A Place of Safety

Where is our safe place?

 

Let’s ponder Psalm 12.

 

Help, Yahweh, for the godly man ceases to be, for the faithful disappear from among the sons of men. They speak falsehood to one another; with flattering lips and with a double heart they speak.

 

May Yahweh cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that speaks great things; who have said, “With our tongue we will prevail; our lips are our own; who is lord over us?”

 

The fall of mankind from God’s glory into sin and death was precipitated by a lie spoken and a lie believed. It seems that we will consummate our mutual destruction by an orgy of lies. We simply do not, and it seems cannot, tell the truth. Lying is so inculcated into our way of life that we disparage those who tell the truth, who are honest with us; we exalt those who lie – as long as the lies are to our liking and appeal to our self-interest.

 

We do not say what we mean nor mean what we say, but it is no longer a problem – it is a way of life. We seek to prevail with our words, we think “our lips are our own” and we proclaim ourselves lords and masters.

 

Life is both simple and complex, and to truthfully engage in life requires both the simplicity of truth and the complexity of truth.

 

“Because of the devastation of the afflicted, because of the groaning of the needy, now I will arise,” says Yahweh; “I will set him in the safety for which he longs.”

 

If you are distressed by our lying society, God sees you, God hears you, and God will set you in safety; a safety of peace, a safety of security, a safety of hope, a safety of confidence, a safety that transcends the lying chaos of this world.

 

What is this safety? What is our safety? Consider what follows in our psalm:

 

The words of Yahweh are pure words; as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times. You, O Yahweh, will keep them; You will preserve him from this generation forever.

 

The Word of the Living God is our safety, our assurance, our peace, our refuge. When the world is filled with lies, our God fills us with Truth. While the world speaks with a double heart, our God speaks with steadfastness and immutability. While the people of the world use their words to manipulate and have power over others, the Word of our God comes to heal us, save us, set us free, and make us His sons and daughters in Jesus Christ.

 

To be sure, God will refine us in His Word; and in a sense it is as if He is refining His Word in us. God will turn the heat up within us to purify us, in and through His Word.  Until we are tried by His Word, we do not know what within us is real and what is not real. Until the furnace is heated seven times hotter, we do not know the dross and impurities within us.

 

Let us not forget that while God gave Joseph His Word through dreams, that that Word was to be tried before it was fulfilled. “…He himself [Joseph] was laid in irons; until the time that His Word came to pass, the Word of Yahweh refined him” (Psalms 105:18b – 19).

 

We find our safety in God’s Word, and we find increasing safety as the white-hot work of the Word transforms us into the image of Jesus Christ. Let us remember that when our Father disciplines us that He does so in order that we may share in His holiness (Hebrews 12:10).

 

Our psalm concludes:

 

The wicked strut about on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men.

 

This is certainly a picture of our society, our nation, our institutions, our politics, our entertainment, our education, our economic policies – vileness permeates our culture, our thinking, our behavior – we call good evil and evil good. However, we need not fear – the world is the world is the world and our Father will bring the things of this world to nothing. The sons and daughters of the Living God have a glorious future with light and life and beauty and joy and goodness – a future in which we celebrate the pure and kind and gentle and peaceful.

 

Let us increasingly learn to live in God’s Word and to allow God’s Word to live in us – and we will find a safety and security and peace that passes all comprehension. (Philippians 4:7; 1 Peter 1:1 – 9).

 

“They Just Want Control!”

“They just want control!”

 

I’m hearing this a lot from friends and others. They chafe at restrictions and recommendations and mandates related to the pandemic and impute unworthy and egotistical agendas to those in authority who issue mandates, recommendations, and restrictions. The follow up to the accusation that, “They just want control,” is, spoken or unspoken, “I’m going to do what I want to do.”

 

Well now, for Christians this attitude is a problem for a few reasons – not the least of which are clear teachings in Scripture that we are to not only submit to authority, but that we are to honor authority; the Bible also teaches us that lawlessness and rebellion come from the enemy of God – so we ought to carefully and fearfully ponder what cup we drink from when our hearts, words, and actions feed on lawlessness and rejection of authority.

 

But I’ve been considering another reason the attitude expressed in, “They just want control,” is something of which we should beware – for it betrays the way we have been living and whether or not we, as Christians, see ourselves as belonging to Jesus Christ.

 

In other words, it raises the question of just who has been in control of our lives prior to the pandemic. If we have indeed been purchased by Jesus Christ, then we are the property of Jesus Christ, the slaves of Jesus Christ; Christ is then our Lord and we are living under His authority. (Remember that the centurion of the Gospel saw that Jesus was “a man also under authority”).

 

If this has been the case, if we have been living under the authority of Jesus Christ, then we are accustomed to respecting and honoring authority. If, however, we call Christ “Lord” in name but not in deed, not in our actions; if we are accustomed to living life however we choose to live it, without regard to the lordship of Jesus Christ – then it is natural that we would chafe at the imposition of authority, of the will of a person or institution that goes against what we want.

 

So, I think what we see and hear in the words, “They just want to control us,” is, more often than not, an indictment of the church. It is certainly the way many churches operate internally, otherwise they would have to shut their doors – congregations do not want to submit to the authority of Scripture nor to the authority of those God has placed in offices of authority in the church.

If we are accustomed to living under the authority of Jesus Christ, if this is our way of life, then we will have a respectful response to governmental mandates during the pandemic. Then we will not direct venomous vitriol at those with whom we disagree. After all, we are taught to “pray for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.”

 

The present distress and uncertainties are an opportunity for all Christians to submit to the authority and lordship of Jesus Christ, to learn the Way of the Cross, to lay down our lives (and this includes our agendas and our wills) for Christ and, in Christ, for others. We have an opportunity to deepen our respect for authority, for government, and to learn to live as Jesus Christ lived on this earth, as a person under authority.

 

Our citizenship is in heaven, in Christ. (Philippians 3:20).

 

(Jesus and the centurion Matthew 8:5 – 13. The Christian and those in civic authority; Romans 13:1 – 7, 1 Timothy 1 – 4, Titus 3:1 – 1, 1 Peter 2:13 – 25. The importance of how we think about life, about how we see ourselves in Christ; John Chapter 17, Romans 8:12 – 39, 1 Corinthians Chapter 13,  Galatians 2:20, 6:14, Ephesians 1:3 – 10, Colossians 3:1 – 4. Reminders that we are engaged in supernatural warfare; Ephesians 6:10 – 20, 2 Corinthians 10:3 – 6, 1 John 2:15 – 17, 4:1 – 6, John 15:18 – 16:4).

 

 

“The Lord Willing”

“The Lord willing”; superstition, rote saying, or Biblical awareness? “The Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” perhaps this one covers both God and nature, just in case God doesn’t rule over nature.

 

My memory is not good enough for me to be able to tell you how I may have said, “The Lord willing,” over the decades of my life, but I can tell you that as far back as I can go until my memory is enveloped with fog that I have said it with an acknowledgment that life is uncertain and fragile, and with an awareness of the reverential fear of the Lord. I take no credit for this, it is the result of others, and of James the Apostle, and of the grace of God.

 

When I was a young man I was around older people who said, “The Lord willing,” as a natural part of their conversation; it was woven into the fabric of their lives. While some may have said it out of habit or superstition, I have a sense that many of them said it out of a deep awareness that our lives are not our own, but that they belong to our Father – Creator. I think they knew that life is uncertain, fragile, and that we don’t really know about tomorrow. These men and women had life experience and God experience, they knew joys and sorrows, gain and loss; this was before our hearts and minds in America were transformed into narcissistic idolatry and self-deification, this was before the professing – church abandoned the self-denial of the Cross.

 

It seems to me that the Covid – 19 pandemic ought to cause us to pause and consider the wisdom and Biblical truth within the words, “The Lord willing.” Here’s the statement in its Biblical context:

 

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. (James 4:13 – 17).

 

Let me begin at the end of this passage, “Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.” I confess that before this morning I’d not thought about its context, and while it does have a broad application, what is its immediate application? Why does James write this? What is the “right thing to do” in this passage?

 

While it is not wrong to think, “The right thing to do is to submit our plans to the Lord and His will,” I want to take this further. I want to suggest that every component of this passage is important if we are to sense and understand the gravity of the words, “The Lord willing.”

 

Consider, “Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.” We are taught, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” This is the American way. We are all about having control over our lives, and when we don’t have control we have meltdown. There are those right now who are saying with their words and actions, “I’ll risk getting sick, I’ll risk dying, I want control over what I do.” The Apostle James tells his readers that they are arrogant. How many times have I been arrogant? How many days have I lived in arrogance? What about you?

 

James isn’t saying that we shouldn’t plan, any more than he would suggest that a farmer not prepare his soil and sow his seed, but he is saying that we ought to be careful how we plan, that it ought to be in an awareness of God’s sovereignty, that God is God and that we are not – and He is Lord, which means that our lives ought to be subject to His direction and control.

 

Do we really know what our lives will be like tomorrow? How often, on December 31 of a given year, can we look back over the year and see that life went exactly as we planned?

 

Many of us have had jobs in which the unexpected occurred just about every day, and our success in those jobs was based, in part, on a combination of both planning, and responding to the unexpected. Just as our plans should be submitted to the will of God, so should the unexpected – it all passes through His hands.

 

Then James adds another element:

 

“You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” We can respond to this truth in at least two ways, one is with the attitude, “Let us eat and drink and be merry today, for tomorrow we may die.” As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, if we don’t believe in the resurrection we may as well live like this. Or, living in the light of eternity, we can live under the lordship of Jesus Christ today, endeavoring, by His grace, to love God with all that we have and all that we are, and to love others as ourselves.

 

Realizing that our lives are short can lead us to either live recklessly or to live thoughtfully. In the West most of us think and live as if we’ll be here forever. Elsewhere in the world death is ever present. In the West we are focused on being young forever, rather than growing in wisdom and understanding. We promote perpetual childhood with myriad toys and diversions and our attention spans at age 80 are about what they were at age 2…and we call this progress.

 

What is “the right thing to do” in this passage? It is to live under the lordship of Jesus Christ, in an awareness that we don’t know what tomorrow may bring, with an understanding that our lives, in an earthly sense, are like a vapor that is here one moment and gone the next. “The right thing to do” is to live with the words, “The Lord willing”, woven into our hearts and minds; to live with those words as part of the fabric of our speech and testimony.

 

Our lives were as a vapor before the pandemic. Before the pandemic we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. The pandemic did not change these realities, but perhaps  we can learn these realities afresh through the present distress – especially those of us in the West – isolated and insulated as most of us are from the suffering in the world.

 

For the follower of Jesus, perhaps we can be gripped by the gravity of the words, “The Lord willing”; remembering that, “Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.”