Walking with no Applause

Our granddaughter, who just a month ago was taking only a few tentative steps before falling on her well-diapered bottom, is now toddling around everywhere.  After every long trek she makes, the family will clap and cheer for her.  My husband will then loudly complain (with tongue firmly in cheek) that he has been walking for years and nobody is making a fuss over him!

While he’s not really expecting any kudos for his ability to walk from point A to point B, his joke made me think about how we can sometimes be as Christians.

When you were first converted, you took lots of tentative steps as you learned and grew.  Sometimes you fell, but if you are still serving God today, that means you stood back up and tried again.  In those early days, in your own mind, success may have been measured by those things that you stopped doing. No longer were you living in the sin that held you captive before.  If you were always out partying the world’s way, you found yourself celebrating in the house of God.  Instead of engaging in a string of illicit relationships, you began cultivating a relationship with Jesus.  If you were struggling with substance abuse, you started partaking of what the Bible calls the “new wine”.  Everything was different. People saw the changes in your life and were drawn to the God who transformed your life so radically.  Those who were close to you constantly encouraged you to stay strong and continue walking this new path.

Then some time passes.  People become accustomed to you living a “moral” life.  Those you have met while you have been on this spiritual journey have never seen the person you were before.  There are no cheerleaders celebrating the fact that you are still walking.  What do you do then?  You do what you should have done all along.  It was never about the praise and approval of others.  It was always about pleasing the God who gave you new life in the first place.

Colossians 1:9-10  For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; ¹⁰ that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God…

When nobody is noticing your growth in the Lord, keep growing.  In a few months, Bella’s walking will not be a new thing in our household.  I doubt we will still be commenting every time she walks across a room.  Instead, we’ll be celebrating each new milestone she reaches.  Even that will stop after a while.  She will grow to be an adult and she will set goals for herself and reach them.  Some of those goals will not even be things we know about.  She will achieve them, and she will grow and change on her own.  She won’t need our constant approval, and neither should we need the approval of man.  We should move on from glory to glory, always desiring to please God and become the instrument in His hands that He will use to do Kingdom business.

Altered at the Altar

     I have been a special education teacher for over 30 years. I have mastered the art of reading upside down when I am sitting across the table from a student who is reading a text right side up. I have deciphered more convoluted spelling than you have probably ever seen and made sense of the ideas my kiddos were trying to write.  I’ve also edited the work of adult writers and found all the small errors that some people wouldn’t even notice.  I’m not a perfect writer myself and I’m sure others could find fault in my writing, but I do think that my spelling and word usage is fairly accurate. 

     Several weeks ago, I saw someone’s Facebook post talking about the wonderful things that God had done that morning in their church at the alter.  The teacher in me mentally took out my red pen to mark the incorrect usage of the homonym for altar, but then the Holy Spirit stopped that train of thought in its proverbial tracks.  It may have been a technical error, but spiritually, it was very accurate.

     In the Old Covenant sacrificial system, an altar was a place where animals were sacrificed to cover the sins of men.  The animals were a substitute so that people did not have to give up their own lives for the wrong they had done.  Rather than getting what they deserved, they offered the blood of the sacrifice.

     The New Covenant is built on Jesus being the sacrifice – once for all.  The cross becomes our altar – the place where He became the ultimate, perfect sacrifice and took away the sin of the world. We don’t get what we deserve because Jesus took on Himself the penalty of the death we deserved. 

     When my friend talked about the “alter”, it struck me that his word choice was a picture of what should really happen at the “altar”.  In the Old Covenant, in the formality of the sacrificial system, sin was covered, but I’m not sure the ritual ever changed many individual lives.  In the New Covenant, we are told that we are new creatures in Christ. When an encounter with God happens at the altar today, our lives can and should change. 

Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

     I know that sometimes I have been guilty of going to the altar to make some whispered promises to God that I have not kept.  Real transformation means allowing the Holy Spirit access into the deepest places in our hearts and being obedient as He directs us.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.  For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. (James 1:22-24)

     This morning my church had a baptismal service that was more than just a religious ritual.  It was a celebration of all the amazing things that God has been doing there.  It was a demonstration that the lives of people had been “altered at the altar”.  I heard stories of bondage broken, marriages and families restored, lives transformed, and purpose given.  That’s what is supposed to happen.  I hope it is happening in your life and in your church.  As it does, the church at large can begin to truly touch the world with the power of God.

Claim What is Yours!

     Last Friday afternoon, I left work with a simple to-do list in my mind.  I needed to go to the bank and cash a check, buy some gasoline, go grocery shopping and then meet my son and his wife to pick up the baby so they could have a “date night”.  I completed my checklist and drove home.  The weekend went as planned with lots of baby giggles, a nice visit with my son and daughter-in-law, and church on Sunday.

     Then came Monday and a regular work day.  At the end of the day, as I left work, I called my husband as I often do.  Because he knows that I often fail to notice my gas gauge and not knowing that I’d put $30 in the tank on Friday, he asked me to check to see how much gas I had.  I laughed at his concern and told him I had plenty of gas, but when I turned the key in the van and the dashboard lit up, the needle showed the tank was on empty.  That was impossible!  I’d only driven about 15 miles on that $30 and once I got home on Friday the van had not left the house.  I called my husband back and we talked about whether the gas tank could be leaking or whether gas could have been siphoned from the tank.  Regardless of the mystery of the missing gasoline, I was running on fumes, so I stopped and put a few dollars' worth of gas in the tank.

     Driving home, I replayed the events of Friday afternoon in my mind, mentally retracing my steps.  I know I went to the bank because the rest of the cash was in my purse.  I remembered paying for the gas, BUT I did not remember actually pumping the gas. In a hurry to check off all my tasks and get my hands on that sweet baby, I’d simply paid for the gas, walked out and started the van and gone off to the grocery store. I guess I'd had a senior moment and a blond moment at the same time! Sheepishly, I called the gas station and asked if they had any record of someone paying for gas and then not pumping it.  Of course, they did, and they were good enough to allow me to come back and top off my gas tank.

     I think many of us struggle through life like that.  We find ourselves lacking something that we thought we had.  We’re confused as to why things in our lives seem to be missing. We review the events in our lives, wondering where we went wrong and trying to figure out why things are not working out the way we thought they would.  Could it be as simple as the fact that we have become distracted and not claimed the things in our lives for which the price has already been paid?

What do you need today? Salvation? – paid for.  Deliverance? – paid for. Provision? – paid for. Peace? – paid for. Wisdom? – paid for.  The list is infinite.  All that we need or will ever need has been purchased for us by Jesus.  It may not always come on your terms or in your timing, but it is all there.  Don’t let the enemy distract you and keep you from claiming what is already yours.

Use It or Lose it!

   

   Our Easter dinner last week was simple. We had no company, so my husband and I decided on a steak and potatoes meal instead of a more traditional Easter feast. He had been craving some corn on the cob, so I added that to the menu. When the time came to eat, we wanted to use the little corn holders with the spikes on them that push into the cob, to protect our fingers from the heat and the messy melted butter.  Unfortunately, we could not find them anywhere.  We searched every cabinet, every drawer, inside any covered container, in the pantry, in the microwave cart – every place we could think to look.

     Evidently, we hadn’t eaten corn on the cob for some time or at least one of us would have remembered when we last used them and where we had put them.  We muddled through the meal like true pioneers and are recovering from the experience quite nicely, but this became one of those simple object lessons that God uses in my life so much.  If you don’t use something, you will lose it.  That’ll preach!

       There are a lot of objects to keep up with in my household, but God has given us many things in our spiritual house as well. In fact, the Bible says in 1 Peter 1:2-4,

“ Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, ³ as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, ⁴ by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

     Just like a physical object can be misplaced and forgotten, it is possible to disregard the things of the spirit to the point that they are not operating in your life.  Peter goes on to say in verses 5-9 of Chapter 1,

“⁵ But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, ⁶ to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, ⁷ to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. ⁸ For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.”

     The corn holders were mine, but they are certainly not abounding, and they are definitely unfruitful because I can’t even locate them. 😊 If I’m not staying mindful of faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness and love, those things will be harder and harder to find in my life, making me ineffective as a Christian.  Peter says to give all diligence to these things.  I like to think of myself as organized in the things of my household, but the system broke down somewhere.  At least the failure to keep all my things at hand has reminded me to keep the things that God has given me at the forefront of my life so that I’ll use them and not lose them!

Lessons from a Baby #4: Imperfect Imitation

Isabella Beth Ellis, age 14 months

     Our granddaughter is almost 15 months old.  She is a very busy tiny human. She crawls everywhere and recently has begun “experimenting” with walking.  After about 8 steps, she plops down on her well-padded, diapered rear end.  She is developing in all ways as a normal, healthy baby girl.

     One of those developmental milestones is learning to talk.  While she doesn’t say much that you could recognize yet, she is beginning to attach meaning to sounds.  One of the things her parents are trying to get her to say is the word “up” when she wants us to pick her up.  So far, we get “uhh” for “up”, but she is trying!

     Our home Bible study group this past week spent a lot of time discussing how we should approach difficulties.  When we talk about the situations in our lives and the lives of others we love, we should be speaking what God says  – not rehashing the nature of the problem.   After all, Proverbs 13:21 says,

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue,
And those who love it will eat its fruit.”

     This is an area where I often fall short.  Our human nature wants to talk about all the details of our woes and rehearse all the issues that plague us.  It’s hard to put those things out of our minds and speak the things of God and the will of God as it is spelled out in His Word.  When we realize that is what we are doing, it’s also easy to be angry at ourselves for our weakness and our unbelief.

    When Bella tries to echo our words, she doesn’t get it right, but every day she is getting a little closer to saying what we say.  Are we angry or disappointed that her words are not the perfect imitation of ours?  Of course not!  We realize that learning language is a process.  We allow her the time to grow and we delight in every attempt that she makes to communicate with us.

     I think God must feel the same way.  When we fail in our imitation of Christ and His ways, God still loves us.  He knows that we need time to learn His Word and His ways and to be more mindful of our words.  The only thing that could hurt me in Bella’s acquisition of language is if she stopped talking at all – just stopped trying.  When we don’t get things right in our walk with God, we often just quit trying.  We stop pursuing Him because we don’t think we’ll ever measure up.  To a certain extent, that’s true. We’ll never get it totally right in this life, but God’s grace accepts our imperfect imitation.  The only thing that would break His heart is if we stop trying.