Unlocking
the Life within
The Greatest Commandment
"You believe that there is One God. Good! Yet even the demons believe that - and tremble" - James 2:19
For my entire Christian life, I have feared that verse in the Bible. A bad day that I didn't handle well would lead me to wonder if I was one of the people who thought they "got it" about God but didn't. Not that I expected to be perfect, but how could I be Saved and still be filled with anger and bitterness as often as I was? I was afraid I might be one of those people about whom Jesus also said
"not all who cry out to me 'Lord, Lord' will see Heaven."
Jesus said too that there are people who - on their Judgment Day - will say "didn't I prophesy in Your name and do all these other things on Earth for You?" And that Jesus would still answer "depart from Me, for I never knew you."
In yet another passage, He says that trees are known by their fruit...and trees that do not produce good fruit are cast into the fire.
Are you trembling yet? Most Christians I know - including myself - have taken the above passages to mean that 'works' do, in fact, factor into our status with God...and may even affect our fundamental Salvation. Yet this seems to contradict the idea of Grace, which is unmerited favor. I think a lot of Christians fear that they might be who Jesus was talking about despite their best efforts. But what I have been led to realize - after forty years of life - is that Jesus was not talking about our efforts.
Basically, what Jesus was saying in all those passages above is that it is not enough to simply believe. Yet Jesus also said that we are Saved by Faith. Like so many things in the Bible, these statements seem to collide head on with each other. Yet every time I have thought that to be true about Biblical passages, I have often found the key to their meaning and reconciliation only later when the words had resonance and relevance to a personal epiphany I had - once I was ready to have it. Such was the case last Sunday.
Despite my Faith, I have always been a pretty uptight guy. The things that seemed wrong about the world - and about the things I had experienced growing up - had left me bitter and angry much of the time. Not to say "all the time" by any means...because I had also had a lot of great experiences that left me elated and feeling excessively fortunate to be alive. I have always wondered how I can be that up-and-down when I have Christ, and all the redemptive power that Salvation through Him is supposed to bring on. More than that, I was even angry at Him for withholding all of that peace from me. Bitterness on bitterness.
Even when I married God's crowning achievement - who has to date provided two thousand and twelve new fulfilling experiences - I still had the bitter moments, and the angry mornings. No one can make us happy, just as we are told. Not even the best relationship can do so - as I found out. I still scared myself by being able to be angry with God. I was angry with God so often that it precluded a lot of my quality time with Him. I should have known better. I should have outgrown this as a Christian. Not that I expected to be unshackled from the human frailties that we all live with - Faith or not. I knew better than to expect a rosy life just because I am a Christian. After all Paul and Job, and even Christ Himself, were still burdened with hardships. But what bothered me about me was that I took my hardships so personally. I did not see them as external to myself, but took them in as indicators of just how "un-squared away" I was as a person...fundamentally. I knew that was messed up. And I knew it wasn't worthy of a Christian...born again as we are into God's family.
Hardships notwithstanding, it should be impossible for a Christian to ever feel a lack of self esteem, right? I mean, logically we should never be able to doubt our worth after the Creator of all things saw fit to die for each of us personally on the Cross. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that He would have done the same if each of us had been the only person for whom to sacrifice Himself. He was that motivated to cleanse us of our sins so that we could enter Heaven when we die, and fellowship with Him. That's how very much we are each - individually - wanted by Him. If we were valued that much as a friend by a U.S. President (pick one that you like for this example) we'd be pretty impressed with ourselves. And yet here is the God who said to the sea, "that's as far as you go. We'll put a beach there." Much more than any President, God's favor should be the source of great self-confidence.
My lingering bitterness, then, has led me
to doubt my Salvation at times. I would ask "how can I be Saved if I still feel
this knawing and profound self doubt? And how can I feel bitterness in the face
of so many great things in my life? Of course, it's not about "things" and
experiences. And the enemy
played on all of this for all it was worth. Satan knows by now that I will never
curse God or turn on Him - no matter what I am going through or how angry I get
with Him. Believe me, I have had ample opportunity to know this about myself, as
have we all. But satan did continue to use my self doubt to make me less
effective as a servant of God. That's the best he can do against me, but he was
pretty effective at it. I'd be short with people who I thought were foolish -
whether we were talking politics or if I just didn't think the service at
Wendy's was up to par on a given day. Not all the time, mind you. I am a
pleasant guy ninety-nine percent of the time. But we all know that it is our
weak moments for which people remember us, and I could feel satan's pleasure
every time he managed to goad me into one of those encounters where I
sharpened my tongue on someone. Of course, when that would happen, I would
just kick myself all the more, and wonder how I could be a child of God and
still be like that sometimes. The cycle kept feeding itself. Logically, I knew
all the right things about God, how He operates, and the significance of His
death on the Cross...and His more significant Resurrection.
Logic
Logic is head knowledge. I have always prided myself on being highly logical. If there is anything I feel I have a good handle on, it is the ability to be logical - about the world and about my Faith too. And so is God. God is the inventor of logic because He is the Author of Truth. Logic is the process of getting to the Truth. And I like being a logical Christian. There is as much power in the fact that God made His Word and His actions logical as there is in the more supernatural aspects of His nature. Of course, even supernatural things are logical when you are talking about God, but that is anther article. Where I was getting shortchanged in my Christian life was that I was limiting my search for Him to a logical process. You can find Him that way - through the logical Proofs He offers us - but we have to go deeper for many of His Truths. I hadn't yet...
Not until last Sunday
On Sunday I was driving with my aforementioned wife and we were listening to a Christian song on a CD. There was a line in the song about how God is the One Who says to the sea "that's as far as you go." I had heard the song before, but - like so many things in our lives - I had not been ready in my heart to hear what those words we meant to convey to me. When we get to a place where we are prepared to hear a particular, familiar Truth, we hear it and it hits us hard with a significance that will break through our familiarity with it and be newly powerful. And it will always grow more so as we ponder it. Hearing that line in that song, I started thinking about God as that magnificent Creator Who can command the sea and so much more. I started to think about how remarkable it is that this Creator of all things considers me His son. But then something new happened. I just started thinking of His creative power for it's own sake - and just loving Him for it. For the first time I wasn't looking for the significance of His Power to my life, not looking for my personal self-worth in being kin to the One Who did all of that, but just loving Him for Who He is...that masterful Creator.
And then it hit me. That is worship.
Worship is simply loving Him. Not groveling, as the world considers worship to be. Just...loving
Him. Simple. Childishly simple, as Jesus also said is the only way to approach
Faith. Then it occurred to me...when Christ said "You say you believe...even
the demons
believe and tremble" what He was getting at was that we cannot stop at logical
Faith. We cannot merely acknowledge the logical significance of even the Cross. We must
also love God for it...for just being Who He is. If we are looking for that crucial difference between us
and satan with regard to our approach to belief in God and the Cross, then
there's a whopper...
Because satan will not ever love God.
It was at that point that many other doors started unlocking in my mind - and my Soul. Other verses I had heard all my life jumped with that new significance into my head. I knew suddenly what is meant by Jesus' answer to the question "what is the greatest commandment?" The people who asked that were likely trying to get to the same Truth for which I had been searching. Maybe they were wondering what I always had - how mere head knowledge had not unlocked the doors they needed to live in victory...free from bitterness or anger. Maybe they were looking for the commandment that - if they could obey it - would open the door through which they could find a life free from that anger, or hurt, or anything else that they might be dealing with. After all, we all know Christians who seem to have found that life-giving door. Most of us know from such people that it is possible to live in the fullness of our Salvation - despite our circumstances. And we wonder how?
The answer to that can be found in Jesus' answer to that question: "what is the greatest commandment?" His response...
"You must love the L
There it is. For two thousand years that Truth has been sitting there right out in the open as the stated key to knowing the difference between us and satan:
Love God, rather than just believe
I had always heard that, but my worship of Him last Sunday in my truck opened the door to finally understanding that fundamentally significant statement. I was just driving and loving Him, with no other desire than to do so, and with no self interest. And the more I thought about it, the more my resentments melted away. I felt the new freedom of the big epiphanies, and it has grown in me since that day. It has brought Peace, and dissolved my restlessness. It has already started to reshape my thinking and my approach to my life. It has affected my behavior with others. It has made me more patient, and I value the people around me more because of it. Yes, even the irritating ones. Which led me to remember in kind that Jesus went further in His answer about "the greatest commandment." He said next
"and the second is equally important: love your neighbor as yourself." - Matthew 22:39
As I said before, I have always been troubled by my seeming inability to see people the way Christ does. I get angry and impatient with people too often, and let it show in unbecoming ways that do damage to the Christian example I would prefer to set. The original revelation I had that Sunday led me to the second: how the effect of loving God just for the sake of loving Him is the key to loving others around us too.
And then, there is (at least) a third Truth in Christ's answer about The Greatest Commandment(s): Notice that He said above to "love your neighbor ...as yourself." What a lot of us miss in that one is that there is a directive - and a way - to love yourself. We always think that passage is for our neighbor only. Interesting how much Truth and redemptive power God can put into one line.
All of this revelation happened in the span of minutes, and I turned down the radio and shared it all with my wife, who not only "got it" fully but was overjoyed to hear that from me. She is a sweetheart, who chafes when my tongue gets sharp with people because it isn't her way. And I chafe at myself all the more at those times for her sake because I never want to poison her sweetness with my bitterness. A huge part of my motivation to change that in me is derived from wanting to be a better man for her sake. She deserves that, and her influence is something God used last Sunday to bring me around to this point.
Since last Sunday, it has already been very powerful to see the work of these revelations in my life. For one thing, as part of the proof that God offers us at these times to tell us we are having a real experience and not an imagined one, I have experienced that the pieces of my life instantly started to fit together better - right there on that day. This is where you can doubt if you want to be cynical, but I have always known that it was my bitterness that blocked a lot of blessings in my daily life. That Sunday - and the days since - have gone smoothly with regard to those little things that more and more had ceased to fit into my life. For some time it has seemed that everything I tried to do was increasingly like trying to mash a lot of square pegs into a round hole. It had become so common that I expected it...like a series of "should be simple" tasks that ended up each taking an entire afternoon, and still were not completed satisfactorily. Since my revelation last Sunday, such experiences have been conspicuously absent, and in their place some very complicated tasks have just fallen into place as I worked the issues with little of my own effort. Say what you will, that is the power of God's blessing, and it is my revelation and subsequent honest worship of Him that opened the door to these blessings.
Last Sunday's relief from the 'square peg into a round hole syndrome' reminded me back to another revelation - related to all this - that I had had some years ago: Namely that
God is less concerned with what we do with our lives than He is with whether we are living our lives for Him
Like
most Christians, I had once sought my divine purpose in such a way that I felt
it possible to "miss out" on it if I was "off the path." Yet this is not how God
works. There is no "one path" that we are supposed to find. God is able to
use any of our imperfect, meandering ways for His greater good - if we are open
to Him. That, in and of itself, is the key to our purpose. Not a particular
job, or school, or even a particular mission trip. Because we are imperfect, we
will screw up, stray from Him, and misinterpret much of what He would give us
for direction. Even with the burning bush variety of direction, we are able to
inject our humanity and miss the mark. Didn't the Israelites in the wilderness -
who had witnessed repeated miracles - stray from His purpose time and again?
Even to the point of idolatry and pure wickedness?
We all do this. And yet in all the Biblical examples, God is able to use us and bless us anyway, on any of our crazy life paths, and even despite great sins...if we are open to Him. We see this even in the lives of the Old and New Testament's "greatest" heroes - David and Paul, respectively. They knew themselves as 'chief among sinners' well after they had come to Faith. Like them, I found last Sunday that being open to Him does not have anything to do with our adherence to rules - or even to Commandments. It means simply to love Him, and worship Him. In short...
Loving
God and worshipping Him are the keys to our ability to love others - and
ourselves as well - because we all walk around with a God-shaped hole in our
soul. We will remain unfulfilled - spiritually as well as personally - until
it is filled. All of this is what is spelled out in
The Greatest Commandment
We often look for that fulfillment in all the wrong places, even if we are well-intentioned, and even though many of these things are in fact very good for us...they are just not the fundamental keys. We look for it in relationships, experiences (religious and otherwise), jobs, education, accomplishment, collecting friends, etc. Again, all are great things...they are just not the first thing in terms of importance and relevance to our spiritual health and fulfillment.
I expect challenges to this revelation, and I expect tasks to be harder on days when my revelation is further behind me and a sticky challenge doesn't go too well for me. I am not naive enough to believe that one revelation is "The Key" to some singular enlightenment that will open all the doors now that I have it. Our walk with God is a process of discovering the several keys that lead us when we are open to seeing them. I will have more "down" days, and in a way I sort of hope so, because...
Without troubles, we will not search for and receive the revelations that lead to new life. And we cannot build our Faith in a proverbial E-Z Chair any more than we can build a great body with couch time
Further, how could others relate to someone who never goes through pain. Anyone could have Faith if they were living that life. We would be a weak witness to what Christ can do if we never overcame anything.
But for now I am living the "mountaintop experience" that a new revelation always brings about, and when I encounter the challenging people on those challenging days - or when I am one of those people myself - I'll have this writing to remind me of the perspective I wish to have.
