Relevant To Life

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD,

   when the plowman shall overtake the reaper

   and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;

the mountains shall drip sweet wine,

   and all the hills shall flow with it.

Amos 9: 13

There were hard days coming. This had been the message that the Lord had given to Amos to proclaim to both Israel and Judah. The prosperity that they were enjoying was to be momentary, and the wealth, power, and riches of the lands would become waste, destruction, and death. Then all that remained by way of the people that inhabited these nations would be carried away to live as exiles, captives, and slaves to a pagan nation. This was not a pleasant prospect for the future, and its coming reality was attributed to the fact that the people of these God-ordained nations were living in the full expression of their own wills with little to no concern for God’s Holy Word or with almost no engagement in the Lord’s commission to live as righteous people in the middle of a spiritual desert.

Despite the Lord’s anger at His people and His sense of futility in trying to get them to turn back to worshiping Him with all of their being, God promises that there will be a day of restoration, rebuilding, and renewed abundance in the land. This rebirth of life for the descendants of those who will face the terror of those days of awful cleansing will be accomplished by the hand of God alone. He will set people to work on doing various needful tasks, but their actual freedom to do these things and the capacity to accomplish them will be the Lord’s gifts to those people. Their opportunity to have an impact on all that is to come rests in the hands of those who are hearing Amos’ plea. They are the people who have the opportunity to change the course of the future for themselves and for their children by turning away from the current path of self-worship and by returning to fully committed worship of the one true God.

It seems to me that we, too, may have this same sort of choice making to consider. The world where we dwell is one wherein worship of the Lord, in its true and fully engaged sense, is rare. We live in many prosperous nations that do little to care for or to engage in meaningful concern for those around us who are oppressed, starving, and rendered homeless because of the unchecked violence of our times. The Israelites were called upon by God to be His hands and to do His work in the world. The abundance of their fields was intended to help feed the hungry, and the wealth of their spiritual legacy was designed to overflow through their proclamation into the spiritually dead peoples that surrounded them. If we too are followers of Christ, then we hold the same calling from the Lord to proclaim His name and to bring the presence of His glory to all of the world by virtue of the way that we live our lives. We are to seek to make the bounty of the Lord’s visionary proclamation a spiritual and a literal reality in our world by caring for others, by loving the unlovely, and by sharing our great wealth, both physical and spiritual, with the numerous people that its provider holds as dear and precious in His sight. 

But I am the LORD your God

   from the land of Egypt;

you know no God but me,

   and besides me there is no savior.

Hosea 13: 4

Egypt was an extraordinary place for Israel. It was also a very special time in the history of God’s relationship with His people. The long years in Egypt were a true low point, a time of striking the rocky soil at the bottom of that pit of life where the skin on the national jaw is abraded away as a result of the face-plant that they have suffered. Yet, even this harsh and demoralizing life could seem to be better than the prospect of starvation, dehydration, and death at the hands of hostile forces that potentially loomed out there to the east in the desert terrain of the wilderness. Moses may have been forceful and Aaron might have been persuasive, but reason, logic, and fear also presented strong arguments against the journey. But Moses and Aaron were not alone in this venture. They were implored to act and led in the actions by the Lord, and the entire great adventure was directed by the ever-present Spirit, who went before them, provided food and water for all of them and protected them from harm by day and by night.

Like the Israelites, we face our times in Egypt. For some people that time of captivity is short and does not carry over into the rest of life. However, for most people, the oppression of that kingdom of evil has a more lasting effect, and its influence remains even after the individual has departed from Egypt’s borders. The Israelites had episodes and periods of time when they desired to go back; so, they acted as if they were still dwelling in that land to the west. Their thoughts and their actions were taken captive by the false gods and the anti-God practices of that former place and of those other people. We, too, may find ourselves thinking and acting in a manner that is reflective of life outside of Christ’s call to holiness. We all sin, we all fall short of the perfection of Christ, and despite the fact that we are redeemed and saved from the eternal consequences of that sin, we each require the on-going presence of the Spirit with and in us to continue the redemptive work of the cross on a day by day basis.

In Christ we each have our Savior. He leads us out of captivity to the rule of evil that is represented by Egypt in Hosea’s account. However, unlike Moses, Christ has already accomplished everything that is necessary for us to be granted a full pardon from all of the sin and resultant separation from God that can ever come over us. Moses was an imperfect and flawed human redeemer, but Christ is the perfect and unapparelled Savior of our souls and of our lives. We can turn to Him in our hours of doubt, and He will be present to assure our hearts of our new calling. Even when we turn away from God’s call to righteous living, the redemption of the cross is not diminished or withheld, for Christ holds on tightly to those who have turned to Him in faith. By and through Christ, each of us has been offered the opportunity to flee out of the bondage to sin and death that is known here as Egypt, as we accept that offer of redemption, we begin a journey of faith that will not end until we are beyond this life. This is a time of traveling in the company of the Spirit, it is a life in which we are required to continually submit to Christ’s transformative work within us, and it is a journey wherein faith and trust in Christ are the elements that continually point our hearts and minds toward our one and only Savior.

For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.

1 Peter 3: 17

Peter was aware of two realities that had faced him as he followed Christ, and he was also certain that they would face every other person who traveled that same path through life. Firstly, suffering and pain would come to each of us in the wake of our encounter with Christ, and secondly, all of our thoughts, words, and actions would order under one of two headings as they would be either good or evil. Although these categories or divisions of the content of life may seem extreme or even as overly simplistic and harsh, they represent the reality of how the content of all people’s lives are ordered when it comes to their most basic of descriptors. We effect good, or we bring about evil. Neutrality is not a part of what it means to serve a master in this world, and all of us are ordered under someone to whom we pledge our allegiance.

Christ leads us into that good side of the equation of life, and His Spirit works within us to bring about change that permeates the deepest aspects of our beings so that these changes have a positive impact upon the way that we think, and so, they also transform the words that we speak and the things that we do. In this process of change our will can come to our aid or it can work to hinder the progress that we will make in assimilating Christ as our identity and image. For as we yield to Christ and surrender control of the deepest aspects of our selves to the work of the Spirit, then we are most profoundly impacted by the presence of the Lord in our lives. When we hold on to areas of our beings that we find comfortable and deem as important to us, we tend to retard that same growth into Godliness.

I am not suggesting that this form of deep and highly personal surrender is easy, for it tends to involve aspects of our identity and being that have been developed over the entire course of life to date, and it also impacts us in places where we find some of our greatest sense of security and self-determined peace. Yet, even these aspects of life are ones in which Christ is asking us to enter into a form of the suffering that the righteous journey requires of all travelers along the holiness road. When we place the prized possessions of our egos and our escapist thoughts and actions upon the altar of Christ’s cross, we begin a journey of faith that will take us upon an often painful journey into transformative healing for those places within our souls that have been rubbed raw by our days of living in this harsh and broken world. The decision to accept whatever pain may come in the process, whether it is ours internally or derives from external sources, is a first step into pursuing good and rejecting evil. 

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Galatians 6: 2 

There are times when having some of the weight of the day lifted is not only helpful, but it can be almost life saving. Sometimes that involves something as simple as having another person come to me and offer to help with a task, talk through a situation, or pray with me for an answer. My shoulders lift a little higher, and my heart can beat a bit slower from the relief. On other days and in other times, I wind up being the one with a part of my friend’s load of bricks on my back; for, there seems to be a wonderful balance to the way that life goes in this regard. God doesn’t give us more than we can handle; however, I think that He looks at our capacity to take on weight based upon both our own strength and endurance and upon that of the other people that He will bring into our lives. 

God desires and plans for people to have a form of healthy interdependence that multiplies each of our strength, endurance, and effectiveness in ways that are supernatural. The Lord makes us sensitive to the needs of others, and He gives us the ability and the sense of security that are required to be vulnerable with others, too. One of the distinctives of the Kingdom of God is that none of us are all sufficient; yet, none of us are without capacity to help others. We are each uniquely, specially, and specifically given personal gifts and areas of strength that when combined create an unbeatable group that is a living, human image of Christ. 

Christ’s law is one of grace, love, and selflessness. Although it does not remove the stresses and struggles of living in this fallen and fractured world, it does provide the freedom, the skill, the strength, and the support to go through that life with our heads high and our hearts made lighter. This lightness is of an unworldly, a heavenly, form, for it can exist in the middle of pain, crisis, and the hardest of times. It is born out of the certainty that Christ has walked the same path that I am following, that He is walking with me in the here and now, and that I am joined on my journey by a world-wide community of faith. Jesus calls each of us to seek the opportunity to walk with others and to support them in handling the burden that they are carrying, and He asks us to trust others enough to open our hearts to let them help to shoulder our weigh with us.. Although, this may sound like a strange prayer request, I think that Christ will smile if we ask Him to bring us another person’s heavy load for us to help carry today.

Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

1 John 3: 18

Expressing how we feel about people is often much easier done through our words than through our actions. The words can be totally sincere and come from deep within us, but if they are not followed by tangible demonstration, they are empty and sometimes actually hurtful. We have all known people who speak about great intentions and express wonderful thoughts regarding commitment; yet, they continually fail to deliver on those words. Many of us can also recall times when we have been the unreliable party.

In my experience with God, He has never failed to follow through. When the Lord makes a promise and tells me that He will do something, He delivers. This is especially true when He tells me that His love for me is without bounds and is unlimited, for He demonstrates this love continually. I am cared about and cared for; I am made whole and made holy; and the Spirit of Christ stays with me through every moment of every day. God is totally true to His word.

Jesus has demonstrated for us what relationships should look like; because, He is the model for words of love that are turned into life expression of it. God’s consistent follow through on His promises to me in conjunction with His loving honesty are the demonstration of His absolute love for me. Christ wants something really simple from me in return; He wants me to extend the same type of expression of love to others. He wants me to show to people the difference that my relationship with Christ has made in me by the way that I actually engage them with honest and loving connection to their lives.

There is no better day than this one to show someone the love of Christ by the way that you treat them. This is the time to honestly care for others in the same manner as Christ honestly cares for you. God’s loving presence in your life will bring light and joy into the lives of others when you love them with caring words of encouragement and with honest and real actions. 

I will turn your feasts into mourning

   and all your songs into lamentation;

I will bring sackcloth on every waist

   and baldness on every head;

I will make it like the mourning for an only son

   and the end of it like a bitter day.

Amos 8: 10

It seems to me that God actually enjoys a good party. He wants His people to feel joy and to express it through laughter and in gathering together to celebrate the faithfulness and the goodness that the Lord has poured out upon them. I think that this appreciation for a celebratory spirit in people is a part of why God called upon His people, the Israelites to plan and schedule several feasts and festivals as specific occasions when they would gather to remember all that God had done for them and to enter into acts of atonement for their sins and ones that sought to solicit the Lord’s guidance and direction for the future. Although for the most part we do not adhere to the same formal schedule of special events, people still do celebrate and remember that which is good in our world at specific times on our calendars. To this day, we are a people who enjoy the goodness with which the Lord has graced us.

Despite God’s desire for His people to celebrate His presence with them, He informed them through the words of the prophet Amos that their actions would lead Him to turn those festivals into wakes. Their sinfulness was leading them into destruction, and their disobedience to God’s will for them to be honest and just people was forcing the Lord to withdraw His protections from their land. This would be a drastic step on the Lord’s part, and He was not quick to take such a radical action. God would have preferred to see the Israelites recognize their sins, repent of them, and turn to doing the Lord’s will than to bring about punishment in the form of destruction, death, and captivity at the hands of another nation. Yet, that is what happened.

It seems to me that there are lessons for us to learn from what happened so long ago in Israel. None of us today live in a nation that was formed by God’s hand with the same specific intent as was Israel. That is to be a country that was governed and ruled by God’s Word alone. That sort of thing was, in reality, an example of why we needed Jesus. Israel’s failure as a holy kingdom was writ large across the history of the world. Jesus brought with Him an entirely new concept of nation under God’s authority that no longer has boundaries that can be drawn upon maps or be governed by people. Still, the nations of this earth are granted their existence by God, and they are intended to bring order to the world’s chaos and to promote justice for all people. These human-crafted and God ordained entities operate under a mandate to be peacemakers in the world. So, it seems to me that the warnings that were set out for Israel have pertinence to us today. We must be people who live honestly, promote justice, and seek to be peacemakers, or we too may find that all of our party décor will become blackened and our festivities will be converted to times of mournful wailing.

The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him,

   and he makes known to them his covenant.

Psalm 25: 14

Friendship is a very special thing. It is also rather rare, for most people do not know all that many really close friends during the course of their lives. If there are a few people that can be reflected upon from the past and counted upon in the present to always be there when life’s events come along, then that person has been fortunate. A friend is someone who is in this journey of living without reservation or restriction. That is why most of the people that we would call friends would be more suitably defined as close acquaintances than they are truly deep friends. Friends know as no one else can, and they are people that can be counted upon to tell us the truth without considering the cost, and we can know that they will still love us even when we are not so lovely, ourselves.

The idea that God could be considered as a friend may strike some of you as difficult to imagine, for I admit that It is hard for me to get my hands around that concept. Yet, David was able to do this very thing. He describes a relationship wherein God knows David well and in which the Lord shows Himself to David, too. The fear that is referenced here is a form of respect and reverence that means that when God speaks, David listens. Where the Lord has set out standards for living and gives guidance for the way that people should love and care for each other, David seeks to go about his day in a manner that reflects God’s desired rules of life. As David walked through his days in this close friendship relationship with God, the Lord demonstrated and explained the truth of the extraordinary depth and breadth of His promised commitment to love, care for, and protect the souls of His people. People like David, himself. 

This same form of friendship with God can be ours as well. Following the Lord with all of our heart, mind, and strength also places each of us in a place where God’s deeper nature is revealed and wherein the Lord guides us into living out the details of His will. This journey of faith is not necessarily an easy one. If we look closely at David’s story, that becomes very clear, for he had many challenging and difficult times in his long friendship with the Lord. Still, God was faithful and true to His promises to David. There were times when David was lonely or living in a form of exile, but he was never alone as God was always present by his side and was tangibly so in the way that He prepared the way for David to travel forward. We, too, can know God in this manner of friend. As we talk over life and its joys, burdens, and challenges with God, this prayer becomes the language of intimates. Reading God’s Word brings the Lord’s words of living truth to bear upon all that life throws at us, and living out each day as a person that is dedicated to following the leading of the Spirit, brings that intimate friendship with God into the present reality where we each dwell. 

Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding,

   but he who has a hasty temper exalts a fool.

Proverbs 14: 29

Our culture’s ultimate source of knowledge, Wikipedia, defines anger in this manner,

“The emotion anger, also known as wrath orrage, is an intense emotional state. It involves a strong uncomfortable and hostile response to a perceived provocation, hurt or threat.”

Well, I agree with this except that it seems as if the part about provocation, hurt, or threat no longer applies, for people today become demonstrably wrathful without any sort of real provocation beyond what should produce mild irritation or slight annoyance. Today anger is a tool that is used to overwhelm, to oppress, and to defeat others. Although the use of this powerful emotion in this manner is prevalent today, I submit for consideration that it has always been employed in a similar manner. The writer of this proverb was speaking about something that was both cultural observation and probably personal experience. Almost all people from the dawn of creation have given in to anger’s ugliness and destructive presence.

Yet, that is not how it needs to be. There is another way to engage with people, even with people who really do tend to cause our blood to boil. Jesus certainly felt anger at the way that people were corrupting their worship of God and at the oppressive actions of those in power. God has expressed His anger at the disobedience and selfishness of people. Throughout the long history of Christ’s church, our ongoing disregard for God’s call to live in a just, loving, and other-focused manner has caused a form of anger to well up in numerous righteous followers of Christ. God’s anger, whether displayed by Him or by Jesus is tempered by a desire to bring about redemption and reconciliation to God’s way of truth and righteousness. Thus, the Lord demonstrates His understanding of the people with whom He is angry and with the circumstances that have caused their sinful actions. The Lord knows each of us as an individual, and He enters into our lives with our specific and personal identities in view even when He is displeased with what we are thinking, saying, and doing.

If we truly desire to break the distressing cycle of angry engagement in our world today, we can do nothing less than to follow our Lord in seeking to understand where others are coming from when they cause strong negativity to arise in us. We must seek to know them as people and to recognize that even the most troubling of personalities bears the touch of the Creator’s hand in who they are and in how they function. That does not mean that all actions and words are acceptable or that we should allow all of them to exist without comment, response, or rebuke. The righteous, the loving, and the God-honoring thing to do is often otherwise. Yet, even the sternest of responses needs to be tempered by grace, redemptive love, and a form of understanding that comes by and through the Spirit. When we live in this manner by abandoning the destructive tactics of our world, we have chosen to follow Christ in a manner much like the one that He taught us in the seventh beatitude,

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Matthew 5: 9 

For thus says the LORD:

Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river,

   and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream;

and you shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her hip,

   and bounced upon her knees.

Isaiah 66: 12

In all probability, most of us have certain images that come to mind when we hear about rivers. These large flows of water might be large, lazy and calm. They may be wild and running freely over rocks and fallen trees as they course down a mountainside, or they could be destructive and dangerous. Rivers come in many forms, and those shapes and consistencies are changeable due to various circumstances, too. Yet, Isaiah suggests that the peace that the Lord grants to His people comes to us in a flow like that of a river. There may be more truth to that image than we often imagine at first glance. The peace that the Lord grants to us comes in many forms in order to fit to the circumstances with which life has surrounded us; so, should it surprise us when God answers our need with something that flows out of the enormity of His resources?

There are days when it seems as if there cannot possibly be an answer for all that is present in life. Grief and sorrow, pressure and stress, and pain and heartache often arrive in bunches and settle in as an encamped army that lays siege to the heart, mind, and soul. When life is like this it can be easy to lose sight of God’s eternal promises and it is only natural to focus inwardly on what it takes to make it from this moment to the next. Yet, the Lord is present even in these hard and darkening hours. His truth will prevail against all that is going wrong around us, and His strength is great enough to take each of us beyond the hour of despair to that new dawn of hope that will come in its due time. 

The peace that the Lord grants to us does not come in one shape, form, or size. It varies according to our individual needs, the situation that is at hand, and the way that it will work within our hearts and heads so that we can go on to accomplish God’s will as we dwell in its presence. God’s peace nurtures as it heals. It provides what is essential for us to become stronger and better equipped to handle the adversity of the day. Additionally, this form of peace provides a type of comfort that is much like what a nursing mother gives to her crying infant. A deep and a settled calm comes over the spirit in the presence of the Lord. So, regardless of the image that rivers bring to mind, the peace that flows out of a relationship with the Lord resembles it. As rivers run throughout the landscape of the earth, so does God’s peace meet each of us wherever we may journey in the course of life. 

And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

Mark 4: 39

The depth and breadth of God’s Word is truly amazing to me, for the Lord never seems to stop revealing new thoughts and applications of it. Thus, I admit that I had never thought of this well-known verse from Mark’s account of Jesus’ time with us on earth in human form in the following manner. In this moment in the gospel narrative we know that Jesus is demonstrating His Godness in that He possesses power over nature, and He also provides a tangible example of the way that He did then and continues to care about and for people in this world. Additionally, there is a strong suggestion of the fact that followers of His will encounter opposition and that He will engage with those forces for our sakes. These are all good things, and they do reflect God’s character and His nature. Yet, it comes to me, even the Holy Spirit seems to be an early riser, that there is something additional on display in the words and the actions in which Jesus engages here.

For a brief moment, short and transitory as it is, Jesus commands nature to return to God’s creation design intent. The natural world was constructed as a peaceful place where everything functioned perfectly and wherein the elements such as wind, water, fire, and rain were to be productive and supportive of the thriving of all of life. All of this, every aspect of nature, has been damaged and disturbed by the effects of sin. Those disobedient and rebellious acts that the first people chose to do have had a profound impact on the way that this world operates, and none of that is for the good. So, on that day and in that boat upon the sea, Jesus took back a piece of this world from Satan’s evil grip, and He set it right for the benefit of a few people and as an example of something much bigger by way of future promise and also in the form of setting out a part of His call and commission for His followers.

There is no question that God has promised that there will come a time when Jesus will again walk upon this earth. This will be a point in history when all of creation will be restored to the glory of God’s design. There will no longer be any grief and death, and all of the universe will exist in a form of harmonious peace. This is God’s promise, and it establishes a form of hope for all of us as we follow Christ in this troubled world. Yet, Jesus seldom left things with future hope as His only teaching point. It seems to me that He also wants us to actively engage with the created world with redemption and restoration in mind. People continue to do real harm to the place where we dwell, and we do this with little regard for the gifts that God has given to us by way of the resources in the earth and seas or that are contained in the atmosphere that envelopes us. I believe that Christ desires for us to join Him in rebuking the corruption that sin has produced on and in nature. He also wants us to care for what He has given to us for the sake of our thriving. Until Jesus returns, we are, in fact, His hands and His voice to be used for promoting peace upon this earth, even peace in the natural world.