Evaluating Self-Evaluation

On occasion it seems a good and right activity to take a sort of self-inventory. These times of self-examination usually occur during times of either extreme tumult or stagnancy, which we tend to refer to as 'moments of clarity.' But at such times as these, do we ask the right questions?

We tend to look at goals, bank accounts, or relationships as the evaluators. We weigh and consider time wasted or opportunities missed. Failures and flaws of character as well as strengths in virtue and charity are put into the mix as we attempt to garner an accurate estimation of life progress and skill. But, again, are these the right questions to ask?

The flaw in such reasoning comes not because we are ignoring that which is important. On the contrary, each of these is a vital category of life and worthy of thorough consideration; however, it seems that we are running under faulty presuppositions. After all, what is should never be used as the line for what ought. That's like using a squiggly line for a level or a dirty glass for a telescope.

It would seem that another approach is in order. For this consider the analogy of a couple lost in their car and leveling a house. While the interior of the car possesses all the requisite gauges to determine speed, range and the like, it is the incoming information that helps to direct the course. It is the information from the GPS, from the couples' eyes, etc. that inform of correct direction and sight. Or think of the plumb line or the level: it isn't the house that determines what is straight or true but. It is the level that reveals crookedness.

In the same weigh it cannot be self-examination that reveals the unevenness of a life or the deficiencies in direction; it is God and His Holy Word. Holding our lives up to the Word of God exposes both virtue and vice while it points the way of truth which is Christ. Because of this there is no better source than Gods Holy Word as the surest footing and perfect path.

Racing as Slow as you can

I grew up in a motorcycle family.  Dirt bikes were my family's way to relate, and competition was a part of that.  My family was always involved in a motorcycle club, the Norsemen, who hold various events and races.  One such event that I remember from my youth was a family fun day, a day of riding when the club members would play around on their bikes with their families.  There are few things better than food, family, and the smell of burning gasoline.

During these fun days, there were always fun "novelty" events.  One of these events was the "slow" race.  For this, riders would see who could  travel the length of the field the slowest, without touching their feet to the ground.  For beginners, who had never practiced going as slow as possible, this was a huge challenge because it pushed riders to control their bodies, their throttles, and their balance.  But even riders who had been riding competitively for years struggled too.

And no matter how clearly or how many times the rules were stated, inevitably, when the race was started there would be at least one rider who missed the point entirely and sped recklessly to the finish line.  Or other riders would get so frustrated by their inability to perform this odd task.  There were even highly-experienced riders that were struggling and frustrated at their inability to do such a seemingly simple task.

To think that very good riders with years of advanced riding experience struggled to compete in this particular event always struck me as a humorous and prophetic ordeal.  Asking someone who has trained and practiced one thing, to then do the very opposite thing is a difficult endeavor, but in many ways is exactly what God asks of us when we become regenerate believers.

Humanity's natural inclination is towards the flesh and to sin.  We spend our lives practicing the flesh and training in sin.  Yet when we become believers through the work of Christ, God changes the rules and asks for an entirely different criteria.  He, God, asks us to live our lives for the Spirit, a way of life that is wholly different than our previous focus which was living for the flesh.

Luckily, God has clearly stated and repeated what He asks of us, what the "rules" for His race are.  He desires our utter love and unabashed devotion.  This means that we will cast aside every sin and weight which hiders us and we will run with effort and perseverance to the Lord.  We should also decide, upfront, to live our lives with an ardent focus on remaining in the center of God's will for our lives.  Let us then listen intently to God's direction(s) for our lives so as to compete in the race to the best of our abilities, especially if that means we have to neglect our fleshes so as to exalt the Spirit of God within us!

Choosing God before we have to Choose

Making decisions is just a part of life.  What you're going to wear or to eat are among a hundred other much more important choices face us daily.  Some decisions, like checking your Facebook page, are more superficial and relatively unimportant.  While other decisions, like who to marry or what your career will be, are more significant and life-determining decisions.

Because making decisions is just a part of life, it is no wonder that the Bible speaks quite directly to how we are to decide and choose.  What is interesting is that Scripture speaks of decision making in both a macro and a micro level, indicating that God is concerned with the minutiae of our lives as much as He is with the "bigger" things.

Most importantly, God wants us to seek Him and His guidance when facing decisions in our lives (Psa. 37:5; Jer. 6:16; 33:3).  In this way, godly decision making begins before decisions are made.  While this may seem obvious, consider the effect: if we pre-decide to commit ourselves to God's will before we have to make decisions, when the time comes for us to make the decision we will be more likely to make the right decisions.

Conversely, if we waver before we actually face the various available choices, then when the time comes for us to make decisions, we will likely be distracted from God's purposes by our own passions and desires.  Remember, the enemy lurks in waiting to devour (1 Pet. 5:8).  He, Satan, knows exactly how to tempt us away from God, so that when we stand at the crossroads of decision making we will not choose God's will but we will follow our fleshly desires that lead down the wide road of destruction.

Instead, we must determine which road we will choose to take long before we come to the fork of deciding.  In this way, we will be on-guard against being led astray.  Pre-deciding to follow Christ also helps to keep us focused on God and His will for our lives well before we are forced to make decisions.  Again, God is as concerned with being the guider of small decisions as He is with big ones.  Because of this, we should never grow weary of seeking His counsel, whether regarding what to eat for breakfast or when to make a career change.  Let us then seek after God first in all things so as to live in the center of His will!

The Salt & Light Snowblower

Several years ago, Ned bought a new snow blower, which is a necessity for the snowy winters of Minnesota.  Previously he had always shoveled his driveway and it took over an hour.  But now, with that beautiful machine, he could get it done in less than five minutes.  The ease of snow-blowing took away the all-too familiar dread of having to shovel.  He even enjoyed doing the drive.

The second winter he had the blower, two elderly neighbors from California moved in across the street.  The couple both had heart problems and Ned noticed them struggling to shovel the drive after the first snow fall.  When he saw them wrestling with the snow, he simply started his blower, pushed it across the street, and did their's too.  It just became a part of the routine; twelve minutes for both drives.  Ned then also remembered that his other neighbor, Mike, left for work at 4:30 in the morning, so he bagan doing his too.  Another four minutes.

A few years later, his next door neighbor, Larry, passed away.  Because his widowed wife, Pearl, was also elderly, Ned just started doing hers too.  Another five minutes.  Later that same year, the neighbors down the block had a baby, so Ned added their's to his routine too.  By the end of that year, Ned was snow blowing about a half hour and doing five driveways.

Ned was happy to be the neighborhood plowman, relishing in the joy of caring for and serving his community.  One night, though, he fell deathly ill and had to be taken to the hospital.  Over the course of a two day bed-ridden, hospital stay he recovered and was eventually released.  As his wife was driving him home, he felt so bad because there had been a huge snowfall the night before.

However, as they arrived back in the neighborhood, he was astonished to see that all of the driveways were done.  To his amazement, Ned's wife told him that in the morning she looked out the front window to see one of their other neighbors, whom they had never even met, doing the driveways.  Ned nearly broke into tears. He never realized the affect that he had made over the past few years.

The point is example.  If we are to be the salt and light of the world, the very hands and feet of Christ, then we need to look at the needs around us and step in to fill them.  Jesus calls us to love as He loves us.  Think of that: He gave His very life, dying upon the cross to serve and to love all humankind.  Laying down our preference and our comfort in order to care for others is what being a Christian is all about.  Therefore, let us seek out opportunities to serve and then seize them for Him!

Heavenly Cure for Depression

The statistics are staggering.  Every year over that past several decades, more and more people, both young and old, are diagnosed with various forms of depression.  The prescription drug industry has ballooned into one of the largest in the world.  The truth is, depression has permeated throughout our culture that if you are not or have nto dealt with depression personally, you certainly have friends and loved ones who have.

Depression, the whole ordeal of being depressed, is a introspective endeavor.  One becomes so engulfed with themselves that a deep, dark lens of discouragement and apathy falls like a pall over his or her life.  The affect is that the person is left helpless, hampered, and handicapped to live.  And be it self-destruction, self-loathing, seclusion, self-pity, self-love, or at the worst, suicide, a depressed person will inevitably seek refuge from somewhere for relief from their pain.

The answer to such a despondent search is God.  In the end, God and He alone, is the alleviator of depression.  He is love and the Comforter for all our ills.  If we or someone close to us is struggling with depression or the like, the only cure is God.  Although the step to that relief is easy in theory, it can be challenging in execution: humility.  Only when we stop spending all of our time thinking about ourselves and we humble ourselves before the Holy Lord will we be blessed with real relief and actual comfort, straight from the Lord Almighty.

The issue is: what do we do when we are feeling depressed?  The answer is clear and accessible: seek after God, the source of all joy, love, and comfort.  This is not brain surgery but it does take humility on our part.  Only when we fall prostrate before God Himself will we be able to stop looking at the imperfection of ourselves and start looking at that which is perfect: God.  Let us then take this to heart when dealing with such challenging issues as depression and to seek after God to light our paths during the dark times!

Gleaning Wisdom from and before Failure

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the automobile industry was taking off.  However, there was one potential hiccup and major hurdle to the industry's growth: rubber.  At that time, synthetic rubbers were still in their infancy and would not be able to fill the demands.  In reaction to the growing need, in 1928, Henry Ford went to Brazil and purchased over 6,200 square miles of Amazon river, beachfront property.  Fordlandia was formed.

Ford sent some of his top engineers and managers who had streamlined his revolutionary mass-production Ford facilities.  The men went down to Fordlandia and, having hired local farmers to live and work in the city, planted hundreds of perfectly symmetrical rows of rubber trees along the banks of Rio Tapajos.

However, the managers and engineers that Ford sent down to Brazil had little to no knowledge of tropical agriculture.  And, not knowing anything about growing rubber trees or tropical farming at all, Fordlandia was a continual and repeated failure.  In 1945, when Ford's grandson took the company over, Fordlandia had incurred a slew of violent local uprisings, had been unsuccessfully relocated further down the Amazon, and was finally sold for a $20 million loss.

The point is that, while Henry Ford saw a need and formed a solution to solve it, because he lacked the information and expertise to accomplish his goals it was an utter failure.  Despite the fact that Ford dumped valuable resources of money and manpower, it was all for naught.  The project failed definitively for a whole litany of reasons, but the chief among them was Ford's own pride.  Henry believed that the skills and tactics that had made him an automobile baron would be equally useful in farming rubber trees.  He was wrong.

Often times we, like Henry Ford, will be faced with issues that we, like Ford, will choose to take on by our own wit or grit.  As Solomon writes, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall (Pro. 16:18)."  We need to always remember that while we may have our own plans and our own ways to deal with the scenarios that we are faced with, it is in the Lord that we are established (Pro. 16:9).

Consider the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21), who because the harvest had been so fruitfully plentiful, he tore down his barn to big a larger one to store all of his surplus. Yet before he can lay the first brick, the Lord calls him out, demanding his life that very night.  The primary point of the parable is that the man who stores up riches for himself has no riches in heaven.  However, a secondary and equally important point is that we cannot know when or what God has for us if we are continually making plans apart from His guidance and separated from His presence.

James, in his epistle, picks up on this theme when he says that we do not know what tomorrow may bring for we are but mists that are here today but vanish tomorrow.  Therefore, we should say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that (James 4:13-15)."  This hits a nerve at the heart of our culture that so heralds individualism, self-expression, and personal power.  But apart from the Lord blessing are very step and sustaining us from breath to breath, there is not a single thing that we are capable of doing.  

Therefore, we should seek His will not only to bless our plans, but also to help us determine them as well, remembering that God desires to guide our steps in order that we would walk in accordance with His will (Psa. 37:23-24; Pro. 20:24; Jer. 10:23).  So that we would not walk in the footsteps of Fordlandia, we should always strive to come to God in humility so that He would guide and equip us for every work that He has already prepared for us to do.  Praise be to God who directs and blesses!

Making Decisions in Light of the Lord

Decision making is a necessary part of life.  One can scarcely go a single day without having to make significant if not life-altering decisions.  Because choices abound and overwhelm, having a system in place for making godly and wise decisions is of great importance.  Luckily, we are not without guidance in this regard as the Bible offers clear teaching to help us.

At the onset, the pertinent word in reference to decision making is dependence.  For our decision making to be godly, we must depend on God.  Decision making dependence happens before the decisions are made when we are sorting through possibilities and choices.  At this point, the pre-decision stage, we need to rely on the Lord to help us to discern the way that we should go.

The Lord, speaking through the prophet Jeremiah, has this to say, "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls (Jer. 6:16)."  The Lord says more, speaking through the prophet Haggai, "Give careful thought to your ways (Hag. 1:5)."  God wants us to be prudent and wise when facing decisions.  Evenmore, He helps us out by the indwelling of His Holy Spirit, who acts as our Counselor (John 14:16-17).

Because the Holy Spirit is to be our inner source of compulsion when facing choices, there is a devotional element to decision making.  In essence, our dependence on God at the front end of decision making comes down to relying on the Holy Spirit to guide our way and the faith that He will protect and keep us before and after our decisions have been made.

In the end, it is God who establishes our paths and keeps the sure (Pro. 16:9), which should cause us to trust in Him and commit to Him to secure our way (Pro. 3:5-6; Psa. 37:5).  The biblical account is unified and clear in this regard: before we make decisions we should depend on God for guidance and clarity to make wise and godly decisions while after we make decisions we should be faithful in depending upon the Lord to keep, straighten, and secure our paths.  Let us then seek the Lord for direction and depend on Him in faith to establish and secure every step we take!

The Book of Philemon

Paul's epistle to Philemon is a curious book in the canon of Scripture.  It is only a single chapter written by Paul for a very specific purpose, which lacks much of the theological weight and length of Paul's other writings, it can easily be read in a single sitting.  However, understanding why this unique work was included in the canon is an odd discussion in itself.

The letter has Paul pleading with Philemon, a wealthy Christian slave owner, for the well-being and status of Philemon's runaway slave, Onesimus.  Onesimus, having run away, ended up imprisoned with Paul (v. 10), and has since converted to Christianity.  Because it was illegal for a Roman citizen to harbor another citizen's runaway slave, Paul resolves to address Philemon, one of Paul's Christian brothers, directly.

Paul appeals for the sake of Onesimus that, as Paul is returning Onesimus to Philemon, Philemon might see to it in his heart to free Onesimus from the bonds of slavery that he might return to Paul (vv. 12-16).  Paul goes so far as to declare that he will personally cover any costs incurred because of Onesimus' fleeing (vv. 18-19).

The strength of Paul's plea coupled with the reality of the letter's content, forms a definite argument for Christian slave masters to free their slaves.  Add to this the implication of the book's canonization: because this letter has survived, reason stands that Philemon did free Onesimus.  This is a radical argument for the ancient world, when slavery was so widespread that approximately 30-40% of the Roman population was comprised of slaves.

It is even reasonable to think that the Onesimus, the Bishop of Ephesus, mentioned by Ignatius in his Letter to the Ephesians (written c. A.D. 100) is the same person discussed in Philemon.  Therefore, this book was supported in its canonization by a primary source, and reveals how Christians should deal with slavery.

The book of Philemon is intimately tied to a specific historical context and addresses a particular scenario.  That being said, Philemon also has a broader application, namely the necessity of reconciliation.  In fact, the primary theme of this book is Paul's plea for Philemon to initiate reconciliation with Onesimus, even though Onesimus had unlawfully wronged him.

Paul thus acts as a mediating force, mediating reconciliation and restoration in brotherly love.  Let us then not overlook the value of such a small and odd book as Philemon, recognizing that it is the Word of God, meant for our benefit and growth, even today!

Giving up the Throne for Guidance

At many times throughout this life we will be forced to make decisions.  Some decisions such as what to eat, or what clothes to wear can seem trivial.  While others like who to marry, where to go to school, or what career to pursue can be monumentally important for their obvious and resounding longterm ramifications.

The method we employ to determine the decisions we will make can speak volumes of who we rely upon most when the rubber hits the road.  Many people would say that they trust the Lord to guide them while they still sit firmly in the driver's seat steering the car.  This is like talking out of both sides of the mouth.  Instead, we should determine who will be the master of our lives and stick to it.  If God is truly to sit upon the throne of our lives then the first step is to clear the seat by getting up and out of the way.

In truth, recognizing that the Lord desires to guide man's steps is a great starting point in seeking guidance from Him.  Not only does God want to guide us but when we rely on Him to lead us, He will (Psa. 23:2-3, 37:23-24, 139:9-10; Pro. 3:5-6).  The Lord will watch over us and will direct our every step, we just need to follow His leading (Isa. 42:16, 58:11).

Jesus spoke clearly, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matt. 6:33)."  This is the point: we need to pursue God and His will.  When we seek after Him, we will align our will with His, we will be focused on spiritual matters over fleshly vapors, and we will take every step with discernment and faith.

God has given us every resource needed to depend on Him for guidance.  We have the wealth of the Bible, imparted through reflection and study.  We have mentors and fellowship, which helps to encourage growth and challenges blind spots.  We also have the inestimable power of the Holy Spirit who, by His indwelling, both guides and empowers us to make the right and sound decisions.  All we need to do is make it our posture to rely on God for our decision making ability.

Making decisions, sometimes life altering ones, is a part of life.  To be sure, the most significant decision anyone ever makes is to confess with their mouth and believe in their heart that Christ Jesus is the Lord of all creation.  The step of faith is to be the gait for every decision we make.  We are to walk by the Spirit, living by the Word, and loving as He has loved us.  Let us take this seriously and cast our decision making upon Him!