The Weight of Being in Control

 

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

“To what can I compare the people of this generation?” Jesus asked. “How can I describe them?  They are like children playing a game in the public square.  They complain to their friends, ‘We played wedding songs, and you didn’t dance, so we played funeral songs, and you didn’t weep.’  For John the Baptist didn’t spend his time eating bread or drinking wine, and you say, ‘He’s possessed by a demon.’  The Son of Man, on the other hand, feasts and drinks, and you say, ‘He’s a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and other sinners!’  But wisdom is shown to be right by the lives of those who follow it.”  Luke 7:31-35

A crowd is impossible to please.  In a football stadium, whenever the referees throw one of those yellow flags in the air, they’ve judged that one or more of the players have done something outside the rules of the game.  And every time they make half of the people in the crowd happy, and the other half fighting mad!  It just depends on which side you want to win.  You cannot please a crowd.

Whether you’re in the crowd or on the field, the weight of being in control of things raises an elevated level of possibilities for good or evil.  Jesus had just gotten done teaching the crowd that John the Baptist’s ministry of proclaiming God’s salvation through repentance was right.  The crowd was pleased, but the Pharisees, lurking in the shadows, had other ideas.  They began sowing seeds for a crop of discontent among the people, and making plans to take Jesus down.

There’s a worn-out phrase that describes what the Pharisees wanted from Jesus:  You go-along to get-along.  They wanted this son of the carpenter to get in line with their brand of thinking and authority; they considered themselves the referees who were in control of what people could do or think.  They knew best!  And every time Jesus wouldn’t dance or cry to the tunes the Pharisees played, they kept score; the game was getting lopsided…so they decided to kill him.

For the Pharisees, being in control was everything.  Without their elaborate robes, sashes, artifacts, and rituals, they wouldn’t be noticeable.  And they wanted that fame, and the attention that went with it all.  This Jesus, a nobody carpenter’s son from a small town, was ruining everything.

The weight of control is tied to the weight of vested interest.  If change will cost you what you want to keep, the tendency (of selfishness) will be to resist.  The larger the personal stake, the more intense will be the level of resistance.  Fame, notoriety, fortune, and self-gratification are intoxicating – to say the least. 

It’s difficult to read this account of the shoving match the Pharisees created, trying to limit Jesus’ effect on the crowds; those people were the Pharisees’ home team, and this upstart country bumpkin was not going to take away what belonged to them.  The battle was joined at this point; and it would get as ugly as it needed to be for the control-mongers to keep it together their way.

For You Today

One benchmark of true Christian discipleship is the absence of control.  It’s known as the surrendered life.  You enter God’s salvation that way, surrendering control of your life by confessing your sins to God, placing your faith in Christ and His blood-sacrifice on your behalf, and God does the forgiving and saving.  Wanting to be in control of any of that negates your confession.

Confessing is admitting that you are not in control…God is!  And that is a weight that’s wonderful to get off your back!

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

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

For another post on this text see The Original Radical

Cracked Pot Decisions

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Listen to the word of the Lord, people of Jacob—all you families of Israel!  This is what the Lord says:  “What did your ancestors find wrong with me  that led them to stray so far from me?  They worshiped worthless idols, only to become worthless themselves…. “Go west and look in the land of Cyprus; go east and search through the land of Kedar.  Has anyone ever heard of anything as strange as this?  Has any nation ever traded its gods for new ones, even though they are not gods at all?  Yet my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols!  The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay,” says the Lord.  “For my people have done two evil things:  They have abandoned me—the fountain of living water.  And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all!    Jeremiah 2:4-5, 10-13

The term “crackpot” may have outlived its usefulness.  It was a great debating vilification of the other side’s position some centuries ago when pottery was in daily use in the average household.  Everyone then knew a cracked pot wouldn’t do what it was created to do…hold milk, wine, or water.  So a crackpot idea was one that wouldn’t hold anything valuable, thereby making it a worthless position.  Jeremiah’s whole point about Israel’s cracked pot decision-making was that they’d made worthless decisions about their God and had, accordingly, become worthless cracked pots themselves.  The scathing rebuke for Israel is that, in the same way you get up covered in fleas if you lie down with the yard dogs, you also become whatever you worship.  They had exchanged the glory of Almighty God for the worthlessness of carved idols of stone; they’d gone from riches to rags.

It’s not an easy ride reading the words of a prophet like Jeremiah.  Day after day his finger points loudly at our decisions gone wrong.  What is so annoying about Jeremiah is that he is simply right; the choices didn’t have to go so wrong had the leaders and followers simply chosen to use the unfailing vessel of Godliness, rather than the cracked pot of selfishness.  They had accepted God’s gracious covenant, only to then (strangely enough) return to idols and superstition.  It was like the sign-then-drive events at car dealerships; they signed the deal, rode away in the convertible, forgot about their part in the bargain, and were never heard from again.  When the car of their cracked pot theology began to break down, they’d come back to the altar and point to the covenant terms as if God were the one breaking the deal.  Jeremiah called that strange; indeed!

Whether or not our country was founded intentionally as a Christian nation, or not, is a debate I’m not willing to explore today.  However, it is hardly debatable that we are anything but that today.  From the pornography on TV screens and theatres, to price-gouging in a Covid-19 crisis, and the selfish posturing of politicians, and justifying sexually-perverted alternative lifestyles, we can proclaim Christianity as a national profile until blue in the face from holding our breath against the stench of sin…we, as a nation, have abandoned whatever humility we may once have owned toward the God of grace and glory – and we have done it in favor of the idols of self-gratification, money, power, and prestige.

In answer to Jeremiah’s question

Has anyone ever heard of anything as strange as this?  Has any nation ever traded its gods for new ones, even though they are not gods at all? 

Yup!

For You Today

Perhaps it’s time to stop holding everyone else accountable and begin-again the true Christian practice of looking within; we might start asking God to judge us and set us straight.  Then, at least in Heaven, we might have a shot at not being such a nation of cracked pots.

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 this topic see Hope - Part 1