IS "OBEY" ANOTHER FOUR LETTER WORD

Yesterday I had a close call.  On a quiet, back country road, I pulled up to a stop sign with no other cars around.  I came almost to a full stop, but not quite.  I coasted through.  Out of nowhere, there appeared a police car in my rear view mirror.  My heart jumped.  Where did he come from?  Did he see my bogus stop?  Is he going to pull me over?  What can I say to him to mitigate my civil sin?  As it turned out, I kept going and he turned the corner.  Whew!  What a relief.  There was no ticket, no accountability, only cheap grace without consequences.  

My heart settled back down.  But my mind remained in a high gear.  I had a cognitive workout.  All the way home my mind rambled over things like obedience, accountability, faithfulness to civil covenants.  I reflected on a life of rolling through stop signs, always intentionally driving 10% over the speed limit, just enough to not get stopped.  If the speed limit were 60 mph, I would push it to 66 mph, but no further.  I then thought, one’s whole life could be like that, only sinning a little, enough to not really get caught.  Is that true?  Do I speed just a little, coast through the stop signs just a little, bend the truth to those I love just a little, fudge my taxes just a little, pad my resume’ just a little, and so on?  It can be a way of life, a life of cumulative sin.

My narrow escape from a ticket yesterday made me think how sin is cumulative.  One does not have to be an extortionist or murderer to be deep in sin.  The small sins add up.  Quicksand is slow, but effective.  Sin is sin and it is an abomination to God.  He cannot and will not have presence in the midst of sin.  He expects faithfulness and obedience to his commands and directives foremost of which is to love the Lord with all our heart and our neighbor as well as we love ourselves.  Jesus made it crystal clear:  “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love . . .”  (John 15:10).  Obedience is not something that is easily embraced at this time and in the present culture.  I remember saying to my kids when they were young, "If you love me, you will obey me."  The same goes with God.  If we love Him, we will show it in obedience. The Word of God is clear.  If we truly love the Lord we will obey his commands, and be better for it.  We will repent (turn about face) and walk in the same direction as Christ following him.

I confess that yesterday may not be the last time I coast through a stop sign.  If I do in the future, it will be because I was not paying enough attention to my driving.  As the song goes, “I want to live right that God may use me, at any time or any where.”  That means doing my part to obey civil laws and keep my covenant that I made when society gave me a drivers license.  More importantly, it means being faithful to walk every moment of every day in the same direction with Christ and not turn back.  Obey need not be just another four letter word.  It can be our means of showing God that we take His word and His love seriously.

GUTENBERG VS GOOGLE

We are migrating from the Gutenberg to the Google era.  Today it became very evident in the Googlesque behavior of my eleven-month-old grandson.  While holding him on my lap, I was reading to him the most elementary of childrens books, See The Rabbit by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.  Before I could turn to the first page, the little guy began swiping his little index finger across the cover several times.  He was trying to move from the picture on the cover to the next picture just like one would do with the I Phone.

A few weeks ago, I let him see the pictures on my I Phone.  I swiped my finger across the screen to the next picture and then to the next one.  At age 10 months, he caught on immediately and began doing it.  Then he learned to turn the phone off and on.  Now he generalizes to bigger things.  He crawls (cant’ walk yet) over to the wide screen Samsung TV and turns that on.  As you might expect, he drags his finger across the TV screen trying to change that picture too.  It really is unbelievable how quickly they learn, especially when the technology is interactive.

For now with him, Google reigns!  Gutenberg needs to recover.  We are committed grandparents and will read children’s books to him every day we have him in our home.  When a child sits on your lap, hears your voice reading a book, and feels the warmth of your presence, score one for Gutenberg.  We want our little grandson to appreciate both the written word on a real page and the emergent wonder of today’s and tomorrow’s technology.  As importantly, we want him to be able to have real face to face, interpersonal conversation with others on whatever he reads.  Finally, most importantly, we want him to know one book backwards and forward, in and out, more than any other.  We want him to know the Sacred Scriptures of the Bible, God’s Word.  As he grows older, whether by Gutenberg or Google and likely by both, we will encourage him to take in and consume the Bread of Life.

Train up a child in the way he should go and

when he is  old he will not depart from it.

PROVERBS 22:6

EYES FIXED ON THE BALL

“Keep your eye on the ball” is a saying that we usually hear in the sport of baseball, but it resonates when we think of the amazing 2014 World Cup performance of the USA soccer team’s goalie, Tim Howard.  He had sixteen saves in the knockout round match against Belgium, something that has not happened in the past forty-eight years, since 1966.  Howard did this consistently throughout the entire game from beginning to end.  The explosion of popular response includes his new nickname, US Secretary of Defense.  His achievement affirms the importance of keeping your eyes fixed on the ball.

The Bible says something similar, but far more important.  We are to keep our eyes on Jesus as the pattern to be followed.  In the letter to the Hebrews (12:2), we read, “Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from beginning to end.”  From beginning to end for us includes from our initial salvation from sin forward to the “unfolding of Christ’s own character in the life of the believer,” holiness. (Frederick Coutts, The Splendor of Holiness, p. 26)

By looking to Jesus

Like him we shall be,

Our friends in our conduct

His likeness shall see.

O God who reveals yourself most clearly through your Son, Jesus, we yearn for your grace to ever keep our eyes fixed on Christ believing that from beginning to end we shall be like him in ever-increasing measure.  We seek to be filled to the measure of your fullness as you seek to indwell our hearts and lives.  Amen.