October 14, 2011
This Little Light of Mine
This time of year it’s dark when I drive out to the fitness center. The
other morning when I saw some small green lights about head high bouncing
toward me I knew immediately that it was a jogger out for a pre-dawn run. The
apparently safety conscious jogger was also carrying a flashlight, but oddly the
light wasn’t focused on the path. Rather the spot of light was weaving all over
the place, first on one side and then another, on the grass and under the
shrubs. It wasn’t until I drove past the jogger that Fido, wearing a lighted
collar, came into view. I have to laugh
when I think about some of us acting like Fido. We’re supposed to be the light
of the world and where do we see our light shining…off the path, under bushes
and behind rocks. “In
the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good
deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” (Matt 5:16 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----When I started going to that Pentecostal church I knew it was all over for me. I was supposed to become nothing and Jesus was supposed to become everything. It only oughta be that way. So went the attitude, anyway. It was robot time - dump everything out of my ambitions, my plans, out of what made me “me” and let the Holy Spirit fill me. A sense rang true about the idea. But the volume of that sense was barely perceptible, the tone softer, and the pitch far more comforting than the chatter flowing around the church.
----That presented me with my first major problem for pondering. What does God do with the “self” of the new believer? Is He interested in it at all? Or does He simply want to dump it out of your body like pouring old French-fry oil from its jar? If that were the case the Holy Spirit would be more like a Holy Haunting, and God‘s interest in you would only be for your body. Yuk! God is more than a cheap philanderer. So I dumped that possibility.
-----Maybe God was like the Borg craft on Star Trek. We were the Borg, “Resistance is futile!” and all! In one episode, the Enterprise captured a Borg. They detached the cabling from his head and everything. The poor guy had trouble being an individual and experiencing actual privacy of thought. The crew learned that what the person attached to the Borg system was didn’t cease to exist. It just dissolved into the system. Like a knob on a control panel, all of its identity and meaning became the Borg - a part of the panel - and the Borg was little effected by its presence. This has a little affinity with Romans 12:4-8 and I Corinthians 12:4-26. But according to I Cor 12:26, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” The church is about you, too. The Borg could care less about its detached comrade.
-----It ain't that way in the body of Christ. We each will get a white stone inscribed with a new name only we each will know, just like Jesus has a name inscribed which no one knows but Him. Names were big to the Greeks and Hebrews, more than just the identity tags they are today. They represented what made you “you” - your character and personhood. They identified and validated the individual rather than the community. In these new names we see the self existing in heaven with privacy and God given purpose.
-----And so it is that Jesus didn’t say, “Love your neighbor and annihilate your self.” If you’re going to love your neighbor as you do your self, you better be loving your self right to get loving your neighbor right. The righteousness Christ makes of us is the correcting to perfection of the self until it functions in all godliness amongst the other perfected selves. And so the light we let shine has the brightness and color of God, but the tint, hue, and intensity of the self from which it shines. For if you yourself weren’t also important to God, Christ would have posted a waiver of your name to His cross. He didn’t. So take it personally.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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