October 18, 2013
Looking Back to See
At 0’Dark 30 I took Charlie, the dog, out to the
back yard for his predawn relief. He was in front of me on the sidewalk, while
I was shinning the flashlight ahead of us so we could see where we were going.
A couple of times he stopped and looked back at me as if to say, ‘Are you coming?’ I laughed and thought,
‘You silly dog, I’m the one holding the
flashlight and lighting your way…of course I’m coming!’ I suppose we
believers are sometimes no different than Charlie. Our forward progress gets
stuck because we’re looking back trying to reassure ourselves that the Lord is still
there. “Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light for my path.” (Psalm 119:105 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Your metaphor is well given, and it is well taken. We’ve come to the Lord because we’ve believed His Word to be the light. It shining before us evidences the fact that He’s got our backs.
-----But metaphors are worth only the truth they cover (which is a tremendous lot.) Other truths bear the weight of holding our course straight, too, like teamwork does. So, in speaking to one of those truths (which I think is greatly relevant for today,) I am in no way trying to counter the beauty of your metaphor’s truth. I am teaming it up with another one.
-----For the truth is the light, and how nice it would be if it were actually physical light undeniably shining upon the information every person needs to know. How great it would be if when we turned around from facing into the light to thank Jesus for it we would see an actually physical body there, Jesus in the resurrected flesh, Whom our eyes could see and our hands touch and our ears hear. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear Him tell us very, very specifically what our next step should be in every completely recognizable detail?
-----This ain’t so. Truly, there is no physical light shining upon the way before us either day or night which we can just follow. But it is yet so that light shines before us from Jesus having our backs. And what it takes to “see” that “light” is what it takes to “hear” His “voice”, like you’ve named this site of good conversation: Christian “ear”.
-----Jesus called Himself the way, the truth, and the life. If we desire to walk in His way, we must walk in truth. I would say that we must walk in His truth, but saying this implies the existence of another truth. Deceit is duplicitous, not truth. There is only one truth. So, I can say, “If you want to walk in His way unto life, walk in truth,” and not feel at all out of sorts, because every truth is His truth.
-----Truth has awareness. Every seeker of truth will find the Lord, because that awareness will take him there straight away. What is that awareness? Consistency. The Truth is scattered about in countless facts. God gave the human mind mental arithmetic for vetting fact from fiction and adding up the facts unto summations. For each fact has a “tab” or “groove”, a nature of its being, which interlocks with proper adjoining facts just as do jigsaw puzzle pieces. We know the light because we search truly for it, and so, we’ve come to a collection of puzzle pieces which link together enough to see it. But we don’t know the rest of truth. And our lives must go further down the way than we yet see. For that there must be found more facts.
-----But as we go on, what we actually find are pieces. Naturally, we say, “Is the piece I’ve now found a fact or a fiction? How can I know?” Well, truth has awareness. If it is a fact, it will be consistent with the summations we’ve made so far (knowing that the true searcher uses true arithmetic.) Look at those summations to see. Aha! I caught you looking back at what you know of the Lord! (By the way, in total summation, truth’s awareness is otherwise known as the Holy Spirit. If He sees anybody looking for the truth, He nabs him up in a flat instant. That’s why truth’s awareness leads the seeker of truth to Jesus straight away.)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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