The Idolatry of Perfection and God's Antedote of Justice and Grace

That's a funny title isn't it!

First of all, I want to invite everyone to listen online to one of my new favorite groups.  Click on the song Jer. 33:3.
http://www.seedsfamilyworship.net/listen-online/

Now, down to business...

Several topics surfaced from my reading, but I only had time and space to discuss the first!  I found it interesting that God has proclaimed the warning of disaster, as well as his promise of restoration- all before the climactic consequence- the fall and destruction of Jerusalem.  As a parent and teacher, I now try to follow this same pattern. 
1.  Warning
2.  Promise of Restoration
3.  Consequence

I used to buy into the “my class doesn’t act like that.”  “our family doesn’t do that” attitude.  I remember being so angry at a student in my drama class for cheating.  She couldn’t understand why I was so upset.  I just couldn’t believe she would do that to me!  I realize now, some of these attitudes came from pride.  I didn’t want to look badly.  I couldn’t handle other people’s imperfections if they reflected on me.  I was buying into the illusion of perfection.  If my class, my kid, my whatever… looks perfect, then I am a success.  Wow is that exhausting. 

After reading Love and Logic and listening to Chip Ingram, I began to realize that my reactions were selfish.  I wasn’t disciplining for their good- it was for mine.  Maybe it didn’t change a lot outward, but I began making small changes that reflected my inner acceptance- that I was an imperfect mother/ teacher of imperfect students and children.  Now God could really use me, once I started to get over me.    
Of course God REALLY brought the lesson home in time for my third child.  His opinions are just louder and longer than my other two.  I am so thankful that I am not as enslaved to other people’s perceptions of me, or he would be a severe emotional challenge for me, and we would have some unhealthy battles instead of the battles God wants me to fight.    

Ethan had a kindergarten teacher who said she would make sure and give him a behavior mark by the end of the year so he could practice handling the fact that he wasn’t perfect.  She said she had seen how devastated some kids are the first time they got into trouble as an older student.  I have seen children and parents fall apart because of an 89.  I experienced the pain of not getting an “A” on a paper in 6^th grade.  After that first shock, I was a little better adjusted. 

I wouldn’t have thought about the need for my children to realize that he/she is not perfect, and that I don’t even expect them to be.  So when Kiera went to kindergarten this year, I told her- I want you to do your best.  She drew that her kindergarten goal is to “stay on target”, which means she wants to maintain perfect behavior.  I am glad that I have two older children who want to follow the rules.  But I told Kiera, remember, you are not perfect.  If you make a mistake, we will forgive you.  We can pray for God to help you make better choices.  Even if you never have to pull a color, remember, you sin, and your Mom and Dad still love you and God can forgive you.  I don’t want other people’s evaluations of her conduct to rule her life.  Only God’s opinion ultimately matters.    

My mom told me about how as a child she thought her parents were perfect, and so it was hard to tell them about problems.  Mom, you did a good job not trying to cover up areas you thought needed improvement.  I never felt pressure to live up to your expectations.  I was free to make a lot of my own mistakes, but later to discover without hindrance what God would have me be and do.   I want to give that to my children by following God’s example. 

Now, I explain to my class:  “These are the rules of my class.  When you break them- because you will make mistakes, these are the consequences.  Everyone breaks the rules.  I try, but I cannot keep them perfectly.  When you break one, I am not going to be angry with you forever, so don’t ‘freak out’”.  Then I have them practice my restoration policy.  When a student breaks a rule, they get a warning, then they have to explain the rule and apologize in a written note.  I am giving them an opportunity to rehearse that step toward restoration.  They choose the rule they are most likely to break and then pretend they are writing the letter of reconciliation.    

Now, you are probably wondering what this all has to do with the verse.  I find it amazing that God tells his people:  You are not obeying me.  You are going to be punished.  I will heal and restore you. 

God has been showing me this lesson over the years, but I didn’t know that it came first from his word.  God is a grace-based parent who knows we will fail.  He promises that we will experience consequences of our actions, but he also promises us grace.    Hallelujah.

Jeremiah 32:37-41

“I will bring them back to this place and let them live in safety. ³⁸ They will be my people, and I will be their God. ³⁹ I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. ⁴⁰ I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. ⁴¹ I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.”

Know the LORD

Before I begin my post, I must say how disappointed I am in myself for not finding the time to comment on each post I've read. I have wandered through a wide range of emotions in the readings this year and have been profoundly touched, blessed and taught. Just because I have not found time to comment does not mean I have not heard what you said. It is highly unlikely that I will ever forget this blogging experience.

"You will know that I am the LORD."

I counted seventeen such statements by the Lord in reading Ezekiel this week, and seventeen times I sensed in my spirit that God was trying to tell me something. As I pondered the phrase, "I am the LORD", I was reminded of the Bible study I went through last summer, KNOWING GOD BY NAME, about 35 of the names of God. The study had such a profound impact on my life, that I continued each month since to review the Scriptures introduced as well as the highlights of the study. The first week of study reveals truths concerning God's deity and the first day of the study is of Yahweh - LORD (always in all-caps). Mary Kassian opens the study with the fact that in ancient times, a person's name depicted something important about their identity, character, or life. She says, "It is not surprising, therefore, that when God spoke from the burning bush, Moses asked Him to reveal His name. Exodus 3:14 records God's name as "I AM" while Isaiah 42:8 identifies Him as "the LORD." But in the original language, the two phrases are exactly the same." She goes on to explain that these names are translated from the personal name of God, Yahweh, in the original Hebrew Scriptures. This is God's name that sets Him completely apart. Scripture confirms that Yahweh is a divine being who is self-existent (John 5:26), self-sufficient (Acts 17:25), self-directed (Job 36:22-23), eternal (Rev. 4:8), consistent (Ps. 102:26-27) and so much more. Yahweh is God's incredibly unique name, regarded by Jews to be so holy that they refrained from spelling it or speaking it outloud. They referred to Yahweh as "the Name" (HasShem), "the Extra-ordinary Name." "Yah" is the abbreviated form used in "Praise Yah" (Hallelu-jah) found in many of the Psalms.

So - what does it mean to know this extra-ordinary Yahweh, I AM, LORD? Can we "know" God by "knowing" all about Him? The definition of "to know" is to perceive, to understand, to discern, to be familiar with, to be aware of. So God was telling His people in Ezekiel (as well as His people today) that His greatest desire is for us to perceive, to understand, to discern, to be familiar with, to be aware of Him as our Yahweh, I AM, LORD. The study asks the question, "How does the fact that the LORD is "I AM" impact you?"

I came to the realization that in reading Ezekiel and being saddened by how desperately wicked God saw His people, that He was actually calling me to be different - to draw near to Him and let Him teach me about His ways and His character. I was reminded of something Anne Graham Lotz says in her book on Revelation. In speaking to the church of Ephesus (2:1-7), Jesus seemed to be talking to me. I quote from her book: "Jesus says, 'I've noticed, I KNOW. Thank you for all you are seeking to do in My Name'." In Jesus' tender and humble way He was encouraging me. As I read on, however, I felt His conviction. "He said, 'Yet I hold this against you, you have forsaken your first love'." Somewhere along the way, without my conscious awareness, my work for Jesus has overtaken my worship of Jesus. I've become so busy I no longer have time for extended prayer and Bible reading. When I do pray, I'm primarily focused on requests, not on Jesus and my relationship with Him. When I do read the Bible it's not just to listen to His voice speaking to me personally.

Tenderly, yet firmly, Jesus pointed out the fact that over this summer I have fallen away from a love relationship with Him. Brokenheartedly, I repented and I am letting Jesus lead me back to Him as my first love. My journey is different from Anne's and yours will be different as well. I think the questions we ask are the same. Jesus tells us in Rev. 2:5 to, "Turn back to me and do the works you did at first." What works? Works I did when I was first born again? Works I did when I first began to serve You? We ask our questions then we wait and listen.

Jesus is leading me into the most deep and profoundly intimate prayer time I have ever had with Him. He is calling me to, "Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you: Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light." (Matt. 11:28-30). So, each morning (when I am able), I yoke myself with Jesus and let Him lead me in His Word and wait and listen. It takes discipline and focus, but I am learning to let Him teach me. Regrettably, this is not the first time God has had to get my attention back to my first love, but I pray it is the last. My prayer for us as we continue through Ezekiel is that when we again read, "You will know that I am the LORD" our hearts will be drawn to Jesus who is our great I AM and surrender our hearts afresh to His marvelous love and work in us rather than being saddened by the sorry plight of God's straying people.

This is the principle that Anne Lotz shares in her book that I pray I never forget: "Our love for Christ is more important to Him than all of our service to Him. Strict obedience and service alone are not enough. Love for Jesus must come first. Jesus said the first and greatest commandment is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." Our worship of Christ must always come before our work for Christ."

Almighty LORD, Yahweh, please give your people a strong desire to love You with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength!

Ministry of Failure

Many of us have felt failure in our ministry from time to time...but are we in a ministry of failure?  We see no signs of success.  Our message is not received.  Those we minister to never change.  There is no measure of impact during our lifetime. 
If this is the case, and we are not merely experiencing occassional failures but we are in a failing ministry, what do we do about it?

Do we bail? Do we alter our direction? Do we tweak our message?

Or could it be that we are simply called to a ministry of failure like Jeremiah and there is nothing we can or should change about it?

Jeremiah lived in the last days of a decaying nation.  The people failed to take God seriously which is what started their downward spiral. They did not pay much attention to what he had told them The people did what was right in their own eyes rather than carefully examining their behavior in the light of God's revelation and word.  Sound familiar?

Jeremiah's ministry covered about forty years, and during all this time the prophet saw absolutely no signs success in his ministry.  Rather he was bombarded with discouragement and plagued with depression. His message was one of denunciation and reform, and the people never obeyed him. Most other prophets saw some fruit of their labor -- but not Jeremiah. He was called to a ministry of failure, and yet he was enabled to keep going for many long years and to be faithful to God and to accomplish God's purpose: to witness to a nation that had decayed.  Jeremiah endured this kind of persecution in his life without quitting...but he did weep.

He didn't have sorrow just for the nation though.  He cried to God about his own discouragement, dissappointment, depression, persecution, resentment, and bitterness.  At one point, he even accuses God of being a liar and undependable. Strong words? Undoubtedly. Honest words? Absolutely. He is pouring out exactly how he feels. He feels so forsaken that he has begun to wonder if the trouble might after all be with God that he cannot be depended upon.

How often have we felt that we have tried to do the right thing but everybody either just disregards it or comes back to make trouble for us or they mock and deride us?  Think back to the last time you have been weighed down by loneliness and depression of spirit.  We can all understand why Jeremiah constantly fights a battle with discouragement.  Who wouldn't with a ministry like his?  Jeremiah not only spoke a prophecy of ruin -- of desolation and destruction and judgment -- but beyond that he lived it and died it as a prisoner in Egypt.

Why did he suffer so much?  Surely, he wasn't doing something right.  What was his problem?  If Jeremiah was a good friend of ours (but no, he was not a bullfrog =), we might say that the trouble with him is that he has allowed himself to backslide.  Disobedience is the reason he is suffering like that.  It's the cause of his failure and the source of his complaining.  Isn't that sometimes the quick and easy answer we flippantly hand someone who is struggling in their life and wrestling with God? 

But that isn't the case with Jeremiah. He is a praying man. He reads his Bible, feeds on the word, and witnesses.  He is not a backsliding man.  These are actually the very things you need to do if you get depressed and discouraged. You need to pray, read your Bible, witness to others, and keep away from evil. But here is a man who is doing all these things and he is still defeated, still disheartened. Well, then my question is still left unanswered.  What is his problem?

The problem is that he has forgotten his calling. He has forgotten what God has promised to be to and for him. So God reminds him of it.  In Scripture, God always gives this answer to a heart that has grown discouraged: "Come back," God says. "Return. Go back to the beginnings, to the original things."  This is what he told Jeremiah in chapter 15 verse 19b.  But what exactly is he supposed to return to?  Well, what did God say him from the very start?  Notice this man's call back in the first chapter:

Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet to the nations." Jeremiah 1:4-5

As one commentator describes it: "And when from a mire of depression and discouragement, the prophet is called back to the promise of God; when he is reminded that God is greater than circumstances and that no matter how depressing they may be, or how negative, the God who calls him is the God who is able to sustain him in the midst of it; when he gets his eyes off himself and back on to God (like Peter walking on the water), he begins to walk again.

And in the strength he receives through this lesson he continues with his ministry, through all the discouraging circumstances. Jeremiah was faithful to the end as he learned to walk in the strength of the Lord his God. And he gives us this wonderful prophecy of the grace of God in restoring lives and taking broken, battered, wounded, defeated spirits and making them over again into vessels pleasing to him.

As Jeremiah watched the potter at work, he saw him making a vessel on his wheel, and as the wheel turned the potter shaped the vessel. And as Jeremiah watched, the vessel in the potter's hand was marred and broken. Then the potter took the vessel and once more pushed it all down into a lump of clay, and shaping it the second time, made it into a vessel after the potter's heart.  This is God's great object lesson of what he does with a broken life. He takes it and makes it over again -- not according to the failures and foolish dreams of an individual, but after the potter's heart, for the potter has power over the clay to shape it as he wishes. 

In the end, there is one thing we learn from Jeremiah's experience with God: notwithstanding the fact that divine call may bring rejection and loneliness, the call must creat a stubborn refusal to abandon God, even when this refusal to give up on God may be the source of our complaint."

According to God's measures of success, Jeremiah's ministry was not one of failure although that's what it seemed.  Jeremiah was called to a ministry of failure but still succeeded because he refused to abandon God even when all hope seemed lost.  In God's eyes, he had a ministry of courage and perseverance!

Are you succeeding in your ministry of failure?  Are you turning them into ministries of faith and submission?  Because that's all God really calls us to do - trust and obey.

Mona Rae Woodworth

“I'm not afraid of death.  I'm afraid of dying”

- Mortimer from Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke

I kept searching for what to write.  I loved the passages in the reading for last week, but I just didn’t know how to expound.  I wanted my current experiences to connect with what I was reading.  Everything seemed to speak to me- even my secular reading, but what was the theme?  What did it all mean, and what did it have to do with what I was experiencing that week?

I think the theme this week is simply my grandmother. 

My grandmother is dying.  I mean that in the same sense as I am dying.  We are both marching toward our inevitable end.  Seeing grandmother slowly deteriorate has been hard at times.  Hard, because, I want to hold on to the memories I love.  For my sake, I don’t want her to change.  For her sake, I don’t want to see her so dependent on others for complete care.  And yet, I think I am better having witnessing these things.  Our time on earth is measured, but I trust in the one who holds the ruler.

Isaiah 40:6,8  “All men are like grass and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.  The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.”

Some may think it is pessimistic, but I think it is healthy to ponder death a bit more than I do.  I have 3 birth stories I love to tell.  They are full of pain and joy and socially acceptable.  What about a death story?  I know Jesus asks us to be born again in a spiritual sense.  He also asks us to die to ourselves.  Baptism itself is a picture of being buried with Christ and raised to a new life in him.  He asks us to celebrate his death every communion.  Jesus sounds a little morbid.  Now, I call him realistic.  Joyfully, victoriously, realistic.           

This week I was looking at these verses with our human life cycle in mind:

Isaiah 44:22 “Return to me for I have redeemed you.”

Isaiah 46:10 I make known the end from the beginning.”

Isaiah 48: 12 “I am the first and I am the last.”

My grandmother is mostly bed ridden.  Parkinson’s disease has made her face expressionless.  Her hands are often clenched and she cannot easily control them.  She must be fed, changed and cleaned.  How thankful I am for the people that are willing to perform a difficult, and at times unpleasant, task in love.  I recall Jesus was prophesied to suffer long ago.  Age seems to be a way most of us will share in his suffering.  My grandmother is probably not comfortable as some of her dignity is stripped away.  Because she has placed her trust in Christ, however, I have to believe that she is humbled, but not humiliated.          

 

Isaiah 50:6-7  “I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.  Because the Sovereign Lord helps me, I will not be disgraced,”

Isaiah 52: 34 “…there were many who were appalled at him- his appearance was so disfigured…”

Isaiah 53:3-5 “a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering… surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows… but he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, the punishment  that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.”

My grandmother is rarely verbally understood.  She tries to talk, but it often comes out jumbled and incomprehensible.  She seems to get frustrated and close her eyes.  It can be painful- hoping for a clear word.  Waiting- in eager expectation- only to be disappointed, and too feel the weight of her disappointment as her tongue and mind cannot always obey her desires.  It reminds me of Jesus:

 

Isaiah 53:7 “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter…”

Jesus did not open his mouth because there was nothing left to say.  He had spoken every word- and every word we needed was recorded.  His actions did the rest.  My grandmother has lived much the same way.  We do not have to wonder if she loves us.  She shows us in action and spoke it in word.  She has not left anything unsaid.  She said it all.  Her words and actions speak of a life full of Jesus.  And those words will not return empty.

Isaiah 59:21 “…my words that I have put in your mouth will not depart from your mouth or from the mouth of your children…”

Grandma participated with us in life.  Card games, presents, laughter, cooking, gentle correction, a listening ear, quiet strength, sincere and passionate prayer, shopping, haircuts, grace, bible reading, praise singing, hymn playing.  She is more than the sum of these parts.  I only know part of the equation because she has touched and continues to touch many lives.  She showed me rocking my baby was more important than dusting.  She is one of the wisest people I know. 

Over the last few years, thanks to my mother who brings us to Washington every year, I have been participating in her death.  I have wiped her mouth, fed her, changed her soiled diapers and given her a bed bath.  My daughter has participated.  We talk about the future- she may have to care for me one day.  She sees this as the normal process of life.  I realize it is one thing to philosophically acknowledge it, and quite another to live through it, or loose someone too early to death.  I don’t have answers, but I do have Isaiah.      

     

Isaiah 57:1-2 “The righteous perish and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.  Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.”

I imagine my grandmother- when she transitions from this life to be united with her God, I imagine her sitting up from her hospital bed and unzipping her body of death- leaving it in a crumpled pile.  I imagine her gracefully standing with a “crown of beauty …and a garment of praise” (Isaiah 61:3).  I see her soaring on wings like eagles (Isaiah 40:31).  I see her radiating the truth of God’s love, with a smile, forever.