Thought For the Day

"It takes very little energy to stoop to hypocrisy."
 
                                                        Jeff Mallett

Happiness in the New Year

On New Year’s Eve, I had the pleasure of encountering one of my favorite cashiers at our local grocery store as I completed my shopping.  This young man is not only extremely competent and fast, he is helpful and friendly.  As I left, he wished me a good day and a happy new year.  I appreciated his cheerful good wishes, and the positive attitude of the other patrons indicated that others were looking for a happy new year as well. 

I want a happy new year along with everyone else.  I love the pleasures that I associate with feelings of happiness, and our good and loving God invented and instituted many of them.  The pleasures of relationship, sex, and food and drink all have God’s name on them.  I love interacting with our pets, I thoroughly enjoy playing games on Lumosity, and I am known to indulge in more than an occasional bowl of ice cream.  But as I entered the parking lot, I also realized that happiness is transitory and temporary.  God wants more for me.  Our Master wants me to experience no less than the peace that passes human understanding and the deep joy that comes as I partake in His nature and participate in His kingdom’s work.

The question is, “Do I want what God wants for me?  Do I want more than happiness?”  Christians often picture the Christian life as one of discipline, of controlling our desires.  To be sure, this is a component of a life of faith.  But C.S. Lewis makes this observation:

            If we consider the unblushing promises of reward 

           and the staggering nature of the rewards promised

           in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds 

           our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are 

           half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and 

           sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like 

           an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies 

           in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by 

           an offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily 

           pleased.”

 Happiness is wonderful, but if I stop there, if I allow myself to be satisfied with those pleasures that make me happy, I will miss the deep joy and peace that I could experience as I become more like Christ and exercise the gifts He has given me for His purposes and His glory.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that we are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  That is a good foundation for a republic that respects the lives and rights of its citizens, but it is an incomplete recipe for success for those who have committed their lives to Christ.  Happiness is neither the means nor the end of a life of faith. It is not a measure of success.  Moments and seasons of happiness are gifts from our loving God in our journey toward Him. 

Our Lord has no objection to happiness as long as it does not interfere with His greater desires for us—the deep joy and peace we experience as we become more like Christ and exercise the gifts He has given us for His purposes and His glory.  More often than we would like, though, happiness gets in the way of God’s purposes, and we are called to endure trials and meet challenges as we follow our Lord.  As we begin this new year and face the cold, gray, and damp New Jersey winter, let us not be discouraged by the times when we are experiencing an apparent lack of happiness.  Instead, may we enjoy the times of happiness we experience as we pursue that which has eternal value and keep our eyes fixed on the Source of all good and all good gifts. 

2014: Out With Guilt; In With Thanksgiving

As January arrives—ready or not, here it is—we encounter yet one more holiday tradition: the ever-popular list of New Year’s Resolutions.  It is out with the old year and in with the new.  Likewise, out with the “old me” and in with the “new me.”

Before determining our resolutions, we must take time to evaluate where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going.  We identify those things about us and our lives that we want to change.  Then we are ready to set resolutions to accomplish these changes.

I believe that evaluation can be a good exercise that promotes healthy growth.  The issue is how and why we go about it and what we do with it.  The typical New Year’s resolution process begins with shame and ends in expectations of self.  Guilt is foremost in the process, both as the result of evaluation and as the means of beating ourselves into meeting expectations in the future.  This is a good time to ponder two New Testament verses:

Luke 22:31—Jesus saying to Peter: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like wheat.”

Rev. 12:10—“Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, ‘Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, he who accuses them before our God day and night.

Guilt is a favorite weapon of Satan, to be sure.  It is guilt that is Satan’s main tool of accusation.  In His words to Peter, Jesus was referring to Peter’s upcoming denial, one that would certainly heap guilt and regret upon Peter’s head.  “Sifting like wheat” tells us what guilt does: it separates us like a sifter separates one type of particle from another.  Guilt keeps us focused on ourselves and convinces us that we are undeserving of love and company.  Guilt encourages us to hide, from God and from one another.

Sherlock Holmes, in the new interpretation packaged as Elementary, had this to say to his assistant about guilt:

             I am an expert on poisons, Watson.  I know virtually everything there is 
             to know about them.  But I’ve come to learn over the last few years that 
             there is nothing on this planet quite so toxic as guilt.

So, what do we do with our regrets that pop up as we evaluate ourselves and our recent history?  Once again, Scripture leads us to a much more powerful and much more effective antidote to our sin than our own efforts at fixing ourselves:

I John 1:9--If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Romans 8:1—“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

When our end-of-the-year evaluations bring us to an encounter with our sin, failures, and shortcomings, we have a choice: we can wallow in guilt and concoct an elaborate plan to fix ourselves, or we can confess our sins and trust in the work of Christ to fix us.  It is easy to think that it is more spiritual for us to fix ourselves, to take responsibility for our messes and clean them up.  While I am wholeheartedly in favor of cleaning up one’s one messes (particularly in my kitchen), the fact of the matter is that we cannot heal ourselves of our sin nature and our sinfulness.  And in pursuing guilt-driven fix-myself strategies, we reflect our spiritual ancestor Eve in trying to do what only God can do.

Reliance on Christ does not lead to a lack of responsibility or spiritual laziness as we might expect.  Quite counter-intuitively, it leads to a humble dependence on the work of Christ and the appropriate work of repentance.  We take responsibility for our wrongdoing, confess to our Lord and often those we’ve wronged, and make up for what we’ve done as far as it is possible.  Finally, we demonstrate our heart’s sorrow at our sin by welcoming the Holy Spirit into our souls to do the work of exposing and healing the darkness and brokenness.  Change, then, becomes deeply and eternally real as it expresses God working in us and through us.

Dan Hamilton, one of my favorite authors of Christian fiction, has written a short story in which Seeker must deal with the guilt and shame of his past sins that will potentially be revealed by Shadowhawk (Satan).  Friend has taken Seeker into His temple to deal with Seeker’s sins.  Friend has this to say to Seeker:

            “You know what Shadowhawk will do with what he has collected—see now

            what I will do with all that you surrender to me.  Behold your shadows….You

            must either cover them with light or they will drown you in darkness.”¹

So then, as we review and evaluate our lives this past year, I would encourage us to bring our failings to Christ and end the holiday season as we began it—with thanksgiving to a great and good God for His work for us, in us, and through us.

¹From The Inn At The End Of The World, a forthcoming collection of short stories by the author of The Beggar King Trilogy.  Copyright 2013, Dan Hamilton.  Used by permission.

November Memorial

November.  Thus begins shorter days, grey skies, cold temperatures, and holiday preparations.  Same old, same old.  What new and fresh thoughts do we need as we enter this winter holiday season?

As I’ve thought and prayed about this, I realized that my question was directing me to the whole point of the Thanksgiving holiday—we don’t need new information; we need to be reminded of what we already know.

Although Thanksgiving is a secular holiday, instituted by President Lincoln in 1863, it reflects the mindset of the early Christian settlers who, 200 years prior to the Civil War, were giving thanks to God for their survival in this country.  Those pilgrims were living in hardship and had been through extraordinary suffering.  Still, they knew that God is real and that God is good; they also knew the importance of a grateful heart.  Gratitude enables us to see beyond ourselves and our circumstances.  In particular, it allows us to see more clearly who God is and what He is doing in our lives.  Gratitude fuels perseverance and grants hope.  Grumbling, on the other hand, keeps us self-focused and accentuates our misery.

The quintessential illustration of this is the post-Exilic Israelites as they traveled into the wilderness.  Even though they had just experienced God’s goodness in rescuing them from Egyptian slavery and facilitating their escape by parting the Red Sea, they began to grumble almost immediately.  Thus their 40 years of wandering began.  Their lack of gratitude continued into the next generation, and when Moses sent spies into the Promised Land, 10 of the 12 could not see what God was doing and reported that the land was populated by giants that could not be overcome. 

When God finally did bring them into the Promised Land, He instructed them to stop in the middle of the Jordan River.  God then reprised His Exodus act and held up the water so that the nation of Israel could cross without getting their feet wet.  As part of this exercise, God instructed them to remove 12 boulders from the middle of the river bed and take them to their place of lodging as a reminder to the people—and the generations that would follow—of God’s personal, loving, powerful goodness.

Like the Israelites, we are forgetful people.  I concluded many years ago that I would make a good Israelite.  It is painfully easy for me to forget God’s faithful protection and provision, and I am quick to complain and slow to give thanks.  And so I have developed a habit preserving my own personal “memory stones,” mementos that serve to remind me of the Lord’s gracious faithfulness in my life.  I can then return to my personal memory stones whenever I need encouragement to look to the Lord in difficult circumstances.

The Thanksgiving holiday is a memory stone of sorts.  Although it is not as precise and personal as the stones in the Jordan River or my own memory stones, our celebration of Thanksgiving, year after year, offers us a memory booster that inoculates us from grumbling and encourages an attitude of gratitude.  It is its predictability and the memories generated year after year that give this holiday its power.  We do not need new, different, or exciting.  We simply need to remember that our lives are in the hands of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present, all-wise, and all-loving God.

I, for one, will praise God for Thanksgiving.

Thought For The Day

"Why fit in when you were born to stand out?"
                                 
                                         Dr. Seuss

Thought For the Day

"Trust the Lord with your life, because your life depends on it."

                                                       Dr. Andrew Straubel
                                                       Pastor, Windsor Chapel

Grace--Amazing and Then Some

“Amazing Grace,” written by John Newton in the 18^th Century, is one of my favorite hymns.  There are two new versions of “Amazing Grace” that I particularly like.  One is Todd Agnew’s “Grace Like Rain.”  The other is Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio’s version of “Amazing Grace” that adds the “My Chains Are Gone” chorus to the traditional “Amazing Grace” lyrics.  It is interesting to me that both contemporary versions include a comparison of God’s grace to rain.  Agnew, of course, puts it bluntly: “Hallelujah, Grace like rain falls down on me.”  In “My Chains Are Gone,” Tomlin and Giglio describe God’s gracious mercy as a flood.

It is singularly appropriate, I believe, to link God’s grace to abundant rain.  In the created world, we depend on rain for personal survival, the ability to clean, for refreshment, to grow crops for our food.  Water is a vital component of our ecosystem, and without it life on earth would perish.  God’s grace, like rain, washes us, refreshes us, energizes us, and ends the spiritual and emotional droughts in our lives.  God’s grace is abundant, often coming as a flood of mercy.  We cannot live without God’s grace any more than we can live without water.  It is fitting, then, to praise God for His grace, and to ask for it.  Our Worship Team often pairs “Grace Like Rain” with another chorus: “Let It Rain.”  Indeed, asking our Lord for His grace is a wonderful way to acknowledge our need that only God can fill.

There is a problem with grace-like-rain, though.  Rain is not always convenient.  It often disrupts our plans and interferes with what we “must” do.  It reminds us that as much as we would like to think otherwise, we have limited control of our lives.  God’s grace, like rain, is often inconvenient.  It can thwart our pursuit of our goals, and it most definitely reminds us that we are not sovereign over our lives.

If God’s grace is like rain, I believe it is helpful to clarify our understanding of grace.  We often view grace with a narrow, self-focused lens.  When we ask for grace, we generally mean that we are asking for a “break.”  The “grace period” associated with a credit card account is the time between a purchase and when payment is due.  We are saved by Christ’s gracious death, His payment for our sins.  It is all too easy to take this aspect of grace and conclude that God’s grace is for our purposes.  But God extends His grace to us as an expression of who He is, our loving Creator, Savior, and Redeemer.  His grace is for His purposes in our lives. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the well-known 20^th Century Christian writer, wrote about the dangers of “cheap grace,” the attitude that sees God’s grace as the means to further one’s own purposes, comfort.  This attitude neglects a genuine participation in the nature and work of Christ and misses the point of grace-like-rain.

Grace is God’s free love gift to us, but it does require something of us.  In order to experience Christ’s offer of salvation by faith, we must relinquish our desire and attempts to achieve our own righteousness and earn our own salvation.  Living by grace through faith means that we maintain our focus on following our Master—we seek grace like rain so that we can be enabled, equipped, and empowered to fill His purposes for us rather than serving our own ambitions and wishes. 

I, for one, have a long way to go on this journey of grace through faith.  I don’t always want grace like rain; sometimes I want to be dry, comfortable, and independent.  I praise God, though, that he doesn’t leave me high, dry, and grace-less.  Instead, He uses hymns like “Amazing Grace” to draw my heart, mind, and soul closer to Him.  May this be true for all of us as we sing such songs.