July 25th, 2011
Ramblings of an Infatuated Mind
Andrew Wiens
July 25, 2011
It is now just two days since we left
Fargo, and the demons have been out in force against my heart.
We returned to
Fargo on Friday and began to prepare for final departure Saturday morning.
This was my first real opportunity to stop and take inventory of what we were about to do, and as such I found new voices within the depths of my heart that I thought had long ago died.
Feelings of insecurity about our decision to intentionally avoid becoming what our world would call secure bombarded my mind with vicious force.
Now as we spend time at Brie’s grandparents in
Wisconsin, I continue to fight with vigilance against the demon of expectation.
Foolish is something I have felt often during this time, even a bit of a failure.
Pressures to make sure that I am providing for my wife and future family have weighed heavily, and the logical part of me begins to panic.
I know I have the tools to make money.
God has blessed me with brains, social skills and general good sense.
I could easily plunder the work-world, settle down with my lovely wife, and consider it all to be blessings from God.
At times I even find myself desiring such a life.
However, it is at those times that God has reminded me of the true blessings he has given me.
Through the book of Hebrews the Lord has brought peace to my soul, and returned me to the correct remembrance of my infinite debt.
How can I honestly use God’s talents which he has so graciously bestowed upon me to bless myself.
Those talents are rightfully His, and thus it is He that should reap the blessings.
I am to be blessed solely with Him, and in response I am to live my life as a blessing for Him.
As I stand before my God in awesome wonder over the past two days sorrow fills my soul for the very existence of hesitation in my spirit. In Hebrews 10:29 God says, “My soul takes no pleasure in anyone who shrinks back.” Satan has been attempting to draw me to a place of cowardice that would displease my Lord. This will not happen. For I am not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved (Hebrews 10:30). That at least is my prayer, and in reality the objective of this step into the great unknown by myself and Brie. We, as I have shared with many, are tired of Christians not looking like Jesus followers. We are tired of ourselves not looking like Acts-style Jesus followers. Biblically, I get very scared about Christianity that is mainly a name, Christianity that has failed to sell all for the treasure and pearl of great worth (Matthew 13:44-5). Hebrews 10:26-31 reads:
“For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy ‘on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know the one who said, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’ And again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
Though I surely fear God and judgment, and that fear motivates me in part, it is much more than that an extreme joy that pushes me on and makes me eager to run the race with perseverance. My greatest sorrow though is that I think we in the modern church, at least the church that I have known, have forgotten what Jesus did for us. This week during my time in Hebrews I have continuously been reminded that Jesus has defeated sin (Hebrews 9:28). We are not to continue living in it. Righteousness is what the Lord wants, and far too many of us are content with our sin. In fact, I think that most Christians are willfully persisting in sin. We all have things in our life that keep us from Jesus Christ, that hinder our ability to serve and live in discipleship. Those things are sin, and they are not alright with God. What Good News it is though that I no longer must be captive to sin, and yet so much of me wants to remain in my sin. My sin is easier. Your sin is easier. The burden of its yoke is not in the long run lighter, but as citizens of the Earth it is surely easier. Yet Hebrews calls us citizens of heaven, not earth, and it is on heavenly things that we are to set our hearts(Hebrews 11:16). Christ has done away with offerings and sacrifices that were made in order to try to prevent one’s self from going to hell and he has instead opened wide the Holy of Holies and made obedience a possibility. Just as the son loved the father so fully as to do His will, so too we are called to love the father to such a degree. And yet we argue with our father, we argue with Jesus when he asks us to dismiss our possessions, to be willing to hate our families, to drop all and follow Him. His will is to have us and we want us for ourselves. Thus, in order to keep ourselves in our own possession we go around offering other things to God, all the while imitating the Pharisees and priests of old, instead of the new priest, Jesus Christ. The way of old was to offer a part, so as to keep the rest. The way of the new is complete offering. (Read Hebrews 9 and especially 10:1-18)
As I have meditated upon these texts, and upon the Lord’s will for our lives, I was given an image that has proven quite helpful for me. It is the image of a newt, or at least I believe it is a newt, but at any rate a lizard. This lizard is one that sheds its tail in order to prevent its entire being from perishing. If caught by a cat or fox by the tail, the animal is designed to simply lose its tail in order to survive. The reality is that there is a sly old fox named Satan who has all of us by the tail. We are in sin, and thus we are dead. As long as that fox has us we are as good as lunch. However, Jesus Christ offers us the capability to split with our sinful ways, the opportunity to shed our tails. There are two problems though; the first is that most of us are more attached with our tails than we are with Jesus, and the second is that most of us also don’t realize that it is truly a life and death situation. Thus we hold on to our tails of money, of security, of family, of retirement, of insurance, of “every weight and the sin that clings so closely.” The author of Hebrews informs us that we must set these things aside in order to run the race with perseverance. This race imagery has been one that has troubled me greatly. I have always simply assumed that I was running my own race for Jesus, and I think that is what most people do. However, as I start to think about actually running a race, I realize that a race takes preparation, it takes discipline. I realized sometime ago that if I was honest, my faith was having an asthma attack just this side of the start line. I also look around me and at the Bible, and realize that all of the record holders lived thousands of years ago. In the Olympics we are used to seeing people break old records every year. As technology improves, and more money is available to athletes, times have tended to improve over time. However, in regards to the race of faith, this trend seems to be the opposite. The Christians I know aren’t even in the same racing class as those men and women in the Bible. Look at Hebrews 11 if you don’t believe me. Try to put your life alongside these men and women. If your honest, you should probably either have a good laugh or perhaps more appropriately a good cry. We have grown content with the fact that we as Christian runners look more like a guy trying to run a marathon while smoking his cigarette, than we do world-class athletes. We cannot be alright with this.
The way Hebrews speaks about sin has been incredibly helpful in bringing me an understanding of what it means to say that Jesus died for my sins. Rather than talking about removing sins (which is a somewhat vague phrase that has allowed me to be alright with certain sins), Hebrews 9 talks about purifying and perfecting one’s conscience. Verse 9 says that gifts and sacrifices cannot perfect the conscience of the worshipper, and verse 14 goes on to say that only Christ and his blood can purify our conscience from dead works. I, at least, have a guilty conscience. I know that Jesus Christ cannot look at me and say, “Forgive them Father, for he knows not what he’s done.” I know full well that I have not surrendered all to my God. My conscience is not clean, and I would be willing to bet that many of you, my friends and family, also have stained consciences. We like to pretend like going to church, being involved and raising our families in the church is enough. However, deep down, I think we all feel half-committed to Christ. Our consciences will not let us off the hook, and that is a problem. I used to think it strange, perhaps even arrogant, when Peter responds to Jesus’ dealings with the “Rich Young Ruler” by assuring Him that, “We (the disciples) have left everything to follow you!” [Luke 18:28] Jesus has just told a man who thought he had it all figured out that what he was missing was the selling of all his possessions, and then gone on to quip, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Than Peter has the audacity to claim that he and the disciples fulfill the necessary criteria laid out by Jesus. This response has seemed to me to be somehow sinful or prideful, and I’ve been surprised when Jesus himself agrees with Peter, and affirms that he will be getting a reward for what he has left behind. Peter’s conscience was clean. Jesus had asked him to drop his nets, his family, even his name to follow him, and Peter did it. As he looked at his life he honestly could say that he had given everything for his Lord. Now we all know that Peter would yet soil his conscience by denying his Lord, but at this point in his life he can look at the path he’s on, and claim to actually have sold out for the pearl of great price. Not many of us in the American church can make such a claim, and the sad thing is that like me, most of us don’t even want to. We pretend that it would be an arrogant thing to be that secure in your walk with Christ, to look at Jesus teachings and commands and say “Yes, I am there with you Lord.” Thus, we use a sort of false humility to prevent ourselves from going too far with Christ. We want to be good Christians, but we don’t want to be flashy, we don’t want to be radicals. The problem is that instead of following Peter on his path of discipleship we instead are flashy with our stuff, our shiny cars, our big homes, we are radically rich, and our consciences are still horribly soiled. Peter was flashy in his loyalty, his poverty, radical in his ministry and eventual death for Jesus. He lived a radically messy life, but his conscience was radically pure and clean due to the power and grace of Jesus Christ. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t experienced that radical purification, because I haven’t let go of my dirt, I haven’t shed my tail completely.
I will finally end this rambling with a thought that I had yesterday morning as I ran. I have made it my habit to pray for people during my times of running and working out. I pray for other things at other times when I can focus more fully, but I find that it is quite fruitful for me to allow individual faces to work their way through my mind as I lift them up in prayer, and keep my mind off of the pain in my legs. Anyway, as I was praying I found myself asking the Lord to help someone taste Him, to taste his goodness. As I prayed that prayer, I immediately realized that this person surely had already tasted the Lord. They may even taste Him daily. What I really wanted was for that person to feast on Jesus Christ. As I meditated upon that revelation, I realized how accurately the difference between these two prayers illustrated the problem that I have seen within my own life, and within those around me. We have contented ourselves with simply tasting Jesus. We treat him like we might treat dessert. He’s become a sweet treat that we use to be the wonderful cap to a main course of what we call God’s blessings. The only problem is that God never says that he wants us to have nice homes, comfortable families, groomed yards, multiple cars. His desire throughout the scriptures is never to bring any of those things. He wants simply to bring Himself. He is the treasure, not anything that he brings. In fact, all he promises to the disciples when he comes is a life without roots, without a place to lay their heads, a life of suffering and death. Jesus doesn’t want people to sample him, he doesn’t want to be the icing on the cake of our life. He wants us to feast on Him, to gorge ourselves on Him alone. I realize that gluttony is on the list of deadly sins, but I believe we are to be gluttons for Jesus. How many times do the Psalms speak of being hungry or thirsty for God and his word. Psalm 63:1 reads “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Remember that Hebrews calls us strangers in this world, as does most every book of the Bible. We are to be strangers because we are to have come to the realization that there is nothing in this whole Earth that can quench our thirst. The Living Water comes from a different place all together. He has opened Himself to us as a fountain through his incarnation, but Living Water cannot be sipped, it cannot be used like a medication. As I ran, my mind drifted to Psalm 23, where David writes, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” As I noted at the beginning of this reflection the enemies of temptation have been knocking at my door over the past days, but the Lord has set a bountiful table before me, within their very presence. Mocking them my Jesus reminds me and them that he alone can provide. The beautiful thing too, is that when our God prepares a feast, he provides himself as the only fair. We eat of Him, or we do not eat at all, but he promises that we will never reach the end of this meal [Psalm 139 is a beautiful reminder of the limitlessness of God]. He calls himself the Bread of Heaven and on the night before his death, he offered his body and blood to his disciples. We are to eat of our Lord, and this is not a sampling party, this is a wedding banquet. Let us all undo the belts that prevent us from eating our fill, and let us be gluttons for the Lord. Let us let Christ wash our consciences clean as we leave behind every other table, for the glorious table found at His throne. Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world. [Isaiah 12:5]
Blessings and love to you all,
Andrew
