At my church we have "Resurrection Week" each year the week following Easter Sunday. I love Resurrection Week. I love the Resurrection of Jesus and everything that it means for humanity, and especially what it means for me personally. I love Jesus. And I love going to church when you wouldn't normally go because you tend to expect more out of those times, and you tend to bring more of yourself to give away: in praise, in friendship, in love.
Jake Hamilton is here in our small church this year. This man and his band can command much larger venues than Messiah's House in Amarillo, TX and are, for all intents and purposes, rock stars. Jake is also a prophet and a zealot. He brings to an event like Resurrection Week all of the power and baggage that any prophet or zealot would bring. He brings deep truth, fervor, prophecy, and contradictions. And he can't help himself. As long as he is in pursuit of God he will carry these things with him and they will spill out wherever he plants his feet for even the shortest space of time.
None of us who are passionate about God can help it that we bring our contradictions along . I personally have a hard time containing my excitement about the Lord, or my anticipation about what He will do, when I'm in a body of believers. I am less fervent outside of a group of believers, which is characteristic (I suppose) of someone that is not a prophet nor a zealot. The Lord often delivers deep truth and prophecy through me, when I am willing to be the bearer. And always - always - I carry around my contradictions.
Isn't this just what and who we are: a people of contradictions? Paul recognized as much. In the book of Romans he lays out lots of contradictions, like when he says "we rejoice in our sufferings." Huh? That's bass-ackwards; no one rejoices in their sufferings. Ah, but the people after God's heart do because "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope." To get to hope, to get to an assurance of God's promises in our hearts, we have to suffer so that we can learn that God is always good, that He is always for us, that He is always reliable, and that we can always make it through the sufferings, which are inevitable. But oh, we still don't want to suffer.
There is a contradiction that beds itself in the notion (and command) of being "set apart." We believers know that we are to be holy and different, not conforming to the world, and so we should "look" different. We should be different. Maybe even have different musical standards, different entertainment standards, maybe even different "set apart" places to live...wait. Weren't we called to "go into all the nations and preach the Gospel"? How can we take Jesus into the world if we start closing ourselves off from the world? But how do we take Jesus into the world without becoming a part of the world? How do we resolve these contradictions?
The pursuit of being "set apart" is a poor pursuit if we fail to stop at the boundaries. Surely Jesus himself was set apart, and yet he found himself at many an undesirable dinner table. Jesus blazed the trail of being set apart, and I believe he also laid the boundaries of that activity. While setting himself apart he might have said, Here's where I'll stop; right here before 'alienation', and I'll stay on this side, 'love'. And so we find that, as in most things in life, pursuing God is about balance. If we leave the world entirely, to whom will we preach? And if we stay in the world completely, how will they know we're any different from them?
Also like most things in life, being set apart will not be an issue if we do this above all else: go after God. The Christian experience in America (and probably other parts of the world; I don't know because I live in America) is rife with ways to better our spiritual lives. Our cultural obsession with self-help carries readily over into our spiritual lives. But the thing is, your spiritual life will find its proper course if you will pursue this one thing: God. If you will make knowing him and spending time with Him - developing a relationship, basically - your paramount concern, everything else will fit. We would be pleasantly surprised at how easy it could be to be "set apart" if we would only go after God. Instead of trying to figure out how we should do it, we need to get to know Him and let Him do it.
There is a lot to be said for zeal, and there is a lot to be said against it. Peter the apostle had great zeal. Time and again he proved his passion for Jesus and for the mission of God. He also time and again proved how a zealot will cross the line without blinking. Jesus had to rebuke Peter on several occasions - like when Peter cut off the centurion's ear at Jesus' arrest. In that instance we see the balance of the love of God butting up against the zeal of a believer. The zealot draws his sword to defend God, but God does not need defending; rather, the world needs healing. Peter had a hard time figuring this out, and yet this zealot was the rock on which Jesus built his church.
You see, God's is the original big tent party. No one is excluded from the Father's plans, if only they'll take Him up on the invitation. There is a sort of contradiction in this: that the God of the universe, perfect and holy as He is, would take just anybody in. It doesn't jive with what we do, what we see happening around us. If we were God we might be a bit more exclusive. We wouldn't use a murderer with a speech impediment to free our people. We wouldn't have the savior of mankind birthed in a stable. And we wouldn't let just anybody in, because in our minds some people are past hope. But fortunately we are not God. And thank God we are not.
Here is the good news: He is God, the one and only, and He resolves our contradictions and shortcomings and baggage in this: He redeems us. He loves us. He has given absolutely everything He can to get us back. This is why I love Easter, this is why I love the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the point in human history - what's more, in the history of the universe - when it was finally done and we could come back to Him. Come back to Him in His garden and finally have what it was intended we should have: a relationship with the true and living God.
No comments:
Post a Comment