It struck me recently that being a steward, far from being a demeaning title that serves to remind us that we are living on someone else’s property, is actually a reminder of the exalted state for which we were made. God designed us to have our habitation in Him, and so, the only path toward human flourishing is to intimately find our all in His fullness. When the reality that we were made to be partakers of the divine nature, that through Christ we are full sons of God, when this reality gets a hold of our hearts and imaginations, then we are free to enjoy all things. We will be free to enjoy all things because we will be relating to them from a position of fullness, and thus we will not look to things to provide satisfaction or security. This is what it means to be a steward.
Jesus came to freely share his sonship with us. He came to give us the same confidence he had as the eternally begotten and faithful Son of the Father. This is perhaps obvious regarding the testimony of Scriptures, but recently this reality has been striking more deeply into my heart, and what I see is a freedom and power to live well beyond the ordinary. At times, it is as if I am able to sense from the inside what it would be like to enjoy all things while possessing nothing, to not look to anything in the world to tell me who I am or what I am worth, and to love all people with a heart that is secure in the knowledge of God’s love.
The two battlefields that I will address this Lenten season are Fear and Restlessness. Both of these realities are pervasive in my soul, and as I look back on the whole of my adult life, I cannot think of a time when both of these enemies, in various forms, were not pulsing.
God structured us to function upon the presence and operations of His Spirit, such that we cannot be fully human apart from the Spirit. In the Fall we were closed off from the Spirit, we barred the Spirit from abiding and operating in the intimate recesses of our being. Through the Cross, the Son of God offered his Spirit formed humanity, a humanity embryonically drawn from the womb of Mary, a humanity upon which the Spirit tabernacled without limit. Through the Cross his humanity was offered on behalf of our incomplete, broken, and Spirit denying humanity. By assuming our human nature and bearing our sin, Jesus opened the depths of our humanity once again to the Spirit. Through the Cross we are enabled to die to the Spirit denying humanity of Adam, and we are made partakers of the Spirit soaked humanity of Jesus. Through the Cross our human depths are claimed for God.
So, the father of my nephew sent an email, with a bunch of humorous content, to my wife for my mom, which my wife then forwarded to me. I read it, and laughed, and decided that given the theological bent of my blog I would share one of the items in the email about heaven and hell.
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Heaven is Where:
The Police are British,
The Chefs are Italian,
The Mechanics are German,
The Lovers are French and
It’s all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is Where:
The Police are German,
The Chefs are British,
The Mechanics are French,
The Lovers are Swiss and
It’s all organized by the Italians.
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It’s funny how merely switching a few ethnic variables can make such a radical difference.
So, in cleaning up and organizing I discovered a forgotten file folder with some essays that I wrote for various theology courses, some photos and postcards that used to decorate a wall at a former office of mine, and a few old poems I wrote. In looking through it all, I thought, “what the heck, post a poem.” And so I give you the following…
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I saw
a white bag
billowy in the wind,
like a jelly fish on
fresh lawn tumbling.
A white bag
for groceries,
discarded,
now dancing
across my lawn
alive.
The seamless gray that dominates the Fresno sky this time of year has withdrawn to reveal the brilliant face of the Sun, which hopefully is a good omen for my forthcoming trip this weekend to Aptos: a little city on the coast near Santa Cruz. The last time my family and I attempted to make it to Aptos our van broke down in a town sadly named Los Banos, which is supposed to be translated “The Rest Stop,” but which is often referred to as “The Toilet,” due to its being located in the middle of nowhere between the Central Valley and the coast.
At least the van had the decency to signal its impending failure, which prompted me to turn around at the edge of town, and go right back to locate a garage. Moreover, it had the decency to fight the good fight all the way till I was able to park it in the lot of that garage, a garage that was located right across the street from Chillis, which meant that the family had a relatively nice place to hang out and eat while a mechanic attempted to heal our ailing van.
Anyways, over 3000 dollars later, here we are, my family and I, on the threshold of embarking on the same journey, and I have a slight knot in my stomach, which will likely tighten when I go past that same garage, on that long strip of road right through nowhere, between here and there, where the lapping waves of the coast are calling our name. Surely this time we will make it, but just in case, if you are one who prays, I would appreciate you mentioning my name, my family, and my van, whom you can call Rocinante.
The knowledge of God’s love is the source and foundation of our love for one another. We cannot strengthen our love through bare strength of will. We cannot become more loving by making love our conscious goal. According to how we are constituted, our love flows when we live in the conscious knowledge of God’s love for us. The more we become secure in how deeply God longs to bless us, cover us, and elevate us to the status of sons, the more we are free from trying to establish our own dignity and righteousness, a trying which ultimately drive us from one another.
In light of all this, the path toward strengthening our love is related to honestly acknowledging our sinfulness in the light of God’s goodness, most clearly seen in the sin-bearing suffering of Jesus. Paul once wrote, “where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” and so it is that through the course of our life when, upon various occasions, we see how deeply sin has marked us, it is then that we can come to a fuller understanding of how deeply God graciously covers us. When it becomes clear to us that despite our sinfulness, God has offered his Son, so that we might unconditionally receive his blessing, we become like the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with oil and cleansed them with her tears. As Jesus said, “he who has been forgiven little loves little,” and likewise, he who has been forgiven much loves much.
I have voraciously been feeding on Tim Keller’s sermons. Tim is the senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York, and his ability to express the depth of God’s grace, and its ability to form a new community of “peculiar people,” has been for me a potent blessing.
Below I give a small excerpt from one of his sermons titled “The Gospel, The Church, and the World,” which was based on a passage from 1 Peter 2:4-12, and in which one of the key ideas is that believers are called to live as resident aliens. Just prior to this excerpt Keller had been talking about the reputation of the Early Church in Ancient Roman society.
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No one had ever seen a group of people that held to all those practices. They were aliens. They weren’t like the Greeks. They weren’t like the Romans. They weren’t like the Jews. They were aliens. Well, you say, “That was then.” Well, okay, now think about this for a second. What if there was a group of people now that were following those same set of biblical values?… Rejecting blood thirsty sports (militarism), empowering women, reveling in the combination of races and classes, radically serving the poor. What kind of group is that?… Sounds liberal. Forbidding abortion, forbidding sex outside of marriage, forbidding same sex practices, insisting that Jesus is the only way of salvation, and what’s that sound like?… It sounds like a horribly conservative group. Guess what, we’re still aliens. We do not fit into Western relativistic individualism; we don’t fit into traditional hierarchical legalism, we don’t fit. We don’t fit conservative, we don’t fit liberal. We’ve always been aliens.
