Right Wrist’s distant relative, Tendonitis, is in town. They’ve never met before, so while they get acquainted (and until Tendonitis leaves), I’ll be very busy making the visit as uneventful as possible …
(I’ll be back to the love meditations later this week after finals end.)
Keeping a quiet heart is difficult. Rushing questions, busy thoughts, and churning emotions. What does this heart know of stillness? It is often a striving spirit rather than a still one.
Times of solitude in some “hiding place” somewhere is good for our soul. It’s good to come ashore for a while and quietly think on the Master, to again refocus our affections on Him. Then does the dust of life somewhat settle and again the vision is clear: Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me save that Thou art.
This is how a quiet heart is cultivated: in the pure pursuit of one thing, with the peace of Christ ruling and reigning over the whole realm of my heart, my mind, and my life. Peace is the tranquil state of a soul assured in Christ.
Jesus slept on a pillow in the midst of a raging storm. How could He? The terrified disciples, sure that the next wave would send them straight to the bottom, shook Him awake with rebuke. How could He be so careless of their fate?
He could because He slept in the calm assurance that His Father was in control. His was a quiet heart. We see Him move serenely through all the events of His life — when He was reviled, He did not revile in return. When He knew that He would suffer many things and be killed in Jerusalem, He never deviated from His course. He had set His face like a flint. He sat at supper with one who would deny Him and another who would betray Him, yet He was able to eat with them, willing even to wash their feet. Jesus in the unbroken intimacy of His Father’s love, kept a quiet heart.
(Elisabeth Elliot)
More like Jesus would I be.
A little break from the love meditations …
Reading letters from Rachel Barkey, a wife and mother in her last months of cancer, has been encouraging and sobering. I recommend them. She writes them on her webpage, Death Is Not Dying.
I am finding that my greatest challenge and what occupies my thoughts most these days is how to finish well. All the little things that I battle daily seem to loom larger in the waiting of each day and moment as my impatience and selfish tendencies rush to the forefront of every thought and activity.
So my challenge is to finish well. And it seems I am to do this by waiting. Appropriately, I found this verse in Lamentations:
“It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.”
Waiting. Quietly. It is a good thing apparently.
I have added it to my To Do list…
(Rachel Barkey)
Paul wrote to the Corinthians,
I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in Him in all speech and all knowledge — even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you — so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
(I Corinthians 1:4-8)
God gave the Corinthians grace. They were enriched in Christ, in speech and in knowledge. They were spiritually gifted.
And yet there were divisions among them (1:10), and yet there was quarreling (1:11). In essence, they responded to blessing with pride and self-inflation rather than humility and pursuit of the common good.
Even for all their knowledge and spiritual giftedness, Paul said to them, “You are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?” (3:2-3)
If they were of the Spirit, love would have been their crest. Instead of being engulfed with self-love that leads to jealousy, they would have been compelled by Christ’s love, the love that gives preference to another and rejoices in another’s good. But instead of love, selfish ambition and pride thrived in their hearts and produced all kinds of strife.
Love, the lifeblood of the body of Christ, was absent. Without love, the church was nothing more than a corpse — all flesh and no spirit.
Similar to the Corinthians, the Ephesian church was told in Revelation to repent. Even for all their “works … toil … patient endurance” and discernment, they were told to repent. Why?
“But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” (Revelation 2:4)
They abandoned love.
Spiritual gifts, knowledge, faith. The Corinthian and Ephesian churches weren’t wrong to pursue these things. But they were wrong to forsake love in the process. They weren’t wrong in pursuing these things, but there was a “still more excellent way” that had been ditched.
The way of love. The way of the Savior.
Literally, His way led Him from Heaven’s magnificent throne to Bethlehem’s soiled feeding trough. His way led Him from Heaven’s throne room, where angels cried, “Holy, holy, holy,” in worship, to a servant’s basin and the washing of His disciple’s feet. His way led Him from giving life, even eternal life, to receiving death on a cross. His way led Him from a king’s welcome to a via dolorosa.
Scripture never says angels marvel at knowledge or giftedness or anything else. But Scripture records that the love of God come down to save man from his sins is something into which angels long to look. They absolutely marvel at this way of love, designed and known by God Himself. A path forged by His own sweat and blood.
Can we begin to feel the weight of it? Can we begin to feel the weight of what He means when He says we are to love as He did?
Let all that you do be done in love.
(1 Corinthians 16:14)For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that One has died for all, therefore all have died; and He died for all, that those who love might no longer live for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised.
(2 Corinthians 5:14-15)
About six years ago, I heard a story that deeply moved me. The story was told about a soldier sentenced to death by Oliver Cromwell during the English civil war. When the evening curfew bell rang, the soldier was to be shot.
Evening descended, and the bell did not ring. Minutes passed, and still, there was no sound.
Cromwell sent servants to see why the bell did not ring.
By the bell was the soldier’s fiance, her hands bloodied and bruised as she cupped her hands around the bell’s clapper (the inner part of the bell) to keep it from ringing judgment on the one she loved.
A little later, she was weeping as she stood before Oliver Cromwell. “Why have you done this?” he asked her.
I don’t know if her response was recorded, but maybe there was none — at least, not a verbal one. Maybe she simply held out her bloodied, crushed hands, letting them speak for her as she wept.
Whatever her response, Oliver Cromwell was so moved that he told her, “Because of your sacrifice, your lover shall live.”
It’s a touching love story, but even more so, it made me consider whether I love sacrificially with the single desire that another might live — not just physically but eternally. And it made me consider the One who once and for all demonstrated His love by sending His Son to lay down His life, that the bell of judgment would not ring on those who would believe in Him.
Like all analogies, this one begins to break down at a certain point. But hopefully not too much unlike Christ’s parables, it is useful in serving as a ramp to greater truth.
For those who are now His, shouldn’t this be our posture as well? Bloodying and bruising our own hands, so to speak, if that’s what it will take to keep judgment from ringing on those we love (or those we ought to love)? Bloodying and bruising our own hands in love rather than clanging our self-fashioned bells of judgment against one another, envying and striving to push ahead of one another at any cost?
We ought to cling to the bell. We ought to pursue love.
But what is this way of love? Why does Paul call it a more excellent way? Over what does it excel? What does it surpass? And must it be a path strewn with blindness and dismissal of sin? Must it be a path that forks away from the beauty of holiness and truth?
This way of love. It is a path so little known, so little traveled. My questions cannot be answered from afar, in abstraction. My questions will find answer only as I actually walk this path. As I pursue it. As I know the One of whom Scripture says is love.
The way of love. To love God and people, people with specific names and faces and temperaments and idiosyncrasies and sin. This is the aim, not yet the attained; and the aim is not one that will be attained by the flesh — only by the Spirit, as the fruit of the Spirit is borne in my life by His death and life at work in me. Praise God for a Savior.
Perhaps there is a thin line between healthy self-examination and unhealthy self-consciousness, and I’m often teetering between the two, especially when I’m sharing the fruits of what have been a study and a struggle in my life rather than a victory.
These meditations and studies on love have been searing and searching my heart. I know all too well the pride and self-love that run their course like poison through my veins, but there is no encouragement nor power in such a lengthy study on my heart as it is. So, I turn my attention to that which encourages and empowers: the Word of God, as the Spirit of God gives understanding. By necessity now, I share that which is a higher standard than I have yet attained. It is my prayer that even yet, by His grace, His Word might truly become my life … and yours.
“Pursue love,” Paul tells the Corinthians (I Corinthians 14:1).
Let’s do just that.
Love (or a lack thereof) for God and for people has been something of a theme this past month — not one I have actively sought out, but rather the contrary. It’s been like a persistent widow, knocking and knocking and knocking at my door, determined to continue knocking until granted hearing.
The hearing is still underway and far from being finished. In short, it’s been good.
Some meditations on love are forthcoming, but for now, just a couple quick thoughts about what Paul, inspired by God, called “a still more excellent way.”
Without love, nothing.
And I will show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains,but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
(I Corinthians 12:31-13:3)
Without love, what are my words? Sounds without beauty. Noise that obstructs the hearing of other voices.
Without love, what are my gifts and knowledge and faith? Nothing. Absolutely worthless.
Without love, what are my noble deeds of sacrifice? Unprofitable. Vanity.
Love is laying down your life.
By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.
(I John 3:16)This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
(John 15:12-13)
We know love because of Jesus. And we’re called to love just like Jesus did. Love outside of Jesus is not love. And love is expressed in the laying down of one’s life. In fact, there’s no greater expression of love than this: that someone lay down his life.
Came to work on some projects at Panera. Ordered iced tea. While fumbling around my backpack looking for my wallet, I suddenly realized it was at home in my other bag.
I told the cashier I’d be right back. She said not to worry about it.
What shall we call that? Charitea? Generositea?
:]
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
(Isaiah 40:28-31)
Alisa is taking this verse very literally. ;]
I wasn’t home last Saturday when she came over, so she left me the cutest little hand-decorated note that included a little something about “God and Jejuss.”
Aw, why must they grow up?
The gospel story begins with the Mystery of Charity. A young woman is visited by an angel, given a stunning piece of news about becoming the mother of the Son of God. Unlike Eve, whose response to God was calculating and self-serving, the virgin Mary’s answer holds no hesitation about risks or losses or the interruption of her own plans. It is an utter and unconditional self-giving: “I am the Lord’s servant. . . . May it be to me as you have said” (Luke 1:38). This is what I understand to be the essence of femininity. It means surrender.
The gentle and quiet spirit of which Peter speaks, calling it “of great worth in God’s sight” (1 Peter 3:4), is the true femininity, which found its epitome in Mary, the willingness to be only a vessel, hidden, unknown, except as Somebody’s mother.
Femininity receives. It says, “May it be to me as you have said.” It takes what God gives–a special place, a special honor, a special function and glory, different from that of masculinity, meant to be a help. In other words, it is for us women to receive the given as Mary did, not to insist on the not-given, as Eve did.
Perhaps the exceptional women in history have been given a special gift–a charism–because they made themselves nothing. I think of Amy Carmichael, for example, another Mary, because she had no ambition for anything but the will of God. Therefore her obedience, her “May it be to me,” has had an incalculably deep impact in the twentieth century. She was given power, as was her Master, because she made herself nothing.
I would be the last to deny that women are given gifts that they are meant to exercise. But we must not be greedy in insisting on having all of them, in usurping the place of men. We are women, and my plea is Let me be a woman, holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is. No arguments would ever be needed if we all shared the spirit of the “most blessed among women.”
(Elisabeth Elliot, “The Essence of Femininity,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, page 398.)
