I've Been Thinking About This…

And hopes that your new year will bring a deepening of your expression of His Grace.

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My Twitterbot – @votd – sent this verse out today -

Psa 50:15 – And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. (KJV< -votd) #votd

- and when I saw it it gave me a bit of a nudge. The reason I endure certain problems is so that I am forced to call upon the Lord for help. Backed into a corner, I can’t solve the problem myself, so I pray upwards.

This Scripture passage is saying that we will be delivered from those problems specifically so that we can glorify God. A neat reminder.

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Reading Mark chapter 5 brings you to this passage:

And the person I’m feeling for is Jairus. There’s obviously a terrible urgency – Jairus (a synagogue president!) is on his knees begging in front of this Jesus; he says that his daughter is at the point of death. You can feel the relief in his mind as he’s finally got the Great Healer in tow to bring Jesus home to heal his 12-year-old daughter. Then some silly woman has to go and get herself healed in the middle of all this! AND she’s ritually unclean … AND she shouldn’t be in this crowd … AND she shouldn’t be touching anyone, let alone someone as holy as this Man. And as if that wasn’t enough, Jesus has to stop and have a little chat with her – “OK, OK, she’s healed, for heaven’s sake. Let’s just get going here!”

Then come the messengers. Jairus recognizes them and must have guessed as soon as he saw them what the story was – his daughter was gone. I cannot imagine the grief he must have felt; the anger at that wretched woman for holding up the journey. Life suddenly grows awfully dark for Jairus.

But God has a plan. (No duh! He always has a plan.) And Jesus overhears the bad news (v. 36) and a chink of light burns into the blackness – the Great Healer seems to think there’s still hope. Now in an act of grace, Jesus permits only the four men to continue with Him – Peter, James and John (the inner circle) and Jairus – to Jairus’ house. Somehow the entire crowd was dissipated, and there was sudden quiet.

I wonder what Jesus said to Jairus during that walk? Was there silence? Deep words? We’ll never know. But the light of hope must have grown a little brighter for Jairus, don’t you think?

When they got to the house the mourning was in full force; surely he must have felt sick with grief. If everybody was mourning, all hope had to be gone. Yet Jesus continues, and ejecting all the mourners, goes over to her bed. Three disciples, two parents and one Lord. Still there is a crack of light for Jairus – the Healer has now seen her and hasn’t stopped.

And He doesn’t seem to do anything special. He simply takes her hand and says, “Up you get.” And she did! Poor old Jairus! How could he handle the shattering of all that darkness? Light detonated around him – life would never be the same. All his preconceived notions of how the world worked were blown away. I’m guessing that, although his daughter got up and began walking, Jairus needed to have a bit of a lie-down!

I find it so easy to see the darkness moving in, just like I imagine Jairus did. The busyness, the inclinations and the beliefs of the world – like Jairus’ crowd, woman and mourners – all get in the way of the light for me too. Sometimes I’m holding on to the sure Truth of the Gospel for myself (by my fingernails, it seems) because there are times in my life when problems are presented to me, I think, solely in order to show me that God is active.

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My pastor has started to read through the Gospel of Mark for the rest of the month – you can follow him here: Saving Pastor Ryan. So a few of our small group members are joining him – thought I would too, even though I’m a few days behind here. As others join the blogfest, I’ll post their links.

Of all the things I think of when I read chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel, I think that the idea of timing hits me most solidly.

First the promise of 2,000 years has suddenly come to pass, and who was ready for it? As a nation it had looked forward to this time since its infancy in Goshen, Egypt – as the patriarchs did before that – but it has been so long that expectancy had become the habit and realization just couldn’t take hold.

Then comes John the Baptist to ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’ – but very few are awake to hear his song in the Jordan Valley. He must have had some impact though: God never sends someone to do pointless things.

But most of all, he is there for the Christ – to make sure that the prophecies are completed:

• Mark 1:4 “John appeared…” (to fulfill Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3-4)
• Mark 1:9 “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee” (a prophecy referenced in Matt 2:23 that seems to refer back to something Isaiah references in Isaiah 11:1)
• Mark 1:15 “and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’

Secondly I’m struck by the immediacy of response throughout the chapter. Look at all these verses:

For all that few are awake to respond to the Christ, He Himself is in the center of a whirlpool of activity. Every few minutes some new event seems to be triggered; there is a sense of intense and irresistible urgency; once the Christ has appeared, there is no stopping the forward momentum.

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1. I wait a minute before I send a tweet. Did I really want to send that? – once its gone it’s not recallable. I’ve lost count of the number of tweets I typed and decided not to send.
2. I follow selectively:
   1. I don’t follow people who don’t add value unless they are a personal friend or a business associate – in which case they are already adding personal value.
   2. I assume that anyone who follows thousands of people cannot possibly be reading all their tweets, so they’re not reading mine.
   3. I also assume they’re only doing it for reciprocity – to build up the number of people who follow them. (Why would anyone even want this? If you gain 40,000 followers just because you followed them back, that doesn’t say you’re popular – it says you’re desperate!)
3. I don’t stalk:
   1. Responding to a tweet with a witty comment to simulate closeness rarely endears you to the recipient – it just makes you look like you want to be in their circle.
   2. Also: it may be corny and very old-fashioned, but I don’t follow many women, and – unless they are personal friends – I especially don’t follow married women. That just feels all kinds of wrong to me. Marriage is too precious a commodity and a tough enough proposition today without presenting yet another opportunity for its destruction.
4. I try to add value with my tweets. Say nothing nasty, private, deceptive, pointless or destructive.
5. Last year I stopped saying ‘hi’ to people just because they started following me. It seems a bit of an arrogant put-down, like saying ‘I was here first, but I’m so gracious I’ll welcome you too’.
6. I don’t spew a torrent of tweets. When I have a lot of points to make, I blog it and send a tweet about the blog.
7. I will unfollow people who
   1. try to sell me something,
   2. try to sell me on something about themselves to their profit,
   3. continually make up or pass along pithy quotes or
   4. violate points 4, 6 and possibly 3.

… and now I’m down to following 3 people.

Other thoughts:

• I won’t unfollow people just because they use ‘LOL’, ‘ROFL’ or smilies or other idiotic contractions, but it certainly doesn’t endear them to me.

• Twitter connectivity starts like this: ‘I find you; I read some of your tweets; I like them because they meet a need or interest that I have; I follow you’. But for some people the line of thought somehow continues, ‘… so I expect you to follow me back.’ This is then turned into ‘twitter courtesy’.
  This is the mentality that says ‘My self-esteem is built around getting a lot of followers. So I’ll follow a whole bunch of people just so they’ll follow me back – and if they don’t, I’ll accuse them of being discourteous!’ We live to the metric – gotta get those numbers up!
  I don’t get this mentality. If I follow you because I gain insights from your creativity, why should I expect you to follow me for free? I’d better be putting out some tweets that you find interesting too.

Any thoughts?

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Have you noticed that there are many times when we don’t want to do something, but we want to want to do it? That sure is true for me. Paul says it in Galatians:

… and more clearly in Romans chapter 7, in each of these verses:

There are times we don’t want to do something, even though we know it’s the right thing to do – but we know we should want to do it.

We don’t do it because we don’t want to do it. But we wish we wanted to do it.

Similarly, each of the ‘works of the flesh’ as Paul calls them (as opposed to the fruits of the Spirit) has this characteristic: we want to do those for which we have a weakness, but we don’t want to want to. How many times have we caught ourselves in a rage about something, for instance, only to realize that (a) it felt so good and (b) it was so wrong? ¹

I think we’re designed that way, and I think it was done for a very specific reason. Over and over again, I find that God limits Himself and us. He could have made us perfect, but for our benefit He didn’t.

So where does all this leave us? Are we helpless pawns to our desires and weaknesses? I don’t think so – for these reasons:

1. As Christians, we are children of Almighty God. Good Dads don’t leave their children defenseless. We are tempted, and it seems that the temptation is permitted in order to produce endurance:
   No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation He will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.– 1 Cor 10:13
2. We are called to ACT, not to REACT. When we act, the things we do and the thoughts we think originate new sequences of events. He who starts something controls it first – the other side must work within the scope of the original action. The enemy longs to reverse that, in order to keep us off balance. But if we get into the habit of ‘checking in’ with the Father before everything we do, then everything we do becomes an initial action, and it is as if every prior wrong step is redeemed thereby. Bad steps are stopped. Poor choices are corrected. Good decisions are strengthened. And best of all, that habit will spill over into the rest of our lives. Thus every thought will be checked out first with God as well – held hostage to the Lord:
   We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, …– 2 Cor 10:5

As the leading proponent of Galatians 5:19-21 thinking, I can attest to the fact that – on the rare occasion when I remember to – when I tell God that I want to think these thoughts but I don’t want to want to, I find it’s easier to shift my mind onto some more healthy topic. Similarly when I don’t want to apologize to someone who deserves an apology, etc..

Life isn’t easy, but then – it was never intended to be.

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