July 19, 2010
Ripped Off
Last week I was in the clearance isle of a shoe store when I noticed a pair of well worn shoes in a box on the display shelf. Obviously someone had walked out of the store wearing a new pair of shoes and leaving their old pair behind. When the sales clerk walked by I told her that it appeared that the store had been ripped off. She laughed and explained that the shoes were actually new, but that they were made to look old. After further inspection the only thing giving the new shoes away were the sole. The Pharisees tried their best to keep the old look and feel of the Law, but Jesus told them to take a look at their souls, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37 NIV)
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Gail;
-----I like buying stuff having a new look. It isn’t that I expect it to always look new. I know that eventually it will look used, then it will look old, and finally, it will look worn out. It is that I will get to enjoy knowing the history making the look in each stage of its life. When I was approaching adulthood, I figured the same way about my physical aging through this life. I knew that if the Lord gave me enough time on this earth, I too would eventually look old and decrepit. But I understood that inside this look would be a precious history of how I got there, if I were only to make it so in getting there.
-----But I did not realize my new life in the Lord, like the shoes you saw in the store, came out of the box with an old look. I certainly knew the church I became a part of had an old look, although I was not knowledgeable enough at the time to sort out what it was that made this look. But the new life fit well in me, and I felt well in it. And it looked new to me. Yet over the years I came eventually to discover the real age in its appearance.
-----The first clue to the age in its beauty is in the concept of redemption. Something can not be redeemed unless it was previously owned. Now maybe it was the Lord owning me at conception that was the previous ownership redeemed. Yet, while such a thought seems good to me, it does not rise to the level of significance of this matter which I find in the Word. There we find a relationship God had with man before the fall, a relationship having both God and man’s participation and expressions, a relationship of peaceful harmony in purpose, one of joy in both participants. It was man who fell away from this relationship, and it is the willing man who has been redeemed back into it. It is an old relationship.
-----Looks aside, it may feel new to the one accepting the Lord today. But to the Lord, I venture to guess there is a certain amount of sweet reminiscence in re-engaging with another life finding the light. In historical terms, the life of the Pharisee may have seemed to them something new in finally holding to something old. Its heightened sense of obedience was certainly that to which God had called the Israelites from Egypt. But its sense of obedience had failed to engage the heart of the relationship lost in the fall, the mutual participation in one another that is love for God and man. God had never left this, and this is to where He has wanted man to return. To us it is a new life. To Him, it must be in a peculiar way, a return to the good old life, the shoe of well fit, the shoe not having been worn enough to look as old as it really is.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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