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Wednesday, March 02, 2005
The Sermon on the Mount
I had Matthew 5-7 as my reading allotment this morning. It had been quite a while since I'd just sat and read through "the sermon on the Mount", and wow. Just so much in there to bless me and teach me. Especially convicting and empowering this morning were the following sections:
Matt 5:13-16 13 "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how will it be made salty {again} It is good for nothing anymore, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. 14 "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 "Nor do {men} light a lamp, and put it under the peck-measure, but on the lampstand; and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 "Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. (NAS)I've read/heard these verses with some regularity since I was a baby. I remember doing a skit about them at "church camp" when I was a little ten-year-old Methodist. And yet it was as I was reading them this morning that for the first time I read verse 16 to mean the following:
"Let people know that you love Jesus so that when they see your good works, they glorify God in heaven, and not you."
In the context of the rest of the teaching, that's the reading that makes the most sense -- we are to change the earth, to light it up, not to just go along our own little ways and leave the world unchanged. Wow.
Also, I got a new "take" on chapter 6, verses 19-21:
Matt 6:19-21
19 "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.
20 "But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal;
21 for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
(NAS)
These verses are often used to encourage people to spend less money gathering up possessions, and more money helping others. And this is one application, but in a larger sense, these verses are about more than just money. "Treasures" here doesn't just mean money; it means the approval and admiration of our fellow men. Again, the key is context. This admonition comes after a long section about not putting on a "show" with our works in various ways -- we're told not to give so that others will see us and be impressed, or to put on a show about fasting or praying. The chapter begins with this:
Matt 6:6 6 "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you. (NAS)and then we have these verses:
Matt 6:6 6 "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you. (NAS)Matt 6:16
16 "And whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites {do,} for they neglect their appearance in order to be seen fasting by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.
(NAS)
In other words, if you do what you do hoping for the praise of men, then the praise of men is your reward. If you're doing it for the Lord, you don't need the praise of men. We can have treasure on earth (the praise of men) or treasure in heaven (reward/blessing from God).
At first glance the teaching about doing our good deeds in secret may seem to contradict the "city on a hill" idea, but when you look more closely, it doesn't. To hide our lamp under a bushel would be to keep our faith to ourselves, so that the good things we do give glory to ourselves, as opposed to letting the world know that we love Jesus so that credit for our deeds goes to Him. And when Jesus was telling the crowd to look healthy when they fasted and to pray in private and give secretly, He was teaching toward the same end. We don't want people to look at us and go, "WOW. That person is SO SPIRITUAL." We want them to look at us, and then say, "Wow. God is SO GOOD." There's a difference, no?
If you have ten minutes today (that's all it takes for a quick read-through), why not pull out a Bible and read Matthew 5-7? It's one of the most user-friendly sections of Scripture, it's basic and yet no matter how many times you've read it you'll never finish plumbing the depths of it. And besides, I'm itching for someone with whom to discuss it. ;-)
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Friday, February 25, 2005
Questions from Kristen
1) What book (in the last year) has most impacted your relationship with God (excluding the Bible)?
Well. Most of the actual book-reading I do is novels, some of which affect me positively spiritually (like Jane Eyre, or the Mitford books, and I'm reading Les Misérables right now, for example), some of which are neutral (Austen and many others) and some of which I frankly maybe shouldn't be exposing myself to. Every bit of garbage I put in my head stays there, whether I'm "reading with discernment" or not. Something to think about. ANYWAY. As far as what I've read that's most affected my relationship with God, well, Kristen, your journal would be high on the list. ;-)
2) If you could choose a country to live in other than your current home country, which would it be, and why?
That would be really hard. America has its faults but I do love it, and frankly I can't think of another first-world nation whose policies and lifestyle aren't even further from my ideal than the U.S. is, with the possible exception of Israel, and that's no place to move right now, when you have kids. Maybe in Africa or South America, as a missionary?
3) If you were sent to the Isle of Patmos for the rest of your life and could only bring ONE BOOK of the Bible, which would it be? Why?
This is the question I've been thinking about the most since I first read these questions, and I'd have to answer Psalms. For one thing, it's the longest, and I like variety. ;-) For another, there's a little bit of everything in Psalms -- lots of comfort, plenty of conviction, BIG views of God, personal views of God, prophecies about Jesus, it's all there. So if I could only have ONE, that would probably be it.
4) What was your favorite movie, book, or character as a child?
In early childhood, I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Narnia books, and a whole lot of assorted kids' books like Mr. Popper's Penguins, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Blue Willow (note: with the possible exception of The Phantom Tollbooth, I am still enormously fond of all of these books today). Later I discovered Anne (of Green Gables, of course), and as a teenager I added Dickens to my list of favorites, on the strength of David Copperfield and Great Expectations. And let's not forget the obligatory worldy-teenager fit of literary angst which included a profound admiration of John Steinbeck and the socialism he stood for. Ouch.
That's what you get for asking me to pick a favorite. :)
5) What's your very 'favoritest' thing to eat?
Oh, no! You did it again! :)
Probably the food that I MOST love to have in my mouth, no matter what my mood is and dietary considerations aside, is REALLY GOOD cookies-and-cream ice cream over a warm walnut brownie with hot fudge and whipped cream on top.
Thanks for the questions (and everything else as well), Kristen! :)
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Why another online journal?
The Lord has been working in me lately. A lot.
I can't really say "it all started with...", because, well, it all started before the foundation of time, when you really get down to it, and God has been working through events my entire life to bring me into first any relationship at all with him, and then to bring me closer and mold me into the woman He wants me to be. I am, like every follower of Jesus (and every other person, really) a work in progress. However. The most recent chain of events which have brought me to this point where I can feel myself being drawn nearer to Him started with, of all things, a really offensive cartoon about homeschooling, and my response to it. Some of the people who commented on my response left links to their journals, and those journals had links to OTHER journals, and just... wow. These are women who are not afraid to put it all out there for Jesus, and who defend the gospel eloquently and with humor, and who also are likeable people in their own right. I think I developed about four friend-crushes in the space of two hours.
Now, I've been a Christian for twelve years this month. I went through the standard phase at the beginning of my Christian walk when I was really passionate and really in love with Jesus and really vocal about it and also really clueless about how to be anything but very heavy-handed with the gospel. I was everything that annoys non-Christians about Christians, really, with very sharp edges and very little understanding of other positions. Fast-forward ten or eleven years and basically I had the opposite set of problems. I had allowed myself to be immersed in the world so much and for so long, and I was out of the Word, and basically my Christian walk was a façade of church and Bible-study attendance and teaching my children about Jesus, over a morass of uncertainty and apathy. I wasn't witnessing, not just because of the standard fear of rejection but because I had honestly fallen into a trap of not really believing that it was important. I was essentially giving lip-service to being a Christian. Well, not exactly, because my life (from a distance, at least, if you didn't look too closely at how I spent my time and what I read and what I watched and the words that would slip out of my mouth) was also "on the straight and narrow". I was never unfaithful to my husband even in thought; I never stopped going to church or doing my weekly Bible study. But I was at first appalled, and then later I shrugged, at how infrequently I opened the Bible when it didn't directly involve one of those two events. I had no private devotions or prayer time. My online journal was full of posts that bordered on disrespect for God and certainly didn't give any solid impression of myself as a woman who was devoted to Him -- because I wasn't.
You know, in reading over that, it sounds a lot harsher than it was. There was nothing harsh about it. It was all very soggy really. Squishy. Undefined. My whole spiritual life was like wet newspaper.
Then last fall I was "roped into" going to a ladies' retreat. My mom paid for me to go; I assumed she was going as well, and then found out that indeed I was going to go off on my own with some near-strangers from our church to spend three days with a lot of TOTAL strangers, worshiping Jesus and learning about him. Now remember, I had my façade in place, although I think those closest to me knew something of the wet-newspaper-consistency mess that was underneath it, so this wasn't something along the lines of Let's Send Rachel Off To Get Right With God. I think my mom saw it as a way for me to get closer to God, because as I said I think she figured that I was not at the top of my game spiritually speaking, but I don't think she knew how riddled with doubt I was, or how very squishy my Christian walk had become. She just figured that if I were there alone (and if you know me at all you know that I do not mix well. I don't mind being ALONE alone, in fact I like it from time to time, what mother doesn't? but one of the worst places for me to be, comfort-wise, is in a large group of people where I am not friends with anybody, but everyone else there is friends with someone else. THAT is the worst possible kind of alone there is, to someone who had the experiences in elementary school and junior high that I did) it would throw me into God's arms pretty hard.
And it did. When I first got there I was nearly despondent; it was exactly as I had pictured it would be. Three hundred well-kept, stylishly-dressed, put-together women, calling out HELLO!! and It's so great to SEE you!! to each other, and then (homely, unattractive, awkward -- these words come FLOODING to mind when I am in this kind of situation) me, wandering around alone, making occasional snippets of meaningless conversation with the handful of women with whom I was acquainted, when I happened to encounter a chattering group of them. My paper journal from those first few hours is filled with words like "exile" and "reject". Then we went to the first evening's worship/teaching session -- and God reached down his arms and hugged me to him in a way that still brings tears to my eyes when I think of it. The rest of the weekend was amazing. I was no less alone physically -- I didn't miraculously turn around and make a dozen new best pinky-swear friends with whom I meet regularly for tea, or anything like that. But I spent the next forty hours or so in a kind of communion with God that I hadn't experienced in years. I couldn't go twenty minutes without crying. God revealed Himself to me in ways that brought me back trembling to worship at His feet and thank Him for my salvation and His love for me. I spent my alone time reading the Bible (and Persuasion too, OK, I was nearing the end of my annual Jane Austen re-read, but a LOT of the time it was the Bible), and praying. I won't lie to you and say that I never felt lonely again that weekend. I did. But God used that loneliness in a mighty way.
The problem was that the retreat ended. I couldn't spend the rest of my life in that painful kind of situation that sent me running to God until I was so happily out of breath -- nor would I want to. But coming back home took a bit of the glory out of the experience. I was back to the same life, the same situations, and it became easier and easier as the days went by to slough off the defined edges I'd regained at the retreat, and slide back toward sogginess. The doubts didn't return, I'll say that much, but over the course of months from then till now, I found it easier and easier to slip into old habits rather than stand out for Jesus. I'll be honest and say that much of it is simple fear -- that people won't like me, mostly. I want my online friends (some of whom are people I have known at one point or another in real life, while others aren't) to think I'm funny and clever, not to see me as one of those boring judgmental "born-agains". If I'd been confronted by it, I wouldn't have put it in those words exactly; I'd have sugar-coated it with things like "not wanting to alienate people with whom I might be able to share the gospel" -- until the last couple of days, reading these other journals by these Christian women, when I have been having a different sort of spiritual renewal -- one where I honestly assess my situation and find it lacking indeed. No fireworks, just a flashlight that shines into the corners and shows up all my spiderwebs.
So, in answer to the question that is the title of this post, this journal is going to be a chronicle of my movement back toward a walk that is truly "in newness of life". By the grace of God, I know I can do it. "Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come." (2 Corinthians 5:17)
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