September 25, 2013
Offer of Proof
I find the tragic mall shooting taking place in Kenya to be
very thought provoking. Laying siege to the expansive shopping mall, terrorists
are killing Christians and anyone one else who is not Muslim. It is reported
that the litmus test given to shoppers is that they must quote a certain prayer
or say the name of a specific relative of Mohammad. If they fail the quiz they
are immediately gunned down. I‘m thinking that if these demands and roles were
reversed, where victims would be spared if they were Christian, many of them
might still get shot. Sadly, people roaming the Christian landscape today might
also fail the test because they can’t come up with the names of Jesus’
relatives, nor be able to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
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Gail;
-----My greatest thanks to God is that He worked salvation for us because we are failures, not because we have eventually succeeded in righteousness and all full knowledge. And when Jesus indicated how completely He empathizes with all who belong to Him, He did so by stating His empathy for the very least of them (Mat 25:40), not just those who could recite whatever or know certain names. Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians that even if the testing flames burned up every last one of a believer’s works, the believer himself would be saved (I Cor 3:15). We look at those whose works are of gold, silver, and precious stones as being the treasures of the church. “On the contrary, the parts of the body which seem to be weaker are indispensable.” (I Cor 12:22) For if we are not in the church to build up and encourage the weaker, then we are there to be built up and encouraged by the stronger.
-----I’m really glad we have God’s Word of assurance in our hands. We may not get all of it from there into our hearts, but that is precisely why we are saved. We love His righteousness enough to take up its proclamations and apply to them the effort we have, not because we believe this effort will in any way save us, but because we want to be more like what we love.
-----It is no wonder the Bible assures us from cover to cover that God will give us our desires. At one time in my life this idea rather perplexed me. I desired a lot of things. And I worked hard towards getting them. Most of them I didn’t get. Some of them I got much later than I would have by my say. But although those desires rode my mind like mad jockeys, deep under them, where I was more confidently founded, I desired what was real about the Lord.
-----If we desire righteousness, we will chase righteousness down paths which emerge from our situations and circumstances and skills and abilities with the intensities of our own hearts, not by the intensities of another’s. So we may not completely recognize each other’s righteousness. Yet, we will love righteousness wherever we find it, in ourselves, or in others.
-----But if we desire to be righteous we must take triple precaution. We must guard against setting the bar so low that we step over it to find we are righteous. Then we must guard against considering something to be righteous just because it is something we like doing, being, or receiving its power. And mostly, we must ever avoid the temptation to chop off another’s head whose righteousness has actually shown up our own. For the Lord defines righteousness. We seek it.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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