What if you died, went to heaven, saw all the glory of God there, and then He asked you to go back to earth and now live here again? The thing was, He set you down on earth like in the terminator where they go through time with no clothes and nothing at all? (Okay, so you get one set of clothes to start with).
But He also gave you a set of priorities: 1) build His kingdom and love Him first, no matter what 2) love all the people you meet 3) do what you can to get people of all the ethnic groups in the world following Jesus 4) strengthen other people who believe as much as you can in their faith and love for God & 5) do as much good as you can anywhere you can, but especially for other believers. The tools He did send with you are 1) His written message for the world 2) His presence and person inside of you 3) access to Him to request help, and anything, really, that you need to accomplish His priorities 4) His promise that He will be with you and never leave you and that IF you keep His priorities first, He will take care of all your needs for living in this world and 5) the reality that there are other people on earth who are followers of this same God.
How would you set off to arrange what you would do here on earth? Where would you start?
What would you begin to do?
I want to propose that the VERY LAST THING you would ever consider would be to adopt living like 99.9% of American people live as your first priority. It would be laughable. "Oh, I will first go get a job so I can buy my own house and invest in 2 cars and enough clothes to have a change for every day of the year and so I can have enough electronics to entertain myself for most of the hours I am not working at my job. Oh, and I want to make sure that I have enough food so I can eat as much as I want every day. And I have to be sure to have my own dwelling place with enough furniture to fill every room. I will also pay money to make sure if I die that my heirs have a million dollars to live on and never have to work. Yeah, that's how I will start." Umm, what does ANY OF THIS have to do with the priorities you were given or the tools God gave you when He sent you back here?
Yet that is where I have found myself and I am undone. I have to go back to the start. The first sentence. This is me and this IS us. But I find myself with pretty much a lot of that stuff now with me. I have had it backwards. You don't start, I should not have started by thinking I should focus on fulfilling the second half of tool number 4 listed above. Why would I even think that? Because that is just what is done here in America. Oh... the American dream. To me has become a nightmare of sorts. "Let me go, I want to be free, I want to live, and follow the One who brought me back from the dead." "NO, YOU MUST SERVE THE AMERICAN DREAM AND GIVE ALL YOUR SOUL TO FIND IT; YOU MUST NEVER FOLLOW THE PRIORITIES THAT GOD GAVE YOU AFTER HE BROUGHT YOU BACK ALIVE. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
So now I MUST re-Imagine my life. Start with the priorities of God, start with His tools He gives me. And whatever else gets in the way of those, and does not help or serve those, they go. Adios. Hasta la vista, baby. They must. "If anyone wants to be my disciple, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." If we want to be Jesus' disciple, we have to say to ourselves NO! Then we must DIE. Then we are given life and we follow Jesus. And following Him means we adapt to His priorities and use the tools He gives.
We DON'Tadapt his priorities to us, to our way of life, and make His tools serve our purposes. Oh God have mercy. This is NOT ABOUT MONEY. It is about priorities and whom I am serving. But in America we give lip service to saying we get that it is not about money. WE DON'T GET IT. We do serve money and live for money and follow money and do everything we can to preserve our way of "life" instead of putting everything on the pyre for the use of the King and reorienting everything about us toward His mission, His goals, His priorities. If we do that and He lets us have money aplenty to bless and do good, praise His name. And if He lets us live with 4 other families and share 2 cars and eat rice and beans so we can follow Him, praise His name. And if He lets us live on 100 dollars a month and have one set of clothes and live in a tent and walk from town to town to share the good news and we are beaten by the unbelievers there, then Praise His Glorious name. And we might then understand how our Indian evangelist brothers, maybe some of them, live their lives for the King. Would it not be better to be laughed to scorn, thrown to the lions and lose our very lives than to sell our souls for money and follow a dollar? We are children of the great King, and we bear the name of the suffering servant: and no servant is greater than his master. Let us follow HIM wherever He leads. And one day, on THAT day, to hear from His lips, "Well done, my good and faithful servant," oh what bliss. We will know that we have pleased Him who is our very LIFE.
Unless we can re-IMAGINE our way of living to accomplish God's priorities with the tools God has given us, we will continue to be sucked along with the American way of life.
Christians: we are dead people brought back to life. Re-Imagine your time here with faces solidly focused on our Savior. We must, we must, we must, we must.
If you want to read more on this, read Francis Schaeffer's book, "True Spirituality," and Romans chapter 6.
a blog of thoughts on life and faith by K T Mat
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Is the red rubber ball enough?
In America, important topics like life and death and meaning and purpose are hard to talk about. Everyone has his or her own viewpoint and we try to respect that. But sometimes we differ and we don’t like to offend our friends. So I offer this little essay to my friends to hear a bit of my personal journey of discovery where it can be read in quietness and thought. I hope you will simply hear it as the discovery of a friend and consider what I say. Some things are too important to keep to ourselves.
A few years ago I heard a man talk about his “little red rubber ball.” He was creating a metaphor for searching and finding meaning in the little red ball he had chased as a boy on a playground. That ball had pointed to his athletic ability, and to what was most important to him. The metaphor is powerful because it says we should follow our dreams, the things that really make us come alive, wherever they take us. In his words, keep chasing the red rubber ball no matter what.
Much of my life I have tried to pursue life by how well I got through a day or how much I enjoyed what I was doing in my life, by the use of my wits and my ability to explain hard things in a simple way. But I have come to the place where I know this is fruitless and has not satisfied who I find myself to be in a deep way. I have come to see that things or vocation or time or even pleasures cannot be my little red rubber ball, nor anything that is only of temporary existence. I know I am made for more than that. These things just do not fulfill.
My discovery is that maybe all this is looking for life in a fundamentally wrong way. What if life cannot be found in day to day existence, and really isn’t about making it through another day, or having our heart beat for another year, or even in finding out what we do best or are really skilled at? Maybe life really isn’t just our biological existence, and the ways we make that tolerable or interesting. So where then do we find a life that is actually life?
Only 86,400 seconds in a day; it’s not enough!!!! Tick tock tick tock tick tock
Philosophical thought: If the universe is fundamentally impersonal, then why should we expect life to be found anywhere at all? I don’t think, in the case of a cold and empty universe where all there is is physical matter, that life can be found. How could it be? My “life” would just be existence for a mere 70 to 80 years and then back to dust. No matter how interesting or eventful my existence was, that would be the fundamental thing. Life would be simply prolonged death, and there is no meaning.
No meaning in this by itself
But what if?
But what if?
But what if?
What if the universe is fundamentally personal? What if a personal being made this universe and calls us into personal fellowship or friendship with himself as the fundamental thing life is? Then that would mean that all the searching for purpose and meaning and “life” in the impersonal, in things or existence or physical pleasure, whatever I can do and muster up, was searching in all the wrong places.
The personal God creates
The personal God puts all here into His creation
The right place to search would be in the realm of the personal, the realm of the creator who is personal. This is what I now believe life is. It is not existence biologically, no matter how interesting or extravagant that existence is. It is friendship with the one who is the personal core or center of this universe: its creator. Many years ago I was approached by this creator to start a friendship, but it has taken many years for me to realize that he did not want to make my “life” better or easier or more satisfying. He wanted to become my life itself.
Jesus Christ said that eternal life is to know this one true God, and himself, who had been sent by God. Life is found in the personal creator God. Jesus also said that if we heard his words and believed the one who had sent Him, we had crossed over from death to life. Fundamentally we are dead apart from knowing Him. But we are also alive when we hear him and begin to believe him and to have a friendship with him.
I am not saying that life is anything about becoming religious, joining a church or synagogue, giving money to poor people, or becoming a good person. Those won’t make dead people come alive. But the person who holds the power of life and death can. And He wants to. And he says that life is in knowing him. Jesus said He had come to give us life, and to the full. And he gives it through Himself.
Jesus gave himself for us in this world and he took away the cause of our alienation from his Father, the guilt of our evil that is a very part of our natural selves. We see this spring up often, in the lies we tell to protect ourselves to the desires we have to advance at others’ expense. We see it in the self centered nature of our existence where we primarily protect our own existence to the lack of concern we have over our creator’s desire to be loved by us. It permeates us. So does a specialness, no doubt. We have a sense that we are special and valuable and worthy. But that does not negate the fact that we have fallen short in many ways of what we know we should be.
We can pretend we are fundamentally good, but we know better when we are alone and realize we don’t have friendship with our creator just because we might wish to.
Historical thought: God has said all through history that the way to come to Him is by offering a sacrifice of a life for all the evil we do; you can read about this in the Bible in the book of Leviticus, and many other places. It is called the Jewish sacrificial system. All those sacrifices that have been offered point to the real sacrifice that makes us friends with God in light of the wrong we have done: the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on a cross in the year 30 AD or so in the land of Israel.
Religions, or doing good, these are not life!
Jesus did this so we could know Him and find life in Him. “He died for us, so that…we might live together with him.” He also was raised from the dead, and therefore we can know him now.
Being someone who knows Jesus is to be someone who is finding life in him. We start by stopping our effort at giving ourselves life, and instead let Him give us life by what he did for us in His death and resurrection from the dead. And then we can begin to know and love him, to become his friend. And life is forever found in knowing him more and more.
Back to the metaphor of the red rubber ball. Someone put that red rubber ball on the playground for that little boy to find. So, I don’t need a red rubber ball, what I need is the one who put the red rubber ball on the playground. I need the person, not the impersonal thing he has given me that seems to satisfy for a while. And once I begin to know him, I can be content. And then he may just give me a rubber ball to express much of my love and friendship for him in a way that suits me best. But that keeps the red rubber ball (or is it golden? Or grey? Or green?) in the right place.
Thoughts from your friend,
Kevin.
A few years ago I heard a man talk about his “little red rubber ball.” He was creating a metaphor for searching and finding meaning in the little red ball he had chased as a boy on a playground. That ball had pointed to his athletic ability, and to what was most important to him. The metaphor is powerful because it says we should follow our dreams, the things that really make us come alive, wherever they take us. In his words, keep chasing the red rubber ball no matter what.
Much of my life I have tried to pursue life by how well I got through a day or how much I enjoyed what I was doing in my life, by the use of my wits and my ability to explain hard things in a simple way. But I have come to the place where I know this is fruitless and has not satisfied who I find myself to be in a deep way. I have come to see that things or vocation or time or even pleasures cannot be my little red rubber ball, nor anything that is only of temporary existence. I know I am made for more than that. These things just do not fulfill.
My discovery is that maybe all this is looking for life in a fundamentally wrong way. What if life cannot be found in day to day existence, and really isn’t about making it through another day, or having our heart beat for another year, or even in finding out what we do best or are really skilled at? Maybe life really isn’t just our biological existence, and the ways we make that tolerable or interesting. So where then do we find a life that is actually life?
Only 86,400 seconds in a day; it’s not enough!!!! Tick tock tick tock tick tock
Philosophical thought: If the universe is fundamentally impersonal, then why should we expect life to be found anywhere at all? I don’t think, in the case of a cold and empty universe where all there is is physical matter, that life can be found. How could it be? My “life” would just be existence for a mere 70 to 80 years and then back to dust. No matter how interesting or eventful my existence was, that would be the fundamental thing. Life would be simply prolonged death, and there is no meaning.
No meaning in this by itself
But what if?
But what if?
But what if?
What if the universe is fundamentally personal? What if a personal being made this universe and calls us into personal fellowship or friendship with himself as the fundamental thing life is? Then that would mean that all the searching for purpose and meaning and “life” in the impersonal, in things or existence or physical pleasure, whatever I can do and muster up, was searching in all the wrong places.
The personal God creates
The personal God puts all here into His creation
The right place to search would be in the realm of the personal, the realm of the creator who is personal. This is what I now believe life is. It is not existence biologically, no matter how interesting or extravagant that existence is. It is friendship with the one who is the personal core or center of this universe: its creator. Many years ago I was approached by this creator to start a friendship, but it has taken many years for me to realize that he did not want to make my “life” better or easier or more satisfying. He wanted to become my life itself.
Jesus Christ said that eternal life is to know this one true God, and himself, who had been sent by God. Life is found in the personal creator God. Jesus also said that if we heard his words and believed the one who had sent Him, we had crossed over from death to life. Fundamentally we are dead apart from knowing Him. But we are also alive when we hear him and begin to believe him and to have a friendship with him.
I am not saying that life is anything about becoming religious, joining a church or synagogue, giving money to poor people, or becoming a good person. Those won’t make dead people come alive. But the person who holds the power of life and death can. And He wants to. And he says that life is in knowing him. Jesus said He had come to give us life, and to the full. And he gives it through Himself.
Jesus gave himself for us in this world and he took away the cause of our alienation from his Father, the guilt of our evil that is a very part of our natural selves. We see this spring up often, in the lies we tell to protect ourselves to the desires we have to advance at others’ expense. We see it in the self centered nature of our existence where we primarily protect our own existence to the lack of concern we have over our creator’s desire to be loved by us. It permeates us. So does a specialness, no doubt. We have a sense that we are special and valuable and worthy. But that does not negate the fact that we have fallen short in many ways of what we know we should be.
We can pretend we are fundamentally good, but we know better when we are alone and realize we don’t have friendship with our creator just because we might wish to.
Historical thought: God has said all through history that the way to come to Him is by offering a sacrifice of a life for all the evil we do; you can read about this in the Bible in the book of Leviticus, and many other places. It is called the Jewish sacrificial system. All those sacrifices that have been offered point to the real sacrifice that makes us friends with God in light of the wrong we have done: the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on a cross in the year 30 AD or so in the land of Israel.
Religions, or doing good, these are not life!
We feel alone; alienated; self centered.
Sacrifice after sacrifice
POINT to One sacrifice for all time.
One final sacrifice to take away all guilt
POINT to One sacrifice for all time.
One final sacrifice to take away all guilt
One resurrected Lord we can know forever!
Being someone who knows Jesus is to be someone who is finding life in him. We start by stopping our effort at giving ourselves life, and instead let Him give us life by what he did for us in His death and resurrection from the dead. And then we can begin to know and love him, to become his friend. And life is forever found in knowing him more and more.
Back to the metaphor of the red rubber ball. Someone put that red rubber ball on the playground for that little boy to find. So, I don’t need a red rubber ball, what I need is the one who put the red rubber ball on the playground. I need the person, not the impersonal thing he has given me that seems to satisfy for a while. And once I begin to know him, I can be content. And then he may just give me a rubber ball to express much of my love and friendship for him in a way that suits me best. But that keeps the red rubber ball (or is it golden? Or grey? Or green?) in the right place.
"I am your life, not the ball.
I gave you the ball, find life in ME.
Enjoy me as you play with the ball I give you."
Thoughts from your friend,
Kevin.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)