What You Put Your Hope In

It's common knowledge among The Churchgoing that the thing you should put your hope in is the Lord.  I have heard the stories and the scriptures, the testimonies and the tragedies, and I know that at the end of the day there is nothing worth my hope but God Himself.  But I'll be damned if I don't go ahead and put my hope in a lot of other things each and every day.

These days my hope is often in an idea I have for a business.  A friend and I have been putting meat on the bones of this idea for over a month now, and in that short period of time I'll bet I've put my hope in three different versions of the idea.  I am classically the kid building sandcastles.  And not small, dismissible constructions either.  We're talking intricate assemblies of sand built to impress.

Hear me though when I say that sandcastle building is a worthwhile activity.  Jesus said that we shouldn't build our houses on foundations of sand because they will wash away.  I completely agree, which is why I try not to build sandcastles to live in.  I look at my little dreams and aspirations that I've built (and am building) on shifting foundations as models of what could be.  If they endure, then I should probably build a bigger one.  If they go out with the tide then hopefully I've learned something.

In effect I'm talking about daydreaming; about imagining what you could do if you had the wherewithal and grace to go do it.  Daydreaming is step one to getting anything accomplished.  However, just like sandcastles, you can't put your hope in daydreams.  My daydream is to open a brewpub in my hometown, but my hope is in God no matter how the daydream shakes out.

Two dangers lie in placing your hope anywhere but in the Lord.  The first is that you'll get what you've hoped for and, in the meantime, miss out on God.  The second danger is that you'll get your heart broken. 

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick" is what the scripture says in Proverbs 13:12, and the image here is more literally of hope "drawn out."  That is: drawn thin, dragged along, stretched taut until the hope in no way resembles what it once was.  Let me assure you that what Solomon is referring to here is misplaced hope.  If your hope is in the Lord, it will never be deferred.  As the Psalmist says, "For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust."  You never get heartsick if your hope is in God because He is trustworthy.  It's safe to put your hope in God because He is our hope; He is both the source and the object of hope.

But you could very well arrive at the same heartsick place if your hope is misplaced and is not deferred.  This is the place of the triumph of the flesh and the bankruptcy of the spirit, where we get what we want but miss out on what God has to give.  And in many ways this is a more dangerous place to be, mostly because you'll be convinced that you did it yourself.  It's easier to get to God from a low place than from a high one.  In fact, the best way to get a fresh glimpse of God is from Rock Bottom.

What you put your hope in will determine what you allow yourself to become.  Rest assured that if you put your hope in man, or in your own hands, or in the next big idea, that you'll come out heartsick on the other side.  But as a reminder of the good things God has for us if we put our hope in Him, here is the other half of Proverbs 13:12.

"But a desire fulfilled is a tree of life."

Seeing is Believing

   Truth is powerful, and the scriptures tell us as much.  Speaking truth is powerful; the scriptures tell us this, too.  I believe in "speaking life" by speaking the truths about God and who He is, and that spiritually this is powerful and edifying.  However, I also know that you can hear about who God is and what He does only so much.  To really know the He is who He says He is, and that He does what He says He does, you have to experience it.  It's one thing to hear it said that God is trustworthy, but you will never know it until you've had to trust Him in something.  It's all well and good to know that the Bible says He heals, but you simply won't believe it until He has healed you.

   This is the open invitation of God: get to know Me.  God doesn't want us to stop at hearing Truth, He wants us to walk with Him and experience it.  The difference is relationship.  You could hear all about what a great person someone is, but until you know them and have a relationship it's all hearsay.  It's not different with God because HE IS ALIVE and HE IS REAL.  God is not a concept to be mulled over, or a philosophy to be adopted, He is a living spirit, made physical in Jesus, and He will be as intimate a relation as a lover if you will draw close to Him.

   The irony is that with God seeing is believing, and He is invisible since He is spirit.  It's true that He was made incarnate in Jesus Christ, but, as the scripture makes clear, we who live after Jesus ascended to not get to see physically see him.

Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

   When I say "seeing is believing," I'm not refuting what Jesus says, that belief in him is possible without seeing.  Rather I am saying that "seeing" God do what He has said He will do imparts to us true knowledge (i.e. belief) in who He is.  When we step out in faith and find out that God is really there and really will take care of us, we see His promises realized.  We see His character made manifest and our faith is consequently built up.

   You do not intimately discover the reality of God without risk.  There are many stories of great risk and great faith in the Bible which show us that this is true.  Think of Gideon attacking Israel's enemies with only torches and trumpets.  Or David standing in the shadow of Goliath.  Remember the Israelites walking between walls of waters, or Abraham with his knife raised to strike his only and promised son.  These people had great faith, but just like you and I they weren't positive God would come through until the moment He came through.  And it's not God's fault if we don't think He will come through, it's ours.  It's the fault of our Flesh, that part of us that always wants to be God and make everything work.

   This is also the open invitation of God: let Me work things together for your good.  As a friend of mine recently said, we are the ones getting in our way.  Get out of your own way and let God do what He has said He will do, then you will know that He really can be trusted.

Daydreaming

Daydreaming gets a bad rap.  I'm thinking of a kid in school staring glazy-eyed out of the window, and how so many parents and teachers and leaders see in this picture only inattention.  I'm thinking of time spent on the porch on a spring afternoon, dreaming of what you could do, not what you should be doing, and how so many busybodies would interpret this as laziness or a poor use of time.  And I'm thinking of my own life, and all the little moments I take in any given day to imagine myself doing some of the things I've always wanted to do, and ignoring so much of what I have to do instead.

I think daydreaming gets a bad rap because it isn't productive; or at least, not in the sense of accomplishing physical labor.  But can daydreaming really be all that bad?  Like anything in life it's about balance.  If you spent your whole day staring into space dreaming, you would actually have wasted a whole day.  But even then, so what?  Some days are perfect for wasting.  The point is, you can't daydream your life away, but if you never daydream it's going to be a less fulfilling life anyway.

It's my personal opinion that God likes daydreaming.  It's my personal opinion that this is why he made us able to do it.  Our imaginations are amazing.  In many ways our minds - the ways they work, their capacities for problem solving and memory, and so on - are a direct reflection of how we were made "in God's image."  God is creative, intelligent, analytical, imaginative, and yes, a daydreamer.  Would He have made us capable of daydreaming if He didn't have some capacity for it already?  I think the answer is no.

But here is what we demand of ourselves: realism.  We can stomach a little idealism now and again, but realism is much more important.  Hard work.  Bootstraps.  Energy.  Rational thinking.  And realism.  We can stomach a good deed now and again, or a highfalutin motive, but don't think for a minute that we will put up with daydreaming.

What is funny is that so much of who we become is borne out of daydreaming, even if we don't realize it.  You see, you have a hard time becoming something if you never pictured yourself becoming it.  When you picture yourself doing something specific - like scaling a particular peak, walking across the stage at graduation, opening your own business -  it crystalizes inside of you: in your will, in your mind, in your emotions.  In your soul.  Daydreaming will not be all that it takes to get where you want to go, oh no.  You'll have to deal with all of that realism too.  But daydreaming will be your first step.  If you don't imagine what you could become, how will you know what you want to become?

God's Anointed, Humiliated

In 1 Samuel we read the story of the first king of Israel and, more importantly, the second.  Saul, who is chosen as the first king, turns out to be a bad one.  Almost from the get-go he shows himself to be more concerned with his own will than that of God.  He is quick to forget his anointing, and thus quick to forget what God is capable of, and so tries to win the battles of Israel on his own terms.  Seeing this, God decides it's time to anoint another king, a good one, and that man is David.

Saul's problem is selfishness, and his conduct after Israel's battle with the Philistines, in which David kills Goliath, typifies his character.  If you'll remember, in that battle David slays Goliath, and then the Israelites rout the Philistines.  It's a great victory, and on the return trip home women of Israel come out to meet the army dancing and singing,

Saul has killed his thousands,
and David his ten thousands

Saul's reaction is to immediately distrust David, and it is interesting to note that Saul does not know what we know.  He does not know that David has been anointed and will be king.  He doesn't know that the Spirit of the Lord has left him and resides on David.  But he doesn't have to know this to hate David, because he sees David as a threat to his own glory.  It doesn't matter to Saul that David serves him, because he doesn't recognize his fortune in having David in his service.  He sees only the threat, not the blessing.

In many ways Saul represents our own flesh.  With David on his side, mighty warrior that he proves to be, Saul should be a proud and satisfied king.  But as it is he would rather risk failure by driving David off than risk victory without personal glory.  This is what we so often do.  Many times we would rather fail than be humiliated; that is, we would rather struggle to the end and fail then fail without a fight, because we could put our name on the struggle and at least go out in a blaze of glory.

But God wants us to be humiliated once in a while.  As you might guess, the words humiliate and humble share a common Latin root.  The Latin root word humus means "ground, earth, or soil".  In the sense of being humiliated or humbled, we are really being taken back to what we are in the flesh: dust.  God formed man from the dust (our flesh) and breathed life in to man (our spirit), and the human condition is this attempt on the part of the flesh to achieve the splendor of the spirit.  And since God is spirit, our flesh is really after the achievement of Godlike status.  So we necessarily (and often) need to return our flesh to it's root, the dust.  We need to be humbled or humiliated, and if we will not accept the former we will experience the latter.

Being humiliated is always more painful than being humbled.  The difference is a matter of choice, and subsequently a measure of our resistance to being brought low.  Humiliation happens against our will; we do not choose humiliation, it's forced on us, and we are forced down.  Into the dust.  But humbling comes more gently, because when we are humbled we are shown--perhaps in circumstances exactly like those that could be humiliating--that we are less than we made ourselves out to be, and so we accept that we are dust.  You see, humiliation is our being pushed into the dust, waylaid, and humbling is us bending down to the dust, prostrating ourselves.

Here is what I realized as I was reading about David and Saul, about Saul's angry pursuit of David and David's long and circuitous flight from Saul.  David was God's anointed.  From even before he met Saul, David was the anointed king of Israel, but it took years for him to experience the fullness of that position.  But in the process of fleeing for his life from Saul, David was being built up--in character, in reputation, in faith and trust in the Lord.  The anointing did not preclude trouble.  The anointing was not a guarantee of circumstances, it was a guarantee of identity.

We are anointed, we who are believers in Jesus Christ, and similarly we are kings (and queens)--sons and daughters of the King of Kings.  And regardless of how things are going in our lives, we are anointed and we carry the title and identity of kingship (or queenship).  And because we are still living, breathing human beings, we have this flesh that we carry around, and so we must remember that we are dust.  But we don't have to be humiliated.  We do, however, have to be humble.

David, in the course of his life, experiences both humiliation and humblings.  But even after his humiliations; even after his failures and sins and spiritual wanderings; even after he is thrown into the dust and trampled, he calls on God and is raised up again.  The anointed of God will be called a man (or woman) after God's own heart.