The Power of Truth

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."

                                                                                                     Ayn Rand

Vision

"While in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred--like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope."
                                                                                           C.S. Lewis

A Doctor's Advice

"Let's get it right.... Never be cruel, never be cowardly.... Remember, hate is always foolish, and love is always wise.... Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind...."

                                                                                 Dr. Who
                                                                                 (From one doctor to the next)

The Law of Love

Matthew 22:34-40:

But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ “This is the great and foremost commandment. “The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Although this Gospel passage is very familiar, it has always intrigued me.  The Pharisees are challenging and testing Jesus, looking to discredit Him. Jesus’s answer to the lawyer’s question about the Law is fully consistent with the Old Testament, but I find the irony of it to be stunning—The rule-bound Pharisees are confronted by the heart of God, who uses law not as an end or the means to self-righteousness but as the means to His ends: love and relationship.

Jesus teaches that loving the Lord with all our heart, soul, and mind is the greatest commandment.  Since God is a spirit, it is not always easy to know what this looks like, how to do it.  I believe that there are several components to loving the Lord.  King David modeled a pursuit of God that while imperfect nonetheless enabled him to become a man after God’s own heart. It is also important to remember that love is fundamentally a God thing. God is love. Love is a fruit of His Spirit as He works in us.  Our ability to love God is dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit in us.

Our ability to love God is also linked to our ability to love others, our neighbors.  It is only as we pursue God and experience His life in us can we truly love others.  We often try to separate the two or emphasize one over the other.  But loving God and loving others are intimately interconnected. As we sink more deeply into the Lord’s presence and allow Him to transform us, we participate in His nature and become able to love others.  And as actively engage in loving others, our primary relationship with the Lord is strengthened and stretched.

In some sense at least, loving others is more tangible than loving God.  And as we seek to love others, we find that our failures in this arena expose our weaknesses and areas of brokenness in our primary relationship with the Lord.  Although we may try to minimize or deny the exposure, it is God’s provision to help us repent and grow toward Him.  If we find that we are looking at others with disdain, use their weakness to feel better about ourselves, struggle with impatience toward them, impose our expectations on them, or forget that they are image bearers of God’s eternal glory, we are in need of God’s work of sanctification within us.  If we excuse our lack of love by blaming the other party or our personality, nature, or circumstances, we will miss the opportunity to meet the Lord in a powerfully healing way.

But if we embrace the exposure of our lack of love as God’s invitation to draw near to Him and open ourselves to the work of His Spirit, we free the Lord to do His work in us.  As we come to recognize our pride and self-centeredness, we can allow our failures to love to drive us back to our Lord and Redeemer. We draw closer to our Lord, Savior, and Redeemer, and as we do so, we find that we are able to love more truly and more joyfully.

Our text makes another association with loving our neighbor: we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.  This raises all kinds of questions, challenges, and difficulties as loving ourselves becomes incorporated into loving God and others.  Please stay tuned for this aspect of loving God!  Meanwhile, please consider that loving God and loving others is more than an expression of Old Testament Law and Gospel history.  Loving God and loving others is at the very heart of who we are and who we are becoming in Christ and an integral part of our life in Him.

Thought For The Day

“I doubt if there is any problem in the world today—social, political or economic—that would not find a happy solution if approached in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.”

                                                                                    President Harry S. Truman

It's Who You Know....

In a recent sermon at Windsor Chapel, Pastor Andy Straubel referred to the common phrase, “It’s who you know.”  The phrase is a close cousin to, “Friends in high places.” Both idioms reflect the pride, satisfaction, and even power and privilege that often comes with knowing someone who is important in the world.  And in our current status-focused culture, who you know may matter more than a little. But only for a wink of time.

It can be easy to get caught up in our celebrity-fixated culture.  Shoppers spend hard-earned money purchasing tabloid newspapers in order to be more “in the know” about their favorite celebrities.  Fans of musical groups wait in endless lines not just to see a performance but with the hope of catching an up close and personal glimpse of one of the its star performers.  In a recent Yankee game, a fan caught the first home run ball of a new player.  In negotiating the ball’s return for this player, the fan got an opportunity to meet some of the Yankees in the clubhouse after the game.  

In the end, though, there is only one relationship that can give us what we truly want and need: a foundational relationship with Jesus Christ.  Christ is indeed a friend in the highest of high places!  He is our Creator and Redeemer.  Because of His death on the cross on our behalf, we are justified in the eyes of the Almighty and are assured of a place in the company of the Triune God for all eternity.

Knowing Christ is about more than stamping our ticket for heaven, or for getting that selfie and sharing it on social media. Knowing Christ is about the ongoing pursuit of a dynamic, intimate relationship with the Lord of the universe. He abides in us, and we abide in Him. We experience the healing power of being fully known and loved anyway.  As bond-servants of Christ, we serve a Master who delights in us and who will never leave us or forsake us.  We find our identity as we partake in the very nature of Christ and the joy of exercising the gifts He has given us in fulfilling the eternally significant purposes for which we were created.  We come to know the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, so that by faith we can move mountains.  And we enjoy the privilege of being son and daughters of the Most High God.

This brings us back to where we began.  We can be name-droppers!  We know the Creator and Lord of the universe.  That puts us in a unique position to declare not only His name but His goodness to others.  As we proclaim Christ in what we say and do, we invite others to trade their worldly focus on fame and fortune for the eternal glory of Christ and His kingdom.

“More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowingChristJesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ….”

Philippian 3:8

The Lion of Judah and Lamb of God

The Bible is full of rich metaphors, word-parables so to speak.  One of my favorites is Christ depicted as the Lion of Judah.  We get our first hint of the connection at the end of Genesis when Jacob-now-Israel blesses his twelve sons before he dies.  These sons represent the twelve tribes of Israel, and none is more significant than the tribe of Judah.  In Genesis 49:9-10 we read:

                        Judah is a lion’s whelp;

From the prey, my son, you have gone up.

He couches, he lies down as a lion,

And as a lion, who dares rouse him up?

The scepter shall not depart form Judah,

Nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,

Until Shiloh comes,

And to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.

Numbers 24:9 records the prophet Balaam repeating part of Jacob’s prophecy, and it is generally recognized as an early proclamation of the coming Messiah, Christ.  The expanded and fulfilled prophecy is proclaimed in Revelation 5:5:

…and one of the elders said to me, “Stop weeping; behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome so as to open the

book and its seven seals.”

But Christ is not always depicted as a lion, as a fierce ruler.  The prophet Isaiah describes the Messiah as a lamb that is led to the slaughter (Isaiah 53:7).  This imagery is potent and powerful.  When the Lord used Moses to lead His people out of slavery in Egypt, He gave instructions for each household (or group of households) to sacrifice a lamb—the Passover Lamb—and paint their door lintels with its blood in order to escape the imminent judgment that was coming upon Egypt.  The sacrifice of lambs for sin was an integral part of the Old Testament Law. 

When John the Baptist proclaimed to two of his disciples that Jesus was the Lamb of God, there were a few dots to connect.  Many and probably most Jews anticipating the coming of the Messiah were looking for a king, for the Lion of Judah.  And here was a lamb, blameless to be sure, but not even particularly attractive.  The concept of the Christ suffering and dying was abhorrent to the Apostle Peter (Matthew 16: 21-23), and we can be sure Peter was not alone in his perspective.

  

And so we come to the point of Easter.  Jesus was not sometimes the lion and sometimes the lamb. He was not merely both the lion and the lamb.  He is the Lion who became the Lamb.  He died for us that we might rule with Him.  Again, the fifth chapter of Revelation gives us a glimpse of what this will look like:

And I saw between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth. ⁷And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne. ⁸When He had taken the book, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each one holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. ⁹And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy are You to take the book and to break its seals; for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.  “You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth.”

Evangelical Christians often claim Christ as their Lord and Savior.  It is the Lion-Lamb who we celebrate at Easter.  May we appreciate both elements of His character and celebrate with joy and gratitude.