To Make Him Heavy

"Does your life make others desire God?"  Meant for the Converse and skinny-jean wearing teenagers, it was a question posed by the man who pastors the youth of our church--my eldest included.  But God meant it for me.  At first listen, the seven words were not unique, not something I couldn't have read in some learn-how-to-be-a-better-Christian kind of book.  But, The Still, Small Voice repeated them, droned them over and over, until my soul ached with their sound.
Does MY life make others desire God?
Does it?
Well?
And when honesty finally out-wrestled pride, I could admit the truth:  probably not. At least not all the time. I'm too busy, too quick tempered, too impatient, too proud.  Paul complained of one thorn in the flesh, and surely, when God fashioned me, he rolled me out first in some blackberry patch with a thousand thorns.  And though I know I am indeed a new creature, with a new heart, those thorns prick still.
Does my life make others desire God?
Hmmph.
Isaiah told us why we were created:  for God's glory. (Isaiah 43:7)
For HIS glory.
God--the great artist's--intent when He molded this frame that would stretch and grow to 68 inches high with brown eyes, brown hair, and a cackle for a laugh, was singular. I am made for His glory, that's it.  But that word, glory, has always bugged me.  People throw it around too much--give the glory to God, honor and glorify God--and I'm left feeling the meaning is like weak depression tea. 
The Hebrew root word surprised me, confused me a bit at first.  A verb, its root means to make heavy.  To make heavy.
Other times in scripture, the same word is translated splendor or precious, and I think of gold.  Gold is heavy.  The more pure it is, the more dense it is, and the heavier it is.  That's what makes it precious--it's purity.  And that too, is what makes it heavy.  And this same root goes with my purpose--to glorify God--to make Him heavy. 
Earthly air stung my lungs some thirty-five years ago for a single reason--to make God heavy.  Somehow, I think I understand that.  When weight is placed on my value, I am to see that value's source and return it there. God.  Making Him the heavy one.  Making me light and Him heavy.  James knew where to place the weight of things when he wrote, "Every good and perfect gift is from above..." (James 1:17) All that is good, then, about me, came from the hands of a good and perfect God.  This must be the way to bring glory to Him--recognizing Him as the source, the giver of all that is good.
Paul himself counseled the Romans with these words,"  For by the grace given (It is all given, isn't it?  Even grace.) to me I say to every one of you not to think more highly of yourself than you ought to think, but to think with sober discernment, as God has distributed to each of you a measure of faith."  (Romans 12:3)  God distributes.  I just receive.
Somewhere, though, deeply rooted in North American culture, there is this sense that we are self-made men and women.  If we work hard.  If we study hard.  If we try hard.  We can do anything.  We.  But there are those words in John and Philippians--apart from ME you can do nothing, and WITH GOD all things are possible. 
In his book, Radical, David Platt adds, "God delights in using ordinary Christians who come to the end of themselves and choose to trust in his extraordinary provision.  He stands ready to allocate his power to all who are radically dependent on him and radically devoted to making much of him."
Making much of him.  Making him heavy.  But when I think of placing the weight on God, I see I'm dancing near a precipice--a cliff, that stepping off of, may prove the greatest abandoning of my personal ambitions I've ever known.  What of His desires?  Do I place more weight on them, than my own?  Because let's just be honest, most of us are more interested in picket fences than going to Africa to share His love.  And there are the haunting words of James, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."  And just how much weight will I place on God's clearly displayed heart?  Love your neighbor.  Turn the other cheek.  Give him your cloak.  Forgive seventy times seven.  Present your bodies as a sacrifice--alive, holy and pleasing.  God, grant me strength, grant me courage to trust that stepping from this precipice is not a foolish free fall, but a forage of faith.
 If I am about this business--if this is the motivation behind my living, then how could anyone not desire God?  Not because of something they see in me, but because in everything about me, there is God.  God is the forgiver and healer of the thorny places.  And there are many.  But look!  God's mercy is greater than those places.  He is the source of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.  When they are evident in my life, they come from Him.  And when they are absent, forgiveness comes from Him.  Much of him, less of me.  John said it too, "He must increase, but I must decrease." (John 3:30)
In America, we are obsessed with losing weight, but what of losing spiritual weight and placing it all--the good and the bad--on God?  This, I believe is the key to a life that somehow, despite our humanity, causes people to say, "If it is God she has, I want Him."
Does my life cause people to desire God?
The answer lies in where I place the weight of my life.

Pray with me:
Father, teach me to make much of You.  Teach me to place the weight of my life on You.  When people see me, Father, let me just be an arrow that points to He Who is ALL, He Who is Good, He Who is Strong, He Who is Able, He Who Heals, He Who is LOVE, He Who is Enough, He Who is God.  Amen.

Inertia of the Soul

So the boys and I are studying science and inevitably my youngest asks me to explain inertia--like that's just something that I should know without needing to google it. If there's one thing I've learned teaching the boys it's that I'll never have all the answers to their questions, but google will. And naturally, I google it because any explanation I give will be sketchy at best. Inertia is the resistance of any object to a change in its state of motion. As I sat there--flanked by two dusty-haired boys --discussing with them how if something is still, it wants to stay that way. Take a rock for example--it doesn't really want to move. It's kind of lazy. In the same way though, when that rock gets pushed down a hill, it doesn't want to stop either. Motivation for change is apparently rather hard to come by in the world of inanimate objects. Then again, perhaps inertia is not exclusive. Perhaps mankind too suffers from a form of inertia--inertia of the soul. Look how long it took humans to recognize slavery as an abuse of our fellow man? I'm not talking slaves that came from Africa here to the United States. We didn't write that book--slavery was around since the earliest of civilizations. There were Spartan slaves and Chinese slaves, there were slaves in Rome and frankly, there are still slaves to this day. Thousands of years and we can't seem to quit moving in that direction. Inertia. Consider the heart of Pharaoh--a man whom Egyptians considered a god. Surely he could change his mind and free the Israelite people. Yet he was steadily moving towards massive pyramids and he needed those Israelites to make bricks. It didn't matter what plague hammered his country, he was moving in the direction of bricks. That my friends, is inertia personified. So I am holding this concept of inertia in my heart, mulling over it, and I can't help but consider how I may be affected by it. I'm a task oriented person, so there's that--don't interrupt me when I'm in the middle of washing the dishes or I may need to take a pill. But I'm talking deeper than epidermal personality type stuff. I'm talking about the organs of my soul--the core of who I am. Do I resist the prodding of the Holy Spirit without even realizing that I'm doing it? Do I insist on mobility when He's whispering Stop, Sarah? What areas are there in my life where I've become completely still and yet God wishes me to move? What areas are there in my life where determined not to stop, I've run for so long while God longs for me to be still? My eldest son has this thing with being teachable. Though tender and generally very amiable and compliant, when it comes to doing something differently from how he has already started to do it, be ready. You'll encounter resistance. Take lay-ups for example. I saw he was struggling with making them consistently. So, like any other mother would do, I got a DVD on the fundamentals of layups and watched the entire thing. Then, I went outside and tried my hand at the new set of skills. And presto! Momma's making lay-ups in her thirties! Then I walked Nate through the process, step by step. He understood, but felt like he was doing just fine the other way. After all, his real problem wasn't his fundamentals, it was that he was doing them on a gravel driveway. Well, that's the way he saw it anyway. He took one or two shots and then just went right back to what he was doing before. I'll spare you the two weeks of teaching details, but eventually with lots more help from dad and some real encouragement, he figured out he wasn't listening to us. And he realized that as soon as he actually stopped and listened to what we were saying and then changed his state of motion, he could hit those shots. Now he's still got some inertia going on, but it's in the right direction and he's making lay-ups in the process. I don't think inertia itself is the problem, I think the problem we encounter is when we find ourselves going one way and God's heart for our lives is another. Consider Jonah--he headed the opposite direction from Nineveh because he did not want to be where God sent him. Sometimes it's as simple as sharing the love of Christ with our neighbor by bringing them some muffins, but our favorite cooking show is on and who wants to leave during Rachel Ray? Sometimes it's an addiction we can't even admit out in the open and we've stayed in the direction of that addiction for so long. We are intert...in the wrong way. And how that must break the heart of our Father. Not because we are not doing what we were created to do, but because we are not experiencing the joy of being who He created us to be. I find it encouraging to consider the definition of inertia. I think we naturally resist change. The devil we know is better than the one we don't. We'd rather keep eating ice cream by the bucketfuls and get fat than we would change that behavior and get onto the treadmill. The treadmill is hard, it's difficult and it's foreign to our muscle memory. We'd rather keep spending out of control than stop spending and start dealing with our debt. We tell ourselves we'll make changes next week, next month, next year. Those are the natural tendencies or the proclivities of a man's heart. We tend toward negative inertia. So, we're not alone. Adam and Eve kind of had the same thing going on. It's an ancient dilemma. Newton's first law of motion says that every object will continue in that state of motion unless acted on by an outside force. I like that. I really like that. In fact, I think this is where it really gets good. This is what I just absolutely love about God. He gets that we are very, very human and He does not leave us in that state of motion. He makes a way. He always has. Pharaoh changed his mind about the Israelites when God softened his heart. If you are like me and can readily identify some areas where you have become inert, then perhaps you'll join me in asking God to change the course of your life. Invite Him to soften the determination of your heart and provide the gentle force necessary to alter its course. We bring Him glory when we are yielding to His directions. We bring Him glory when we are surrendered to His course for our lives. Alternatively I am considering the ramifications of one right step. Then another. And another. Before long we have momentum built up--the whole thirty days to develop a new habit could in fact be true when you factor in the idea of inertia. What would the my world be like if I took just one or two areas and said I'm going to take one small step for thirty days in a row? Because once that momentum starts, I'm going to resist a reversal of my new motion. Only days away from a New Year, isn't it a perfect time to open our hands and release the reins? Isn't today, when we are celebrating the season of His birth, a great time to take hold of the peace He sent Jesus to bring into our lives? If we are holding tightly to our present state of motion we are not free to hold tightly to joy, to peace, to hope--the things that Christ came to give. I don't write to discourage. If you live the rest of your life in a muddy rut your Heavenly Father will love you no less. What we do doesn't make God love us more, but when we yield to His ways, the quality of our life drastically improves. Pray with me: Lord, thank you for the spiritual truths that lie in nature, in science. Thank you for the joy and peace you came to give. Please give me eyes to see where I am resisting a change and give me a heart that is soft in your hands. Replace my heart of stone, Father, with your heart. Overcome me that I might bring you glory and that I may fully enjoy the life you have given me. Amen. Read with me: Psalm 95 Luke 22:42 Colossians 1:9-14

The etching of God--Unpacking the passage part 4

I've been loving my time in the book of Deuteronomy. Though I've read this book through several times God always reveals a greater richness and depth than I took in each time prior. It reminds me of this place in Ontario where my husband and I used to go on the weekends from time to time. We'd take a twenty minute drive out into the country where the city sounds were hushed by the whispering harmonies of Winter Wheat's meandering gardens. An artist's home, a craft boutique of sorts, a chorus of gardens and most of all a tiny haven of refreshment for parched city dwellers, this place offered a new inspiration with every visit. And so it has been with Deuteronomy. Listen as Moses reminds the Israelites of the time they received the second set of commandments from God. "At that same time the Lord said to me, "Carve out for yourself two stone tablets like the first ones and come up to the mountain to me; also make for yourself a wooden ark. I will write on the tablets the same words that were on the first tablets you broke, and you must put them into the ark." So I made an ark of acacia wood and carved out two stone tablets just like the first ones. Then I went up the mountain with the two tablets in my hands. The Lord then wrote on the tablets the same words, the ten commandments, which he had spoken to you at the mountain from the middle of the fire at the time of that assembly, and he gave them to me. Then I turned, went down the mountain, and placed the tablets into the ark I had made--they are still there, just as the Lord commanded me." (Deut. 10:1-5) This week my boys and I have talked at length about rocks and stones--their use to mankind over the years. In particular we've discussed their usefulness as tools for some of the first people God placed here on earth. Did Abel use a spear with a stone tip to kill the first lamb he offered to God? Did God himself use a rock to scrape the animal skins he fashioned into clothing for Adam and Eve after they realized their nakedness before Him? Perhaps though, the most significant use of rock is found here in the Old Testament when God tells Moses to carve two tablets from stone. I love the phrase "Carve out for yourself..." that God uses when he instructs Moses. The Bible describes mankind's heart in various forms, one of which is stone. (Ez. 36:26) There are so many days when my heart carries the weight of the heaviest stone behind the cavity of my chest. Days when it's texture is not smooth or soft within the hands of others, but rough and jagged. Days when the hardness of it can only be likened to a rock's density. A heart of stone is a term with which I am familiar and it is true that I have carried a hard heart more than once in my life. But we serve and love a God who specializes in rocks and stones. God tells Moses to carve out two tablets from stone--not from some soft squishy sweet clay, not from some sifted sand which takes any form, but from stone. To imprint His ways permanently for the people of Israel, God needed something that would not alter over time. God's Word says that he replaces our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh and I love that. I believe Him when he says in chapter thirty of Deuteronomy, "The Lord God will also cleanse your heart and the hearts of your descendants so that you may love him with all your mind and being and so that you may live." Over and over and over in this book God repeats the phrase "love the Lord..." Love him. Just love him. And what is so incredible is that He is willing to cleanse our hearts, make them a space where He can etch Himself into their stone surface, transforming what once was dense rock into flesh and life. To make a space for God to imprint the way of life for the Israelites, Moses had to carve tablets from the face of stone. Carve it out. So often, it is the same for me. It is in the places and points in my life where I've struggled, wrestled the most over things that God has left His indelible mark as He has carved out a space for His image. Carving out is never painless for the heart of mankind--the scraping away of old grudges, painful pasts, and deeply rooted desires not founded in God. The chipping away at habits that don't glorify God, the peeling back of misconceptions and distortions of God's Word--these are all intense and often heart wrenching processes that take time. Rarely do they happen overnight. These are the processes and transformations of the long-haul followers of Christ. Even now as I write God has been carving into my heart the Words, Sarah, I'm worthy of your trust. I AM. And as He carves, He places me in situations where I want to cry out, "No, God, I need to take care of this on my own." As He scratches away deep gashes from the portals of my past He gently whispers I know there have been people in your life who weren't trustworthy, who let you down, but I am not like them. Learn ME. Learn who I AM. Submit to my yoke and you'll rest." And over time as I allow Him to inscribe His ways on my heart, I will reflect the writings of a loving, faithful, good and trustworthy Heavenly Father. This is my purpose in being created--that I would bring Him glory--reflect His character to the world. This was the heart of God when he gave the Israelites those commands too--that they would obey Him and have life. How many of us are like that old movie Dead Man Walking? I never saw it, but the title has always captivated me. Am I choosing ways of death because the way of life--the carving out of the stone of my heart a place soft enough for God to write Himself into it's surface--is too painful, too risky, too radical even? Let it not be so. Most often the book of Deuteronomy is associated with the law, but I believe that is a short sighted understanding. This is a book that begs to echo the heart of God--I love you enough to inscribe myself on stone. I love you enough to give you clear boundaries and a way to live life in abundance. I AM love. Carve out a space for me within your heart. Lord, take your tools and carve yourself into my being. Etch your face and your heart and your character deeply into my heart that it may not fade or wash away with the passing of time. Create in me a clean heart, cleanse me from within--allow me to reflect the perfect law that gives freedom to all mankind. I declare you are a good and faithful Father. I choose today to live in that knowledge. Amen. Read with me: Deuteronomy 30:6, James 1:25, Psalm 51:10