July 17, 2015
Name Recognition
For a year I’ve been visiting
local churches and writing articles about the experience. I have 18 more
churches to go, so I’m close to finishing up the project. Recently I was
entering a building as a woman was leaving and she stopped thinking she
recognized me. She didn't look familiar,
but when I introduced myself she said, “Oh, you’re the church lady!” I had to laugh
at the name association, but decided that all things considered, it’s really not
a bad name. “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your
neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win
favor and a good name in the sight of God and man” (Proverbs 3:3-4 NIV).
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Gail;
-----”Let love and faithfulness never leave you…” is a big order. It is a call to Hi-Fidelity. You remember the old world of Hi-Fi. Its everything was the replication of the master copy, the first cut, not just so the little grooves in an album would be full of exactly the same tiny jags and dips filling those of the master, but more so the sound made by a needle crossing those jags and dips would make music just like the master copy. That was the goal - the sound. Then, the sound controlled the shape of the grooves.
-----Jesus Christ is the master copy for our fidelity. But we get stuck in replicating all the tiny jags and dips of His life instead of the sound of His love and faithfulness. This entrapment is displayed by the pop-saying, “What would Jesus do?” It completely fails to show any interest in why Jesus would do it, how He would know to do it, when and where He would or would not do it, or to whom He would or would not do it.
-----Love and faithfulness are realities, living concepts, not just feelings, or worse yet, mere proclamations. What, why, and how they are and to whom when and where they go are defined for us, not by us. They are something to be put on, not just mimicked. Like putting on a nice sweater, you may have selected and acquired it, but you did not make it. Nor do you put it only halfway over your head. You put the whole thing completely on.
-----Then you wear the whole sweater, not just a snip of it stuck to your shoulder. Yet we make that very, snipping mistake with both love and faithfulness. We’ve all heard countless times, “Oh! I just can’t! I don’t know how I would ever be able to love a person like that!” And, “Oh! I’m working on it. But I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive her.” When we key into “WWJD?” we set loose the excuse of our failures being covered by His grace so we can not love some and not forgive many. After all, He is true though we are all false. Therefore, trying to just replicate the things He did in His life puts Him to death in us as we resurrect our self unto determining what He did and why we can, can‘t, or won‘t do the same. We snip little patches we like from the sweater and paste them on by treating love and faithfulness as things to do rather than processes to allow. This snipping denies the strength He gives us to put on even what of Him we don’t like (90 to 1 I‘ve heard bad-mouthing of the martyr spirit, though Jesus was exactly the martyr.)
-----Hi-Fidelity seeks to replicate the whole sound, not just shapes in grooves. It’s a process, not a thing. Yet shapes in the groove will be replicated faithfully when replication of the whole sound has been achieved. That’s the way processes work. But since the sound is the goal rather than the jags and dips, excuses loose all power to snip up the sweater. The matter becomes the whole sound or no sound so that everywhere a jag is required a jag must be made the best it can be made. When someone we just can’t love becomes who we’re called to love, we must excuse inability to love and love the best we can while learning to do it better during the process. This process brings decisions to life in Christ while putting excuses to death in ourselves, so the music of love will become ever fuller of Him and more faithful to Him, while His grace to us will more comfortably cover the hiss and pops amongst the music rather than giant sections of no music at all.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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