Branded

Thursday, April 30, 2020

The Lord is my shepherd; I have all that I need.  He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams.  He renews my strength.  He guides me along right paths, bringing honor to his name.  Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me.  Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.  You prepare a feast for me in the presence of my enemies.  You honor me by anointing my head with oil.  My cup overflows with blessings.  Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the house of the Lord forever.  Psalm 23:1-6

I’ve never heard of shepherds branding their sheep; according to Jesus it’s entirely unnecessary, because the relationship is deeper than the skin’s surface:

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.  John 10:27

More about my interest in tattooing in a moment; first a disclaimer:

I am neither a proponent of, nor an opponent of tattoos; I do not judge the worth of anyone who chooses to adorn themselves with ink. 

As an art-form, tattooing is not something today’s generation discovered…people have been inking themselves for thousands of years.  Like all personal choices, hairstyles, fingernail length and décor, music, clothing, and accessories, popularity of style is momentary and varies within cultures; it rises and falls on everything from whimsey to social outcry.    I am, however more curious about what the numbers might look like if you tried to figure out the why of people choosing to get tattoos.  To name a few categories there are, it’s pretty, manly-macho, my social statement, identity (such as clubs and gangs), and the list goes on.  All choices are personal; some are deeply-meaningful, and some border on just filling time.

The closest I ever got to a physical tattoo was a few marks I didn’t choose; targets, really.  They were the location points for radiation due to throat cancer.  The markers disappeard eventually. 

The tattoo, or brand, I did choose was the Psalm 23 type.  The sheep-branding of the heart, where you are known by the Good Shepherd is that which brings you safely through a lifetime of both sorrow and joy.  It is the seal of God[1], placed by the Spirit of God in the heart of one who has accepted the offer of God to be saved by the blood of the Son of God.  Christ-followers are branded with the seal of the Holy Spirit.  It is a promise of things to come, of eternal life, joy, and peace, not only in Heaven, but here and now, through this current life of toil, pain, and darkness.

This seal of the Spirit is (like the ink artwork in fashion today), a deeply personal choice.  It isn’t a matter of putting your name on a church roll, or going through someone’s prescribed rituals; it’s a matter of surrendering your heart to be sealed.  That means surrendering your will, bending your choices to fit what God has ordained, not what simply pleases you. 

Following Christ is all about personal choice; Jesus chose to frame the relationship He offers as sheep with a shepherd.  Sheep are led by one who is worthy to follow and trust…not like cattle which must be driven, or dangerous wild animals which must be tamed, incarcerated, or killed.  Those who follow Christ follow a worthy Good Shepherd…one who lays down His life for His sheep.

For You Today

To be branded HIS, means you will begin to recognize His voice, and follow where He leads; that is, after all, the nature of sheep and shepherds.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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Title Image:  Pixabay.com      Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on Psalm 23 see In Green Pastures and Beside Still Waters and Enough and     The Tools of a Shepherd  

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[1] Revelation 7:4

Worship...From a Distance

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Then the Lord instructed Moses: “Come up here to me, and bring along Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of Israel’s elders.  All of you must worship from a distance.  Only Moses is allowed to come near to the Lord.  The others must not come near, and none of the other people are allowed to climb up the mountain with him.”  Exodus 24:1-2

A few days ago I had to get an X-ray done.  When I entered the facility everyone was wearing masks.  When I walked into the room with the big machine the small talk moment was a hello nod.  The first words from the masked man were:  you’re wearing gloves?  I answered in the affirmative because it’s hard to ignore robin’s egg blue latex on all ten fingers.  I then got a lecture on the medical mistakes I was making, such as cross-contaminating everything my gloves touch, and how, underneath the offending gloves, the unventilated sweating of my hands was providing a perfect storm of bacteria.  It was a monologue that lasted the full 10 minutes it took to look at my insides with the magic machine.  I found myself bristling at this sermonic tsunami of medical expertise coming from a mouth I couldn’t see, probably quite unventilated, and (I surmised) only loosely fact-checked.   My last bristling thought was:  I wonder if he knows how much of a bacteria perfect-storm is brewing in that cave underneath his face mask?

The technician must have sensed my bristling (I’m not a good poker face sort when held captive under 3 tons of equipment, forced to listen to how I’m ruining the universe and Mom’s apple pie with my blue gloves).  He took a little breath-break in the middle of his diatribe to inform me that he was just trying to educate [me].  I have to admit my first words to this man I’d never met surprised even my natural affinity for sarcasm…I replied...I guess all those surgeons are wrong about wearing gloves.  When I left the room there was no goodbye nod.

I suppose most people are registering higher on the Richter Scale of edgy these days.  Even though I’m trying my best to stay calm under my mask, taking deep breaths, not adding to the national debt of angst, it is getting harder.  And, like Aaron and the 70 elders, I’m not happy with having to stay at a safe distance…especially in worship.  I grew up with a prevailing sentence ringing in my ears every Sunday morning as our pastor’s morning prayer always included the phrases that thanked God for this land, where we are still free to gather in worship!  I’m a lot older now, and, hopefully, a little wiser; this land is still a God-given beautiful place.  The free part…not as much.

I never thought I’d actually see the day when we had to close the church doors at the direction of political fiat.  Closing the church doors was always a euphemism for the consequences of God’s people behaving like the world, a fate to be suffered by congregations too afraid or lazy to do the Kingdom work of spreading the Good News.

But, here we are!  We have been social-distanced out of the sanctuary!  Only the proverbial resident church mice abide under the steeples of the houses of worship.  Now our altar is an IPad, or a desktop screen, or (for more contemporary types), a smartphone.  There is no embrace across the pews, handshaking, offering plate-passing, lingering, or holy hush moments.  The hymnals lie collecting dust, along with the Sunday School roll book.  We have kept our distance.  

Now…if that’s the lament, here is the joyous response of praise.  We have been forced from the forms of worship to which we’d become stagnated and unprofitably glued, and launched back into the catacombs, finding dangerous ways to follow the Christ Who still indwells, still calls, and gifts to do His bidding…no matter the cost.

For You Today

There are times for distancing – from sin, from forms of godliness which deny the power of God, and so on…but there is nothing that can ever social distance God’s people from His love.  Let’s dwell on Paul’s words on that promise:

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day! 

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Title Image:  Pixabay.com      Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For another post on Exodus 24 see Covenant

Learning to Use Good Judgment

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.  Romans 7:15

Leave your simple ways behind, and begin to live; learn to use good judgment.”  Proverbs 9:6

If you’ve ever had a wood splinter in your finger, you know it will nag you with a painful reminder everytime you grip something.  If you’ve ever had a paper-cut, you understand you will manage to rub it the wrong way twenty-eight times a day.  And if you’ve ever read what Paul wrote about doing stupid stuff, while failing to do smart stuff, you are well on your way to comprehending why the whole idea of wisdom is not to cram your head full of thoughts, good, bad, or trivial; it’s all about being able to live in a way that makes sense in three ways:

          1.     The ability to be in right relationship with your Creator

          2.     The pathway to being in right relationship with your Community

          3.     The pathway to being at rest…having peace within your own heart.

The apostle Paul had a hard-driving way about him; he was a Type-A that made obsessive-compulsive people look like slugs.  He had to get clobbered on the Damascus Road with a spiritual 2” x 4” to wake-up to the fact that his wisdom was nothing but a splinter of foolishness driving him into the ground. 

Paul knew this every day like a paper cut; it nagged him, but he couldn’t shake living like that.  And then he met Jesus, and things began to change.  His so-called wisdom began to show itself for what it really was, pride masquerading as being right.  He not only had to re-think his behavior, but everything about his life.  It took a long time to sink-in (about fourteen years in all ^{see Galatians 1-2}), but he finally learned how to submit his life to Godly control – and with that came wisdom for really living.

The apostle Peter had much the same problem, but with a different pedigree.  Peter was not an astute rubber of elbows with the higher-ups.  Peter was a common, uneducated fisherman.  But he occupied a big space, having been on the inner-circle with Jesus, and a chief leader of the early church.  Peter’s impetuous roller coaster life of being hero one moment, and coward the next, made him a perfect pastor.  By the time he figured out his selfish, prideful ways were destroying whatever manhood God had given him, and he was making a mess of his life and witness, Peter had grown to know how to counsel the rest of us who would come behind.  Peter had walked with Christ, denied him three times, and been forgiven; that was a taste of the divine, and Peter had learned to cling to God’s ways over his own way of crashing through life like a bull in a china shop.  Peter’s advice to us is born of his own testimony of what real living is all about:

So get rid of all evil behavior.  Be done with all deceit, hypocrisy, jealousy, and all unkind speech.  Like newborn babies, you must crave pure spiritual milk so that you will grow into a full experience of salvation.  Cry out for this nourishment, now that you have had a taste of the Lord’s kindness.  1 Peter 2:1-3

For You Today

If you’ve been driven with trying to do better, do more, get more, and experience everything, you’re in a place where Peter and Paul called home.  Solomon also tried to live life on his own terms.  Maybe it’s time to heed what these wise men had to learn the hard way.  Wisdom is hard to come by, but when you give-in to God’s way, good judgment is on the way.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!V

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Title Image:  Pixabay.com      Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For another post on Proverbs 9:6 see Standing in the Sweet Spot

Seriously?

Monday, April 27, 2020

The Lord appeared again to Abraham near the oak grove belonging to Mamre.  One day Abraham was sitting at the entrance to his tent during the hottest part of the day.  He looked up and noticed three men standing nearby.  When he saw them, he ran to meet them and welcomed them, bowing low to the ground.  “My lord,” he said, “if it pleases you, stop here for a while.  Rest in the shade of this tree while water is brought to wash your feet.  And since you’ve honored your servant with this visit, let me prepare some food to refresh you before you continue on your journey.”  “All right,” they said.  “Do as you have said.”  So Abraham ran back to the tent and said to Sarah, “Hurry!  Get three large measures of your best flour, knead it into dough, and bake some bread.”  Then Abraham ran out to the herd and chose a tender calf and gave it to his servant, who quickly prepared it.  When the food was ready, Abraham took some yogurt and milk and the roasted meat, and he served it to the men.  As they ate, Abraham waited on them in the shade of the trees.  “Where is Sarah, your wife?” the visitors asked.  “She’s inside the tent,” Abraham replied.  Then one of them said, “I will return to you about this time next year, and your wife, Sarah, will have a son!”  Sarah was listening to this conversation from the tent.  Abraham and Sarah were both very old by this time, and Sarah was long past the age of having children.  So she laughed silently to herself and said, “How could a worn-out woman like me enjoy such pleasure, especially when my master—my husband—is also so old?”  Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh?  Why did she say, ‘Can an old woman like me have a baby?’  Is anything too hard for the Lord?  I will return about this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”  Genesis 18:1-14

When the visitor brought the news to 100 year old Abraham and his 90 year old wife Sarah, that they would have a baby, Sarah hardly had a fighting chance to stifle that laugh.  My wife knows that drill.  Sometimes when she hears even bad news she will giggle.  It’s an involuntary response to something unnerving.  For Sarah, sneaking-up on the age when birthday cakes are official fire hazzards, signing up for Lamaze classes and shower gift lists at Macy’s was nothing more than a rear-view-mirror memory.  Seriously?  Not even a hope anymore. 

I was 24 when I found out I was going to be a father.  Elizabeth had planned this big speech surrounded by a romantic dinner if the pregnancy test came back positive.  She’d been thinking about it for the whole 5 years we’d been married.  Unfortunately, I was the one who got the phone call before she got home from work.  When she walked through the door I told her, Doc called…yer gonna gain weight.  (Mr. Romance-killer strikes again!).

Reflecting on that moment of being told I was going to be a father, it was overwhelming; I was still a kid, and what did I know about diapers, teething, and not-breaking a little human?  It was fearful…but, somehow wonderful.  There was so much of that how can this be in my mind that day…and for the last 49 years. 

And yet, there it was.  The news was undeniable in May of ’71…the promise of the doctor’s office became a presence in our every waking moment (which was plenty, considering she didn’t sleep more than two hours at a time!).

It’s a deep thinking process when you begin with is anything too hard for God?  That’s the question Abraham’s visitor posed; there came a time when Sarah stopped laughing the skeptical grunt of human response, and began the joyful laughter of God’s redeemed people. 

God’s always been into miracle births…a 90 year old woman, who’d doubtless tried countless times to have a baby and couldn’t, and then gave up the idea or hope.  And what about the teenager who’d never tried to have a baby, and then had one like none other, and laid him in a manger?  And talk about births…how about that one where all hope lay buried in a borrowed tomb…where life was well-past the expiration date…when a dead man gets up and walks out of a grave, you have a really new birth to talk about then!

For You Today

It’s wise to remember that when hope is long past, and even the thought that you could ever begin to hope again, the visitor’s question is always going to rule the day:  Is anything too hard for God?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day! 

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Title Image:  Pixabay.com      Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on Laughter see Laughing So You Don't Cry and Flamingled and Elderly People and Laughter of the Redeemed and Why There Should Be Seatbelts on Dentist’s Chairs