Saturday night

I'm feeling very thankful tonight.

Because this handsome, heroic guy

helped me clean windowsills today.

And by "helped," I mean he manned the vacuum.  Actually, first he used the central vac, until it wouldn't reach anymore.  Then he journeyed down and retrieved his vacuum from the basement, to finish every far nook and corner.  He did such a good job that when I came behind him with spray cleaner and paper towels to polish the next layer, there wasn't much left to wipe off.

We've had an incredible number of spiders this year, spiders and webs by the dozen, every single night.  I haven't been able to keep up.  Then I got seriously behind.  My windows were terrifyingly infused with cloudy white webbing, dangling black egg sacs, and the crusty remains of fly entrees.  Whenever I thought, "I ought to open up those windows and get after that," my next thought was immediately, "Nope.  Not when I'm home alone, I'm not getting after that."

My HERO helped me overcome this.

Spider-extinguisher.  Web-obliterator.  Insect-refuse-eradicator.  Rescuing hero and lover of my soul.

Thank you.

Fresh air blew through the house for the rest of the day.  The sills gleam, shining white.

It was a good day.  I will sleep well.

A question from BSF Lesson #2 (Romans)

In Bible Study Fellowship, we studied Romans 1:18-32 this past week.  This is the classic Biblical text that addresses the progression of rebellious man into increasingly destructive sexual sins.

One of the questions in our lesson was, "What are some of the reasons God links the sin of idolatry to sexual immorality?"

A number of people reacted to that question with confusion and disinterest.

It was a good question, though, and leads to a much better understanding of sexual issues.

In my attempt to share my answer, apparently I failed to be clear or convincing, because when I was done, one woman in the group said, "Well, I don't know what the question means, but I just think sin is sin, and that's all there is to it."

It made me sad.  I think this is part of the reason why it is hard to reach those who have been drawn in by sexual sin.  Telling them, "Sin is sin, and you are sinful," is not a productive approach.

On our lesson sheet, the BSF question: "What are some of the reasons God links the sin of idolatry to sexual immorality?" suggested we look up the following texts for "help" answering the question.

• Genesis 1:26-27 (God created man in His own image, male and female in the image of God.)
• Genesis 2:24-25 (Man and woman are to leave their parents and be united into one flesh; the first man and woman were naked and unashamed.)
• Mark 10:8-9 (Restates that a man and a woman will be joined into one flesh, joined by God and not to be separated by man.)
• 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (Talks about who will not inherit the kingdom of God, and lists sexual sins, including homosexuality.)
• 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 ("Flee from sexual immorality.  All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.  Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own; you were bought at a price.  Therefore, honor God with your body.")

I'm just saying, but in that list, the only texts that actually apply to the question are the first and the last.  The three in the middle only confuse the issue.  They may show Biblical evidence that homosexuality is contrary to God's design, but they don't bear any weight on why God links idolatry with sexual immorality.  The question was, "What are some of the reasons God links the sin of idolatry to sexual immorality?"

Besides pointing to some unhelpful texts, BSF left out some texts that would have been extremely helpful:

• Isaiah 43:6b-7 ("Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth--everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.")
• The book of Hosea.  (This book is about spiritual adultery, allegorically explained through human adultery.  Hosea 3:1 somewhat encapsulates the theme:  "The Lord said to me, 'Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress.  Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.' ")
• Jeremiah 2-3, 13:22-27 (Graphic descriptions, comparing the idolatry of Israel to sexual unfaithfulness.)
• Ephesians 5:31-32 (" 'For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church.")
• James 4:3-4 ("When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your own pleasures.  You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God?")
• Revelation 19:7 ("Let us rejoice and be glad and give Him glory!  For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready.")

(All emphases were added by me.)

Maybe in reading these texts, you are starting to synthesize an understanding of where I am going, before I spell it out.  I hope so!  I want so badly to answer this question simply and clearly.

Here are my points:

1.  God created humanity in His image.  He even created both maleness and femaleness, somehow, in His image.  We are created in the image of God for the purpose of glorifying God by reflecting His glory into His creation.  Reflecting the image of God is a Big Deal.  We are only little mirrors, little moons, reflecting the sun. We have no business messing with or distorting the Image of God.

2.  God created the male-female relationship to mirror the God-humanity relationship.  God is a God of faithfulness, relationship and covenant love.  God is always faithful to His promises, His covenants.  God has made a covenant with His people.  Jehovah is the husband of Israel, and Christ is the husband of the church.  God keeps His covenants.  Likewise, it is God's desire that a man and a woman remain faithful to the promises they make to one another when they covenant in marriage.

3.  When we see physical adultery among the people of earth, we can understand the pain it causes.  This should help us understand the extreme devastation that results from spiritual adultery, when people turn away from the one true God and look instead to worthless things for their hope, satisfaction, peace, joy and sustenance.

4.   Sexuality can become an idol, when we look to it for fulfillment and pleasure outside of God's will.  When we try to use sexual intimacy as a replacement for spiritual intimacy with God, we are bound for big trouble, although we may not realize our predicament right away.

5.  Sexual sin is especially insidious.  When a murder is committed, a dead body makes the problem fairly obvious.  Likewise with theft, there is a visible loss of property; someone's means have been diminished.  When sexual sin occurs between two consenting parties, and particularly if there are neither betrayed spouses nor children involved, it may be less obvious what the problem is.  This is why 1 Corinthians 6 tells us, "he who sins sexually sins against his own body."  We may not be able to see, immediately, what the harmful result is.  It is an invisible problem, a damaged soul and spirit.  Nevertheless, the damage is deep.  When we depart from God's directions for sexual relationships, we lacerate our purity and faithfulness.  Thus, the image of God in us becomes disfigured.

After considering these points, we can reconsider the question:

"What are some of the reasons God links the sin of idolatry to sexual immorality?"

Here are some reasons:

• Both idolatry and sexual immorality are about turning away from God and rebelling against His authority.
• Sexual immorality breaks down the image of Himself that God designed within mankind.  Thus, sexual immorality reinforces fallen humanity's inclination to turn increasingly farther away from God and seek satisfaction, pleasure and happiness elsewhere. 
• The definition of idolatry is: seeking satisfaction, pleasure and happiness in something other than God, while turning away from God (or sometimes even while trying to pay lip service to God on the side).

When sexual sin disfigures the image of God in man--the glorious image that man was created to reflect and display--man loses his worth (see 2 Kings 17:15, Jeremiah 2:5, Hosea 9:10).

It begins with a failure to trust God and believe that He knows what is best for us, even if something forbidden seems like it would be very pleasurable (remember how "good for food and pleasing to the eye" that lethal fruit in the garden seemed?).  As people turn away from the wise counsel of God, prioritizing their own opinions and desires, it is as though they turn off a light.

When you turn off the light, you are left in the dark.

That is what Romans 1:21 is talking about.  "For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."

So, Romans 1:24-28 tells us three times that God "gave them over" to what they were seeking.  God never forces His way on us.  He will pursue you, because He loves you.  However, He will never coerce you.

God gives you what you want.  Woe to you if you want destructive things.  However, even in giving you over, God often opens your eyes to the devastation of your choices in time for you to see the resulting wreckage and repent.  He wants you back.  He calls you back.  He sent Jesus to get you back.

Here's one of my current favorite verses:

I will heal their waywardness 

and love them freely, 

for my anger has turned away from them.

Hosea 14:4

What do you do?

What do you do

when you are just that tired,

oh so tired,

and your neck hurts

because you threw it out whilst fumbling a tiny pot of eye cream

during your morning ablutions?

When you are parched with thirst

but too tired to get a drink,

because it's so much work to find a way

to balance the glass

and avoid leaving wet rings on furniture.

When you need a walk

but a walk sounds ghastly,

 although you usually like walks,

but not today

in this sweltering Indian summer heat.

Too tired to type.

The letters keep coming up wrong.

Too tired to read, 

but perhaps you will try.

Too tired to initiate a project.

Too tired to make an appointment.

Too tired to carry the laundry downstairs.

Yet, the sun is high,

shining up a bright and fancy day

totally inappropriate for napping.

Words coming together

Many years ago, I started to pray for joy.

I did this out of selfishness and self-defense, primarily because I was afraid to pray for patience.  I'd heard stories about praying for patience.  "If you pray for patience," everybody said, "watch out!  You will get all kinds of trials, to test your patience."

Of course I wanted to avoid trials.  So I decided never to pray for patience, but to pray for joy instead.  I didn't think there could be a downside to praying for joy.

Well.  I had a lot to learn.  I could probably write a whole series of books about everything I've learned related to this.  And that is not saying that I learned everything there is to know--I'm sure that I've only learned a small fraction of what there is to know.

So, instead of trying to tell you "everything," I'm going to distill it to a few words:

Pride.

Dignity.

Humility.

Grace.

Gratitude.

Joy.

Pride is the problem.  Pride is putting yourself first, focusing on your feelings, and working hard to control your circumstances.  Pride is not so much thinking that you are better than other people, although that's what we automatically associate with pride.  Rather, pride is assuming that your perspective is correct and your feelings are very important.  Most of us do this without thinking about it; it's so automatic, it's invisible to us.  That's Satan's favorite.  He loves to keep us blinded to our sins.  Pride is a sin--a very fundamental, basic sin--that hinders our relationship with God.

Dignity is what we should have instead of pride.  Dignity means that we have an appropriate, accurate view of who we are and what is called for in our behavior.  When we have dignity, we act with respect for others and respect for ourselves--true respect, dignity, acting with grace even in difficult circumstances--because this is who we are.  And who are we?  We are children of God, created by God, redeemed by Christ and indwelt by the Holy Spirit.  Dignity knows Whose we are, and carries His banner like an ambassador.

Humility is the opposite of pride, but it is inherent in dignity.  Humility is understanding that God is sovereign, and we are not.  Humility is realizing that none of us are the center of the universe, God is.  Humility is realizing that God does not need us, but we need Him, desperately.  Humility is understanding the way we have been born mutated by sin, and in need of repair by the Master Creator of the Universe.  Humility understands that God created people to glorify Him--to love Him and to reflect His glory into the created Universe.  Humility also understands that we--created men and women--have pridefully rebelled against God, and thus failed to fulfill His purpose for us.  Thus, humility understands that we deserve nothing from God except destruction.  When something is too broken to fulfill its purpose, the normal conclusion is to throw it away.

Grace is what God gives us in place of our deserved destruction.  We cannot understand grace if we do not understand what we truly deserve.  If we assume that we deserve heaven (or even just "all the good things"), then "grace"--under that assumption--simply would mean that God is nice and comes through to provide what we thought we ought to have received anyway.  But if we understand that God had every reason and every right to crumple us up and discard us, that He could have started over with a new, unblemished creation, but instead He chose to die for us, in our place, while we were sinners, so He could purchase us back from Satan and embark on a massive restoration project, then we begin to grasp what grace means.  Grace is undeserved, by definition.

We can't understand grace if we don't have any humility.

But when, through humility, we grasp the concept of grace, we arrive at gratitude. Thanksgiving.  Gratitude.

Gratitude arises when we receive something outrageously generous, something we could never have hoped to attain or afford, outside of an intervening miracle.  We are thankful when we brush the edge of destruction and the hand of God delivers us into life, instead of death.

When we are truly thankful, to the depth of our being, in the reverberating center of our hearts, then we experience joy.  Joy comes from gratitude and thanksgiving.

Joy is the fruit that grows in a grateful heart.

A grateful heart comes from an accurate understanding of what we deserve, and what we are not entitled to.  In other words, gratitude originates in humility.

Humble people experience joy, and (sadly) prideful people cannot.  That's another one of Satan's lies: "Have pride in yourself.  You are important.  You are where the buck stops.  You can call the shots, and anybody who tries to stop you from calling the shots is a bad person.  Seize your rights!  This is how you pursue happiness!"  But it simply doesn't work that way.  Satan is a liar, and pride will never bring you more than a flashing glimmer of happiness.

Pride is the pitfall.

Dignity is the escape route.

Humility is the cousin of dignity and the key to appreciating grace, which ultimately results in gratitude.

And gratitude leads to joy.

Words coming together.

In conclusion, here is a short analysis of the result of praying for joy: You will get the pride beat out of you.  But it's a really good thing.  It's worth it.



Also, you'll find all of this in the book of Philippians, in the Bible, if you are inclined to look.  I realized this today at church, as our pastor is preaching through Philippians.

Pride and Dignity

Our culture celebrates pride.  We are supposed to be proud of ourselves, our bodies, our traditions, our ethnicity and our choices.

I think when our culture glorifies pride, the assumption is that pride means feeling good about yourself and accepting yourself.  Pride is believing in yourself.  Pride is telling yourself, "I am a good person.  I am worthy.  I am deserving."

Although there may be a surface appeal to this philosophy, the Christian in me must protest.  There is a part of me that has a knee-jerk reaction that says, "This is wrong!  This is utterly contrary to the gospel!"  And it is.

But.

Sometimes we Christians get the gospel a little bit mixed up, too.  Because in the self-deprecating idea that we are miserable, undeserving, stinking, low-down sinners, we lose the idea of the dignity inherent in the fact that humanity was created by God, in His image.

Created by God.

In His image.

The Bible says that everything God created was good.  God created us, and pronounced us good.

Original goodness preceded original sin.  How often do we ponder that?

We were created by God, for friendship with God.  We were created out of God's love, to receive God's love.

There is dignity in that.  We truly are special.  It's not marketing puffery.  God created us.   He did good work when He made us, and He was pleased with His creation.  He pronounced us good.  There is an intrinsic goodness in us that sin can never completely erase.

Ah.  Sin.

Sin originated in pride, flowing out of those who believed in themselves rather than in God.

God created all things good.  As He went through the process of creating, He continually examined what He was making and saw that it was good.  Everything was good.

Into all this goodness, God placed a man and a woman.  Then, He saw that His creation was not only good, it was very good!

In God's good creation there was a beautiful garden, and in the garden there were many different, beautiful, fruit-bearing trees.  In the middle of the garden, God placed a tree called, "The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil."  This is the first we hear of evil.

C.S. Lewis says that there is no evil that was not first something good.  Evil does not exist independently.  It is merely a perversion of what is good.  This is why, even today after so many years of living with the consequences of sin, we are shocked and appalled when we see news stories about heinous crimes that people have committed.  God created people for good, and it bothers us when people do horrible things.  "What is wrong with people?" we ask.

Sin.  That's what is wrong with people.  Sin came into the garden when Adam and Eve chose to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The irony is that they already had the knowledge of good (Colin S. Smith pointed this out, and it is true).  God told them not to eat the fruit, because He wanted them to be protected from the knowledge of evil.  The only thing God had denied them was the knowledge of evil.  Who would even want to know evil?  Satan, the deceiver, came along and gussied up evil like a flashy prostitute, to tempt them. "Your eyes will be opened if you eat this fruit," he beguiled. "You will be like God, knowing good from evil.  You won't die!"

"You will be like God," he said.  And their pride rose up in their hearts.  God had something they did not have.  God was keeping something from them.  They wanted it.  They wanted everything.  They wanted to be like God, great and powerful and wise.  How could a loving God refuse to share something with them?

"You will be like God, knowing good from evil," said Satan.

So they ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and since they already knew good, they learned about evil.  They experienced evil.  Evil grabbed hold of God's creation with a power Adam and Eve had never imagined.   Winds turned harsh.  Gentle rains turned into violent storms.  Lions started eating lambs, and bacteria began to spread diseases.

"You won't die!" promised Satan.

They did not die immediately, that day.  But they eventually died, just as God had said they would, and Satan is a liar.  Before their own deaths, they saw other deaths.  Because they were naked, God made clothing for them from animal skins, from animals that died, animals whose deaths they witnessed, animals whose deaths benefitted them.  They also saw one of their sons kill another of their sons.

They ate the forbidden fruit, and they experienced evil.  They experienced sorrow and fear and death.

Thus, the curse of sin entered creation and contaminated all of creation.  Sin and death rule our world, and every person born arrives marked with the mutation of sin.

Yet, even in the earliest beginning, God made promises: "I will cause hostility between the snake and the woman, between her offspring and the snake's.  The snake will bruise the heel of the Seed of the woman, but the Seed of the woman will crush the snake's head."

The snake would be trampled, and the curse would be undone.

Someday.

Because God loves His creation, loves humanity, loves people.

God values people, and from the beginning, He planned to rescue us, to go to unfathomable lengths to redeem and restore us.  He created us good, and He has perfect plans to restore us to goodness.

* * * * * * *

Pride says, "I believe in myself.  I can live perfectly well without God.  I can figure out my own standard for good and bad."  This is a lie.  It's quite obvious.  If all of us try to figure out our own standards for good and bad, there will be millions of different standards, and nobody will agree, and everybody will fight.  Life cannot be good if we don't have a universal standard for goodness.  It is hard enough to cooperate if we have a universal standard for goodness, but it is fundamentally impossible if we don't have one.  Meanwhile, Satan slithers around in the background, gleefully whispering to each proud heart, "You are the one who is right about this.  Believe in yourself.  Nobody can tell you what's good or bad.  Nobody has the right to judge you."

Unlike pride, dignity says, "There is a true goodness that I can aspire to.  There is a good God who loves me and wants to reveal this goodness to me.  There is a quest for true goodness that I can embark upon, and God will meet me and teach me, because He loves me.  I believe in God and His good plans for creation."

* * * * * * *

Pride says, "I am a good person."

Dignity says, "The Lord loves me, and He is in the process of purifying me for His good purposes."

* * * * * * *

Pride says, "I am worthy: worthy of respect, worthy of reward."

Dignity says, "The Lord Himself has redeemed me, at the price of His own precious blood.  Although I was of little worth, He saw my potential and bought me out of slavery to sin.  I am a fixer-upper, and He is the best renovation artist ever.  In the opinion of the God of the Universe, I was worth dying for, even in my sinful state, because He knows the plans He has for me, to make me valuable in His Kingdom.  His work in my life produces beauty in me and proves my worth to Him."

* * * * * * *

Pride says, "I am deserving. I deserve all the good things.  I should have comfort, health, happiness and approval."

Dignity says, "Although I was captive to foolishness, godlessness and sin, the Lord graciously saved me and gave me hope and a future.  When I deserved to be cast aside, He drew me into His arms.  He opened my eyes to reality, brought me to my senses.  He showed me the destructive end of sin, the dire consequences I had racked up for myself.  Then He graciously pulled me up out of the slimy pit of mud and mire, and gave me a firm place to stand.  He put a new song in my mouth, so I could thank Him and praise Him and experience fullness of joy.  When I deserved hell, Jesus offered me heaven."

* * * * * * *

One of the greatest ironies of life is this:  Pride, while pretending to offer you dignity, actually robs you of your dignity.

Dignity comes from understanding that we were created in the image of God, for the glory of God.  Sin has thrown some kinks into the equation, universally staining us from birth, but under God's powerful hand we can be made new and pure.  This purity comes first through the forgiveness that is possible because Jesus took the penalty that we deserved.  Yes, if you want to talk about what we deserve, we deserve permanent separation from God--in other words, hell.  But Jesus experienced hell in our place, to save us from eternal damnation.  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He cried from the cross.  He died for us, taking our punishment on His own body.  By spilling His blood for us, He has enabled us to be declared righteous before God.  Then, when He rose again, He enabled His very Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God, to be poured out into our hearts.  The Holy Spirit works to purify us day by day, helping us to understand what is right and good, and empowering us to do what is right and good.  Dignity says, "I belong to the King of the Universe, and He loves me."

* * * * * * *

Pride denies God and refuses to worship Him, refuses to glorify Him, refuses to thank Him.

Dignity sees creation and gives thanks to the Creator, wondering at the mystery of His power, beauty and love.

* * * * * * *

Pride becomes darkened in its thinking, foolish and futile, fixated on defending its own wrong perspective.

Dignity sees by the illuminating light of the Holy Spirit and grows in knowledge and truth.

* * * * * * *

Pride casts aside the Creator and instead worships created things.  Eventually, pride worships mere images of created things, becoming more and more degraded as it worships increasingly worthless and harmful things.

Dignity aligns itself with the Creator and Redeemer and praises Him in gratitude, drawing worth from the Glorious One it worships.

* * * * * * *

Pride behaves in destructive, disgraceful ways that lead to shame.  Pride tries to battle shame by pretending that there is no shame, by claiming that shameful things are good, by lying.

Dignity is clothed in the righteousness of Christ, empowered by the Spirit of Christ, and transformed into the likeness of Christ.  Dignity bears the good fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Dignity walks in the power of Truth.

* * * * * * *

God offers us dignity, in place of our miserable, deadly pride.

But you, O Lord,

are a Shield about me,

my Glory,

and the Lifter of my head.

Psalm 3:3 (ESV)

Humility

That's a bad picture, the one I put up at the top of this post.

Humility is not about posting bad pictures.  Yet, pride can be about only posting beautiful pictures, only showing what you want to show, presenting an image that only reflects the best light.  "The me I want you to see," that's pride (also, it's social media).

The Lord seems to be teaching me a lot about humility lately.  Although, by virtue of what humility is, one can never become exactly adept at it, or comfortable in it, or proficient.

What would it even look like to be proficient in humility?

One thing I've learned that humility is not: Humility is not pre-emptive self-deprecation.  A lot of us can fall into doing this, this pre-emptive self-deprecation thing.  We apologize in advance for our shortcomings, the ones we are aware of, in hopes that people will then go soft on us, understand that we already feel bad about ourselves, desist in looking deeper for further flaws, since they've already been presented with some really outstanding flaws to distract them.  Yes, I do this.  It's a self-protecting technique.  It rises out of insecurity, and it is not humility.

Humility is the opposite of pride.  Sometimes when it is hard to understand a concept, it helps to look at the thing opposite it, to determine what it is not.

Pride is believing that you are important.  This may not mean that you think you are important to the world, like a king or a queen or an army commander.  It means that inside your head, you operate under the assumption that your feelings are very important.  You may not consciously realize it, but you think that people ought to treat you as you wish to be treated, fairly and kindly and respectfully.

Unlike a proud person, a humble person does not assume that he is entitled to be treated well wherever he goes.  Instead, a humble person thinks about how he is treating other people.  He is much more attuned to whether he himself is being fair, or kind, or respectful than to how others are treating him.

It's tricky, too.  Because it becomes pride again if, while thinking about the other person's perspective, you start to focus specifically on how the other person perceives you.  It's not about your image in the other person's eyes.  It's about the other person's feelings.  You have to lose track of yourself, and attend to other people, if you are to escape pride.

This sounds pretty good.  The idea of thinking about the needs of others, and being able to get one's eyes off one's own needs, actually sounds pretty freeing.  In fact, I'm sure it is very freeing.

But it's also stinking hard.

They have always said, "Don't pray for patience.  You'll get all kinds of experiences that test your patience."

Well.  Let me tell you.  If you pray for humility, you may find yourself having experiences that humiliate you.  Humiliate, shame and embarrass, not necessarily in that order.

Still, if God has chosen to grow you in humility, you won't escape the process by not asking for it  (that would be the proverbial you, which is to say, me).  The same holds true for patience, and any other virtue.  God will do what He needs to do.

It will probably hurt a lot.  But it will be good, profitable, worth every agony.

If Jesus emptied Himself of all His divine glory and became a human with a body of skin, bones and blood, we need to be willing to empty ourselves of our ideas of what is due us.

If Jesus humbled Himself to death on a cross, we need to be willing to make personal sacrifices and pour ourselves out for the good of others.  (Oh how difficult this is.)

If Jesus was raised and glorified following His obedience, we can have hope that our faithful God will also raise and glorify us, after we have served in obedience, and there is great joy to come in the future, certain joy that gives us strength to carry on.

In humility.



This post is based on Philippians 2:1-11 and Hebrews 12:1-3.