October 05, 2011
Improvement Team
It’s sometimes important to resurrect an old committee for the purpose
of assessing current needs and updating data. A recent resurrection for my city
was the Montrose Improvement Team. The task for this group of folks is to look
at the future needs of capital improvements for our municipality. I’m wondering if the Spirit might well look
at us in a similar way as He assess our needs and looks for areas that need
upgrades. His assembled team might consist of the preacher, an elder, a
faithful brother and even a believing spouse.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I hope this isn’t the same team that thought the messes made of North and South First Streets were an improvement. Then again, maybe they’ve been listening to the unfortunate folks who now navigate those confusingly constricted intersections. The most practical insights always seem to come from common folk who daily do the things those insights most involve, in this case, going to the Post Office, City Market, and Ace Hardware. Central control never works. It has never worked. And it never will work, because the Post Office, City Market, Ace Hardware and the little man mean diddly-squat to Central Control.
-----I think we get our misconception about Central Control from a misconception about God. We might believe He is a big central control freak since He is the Almighty. For more years of my life than not, I believed that once God defeated the evil in this world He would rule everything by command. I believed evil was nothing more than resistance of that command. I know this sounds kind of strange, because God will rule by command, and evil is resisting that command. But His rule is not from Central Control. And righteous resistance is against Central Control.
-----Why do you suppose God’s desire was to write His law upon our hearts and put His commandments within our minds? He led Israel around the desert and then into Canaan like a band of storm troopers. His orders were detailed in the Law. If anyone needed to know something in specific, He would reply through the Urim and Thummim. It was first about their being able to goose-step in lock-step, then it was about their thinking and feeling. Thankfully, this was the first lesson put to an end when the Way came next. The commands to be followed in simple lock-step moved from Central Control’s tablets of stone into the way’s reborn hearts. Central Control exudes marching. The Way exudes living.
-----It is not enough for God that man’s actions are in His image. God desires man to be restored to His image. Therefore He desires His nature and character, His wisdom and thinking, His ambitions and feelings to be reflected in those of man’s heart and mind. God is not looking for a mankind who will simply follow Him around and do what He says. He wants a mankind who will desire what He pleases, be what He loves, and do by that. He wants a mankind who will themselves think and feel and act right, each making all their own appropriate decisions by their own new nature. That is not God in Central Control.
-----So indeed, influence upon and inspiration of one another is vitally important because we haven‘t been placed there; we are growing there. But God meant us to have no actual command over one another, not even that of a tinker and tamper team like what messed up North and South First. Yet that is exactly what the church made of itself by the close of the Fourth Century. Church history from then to the tinkering and tampering of today’s fad movements bespeaks the ineffectiveness of “Improvement Teams.” Improvement is cultured from the sincerity of the individual directed by the Holy Spirit into the Word of God being lived within loving fellowship of the believers. It comes from skills increased by the appropriate navigation of life’s intersections, rather than skills made superfluous because Central Control allows one turn only.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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