god’s truth

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Blindness: The Best Medicine

​In my Monday night group, we’re studying the life and ministry of the Apostle Paul, and we were asked why we thought God would strike Paul blind to get His point across. Was it to simply humble him, or did God have something else in mind on that fateful day on the road to Damascus?

Among the possible reasons we came up with were: 1) When one sense is taken away, we compensate through one or more of our other senses, so maybe blindness obliged Paul to listen; and 2) Sometimes, drastic measures are called for so that we may “see” what God is saying.

Listening is, by far, the one thing humankind struggles with the most. We have been given eyes to “see” and ears to “hear,” but we can’t seem to coordinate their use. When we see, we seldomly listen, and listening is paramount to recognizing the voice of Wisdom, the voice of God.

Like Paul, we can become so convinced of our own wisdom that we can’t even see what is right in front of our faces. We think we know, and we’re passionate about it, even when what we “know” is completely wrong. We tend to live life in a bubble of our own making, and when we look for validity, we tend to only see those things that confirm our correctness, our righteousness, giving us a false sense truth. That’s why we are told that we shouldn’t worry about the speck in our neighbor’s eye, when we have a board in our own. It’s because we look at the world with impaired vision, and reality is more vast than our limited scope can comprehend, and perhaps, being struck blind is what we need, when we can’t see any other point of view but our own, when our prejudice gets in the way of our ability to see the truth.

Often times, it does, indeed, take something drastic to stop us in our tracks. A bolt from the blue is exactly what is needed, a shock to our senses meant to get our attention, to help us reevaluate what we think we know, to make us see things in a new way. Paul’s whole life changed after that fateful day. His blindness gave him the chance to listen, to evaluate in a new light, God’s light, all he had learned and studied up to that point in his life. Sometimes blindness the best medicine to show us how we’ve been blind, to humble us with the light of truth, and to send us down a whole new road.

~SLM

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Who Is To Blame, Anyway?

Here’s what’s been stuck in my head for the last several weeks: 1 John 1:8 which states “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the Truth is not in us.”  We say these words as often as we recite liturgy, yet we seldom take time to analyze them, to really understand what they mean, what we say by reciting them.

When we refuse to admit that we are sinners, we are basically saying that we are blameless, and we can do this in a myriad of ways. We can reject our own guilt, we can deny that we are wrong in our thinking or our actions, or we can hold ourselves guiltless for the events of our lives. If we claim to be blameless, that an action we take, or even the result our actions, the reaction, is not our fault, then what we really claim is that we are without sin. It’s a splendid falsehood, making excuses for our behavior, claiming that we can’t help ourselves, but to act in a certain manner, in irrational and self-obsessive ways, figuring that if we lie to ourselves enough times, the lie will become truth. It’s so easy to make excuses, to lead ourselves astray, to give ourselves a “get out of jail free” card by twisting our perception; by looking at it wrongly and telling ourselves that we are justified in our delusions, because the situation was fostered upon us rather than created by us, or the result of what we have done.

Holding ourselves blameless is the ultimate avoidance of responsibility, of saying that we are not the liar, the cheater, the deceiver, the thief; we are instead the victim or our behavior, not the perpetrator of it.  So, who is to blame, anyway? If it’s not us, who? 1 John 1:10 tells us this: “if we say (claim) we have not sinned, we contradict His Word and make Him out to be false and a liar.” And, for this reason, we cannot have the truth in us, because we must accept responsibility for what we say to and how we treat each other, if we intend to lead truthful and authentic lives.

~SLM

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Deuteronomy #4: The Battle

Sometimes the “real” battle is in our minds; it’s the argument we have within ourselves to either take a step toward our destiny or shrink away from it. We are at war with our thoughts in a continual struggle between the voices of condemnation, doubt, and fear on the one hand, or confidence, encouragement, and love on the other. A conflict between who we think we are and who we were created to be. We have to have this battle before we can ever know what experiences we may encounter, what dangers or blessings lie ahead, shaping us into who we may become.

It’s really just a matter of making up our minds. We have to decide whether we’ll go along with the pursuits of this world, or set out intentionally to follow God, holding fast to His promises, walking in all His ways. Moses tells us in Deuteronomy 6 that we should make God’s ways a part of who we are; that we should not become devoted to any of the other “gods” those around us worship.  This is not an easy road to take, especially with all the distractions, traps really, we are presented with in our daily lives. Moses also says “to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength,” and that we should be ever aware of God’s gifts to us, that we should never forget where we have been and how we have been delivered into our “promised” land. We must live in this world, but we dare not be of it, and every day we must fight, stand-up to the temptations we face, and trust that God’s way is, at the end of the day, the best way to live, the only choice that makes sense in a world that’s too wrapped up in itself, too self-obsessed to even care about its neighbor, let alone to love its neighbor as itself.

As David writes in Psalm 15:

1 Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent?

Who may live on your holy mountain?

2 The one whose walk is blameless,

who does what is righteous,

who speaks the truth from their heart;

3 whose tongue utters no slander,

who does no wrong to a neighbor,

and casts no slur on others;

4 who despises a vile person

but honors those who fear the Lord;

who keeps an oath even when it hurts,

and does not change their mind;

5 who lends money to the poor without interest;

who does not accept a bribe against the innocent.

Whoever does these things

will never be shaken.

~SLM

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Bigger Than The Box

Sometimes, because of human nature, and how we assimilate external stimuli, we tend to categorize things, sort them out and stack them up in nice, neat little piles, containing them within a certain space. We even do this with God. We box Him up in a proper little package and define Him in our terms, how we think He ought to be, but we cannot limit God in such a way. Mark tells us that Christ said to his disciples as they questioned him about salvation, “With people it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:27). God is bigger than the box we make for him. He is more than our rudimentary grasp of Him; He is everything and nothing at all, He is every possibility, and He cannot be neatly filed away into our definition of whom and what He is. Sometimes, God’s message for us is not what we want to hear, or how we want to hear it, and we simply cannot afford to close our minds, because we don’t like the message or the messenger.
In the search for truth, we must be ever-vigilant in our quest to recognize the voice of Wisdom. We cannot pick and choose how and when God will give us guidance. He speaks to us in many voices, and not just the voices we know and love, agree with and respect. He uses every means at His disposal to share His truths with us, and it is up to us to have eyes to see and ears to hear.
~SLM