From Good Things to Evil Things

It’s said that the enemy of the best is the good, or even the better. It’s easy to decide that something is good enough, even when it isn’t the best, when the price tag of “the best” is prohibitive. In a lot of circumstances, that’s absolutely true. If you’re looking to buy a computer, for example, You could spend a lot of money and get the very best, fastest, and newest computer out there, knowing that in six months it won’t be any of those things any more, or you could spend a lot less for the computer that was the very best six months ago. You may even find that the very best computer for your needs isn’t the fastest or newest anyway. If your main concern is doing word processing and a little web surfing, you don’t need the graphics capability and processor speed that someone would want for playing on-line video games 23/7.

Having said that, let me point out that God wants you to have the very best. Not necessarily the best and fastest computer, or the biggest and nicest house, or the prettiest and fastest car, because all of those things are temporal. Those things really don’t mean anything in the long run. God wants us to have the best and closest relationship with Him, He wants us to have inner peace in times of trouble, He wants us to know that we will spend eternity in a good place instead of a bad one. That’s the sort of “best” that God wants for us.

The other side of that, though, is that God wants our best. He doesn’t want us to just do good things, or even better things; He wants us to do our best. Don’t misunderstand me, our best is never good enough; that’s where grace comes in, but He does want our best. In 1 Samuel 13, King Saul is waging war against the Philistines, and the prophet Samuel was supposed to meet him, but Samuel didn’t show up within the time frame that Saul was expecting him. Saul was worried that the Philistines would attack before Samuel got there, so he offered up a sacrifice to God, to try to curry favor with the Almighty before the battle began. Obviously, Saul had some good thoughts: He didn’t want to go into battle without the Lord being on his side; He was willing to make a sacrifice to God (which puts him at least one step above a lot of people). Of course, the first concern is a little backwards; it isn’t a question of whether God is on our side, it’s a question of whether we are on God’s side. Realistically, though, Israel was God’s chosen people, God wanted the best for Israel, just as He wants the best for us, and that would only include being subjugated to the Philistines if Israel needed to be taught a lesson. As far as Saul wanting to make a sacrifice unto God, in this particular instance, that wasn’t his place. To the human mind, offering a sacrifice to God would seem to be a good thing to do, but, if it isn’t what God wanted, then it isn’t such a good thing. If Saul had simply trusted God to take care of His people, there would not have been a problem. Samuel arrived well before the battle actually started, and, even after Saul’s mistake, God delivered Israel from the Philistines, but God told Saul (through Samuel) that he would be removed from being king. If Saul had truly repented, and put forth a renewed effort to try to be the sort of man that God wanted him to be, who knows whether he might have been able to turn God, as the Ninevites did? Instead, if you continue reading, you find that Saul slowly fades from being a good king (although perhaps not the best king), to being a man that tries, not only to maintain his power, but to pass it on to his sons, as God works to take power from Saul, and give that power to someone who will give his best to God, and do his best for Israel.

We can get caught up in the same thing. We can try to do good things for God, and find that what we consider good things are not the things that God wants from us. When we find that we have misjudged what God expects of us, we can develop a bad attitude, as Saul did, or we can work to improve that relationship. Seek God, pray that He would help us to become what He called us to be, or backslide. There’s a reason that it is called “backsliding;” it is when one slides back to one’s old life, and that’s a slow process. It doesn’t happen overnight, and God will generally give one lots of chances to get right, but, the sooner one starts turning things around, the easier it is. If you are climbing a hill, and start sliding back down, the sooner you catch yourself and start back up the hill again, the easier it is, but, if one lets it get too far, eventually there is no stopping; spiritual backsliding is no different.

Scarcely Saved

The Bible says that if the righteous scarcely be saved, than where will the ungodly and the sinner appear? Now, of course, the question is, why are the righteous scarcely saved? In Isaiah we are told that our righteousness is as filthy rags. The very best that we can do is nowhere near good enough for God. Fortunately, He has made a way. What people don’t seem to understand is that His sacrifice, by which we have obtained mercy and grace, is not a blank check to go and do whatever we want. Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. Run that you may obtain the prize, but keep in mind that not everyone who runs in a race wins a prize. Even in marathons, where they have lots of people sign up to run, and they award a medal to everyone who crosses the finish line gets a medal, they generally don’t order enough medals for everyone who pays the fee to run the marathon. Some people end up not showing up, and some people drop out during the race. Why would you enter a race and not finish? I’m sure that there are many reasons, but it really comes down to the basic idea that sometime during the race, something else became more important; something else took precedence. Maybe one just becomes discouraged; the medal at the end doesn’t seem worth the pain in the side and the burning lungs along the way. That’s at least somewhat legitimate, but keep in mind that in the race that we are running the prize that we are striving for is not a trifle. We are not striving for a few dollars worth of metal fashioned into a fancy design as a symbol of accomplishment (and by saying that, I don’t mean to downgrade the accomplishment of completing a marathon. That is an accomplishment, and I have a lot of respect for those people that have done that, but it’s kind of like getting an A+ on an important test in high school compared to graduating Magna Cum Laude from Harvard medical school). We are striving for an eternal reward, a crown of glory that fadeth not away. Jesus told us to strive. I think sometimes we get confused as to what exactly that means. To strive means to work hard at something, to really put your back into it, to struggle with it. So often we treat salvation as something that we can simply say a few words to obtain, and live how we want to. So many people make a profession of faith, and then go right back to the way we were living, just like a sow that was washed goes back to her wallowing in the mire.
You've probably seen the T-shirt with a picture of guy wearing jeans with the knees completely worn out, and a caption that says, "Pray Hard." So often, we send God a cursory prayer simply saying I want... And sometimes that's all the prayer we need right at the moment; after all, the Spirit intercedes for us, when we can’t find the words, right? Don’t use that as an excuse, though, prayer should be an expression of gratitude, of praise, and, yes, occasionally, of request. If you don't ask, you won't receive. Of course, if you don't thank God for what He's given you already, or if you don’t praise God (show an appreciation just for who He is), He's going to be considerably less inclined to give you more. Sometimes, though, prayer needs to have more intensity than we really want to commit to it. I think about Jesus praying in the garden, and it says that his sweat was as great drops of blood. There has been some discussion as to just exactly what that means, but the bottom line is, it means He was praying really hard. In some ways, it seems a little strange, He knew ahead of time what was going to happen; His impending crucifixion was not a surprise. Yet, here He was praying in the garden with a kind of intensity that most of us never reach. I have to believe that He prayed the way He did as an example to us. I don't mean that every time you pray, you should pray until sweat just rolls off of you, but that there should be an intensity to your prayers, and if you ever get into a situation that is as serious as the one He was in, then, yes, pray as hard as He did.

I was reminded yesterday of an experience that I had as a teenager. I had some people trying to share the gospel with me, and they spent a lot of time talking about how bad Hell is going to be, and that I should be very much afraid of going there. Also, they tried to impress upon me that I didn’t have to go there, that all I had to do (they said) was believe. They even went so far as to say that if the Gospel message was true, then I could follow it, and go to Heaven, but if I followed the Gospel message and it wasn’t true, then eventually my body would just decay in the ground. The biggest thing that impressed me about their well-meaning attempts was that it seemed that they were trying to blackmail me into believing in the crucifixion. I don’t respond well to blackmail. Fortunately, later on, I found myself drawn in by God’s love for me.I know that a lot of people feel that, to share the Gospel effectively, you have to scare people. I don’t know, I suppose that works sometimes, but it would seem to me that it’s the exception, rather than the rule. I will admit that sometimes the carrot and the stick approach seems effective (do what I want, and I’ll give you a carrot, otherwise, I’ll hit you with the stick), but it occurs to me that the stick should be more of last resort. Sometimes you have to scare people to get their attention (but once that gets your attention, you should very carefully examine the Gospel for its merits), but if someone obeys the Gospel purely out of a desire to avoid eternal damnation, they are wasting their time. They may as well enjoy this life, because the next one will be considerably less pleasant. Your relationship with God should be based on love (Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fear God, we should, but, in general, that should be less of a motivation than love for God). Sometimes we are motivated by desire, and sometimes we are motivated by the fire.
I think that Apostle Paul was frightened into really examining the Gospel. Of course, part of the scare was incontestable evidence that what he had believed his entire life was completely wrong, but once God scared him into looking at Christianity objectively, he became a fierce proponent of the Early Church. Again, though, this is the exception; I think most of us would have just run as fast and as far as we could in the other direction, blind or not.
The point has also been made that God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son… and we killed Him. Some would say, “Oh, but we didn’t kill Him, it was those Jews!” That is just anti-Semitic semantics. The point is, He created us, He came amongst us, as one of us, and we human beings killed Him. Don’t point fingers, don’t try to blame someone else, we did it. Keep in mind, though, that was His plan all along. Jesus took the form of man in order to become the perfect sacrifice in order to absorb the wrath that we already deserved before He even came. He had to die, so that we could be saved. It’s not important who killed Him; it’s important that He sacrificed Himself to save us. The High Priest that twisted Jesus’ words in order to obtain a conviction, Pontius Pilate, who ordered the crucifixion (no matter how much he tried to wash his hands of it), even the soldier who put his spear in Jesus’ side at the cross; those people are all just as entitled to salvation as any of the rest of us (don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think those people actually were saved, but they had the same opportunity to be saved as any of the rest of us, and the same right to claim Jesus as Lord that any of the rest of us have). The crucifixion is not an example of why God should be angry with us, so much as it is an example of how much God loves us, that He would be willing to accept the punishment that we deserved so that we wouldn’t have to. Of course, I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of the ones who reject God’s love after He made such a sacrifice for us…

Freedom

Many years ago, Janis Joplin made the claim that "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." I suppose that's one form of freedom, perhaps even the purest form, but it isn't the best form.
Our nation's founders stated that they believed that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Obviously, there are some curtails on our liberty; the government can't allow my right to liberty to infringe on your right to life, no matter how much I might want that. By the same token, your right to pursue happiness should not be allowed to infringe on my right to liberty. I would hope that any of us who celebrated the Fourth of July were reminded of that (Do they have the Fourth of July in other countries? Of course they do, they just don’t celebrate it).
Jesus said that we shall know the truth, and the truth shall make us free. We have a freedom in Christ that is like no other. Even then, there are consequences to our freedoms. Apostle Paul said that all things are lawful unto me, but not all things are expedient. There are some things that I have the freedom to do, but that would eventually hurt me, or hurt those around me. I have been commanded to love others as I would love myself, so I have to mindful of how my actions impact other people. I could, of course, learn to love myself very little, and then not have to worry about others, but, no, I don't think that’s how it’s supposed to work. God loves me, and He thinks I'm worth loving, even though sometimes I don't understand why. He expects me to love myself, too.
At the same time, we are told to present our bodies a living sacrifice to God. Wait, what about my freedom? I still have my freedom, but there are consequences for exercising my choices, if they are not wise choices. God doesn't expect us to be robots, blindly obeying His every command; He wants us to obey His commands out of love, respect, and trust. If God knows what’s best for us, doesn't that mean that what He commands is going to be better for us than what we think of by ourselves? Keep in mind, He can see the big picture; we can't. He knows exactly what we are capable of, and how much help He is going to have to give us in order for us to perform that which He asks of us. We, so often, get caught up in thinking that we can't; it’s too big, and we forget that what ever got wants us to do, He's going to help us with. Nothing's too big for God. There is a lot of freedom in that, believe me.