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In re de somnium (The dream of Reality)
We’ve all said something like this: “They are their own worst enemy.”
What motivates us to make this kind of observation? Usually it’s due to individuals who seem to be captive of their own weaknesses which they either cannot see or cannot overcome.
Yet even while we may shake our heads as we walk away from someone who should have known when to stop talking, we must always keep this in mind: we are no different than they are. There are times in everyone’s life when we are simply unable to determine where we are or what we’re doing.
No matter how aware we believe ourselves to be, no matter how we may even pride ourselves on our ability to understand the consequences of our actions, time and again we demonstrate our inability to often see what is proverbially directly in front of us. It is almost as if our brains seem to work against our efforts to interpret our circumstances.
There is an old Chinese proverb which says, “If you want to understand water, do not ask a fish.”
Here’s the scenario: your wife has sent you upstairs to get a particular cleaner out of the closet (usually due to the fact you had the audacity to appear to be “un-busy” while she is busily “doing something”). You are familiar with this cleaner; you know what colors the bottle has on it, you even are familiar with the size and shape of the bottle, so off you go to check another victory off your list!
Unfortunately, the cleaner isn’t in the closet. You looked. It wasn’t there. So, you inform your wife that it isn’t in the closet (usually by increasing the volume of your voice so it will reach your wife who is still downstairs). After mere moments have passed, your wife comes to you. Of course, you are prepared for your vindication. You are confident of your situational assessment. You are prepared to receive your prize (trust me, this is a guy thing).
Reality, in these moments, becomes simultaneously displeasing and disappointing. Your wife reaches into the closet and turns to you and places the cleaner into your disbelieving hands. She then goes back downstairs while muttering an esteem-destroying narrative which further weakens one’s grip on one’s man-card….
So, you are standing there with the bottle of cleaner, attempting to process the reality of your ignominy, and you cannot fathom how you could be so wrong! And judging by the continued muttering of your wife downstairs, neither can she.
If your inability to have seen the cleaning bottle was a physical issue, this would have been referred to as a scotoma, a physical blind spot in one’s vision which makes one unable to see anything in the center of one’s vision. Yet very few people have a true diagnosed scotoma; while everyone has a blind-spot in their field of vision, few have the debilitative sort.
The reason our “man” example could not see the cleaner was a kind of scotoma, a mental one. I’ve done this very thing. The reason we do not see the very object for which we are searching is our minds have given us an image for which we were looking! If what our “eyes” see does not match our mental image, our brain immediately dismisses what is before us.
We are seeking. We desire to find a particular object. Yet because of what we are thinking our brain says it isn’t there!
It happened. We’re in the water but we don’t know it.
We have become our own worst enemy.
For the believer in Jesus Christ, this should cause us great chagrin and even alarm. If our minds so readily dismiss the reality in which we live simply because we have the wrong image of reality, how can we know we know? How can we avoid being our own worst enemy?
In Romans 8:26, the Apostle Paul informs us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (ESV).
Because God created us and because He knows us completely, He has placed His Spirit within everyone who has a relationship with Him through the Son Christ. One of the most overlooked benefits of the presence of the Spirit in the life of a believer is the Spirit, who is God, knows what we need—and what we should know—better than we do.
Perhaps we should remember the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the 1990 movie Total Recall: “How do we know this isn’t a dream?”
There is great power and strength in our relationship with Christ! No, this doesn’t mean we must all live in fear of spoiling our relationship with Him because of what we could do. A few verses after the above reference, Paul adds that nothing in the list he gives “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39 ESV).
So the next time you are looking for something you know you should be able to find, remember the gift God has given us so we can always find Him, we can always know His will and we will never be able to make any decision which will separate us from the love He has given to us in Christ through His sacrifice.
We will have defeated the enemy within us: ourselves.
Getting to Give
A friend of mine who was an amateur astronomer used to mention something to which he referred to as “seasonal creep.” He told me that the local astronomy club had studied about a twenty-year cycle and found that the seasons were “shifting” to later and later in the calendar year.
Winter in Springfield, Illinois
Even I could remember that as a child we would often get snow before Halloween. As I grew older the snows often did not come until the middle of December, with the strongest storms in January; over the past five-to-ten years I have also noticed that cool weather would also continue until early June.
Of course, anyone who ever enters our malls and shopping centers can attest to this seasonal creep as well! Halloween decorations appear near the first of September. Christmas arrives (at least in the stores) even before the end of October. I believe the main reason for this is a hope by retailers that people will begin to “get into the holiday mood” when they see the seasonal decorations.
The amazing thing is the amount of stuff that can be gotten during this time of year! When I was a child, our family did not have much “disposable” income: we always had plenty of food, clothes and basic necessities, but the things that my brothers and sisters just “wanted” were reserved for Christmas—and even then, we did not get everything we wanted!
In Acts 20:35, the Apostle Paul in his farewell address to the Ephesians, reminded them of his desire to serve the Ephesian believers and demonstrate his obedience to the words of Christ: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” While Paul desired to live out who Jesus was in his life, Paul never taught that getting was wrong or evil; yet Jesus merely pointed out to him that giving provided a greater blessing.
Thankfully, those of us who know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, serve a God who freely gives us all the things of which we have need! From the beginning of the Bible in Genesis, we witness a God who created this world and then chose to give it to Adam and Eve to enjoy.
God later in Exodus gave his people the Ten Commandments so they would be able to have a relationship with a holy God. Later, God gave David’s son Solomon the intelligence and imagination to build the Temple—thus giving His people a most holy place to maintain their relationship with Him. More importantly, John records the words of Christ in John 3:16 where we read that God loved the people of this world so much He gave His Son to be our sacrifice—and He also gave us His Spirit to prove we belong to Him!
“So should we deprive ourselves of material goods to be ‘better’ people?” No, that thought misses the point. Yet during this holiday season allow me to propose this: Jesus in Matthew 5-7, which is the Sermon on the Mount, stated those who truly “are” His would be both salt and light to those in this dark world. Those who are truly changed by God’s Spirit will also in turn demonstrate that change to those in this world.
We should remember the mantra that says, “A difference that makes no difference is not then different.” If we have been changed by God, that change must be evident in our lives.
So, what about giving being better than receiving? We serve a God who gives! While God gives, not everyone receives; the gift is there, it is offered but few take it. Yet as God gives, and we in turn receive. Paul concludes in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that we are a new creation; our old lives, our old desires have been removed. True, we struggle with this, but we also must realize before accepting God’s gifts, we sinned because it was the natural thing to do. When we sin as a believer, it is an unnatural thing and we do it willfully and in rebellion to our Creator—unnaturally!
It all boils down to this: God gives, we get—but in this “getting” we in turn can give! This giving can be concrete (by imparting gifts to another), or it can be more abstract (by demonstrating how Christ has changed us through our actions). We are commanded to give through demonstrating our love for Christ through our obedience to Him and through our missional actions of going, doing and telling others about Jesus Christ.
If you think getting that hoped-for-gift would bring joy to your life, have you ever considered what it would feel like to give something of eternal value and everlasting consequences?
joyeux Noël!
Feliz Navidad!
Fröhliche Weihnachten!
счастливого Рождества
Wesołych Świąt
Merry Christmas!
Making Jesus Real in an Unreal World, Part 2
We live in interesting times.
Christians in the United States are becoming somewhat frustrated at the erosion of their religious liberties. Unlike believers in other parts of this world, there has developed within the United States an attitude of entitlement based on legislated freedoms found in the founding documents of the United States.
“Sign” of the times!
It seems the very blessings for which we as believers in Jesus Christ enjoy have made us complacent. I find it interesting the number of parallels between our situation in 21st century America and the Israelites under the Law in the Old Testament.
Yahweh-God gave the Ten Commandments (more accurately, the ten words) to the Israelites not as a means for them to perfect themselves, but rather as a stark reminder they were imperfect and could never approach the perfection God demanded. Apart from their relationship with Yahweh-God—demonstrated through the shedding of sacrificial blood through sacrifice (which only covered but did not remove sin)—the Israelites should have realized their innate imperfection and sinfulness the more they attempted to keep the Law!
Unfortunately, this never occurred. The aphorism, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” seems to have come into play in their minds. They had the Law. They were a people chosen by God through Abraham. They measured themselves by a comparison to others who may or may not have the Law. Those without the Law (and a relationship by blood to Abraham) were “dogs” and Gentiles. Those “under” the Law were subjected to a hierarchy of means measuring those who did have Abraham: “I keep seven commands and you keep only four therefore I’m better than you.”
The gift of the Law by Yahweh-God—allowing the Israelites to see their need of God’s grace and their inability to keep the Law—should have caused both humility and a greater dependence on God’s grace. Instead, their response was not an acknowledgement of their need of God; their response was to elevate the importance of the keeping of the “rules” of the Law. They forgot the biblical principle James enunciated in James 2:10: “Whoever keeps the entire Law, yet fails in one point, is guilty of breaking it all.”
Now keep in mind, this was no easy task. Every aspect of their worship spoke of the holiness and majesty of the Lord. From the delineation of the sacrificial system, to the preparation of the sacrifices to the clothing and methodology necessary for the priest to enter into the Holy of Holies—the presence of God—all of their worship emphasized the person of God, His majesty and His holiness!
Yet they ignored it all and focused on themselves, their performance and how they could create a hierarchy in their society and relationships.
Here is the parallel I mentioned earlier: American Christianity has over the course of the years of freedom has forgotten the difference between freedom and grace, between the person of God and the mechanism He provides for blessing.
Yahweh-God in His wisdom has allowed Christianity in America to flourish for almost two full centuries virtually unopposed. God did this by providing founders of this country who were both believers in Jesus Christ and who were deeply influenced by a Judeo-Christian philosophy.
Our Founders even produced something called a “Bill of Rights,” which is a singular example of a clear enunciation of not merely human rights, but the source of those rights. While over the course of the first 200 years there have certainly been times when a complete lack of wisdom has been demonstrated by those we would refer to as “Evangelical Christians,” the United States has been an incredibly effective and fruitful source for worldwide missionary activity.
Yet even acknowledging all of the good American believers have accomplished, now we are seeing a huge swing of the pendulum away from the biblical moorings which traditionally anchored this country to what is nothing more than an emphasis on erotic liberty (which is driving almost all of the changes now).
We in the United States are now seeing the beginnings of the erosion of religious liberty. Should we use all legislative means at our disposal to fight these losses? Yes we should because God has given us all of these; the freedoms, the means and the methods for us to protect laws and to even pass new ones.
Sometimes we as believers act as if we think God is in Heaven looking down and thinking, “Wow, I didn’t see that one coming!” God is sovereign and He is the One who gave us a country rules through the democratic process.
When Jesus Christ was on this earth He stated often, “You have heard,” referring to what the Law stated and then He went on to radically apply the Law in a way emphasizing our relationship with God through Him! There was no “keeping the rules,” people would no more be able to measure themselves against others. Jesus wanted people to see our thoughts and motives is what drive our actions!
I am thankful for the rights we as believers in Jesus Christ have been granted through the Constitution of the United States. Yet I do not worship the Constitution. Through God’s grace and His choice of me, I worship the God who gave us this document and allowed it to exist for this time. There will come a time when God will no longer need this document to aid the furtherance of His kingdom. When that occurs, the Constitution, and perhaps even America, might well be gone.
Yet just as God was active in the first century Church, He will continue to be active in the lives of believers in America—just as He is active in the rest of the World today.
Yet is this what God must allow to happen before we really make Jesus real in this world?
Life. Seriously? Funny! 