On the
national political landscape everyone is making up new rules as they go along
to control Donald Trump and keep him out of the White House. Local politics are
no different. After a recent election the old guard, in an attempt to control a
controversial newly elected representative, made up a few new rules for him to
abide by. Even in the church, leaders find it easier to write new rules and set
policy, than to help believers mature. The Pharisees were insulted when Jesus
exposed a similar practice. Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law,
woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry,
and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them” (Luke 11:46 NIV).
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Among man’s most pervasive fallacies, and the one maybe most responsible for generating cascades of other fallacies, is the obsession with self. Even when people turn to the Lord with vim and vinegar “I” and “me” do not recede into their lesser used categories of words. Even many of the few folks who are able to diminish their occupation with those words and concepts remain occupied with the certainty that their own perceptions and knowledge need to be widely known. Everyone is sure they know the order the world needs to have. Even I do. I suppose if an individual did not maintain a stable core of perceptions his life would cut a rather loony path. And Paul doesn’t completely dispel such conservation of core beliefs, “One man esteems one day as better than another, while another man esteems all days alike. Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind.” (Rom 14:5)
-----That there is a self about an individual to which “I” and “me” often properly apply is not a sinful condition. Neither is being sure about one’s own perceptions necessarily evil. Evil is failing to humble those perceptions to the Word of God and to those whom they touch or effect.
-----We are all works in process. That is why all of us are false. Romans 3:4 isn’t saying each of us is all false, rather, it is saying that all of us are somewhat false. If we were not somewhat false, we would not be works in process, we would be works perfected, and we would not be changing into His likeness from one degree of glory to the next, but rather we would have been changed into His likeness. So, until we are perfect, we are false.
-----But our own falsehood becomes eclipsed by other’s falsehoods when we achieve powerful positions. Who has either time or need to truck with his own falsehood when he has some power to wield upon others? And power comes in all forms. For the remainder of this year we all are going to gag on the omnipresence of political power. Everywhere people interact there is power concentrated in a few whom many follow with minds nearly emptied. And your observation is golden; look at the forest of denominations made of the body Christ called to be one. The common blame is placed upon so many others being wrong about the Scriptures, while the accuser of this fails to consider the fact that to anyone else he himself is also an other, so thusly accusable, too. And rightly accused, sometimes, because all men are false, not just other men.
-----When humility makes this perception into being an ever present woodwork of the frontal lobes, then the resulting stream of consciousness will always be challenged to consider the possibilities that others are also at least partly right, and in what they are right they deserve some power. In fact, if rather than bogartting the power, we humbly allow good sensibility and Scriptural likeness to take power amongst us, then maybe the power within the church would begin accumulating back into the Head of the Church where it belongs in actuality rather than in mere proclamation.
-----So also the once great (and partially false) political power of a bygone America allowed its people to be free, mobile, and powerful in their perceptions, activities, and accumulations. But now an ugly, additional head is growing its own power into a bullyhood of unlegislated rules and regulations about how much accumulation is too much, which words, expressions, and art are verboten, which concepts must be stricken from public view, which other concepts must be placed into public view, which activities can no longer be allowed in public space, and which activities no longer can even be considered shameful. It is like a new gleichschaltung, a horde of harpies each with a little social power for pecking others into a new social order. We who believe in respecting and honoring others call it persecution, for those others are not respecting and honoring back.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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