October 03, 2014
Accommodating
I’ve visited one church that
had cigarettes butts littering the sidewalk, and another church had a cigarette
butt receptacle prominently stationed outside the entrance. Last Sunday a newer
member in my congregation, who occasionally steps out for a smoke, decided this
day to smoke an electronic cigarette during the worship services. I’m beginning
to wonder if people aren’t taking the lyric in the praise song, “Come, Now is
the Time to Worship” just a little too literally — “Come just as you are to
worship …”
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Gail;
-----When I stopped thinking of righteousness as dropping coin in the offering plate, eating cracker chips and drinking shots of grape juice, not falling asleep during sermons, going to church while your team’s winning the big game, saying the right thing at the right time, and the long list of churchy things we expect of each other, when I stopped thinking those were righteousness and began thinking of it as just doing what actually benefits everything effected by what you do, then I began realizing how short of righteous I am. Moreover, I became awestruck at the immensity of His kingdom and the depth of intimacy necessary for every, last, tiny thing therein to bless everything else in all of their effects. Everything interrelates in the righteousness of God.
-----So, His righteousness applied to us must necessarily involve mercy. We don’t have to dig to the micro-scale to find many of our effects being deleterious to something else, whether it be to a bug, a person, or Jesus. Therefore, our coming to Him does not require us to be righteous of our selves in all ways. Jesus did say our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees or we would never enter the kingdom of Heaven. “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mat 5:20 and 48)
-----So, which is it? Are we righteous through His gracious seeing us as righteous in Christ? Or must our righteousness actually exceed and we be perfect? Both. Through God’s mercy only can we be completely righteous, and are. We can not even be completely righteous on our own within any one, simple situation. There are too many elements involved in even the simplest of situations for our minds to comprehend, and by the broken nature of this world things here do not interrelate through righteousness, but rather by the second law of thermodynamics, that is, for one thing to gain, another must loose. Therefore, what you do to benefit one element of a situation will always detriment another in some way (you are an element of all your situations, so, being generous with a dollar costs you a dollar.) With God, a mere jot or tiddle out of place is imperfection. Then, it is impossible for us to ourselves be wholly, perfectly righteous in all here.
-----But our being righteous on our own can and must be achieved in one situation wherein everything can interrelate on the basis of total benefit. That situation involves nothing of this physical world, not even your body. It involves only two things: your spirit and the Holy Spirit. And what you must do to do that righteousness is indeed to narrow the importance of all matters to you down to that one situation, turning from the world, confessing that you are false, that you sin beyond your ability to know how much, and to grasp only the desire to be completely right according to God’s definitions of right. There you will be perfect before the Lord, doing the only thing you can do right, confessing and coming to Him (which is leaving the world, aka, repentance.)
-----That’s the you He will look at. The rest of you has rabbits to chase so you can feed your family hasenpfeffer. Bad for the rabbit; good for your family. But while you run their trails, stepping all over dainty, little flowers, and innocent bugs and the likes, your spirit with the Lord’s keeps part of your decision processes focused on catching only as many poor rabbits as your family’s hasenpfeffer needs, and how to catch them while doing the least damage to little flowers. Though you’re sinning by nature (costing to benefit,) you’re acting in His righteousness by doing it as honorably before Him as you can while desiring to do it even more honorably, (aka, desiring righteousness.) That He loves, and all else is forgiven. “Come just as you are” is for the moment of coming. The process of staying will have you coming better tomorrow.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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