a magic akin to the shaman and traditionalists that “works” and retards and keeps us in luck. We’d tell of a God who beckons with haste to our every call and never disappoints.
God took Abram out one night and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars…so shall your offspring be” (Gen. 15:5). Being a Mesopotamian, Abram would have at some time in his life relied on the stars for their religious symbolism and premonition. The skies explained everything.
But this was a new context for the stars, offered by the star-maker himself. And it involved the dearest wish of Abram’s heart, a child. This wasn’t just a natural illustration God was making; it was a spiritual one, too. Power was shifting from the stars to this personal One who had already commandeered Abram’s life when he ordered, “Just go until I tell you to stop!” Oddity had become the new normal for Abram.
You see, the things that matter most to us take faith. Faith is co-oped and faith is difficult. I wish I could offer you an easier approach to God, but it wouldn’t be realistic or acceptable. Moreover, life can be tough and we don’t get through it by chancing good results. And so stands God, turning our eyes away from the stars to himself, advising, “Trust me.”
With Him All is Possible
God began a process of conversion in Abram’s life, converting…his wishes to prayers, his hope to faith, his chance to certainty, his eagerness to waiting, his ease to agony. Although it was far from pleasurable, it radically altered the core of his spiritual existence.
Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised (Rom. 4:18-21).
Abram stopped reaching for…believing in the stars and learned to trust the God who could bring the stars down to him. It was the only way. They were his God-given possession that God always wanted for him, not haphazard good coming his way.
Augustine said, “Faith is to believe in what you do not yet see; the reward for faith is to see what you have believed.” Maybe the reward is even better than what we’ve hoped for; it is to see God himself. Have you ever gotten your desire from the Lord, but it was his reality and love that crashed in on you more than anything?
Perhaps Abram shows us what true piety is all about. It is not simply a life of faith, but a life disciplined enough to believe God until it becomes a natural response. The pious one is he or she with conviction lodged in the bones. It is not about the star but about the one who guides it.
The joy of life in Christ is the assurance of ownership. We are God’s property, those of us whose lives are dedicated to Jesus. It is a revealing distinction between those who walk with God and those who do not. The mark of God doesn’t make one anything more than human, our gift, now flawed and frail. Yet that distinction lends us the necessary grace to push through and above the wretchedness of life and sin into fellowship with God.
It is a deep consolation to me to know that God controls my life, that I am held in his gravity and illumined by his light. I need not rely on my own headiness or caprice or draw cues from a dust cloud of wrong messages. I don’t have to be moved when trouble comes or left confused in life, lost between euphoria and depression in a tug-o-war of happiness. Instead, rest becomes my only chore—and strangely what a chore it can be but to trust that God’s sovereignty and goodness work for my good, that I can always retreat to the silent center where he dwells for instruction.
This ownership is available to all. God may not be everyone’s spiritual father, but he is nonetheless the Father of all creation. Everything and everyone already belongs to him. Life happens by his rules and according to his will, as mysterious as they can be. The difference, however, lies in our approach. I have resigned myself to need him. God ownership begins there, where we acknowledge our dependence on him and devote ourselves to him. This posture is difficult for the person who is the center of everything.
“For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”(Matt. 6:14-15)
This verse always struck a chord of fear in me: Can I really cause God to not forgive me? God is full of love and mercy—how could he not forgive me, his child? These questions led me to new understanding about God and his forgiveness, but I had to take an honest look at myself first.
When a person wrongs us, we have a decision to make about the offensive action. We can forgive or withhold forgiveness. To forgive is to set aside offense that it might not impede relationship or cause one to ungraciously judge another. This is significant for a reason you may already understand.
Jesus’s teaching abounds with one major theme, the love of God and neighbor and the interrelationship between the two. One can love man and hate God, but one cannot love God without genuine love for his neighbor. “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart…your soul…your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matt. 22:34-40).
What weighs in the balance with our decision to forgive is what Christ claims is the core of all life and faith: our love for God. We risk the damage of diminished love for God when we hold offense against our neighbor (cf. 1 John 4:20), especially when unforgiveness becomes a pattern. This is contrary to the portrait the apostle Paul paints in Ephesians of the divine plan to transform a world of cultural diversity and complexity into one spiritual tribe having all its new diversity dominated by one operative principle, love. It is a monumental lesson with many implications.
God will not forgive me when I do not forgive others. Said differently: God will not remove the hindrance between him and me when I do not remove the hindrance between neighbor and myself. It is to offend God that I should hold the knife to my equal’s neck when God, far more my superior, chooses mercy when he has every right to destroy me (cf. Matt. 18:23-35). Thus, God will not forgive me because he cannot—I have become the offense stranding the relationship with him. The real disappointment is that I have failed to understand his good nature.
God is not like us. He does not hold grudges or seek injury as we do in our hearts. He is not vengeful. Hear the scripture: “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:10). So it is not his nature to withhold mercy, but he is constrained by our actions and hopes for our spiritual maturity.
We often hear that God forgives our sins and tosses them into a “sea of forgetfulness.” Perhaps the closest thing in the Bible to this sea is Micah 7:19: “You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.” Marvelous, yet no sea of forgetfulness. Can God forget? He’s God, so no he cannot. The moment we maintain such a position, we create a critical limitation in God’s sovereignty; then his perfections can be challenged. Deep theology it is, but now let me show you amazing grace.
When I sin, humble myself, and ask God for his mercy, that offense—the scandal of immorality it is—God chooses to remember no more. Now he tells you and me to go do likewise.
A 'Mike' for Christ 