Boasting of the future

"One who puts on his armor should not boast like one who takes it off."
Ahab, in 1 Kings 20: 11

Ahab certainly isn't the Old Testament king with the cleanest record or the most upright life, but he got at least one thing right. No matter how certain we are of the odds, we must wait until the battle is finished before we claim the glory of the results. Let us be patient and humble, preparing ourselves for what is ahead rather than claiming to know it already.

Picture of a king

This is the description of a godly king given by Moses to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 17:

"He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite. The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them, for the LORD has told you, 'You are not to go back that way again.' He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.

"When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the priests, who are Levites. It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the LORD his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel." Deuteronomy 17:15-20

This goes against so much of what we see and understand and have as examples through history. Israel didn't always follow these guidelines faithfully, but here is the root of God's heart for leadership and authority. The king is to be one of them, humble and not self-serving, not chasing after multitudes of women, not seeking out riches but burying his head in God's word. This is government.

Service as a gift

"The more we do in the Lord's service, the greater are our obligations to Him, for the will, for the ability, and opportunity."
-Matthew Henry in his commentary on Leviticus 1

This, like so much of faith, is so backwards from the way we think. We feel that the Lord should be indebted to us for our service, that we are somehow giving Him something out of the goodness of our own hearts. But everything we have was given to us by His hands in the first place, even the very opportunities we have to minister! We really cannot believe that our cars and houses and food come out of His generosity (and indeed sometimes we don't even give Him credit for these) but then claim that our service to Him flows from our own resources. We have no resources. All is from Him, and He makes it ours to give or to keep, but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that we are especially good or generous. Only One is exceptional in His goodness and generosity, and every good and perfect gift-- including ministry-- comes from Him.

Duty

"Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, 'Come along now and sit down to eat'? Would he not rather say, 'Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink'? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' "
Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. We exist to bring Him honor. He has made it clear how to do this: love God, love each other. If we live this way, our life is perfectly glorifying to Him and also perfectly satisfying to us.

But we don't. We sin. We seek to glorify ourselves instead of God, and we love ourselves above our fellow man. We can live a redeemed life and get closer and closer to holiness by the grace of Christ, but our nature is still sin. Our nature is sin, and our duty is holiness-- polar opposites. There is grace, oh praise the Lord, there is grace flowing down abundantly from the cross of Christ, and that grace will cover over all our sins, but let us not ever believe in our own achievements. Let us not ever say to God, "Give me the credit I deserve," for if He gave us all we deserved, we would be sadly surprised to find ourselves in Hell. Let us humble ourselves before Him, love Him and each other as He as asked, and ask nothing more than that our life would be a pleasant aroma to Him.

And in all of this, oh mercy of mercies, we truly find joy and peace.

Born again

Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." "How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"
Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.'"
John 3:3-7

Several friends or acquaintances of mine have had babies in the past couple weeks. For the families, it's a time of excitement and joy, the fulfillment of long months of waiting. The babies themselves are beautiful, intact and perfect, perhaps with their mother's nose or their father's eyes. But so much of the joy of this occasion lies in anticipation: the baby is a clean slate, humble and full of possibility. It is a life just begun, with no long list of sins and no pride keeping it from dependence on God and family. There is no claim to wisdom or greatness in a baby, nothing but potential.

So, too, must we be. We must come to a place spiritually of humility and dependence, letting the blood of Christ wipe away the sins of the past and declare us new. And, in that place, we are full of beautiful potential in the eyes of our own Father.

Humility

One of my new year's resolutions this year was to ask questions. For me, this meant two things-- first, to learn to listen (another resolution) more and talk less. I love hearing from the hearts of the people around me, but I have never been good at asking questions to initiate that sort of conversation. I am very good at talking about myself. And second, to humble myself and acknowledge willingly that I do not know everything. I want to learn from the wisdom and experience of the people around me, whether in web design or walking with the Lord.

In reading Matthew Henry's commentary on Leviticus 4 today, I was reminded of this resolution. Henry writes: "That which I see not, teach thou me, and, Show me wherein I have erred, are prayers we should put up to God every day; that if, through ignorance, we fall into sin, we may not through ignorance abide in it." When I was in a position of supervising summer staff members at Jonah, the question I loved most to hear was "What could I be doing better?" It invited teaching, encouraged growth, and showed a truly humble heart. How much sweeter must that question be to the One who has everything to teach us, when we have everything to learn?

Not because we are righteous

Today I was reading in the book of Daniel and came across the passage where he is praying for the city of Jerusalem. This had struck me earlier this summer, and it stuck out to me again today. He has seen a vision that Jerusalem will be in desolation for seventy years, and he lays out his heart before the Lord on behalf of his city, confessing their sins, blessing the name of the Lord, and pleading with Him for mercy. The whole prayer is powerful, but the part that stands out to me is the end:

"Now, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of your servant. For your sake, O Lord, look with favor on your desolate sanctuary. Give ear, O God, and hear; open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your Name. We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For your sake, O my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your Name."

We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. So basic, but so essential, so beautiful, so pure and empowering and freeing. This truth alone sums up so much of the Christian faith, of the character of the God that I love and serve. This is it. I live and breathe and thrive not because I am righteous or have any inherent goodness, but because of God's great mercy. And for that I praise Him and bless His name.

Then they will know that I am the Lord.

I just finished reading the book of Ezekiel. While I had read it before, it had been a couple of years since I read it in its entirety. The overwhelming theme, in the midst of a mind-boggling amount of rebellion by the Israelites and a mixture of justified punishment and freely-given mercy from the Lord, is this: that they might know that I am the Lord. Everything God does, He does so that the people might know and understand that He is the Lord. Everything the Israelites do wrong, it boils down to the fact that they are placing themselves or some other idol higher than the Lord.

Is God so egotistical? Does He really have such a petty need for glory and attention that He would act out like an ornery two-year-old? Or is something else at work here? In A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, he writes that "the cause of all our human miseries is a radical moral dislocation, an upset in our relation to God and to each other." We are not God. As long as we live as though we were, we will know a life of deep dissatisfaction, a sense of strangeness and discomfort that comes from trying to be that which we are not and trying to carry a load that we were never meant to bear. How much trouble could be saved if we would simply humble ourselves before the Lord and give thanks for the position He has given us? Let it be enough to be God's dearly loved creation, to live in a right relationship to one another and to Him, and to bear His image humbly as we walk this earth.