Clenched Fists

Clenched Fists: The Tyranny of what’s MINE

When I was a kid, I labeled anything I could get my hands on “MINE.” This toy is mine, you can’t play with it. These friends are mine, you can’t be friends with them. This family is mine, you aren’t allowed in. This food, this sport, these clothes, this life is all mine mine mine. I don’t care if any of this was yours, it’s mine now. Tough luck.

Obviously, that was very childish of me. But I’ve noticed that even now, I’m not really that much different. I cling to what is mine and I don’t want to let it go. I am typing on MY computer. I am sitting in MY campus ministry. I drove here with MY car. I just finished eating MY lunch which I bought with MY money. There seems to be an eerie power in the pronouns ‘my’ and ‘mine’. It seems we are all holding tightly to what is ours with clenched fists. If I lose something that is mine, it pains me. In fact sometimes, it makes me downright angry. I hate it when someone wastes MY time and MY money. It was mine. How dare they dishonor me like that?

But what causes me to attach myself so earnestly to this false illusion that I own anything? To put it simply, it’s greed and selfishness. I am thinking about MYself rather than others. William James, an influential Harvard psychologist in the 20^th century, analyzed our culture like this:

 Poverty may be the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul… the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment…

            Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devote to unpopular causes… I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

Isn’t that challenging? So Jeremy, are you going to go give away everything you have and live on the street? Not quite. But if I did, I would be okay with it. With Jesus, it’s not so much about our actions, but instead our heart. The Pharisees were all about actions. Jesus wants us to not only do good, but to do it for the right reason: out of complete love and devotion for God and for others. So it’s not necessarily demanded that every Christian renounce every good luxury. But it is true that if we place anything above our devotion to Him, it must be removed immediately.

Open Hands

·         The world asks “How can I get more?” I want to ask, “What can I do without?”

·         The world asks “How can I find myself?” I want to ask, “How can I lose myself?”

·         The world asks “How can I win friends and influence people?” I want to ask, “How can I love God?”

·         The world asks “How can I hold on to everything with clenched fists?” I want to ask “How can I live a gentle life with open hands?”

For the truth is that we cannot receive what God has to give us if we are too busy clenching onto what we’ve already got. Jesus demands our entire lives. When we grasp on the things that we label with MINE, we prevent God from moving powerfully in our life and others. Abbot Agatho says it best: Never acquire for yourself anything that you might hesitate to give to your brother if he asked for it, for thus you would be found a transgressor of God’s command. If anyone asks, give to him, and if anyone wants to borrow from you, do not turn away from him.

I’ve too often thought this “self-denial” thing Jesus speaks of was throwing some extra money in the offering plate, or giving up Saturday at Christmastime to work for a non-profit, voicing the latest movement for justices, but these moments are rarely more than occasional. I want my whole life to be a natural progression of generosity and love.

Annie Dillard says it well:

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the Spirit requires less and less; time is ample and passage sweet.

Doesn’t that sound like the right way to live? We are so busy spending all our time to get money and spending all our money just to find some time. We are in a vicious cycle of acquiring more and more and more. I’m not saying we should all going live in a cave, but it’s hard not to be convicted by the words of Jesus when He says “How hard it is for a rich man to enter Heaven!”

I want my life to be like the prayer Blaise Pascal:

Deliver me. Lord,… from the sadness at my proper suffering which self-love might give, but put me into sadness like your own… I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the Church and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one. You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you and bad to offend you.

I want to understand the admonition of Thomas a Kempis when he says:

Full liberty will never be yours, my son, unless you totally deny yourself. Everyone who seeks and loves only himself is held fast by heavy chains; he is a selfish busybody who always seeks his own interests and not those of Jesus Christ. Whatever he plans or accomplishes will not last long for everything that does not come from God will certainly perish.

We aren’t supposed to merely invite Jesus in; we are supposed to uproot and make secondary everything else in the aim of loving Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. These Christians that I’ve quoted understood that self-denial does not require a weary pessimism about attachments or estrangement from beauty, but rather cheerful satisfaction in God. When they set aside their lives for Christ, they often found a much deeper, more permanent joy on the other side. They found that beauty and love are most meaningfully experienced through lives that love God first.

Gifts

My natural tendency is to hold all these things that I have with clenched fists, but Jesus is imploring me to open my life up with a posture of open hands. Jesus has to remind me of this time after time after time. Everything is a gift. We have been blessed so that we might bless others, for he who is given much is expected much. So let’s take this gift called life—and all that it has to offer—and offer it back to the gift giver. It will be a beautiful sight when we find ourselves desiring less and less, instead of more and more.

I write all this conviction not to lament at our greedy and materialistic society, but to challenge myself and purify my heart. The message of self-denial gets drowned out in a culture of ME ME ME. I need to remind myself of this because if I don’t, the worries of this world will choke me out and I will find myself as selfish and consumed as when I first started. Following Jesus in this country is like walking up a downwards escalator.

Let’s be a people who seek His kingdom knowing all these earthly things will be added to us.

Read More

Give it a Rest Already

Give it a Rest Already

Have you ever noticed that not honoring the Sabbath (aka not working one day of the week) in the Old Testament was right there on the same level as not killing someone? Thou shalt not kill anyone; that’s reasonable. That shalt make sure not to do any work on this particular day; a little stranger. In fact, God straight up smote the Israelites who did work on the Sabbath. It seems the message is loud and clear: The Sabbath is important to Him.

But then we take a look at Jesus, who’s all like “I’ll do miracles on the Sabbath if I want to, so ha, because, you know, I am like the King of the Sabbath.” So what’s the deal here? Is the Sabbath important or isn’t it? On one side God killed people if they worked too hard and on the other, He was like “eh, people need healing today. Might as well!”

The Heart

The heart of the issue is not that God just hates 7 day work weeks (don’t we all?), but instead, God hates it when His children rely on themselves instead of Him. There is a fundamental passion in God that yearns for His children to rely on Him not because He is being difficult, but because that is how WE were designed. We were never meant to be self-sufficient little mini-gods. We were meant to be interconnected children made in the image of an interconnected God—3 personalities in one. So why did God implement the Sabbath? The same reason humans don’t drink gasoline and cars don’t run off of milk. We were designed to run off of rest.

The Gift

So how do we reconcile the seemingly different views of the Sabbath between the Old Testament and the New? It’s all about how you understand what God is saying. The Old Testament laws aren’t a bunch of rules, but instead, gifts. The New Testament idea of the Sabbath is not a breaking of the law, rather a reinforcing that it is indeed a gift. It is all summed up in Jesus’ words “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Jesus is explaining to us that God doesn’t force us to rest for His sake, but for ours. The Ten Commandments aren’t a collection of rules, but a collection of gifts. In the same regard, God gave us the Sabbath for our benefit. So why don’t we receive the gift that we’ve been given?

The Problem

For one, we like to work and provide. In fact, we were designed to work. In the Garden of Eden, when everything was just right, Adam had an occupation. So work is not a necessary evil, but a glorious delight. However, because we are fallen, we have this idea—whether consciously or subconsciously—that we can earn our worth through work. It’s the reason why so many men are caught up in 60 hour weeks. It’s the reason why families only interact a solid 12 minutes a day. It’s the reason why retirees have to find something useful to do or they are miserable. We don’t want to stop working because if we do, we feel like we will die. We feel like we are failing. We want to feel our worth through work. But the truth is, you can’t earn your worth. So stop trying. No matter what you do, God will never love you more. But the beauty of it is that no matter what you do, God will never love you less either. His love is unconditional. You could sit at the end of a dock and drink sweet tea all day and your Father will still delight in you.

The words of Jimmy Needham say it best:

I tried Lord
I tried Lord
I tried hard to be Your good little boy
Chin up, head high
All zeal and no joy
Thinking all my good deeds could please Jesus
Boy, was I wrong
Though I knew the right songs, all my cymbals and gongs played the melodies wrong
And it wasn’t long ‘til I saw my disease
A life spent wanting to please
On hands and knees
To make right, to appease
God help me please
This can’t be Christianity, it can’t be
The whole thing’s like insanity
Where’s the rest of eternal security?
Where’s the hope of a God big enough to cope with all my hang-ups and insecurities?
Certainly this isn’t breathing

My chest burning and heaving
It’s like my pulse is ceasing
Like my heart quits beating 
Yet this I recall to mind and therefore I have hope:
You died, Lord
You died, Lord
Assuredly, like the coming of the dawn, the Father’s love song goes on
Drowning out my bitter songs
And breaking through walls and barriers
Christ swoops in, removes sin, picks up His bride and carries her 
So I can sing in agreement with the King this thing:
There’s only one thing that pleases the Father
The God-man on the tree in the midst of the scoffers
Now I finally see that Christ is what Christ offers
And I’m finally free in the love of the Father

Video if it elegantly spoken here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD-wnNnW4KE

Another issue we have: we don’t trust God. We don’t truly believe that He will dress us like the lilies in the field or provide for us like the birds in the air. We don’t truly believe that He is all-powerful and full of every good thing. We don’t truly believe He will give us what we need, or more importantly, what we want! God told the Israelites. “Don’t work this day every week. I will provide for you!” He is telling us that now!

The Effects

We are restless, worried, downtrodden and miserable when we don’t rest. Quite frankly, we are a nation of people who are overworked and overwhelmed. We feel like we have to fill up every single moment, otherwise, we are wasting our time. We are told that our worth is in our production. Time and money become our idols and we can never get enough. Ultimately, we are running on fumes and running aground.

The Death

When you stop working, you taste a bit of your death. You realize that even though you’ve stopped moving, the world around you keeps on going just fine. The world isn’t running because of you. You really aren’t that important. Every time you take a Sabbath, you feel the discomfort of not taking part in this world’s parade. In essence, standing still isn’t easy when the world is moving backwards. As a Christian, tasting your death is delight not depression because you know that death is not the end but the beginning.

The Practice

So what does a Sabbath look like in this day in age? Do we just sit around for 24 hours and watch the paint dry? Do we sit in a church service until we fall asleep (which may not take that long)? Nope. Unless that’s your sort of thing. I think the modern day Sabbath looks like this:

1.      Stop

Well first, you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to find 24 hours every week. Mine is typically from Friday at 6 to Saturday at 6 or Saturday to Sunday, depending on which is more available. You’ve got to stop doing all the things in your life that bring you stress, anxiety, and tiredness. You’ve got to stop trying to earn your own way. You’ve got to be still and know that God is God. He is in control, not you. Finally, you actually have to plan for it. Sabbaths don’t just happen.

2.      Rest

Once you’ve stopped, do whatever gives you rest. If taking a nap, gives you rest. Do it! If cooking gives you rest, Bon appétit!  If gardening, or washing your car, or playing with your kids, or having sex with your spouse gives you rest, then do it! The Sabbath isn’t a 24 hour church service. It’s a period of rest and relaxation.

3.      Enjoy

Not only should you rest, but you should enjoy! I want every one of my Sabbaths to be associated with fun and so does God! Do what you have to do to enjoy your relationships and your rest. If you need to spend money to go roller skating with your family or out on a date with your significant other or out on the town with your best friends, do it! Does a father hate it when his kids have fun? No! He loves it! God loves it when we take delight in His creation and in Him.

4.      Contemplate

The Sabbath is not just a day off. A day off is a bastard Sabbath. A Sabbath is a time to contemplate the glory of God. All during your Sabbath, rejoice, be thankful, and just spend time with our amazing God. Don’t just rest physically; rest spiritually. Remind yourself of the truths of the gospel, the glory of God, and the bounty of blessings in your life.

Our nation is full of people needing to feed their own ego, parading status like steeples. Joy is the serious business of heaven. If we are too busy in our earthly business to take a mere 1/7^th of our week to delight in God, we are working for the wrong boss. God deserves our attention every day and every week. If we are relying on ourselves to get through this day and this week, we will live a miserable life like everyone around us. The Sabbath is a gift that God loves for His children to enjoy. Wouldn’t you hate it if you got your child a gift that would make His life so easy, and then he refused to use it?

Let’s spend our time in a heavenly balance of work and play. Let’s get to the end of the week, stop, and look back to declare “It is good!” Let’s stop working and start worshipping. Our relationships and our composure is too important not to.

Read More