Quieting (Sunday) – Isaiah 30:15-18

by RobertCummins | Aug 7, 2016 | 31. Quieting

In repentance and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength. (Isaiah 30:15)

However Israel rejected repentance and rest. They refused quietness and trust. Consequently they were put to flight by the bluff of an inferior force. Even with the swiftest of horses it was a terrible route. The outcome of Israel’s independence was isolation and exposure.

We no longer ride horses into battle armed with swords and spears but the nature of warfare has not changed; there is an enemy who seeks to destroy us. When I hear God declaring that our salvation will be worked out through repentance, rest, quietness and trust, I have a vision of a grace-saturated inner-life, one that we compose, taking our lead from the Holy Spirit.

Sadly, I suspect we too have turned down God’s terms of rest and repentance, and of quietness and trust. Our hearts are the battle field. We still have a diabolical enemy who would love to destroy us. His chief weapon is deception. He is referred to as the prince of the power of the air. When I think of the war he is waging in this air-space, I picture radio waves travelling unseen through walls carrying their messages of advertising, news and entertainment. I see the prince of this age crafting the bulk of these transmissions from carefully blended amounts of fact and fiction. This content too frequently passes unchallenged through our hearts and minds. However, because of God’s part in this war, I picture a day when Satan’s lies will be filtered out. On that day I believe we will be astounded that this singular master lier caused so much paranoia and drove so many into chaos, bondage and misery. We can take courage though because our passage concludes with…

Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, and therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him. (Isaiah 30:18)

To compose our hearts for a war with the father of lies we must remind ourselves that light obliterates darkness. Our God is the Father of Lights and we are the children of his light. Our spirits were created to be clothed in truth and light.

Father, may it not be said of us that we rejected your means of working out our salvation. May we establish our secret places of retreat and prayer. May we become adept in discerning spiritual reality, in distinguishing religion from relationship, in separating truth from error. Help us to cultivate longing where there is complacency. We long to see Your justice exercised against Your enemy and ours. Amen.

Quieting (Saturday) – 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

by RobertCummins | Aug 6, 2016 | 31. Quieting

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands. (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12)

Because we share a divine origin and are now joined together in Christ, our stories are essential to each other. Your story will hold light and encouragement for me and I pray that mine will do the same for you. Telling our stories is important in learning how God’s creative and redemptive love plays out amidst our impure motives and messy lives.

I mentioned on Thursday that 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 was one of three passages I had claimed for myself as a young Christian. Based on what I thought of myself at the age of 23, which was not much, I just knew these verses were for me. Another verse was from Psalm 131;

I do not involve myself in great matters, or in things too difficult for me.

If you read Thursday’s installment you know my motives in the selection of these verses were tainted. Since I was a young teen I had been in flight, distancing myself from anything that might cause me pain. One of the big things I was fleeing was our family’s business which I had come to associate with the undesirable aspect of complexity. Another was the company’s president (my Dad) who represented the intolerable pain of rejection. Complexity is not too inviting if you have come to believe your intellect and social skills are substandard and rejection cannot be tolerated if you are already hyper-sensitized to it.

There was still another layer to my mess – it had to do with the stigma of wealth. As a young kid I started picking up on the attitudes my classmates had toward those who ‘came from money’ as they would say. I didn’t at all like what I was hearing about golden spoons and where they should be stored. I did everything I knew to hide my social status but in my small town it was futile. Hiding seemed innocent enough in grade school but it became neurotic in junior high and high school. I dreaded every social situation where this attitude might be lurking. Fear had driven me to the point of being nearly invisible. Alcohol, and eventually drugs, became my refuge. However, while numbing my short-term pain, chemicals were compounding it for the long term.

After the better part of a decade of mixing alcohol and drugs with the already toxic things inside me, I had exhausted all hope of a future. At 23 I was utterly lost and suffice it to say – free falling into darkness. Enter Jesus. He made nothing less than a dramatic entrance into my life, immediately setting this prodigal free from a bunch of nasty stuff and introducing him, for the first time, to love, hope, peace and joy. It was a pure miracle! Frogs do become princes! My old mission which had been raising hell had now become – how to sustain this new place of safety. Better yet, how can I expand (or exploit) it?” The question before me was simple “What do I need to do?”

Some of the believers I threw-in with and many of the authors I began reading believed the narrow path we were now traveling must be paved with self-imposed austerity. Following their lead, I began, unknowingly, blending religion (compliance to external and internal standards) with my already contaminated, wound-driven motives. I developed the conviction that monetary success would damn my soul. Therefore to sustain my new sense of well being, I must flee wealth before it sunk its talons in me.

I was confusing my insecurity and inferiority with brokenness – a much desired spiritual attribute. Embracing brokenness was how I could honor my depravity – the inappropriate center piece of my theology.  Most of the preaching I had listened to reinforced the notion that I was, in my essential identity, a monster of iniquity – a sinful creature with irreversible, prideful motives. This type of person would be woefully incapable of managing prosperity should it come knocking. So, the plan that formed in the dimly lit space of my heart was to flee from this temptation, work with my hands, insure a lower middle class wage and work exceedingly hard (which was the religion of my father’s family). While it was really about avoiding pain, my tortured reasoning was as follows; if I perform well, I will please God and consequently sustain (and improve?) my relationship with him. However, one question I kept conveniently at bay was; “Just how poor does one have to be to please God?” Or stated differently, “At what point of financial success would one become displeasing to God?”

I would have crawled on glass for the balance of my days to avoid going back to the the hell my life had become before Christ. Even though it was driven by an illogical fear (how can one earn what has been a gift?), I’m glad the Lord taught me to pray; “Search and try my heart and expose wrong motives.” Over time, I believe God answered this prayer. Through his kindness and mercy I would eventually learn the difference between fear driven flight into religion and an appropriate response to God’s love.

Not that he needs it, but our relationships wth God work best if he superintends our hearts -having been invited to do so. Overcoming my inner-vows and wrong-hearted motives represents one of his greater victories in me. It has been no small thing for him to undo the strongholds that bound me to religion. How astounding God is – that while I was bent on acquiring his favor with my labors, he was leading me toward green and well-watered pasture where I would ultimately find myself resting in His arms. Carnal sin was the yoke that Jesus delivered this young prodigal from at 23. Religion was the even heavier yoke he rescued this elder brother from at 57. I am stunned by his kindness. (By all means read Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God. It’s a treasure.)

I believe works driven–religion is at least as binding a yoke as raw debauchery. It looks so impressive with all its labor and accumulated doings. Inherit within the religious-spirit is the deception that the doings have earned a credit balance with God while in fact the opposite is true. The doings within religion create a false-salve to the conscience of  wounded and insecure hearts. Religious darkness is greater because the religious do not know they are lost while most carnal sinners are keenly aware of it.

Our journey is all about discovering who we are in Christ and resting in him alone; its is about becoming the beings he originally created in his image. By his grace we shall learn that our efforts to do anything to create or to preserve relationship with God are backward steps. Laboring to earn a gift will undermine our enjoyment of it. Religious doing undermines relational being. Whatever doings God requires of us must ultimately flow from hearts at rest in Christ.

Father, Help us to see where we have undermined Your grace through our entanglement with religion. Heal our hearts that we might truly enjoy You. Expose religion for what it is – a demonic ploy to distort our image of ourselves, others and You. May You continue Your editing of our stories. All to Your glory. Amen.

Quieting (Friday)—Lamentations 3:19-28

by RobertCummins | Aug 5, 2016 | 31. Quieting

A child we knew described that time of day when the sun was setting as “darking.” Darking may be an apt description of what was going on in Jeremiah’s world. Here’s a sample;

He has driven me and made me walk

In darkness and not in the light…

In dark places He has made me to dwell,

Like those who have long been dead…

He has filled me with bitterness.

He has made me drunk with wormwood…

My soul has been rejected from peace;

I have forgotten happiness.

So I say, my strength has perished,

And also so has my hope from the Lord.

Admittedly, calling and context are important. Jeremiah was the watchman on the wall observing the rise of Babylon and the fall of Israel. He knew Israel’s demise was due to her idolatrous and unrepentant heart. Her sin was so grievous, her heart so hardened, God had arranged Babylon as her punishment. Jeremiah had the additional burden of knowing that God himself was in the middle of it all. Perhaps our circumstances are not as severe but even so there are valuable things to learn from Jeremiah. This passage reveals some of them. One is his response to suffering, especially of the God-prescribed variety. How Jeremiah handles his relationship with God is worthy of our attention.

He begins by remaining in communication with God and emotionally open to Him. He intentionally names his sufferings and asks God to remember each of them. He tells God outright that he will be unable to ever forget. However, he also demonstrates that emotional responses to hardships do not have to be our determinants. In other words he was not a victim of circumstance, however nightmarish his was. Jeremiah demonstrates that emotional responses must be subservient to our powers of choice.

Regardless of how we feel, we must choose how we think and what we say. Even in the midst of punishment, Jeremiah demonstrates this as he deliberately recalls God’s loving providence as the greater context of his life. So, in the presence of dire circumstance he says, with great intentionality (and I believe we can say in worship), “I have hope that….

 The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,

For His compassions never fail.

They are new every morning.

Great is Thy faithfulness. 

“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,

“Therefore I have hope in Him.”

The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,

To the person who seeks Him.

I believe our love of black-and-white explanations generates many inaccurate doctrines about God. Some cast Yahweh as the angry Old Testament sovereign with a hair trigger on judgment, ready to disperse suffering aplenty where warranted (which is mostly everywhere). Others are designed to get God off the hook for having any association, direct or indirect, with suffering. When the Bible has not gone to this trouble, why do we? Could it be in our inability (or unwillingness?) to reconcile suffering with what we want the will of a good and sovereign God to be, that we fashion an image of Him more to our liking, then hire teachers who will represent this god to us—one bent on delivering us from all pain in this life?

The bottom line is that suffering is a mystery and a potential stumbling block unless we learn a crucial lesson from Jeremiah. Based on what I read in scripture and what I’ve experienced so far in life, I believe God is more often inclined to help us through suffering as opposed to delivering us from it. Yet, as God moves us through suffering we find we are brought to a question: Is it essential for to us to know why we suffer? Jeremiah may not answer our question directly, but his commentary may keep our hearts attuned to God in the midst of the universal and unwanted mystery of suffering. Listen to his wisdom:

 For the Lord will not reject forever,

For if He causes grief,

Then He will have compassion

According to His abundant lovingkindness.

For He does not afflict willingly,

Or grieve the sons of men.

Jeremiah’s own heart is conflicted regarding the origins of suffering. In the first 18 verses of chapter 3, he clearly portrays God as the willing author of suffering. Then, in verses 31-33—not so much. So what’s the application?

My takeaway is that God permits us, even encourages us, to vent our anguish directly to him. It is a big deal to sustain communication with God and remain emotionally honest with him. This is not an easy path, but it leads us to that precious place where we are exhausted by, and have emptied ourselves of, our questions—a place where all that remains is our willingness (in our darking) to be quiet before Him.

At some point, all the tears have been cried and nothing remains to be prayed. It is there in the lull after our storm (which may last for days or for years) where we discover an ember still burning, which waits for the breath of God. In this place, many of our whys remain unanswered; surprisingly, they are now less insistent. The heart left with nothing discovers it now has everything and can say with certainty: The Lord is my portion.

Father, nothing has been so vexing to my intellect as suffering. Even the modest amounts of it I have known have seemed like bitter wormwood to me and at times have caused me to stumble. Forgive me for viewing You and others as the authors of my pain. Teach my heart that in all circumstances: I live and move and have my being in You. You alone are my context and my sufficiency. Truly, Lord, You are my all in all.