Keep Your Eye on the Ball

"At that time [the king of Babylon] sent letters and a present to Hezekiah; for he had heard that Hezekiah had been sick and was recovered. And Hezekiah was glad of them, and showed them the house of his precious things...Then said Isaiah to Hezekiah...'Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house...shall be carried to Babylon, nothing shall be left, saith the Lord.'" Isaiah 39:1-8

This was not a punishment; this was a reality check. Hezekiah's flaunting did not cause the Babylonian exile; the exile was an inevitable consequence from things before Hezekiah's time. What God did here was demonstrate to him how the impending exile rendering all his flaunting foolishness, i.e., shatter his supposed reality with His true Reality. "Why do you treat like friends those who are not your friends? Why are you obsessing with that which does not matter?" Good question.
One of the biggest caveats to being a Christian in the modern world (both of the East and West) is the danger of being swept up into a corporate consumeristic materialism. This is not merely "mega church" syndrome. This is "the American Dream" syndrome. If you want to do or be anything or something around these parts (or so we are told), you need money, status, and power. To get that, you must throw yourself, body and soul, into the world corporate machine, or into a business endeavor. You have to "know people," you have to "schmooze," play politics, jump through hoops, dance, play ball, etc., etc. The tragic irony of it all is that once you have finally got the money, status, and power, your life is now consumed with the pursuit of them, and all spiritual applications of your life are left to the back burner. In trying to be useful to God, we become absolutely useless. In trying to serve Him, we serve ourselves. In trying to love Him, we become friends of this world. If one could just stand back and take in the whole horrific scope of our "busy-ness," our frittering and fluttering about, one would be led to ask, "What are we doing?"
God does not need money, either yours or others. He does not need your talents and abilities. He does not need your usefulness. He does not need your wit or wisdom. He does not need your pluck or personality. He does not need your humor. He does not need your sense of fashion or style. He does not need your creativity or "new" ideas. He does not need your strength or determination. He does not need your political candidate. He does not need your political party. He does not need your country. He does not need your denomination. He does not need your translation of the Bible. He does not need you to save souls. He does not need your service. He does not need your praise. He does not need your sermons and your lessons. He does not need what you "know." He does not need what you are. He does not need anything. What He wants, what His will is for you is (please pardon the cliche) for you to "let go and let God," i.e., stop trying to tell God what kind of person He gets to use and start letting Him make you into the person that He wants to use, i.e., a spitting image of Himself, a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ (Romans 8:29).
Jesus Christ is not a cookie cutter. God is not monotony, sterility, and generality. All the unique elements of your person that He created will be brought to bear in a life of Christ-likeness. However, all those elements too often become distractions and hindrances to God's will for us when we get wrapped up in them and not in Him. "Oh God! I am so beautiful! So witty! So talented! So smart! So useful!" No you are not. You are nothing without Him (John 15:5). You can offer Him nothing (Philippians 3:4-11). All you can offer (pardon another cliche) is yourself (Romans 12:1), the real you, the one unhindered by fleeting wishes, wants, desires, and ambitions. God wants to take our fading dreams and gives us His own eternal ones, to make His desire our own. That can only happen when we stop dictating to Him how things are going to work and start being swept up into Him.
We so easily take our eye off of the ball. God does not need anything from us, nor does He even need us. The wonder is that (despite His lack of need) He still wants to use us, to take us into Himself and make us one with Him; but to do it as He says, not as we say. We do not know ourselves as well as He does. What we see as a talent could actually be a hindrance that must be removed, and what we see as a triviality (or even a weakness) could actually be what God plans to use (What good are the skills of a shepherd on the field of battle? And yet the giant was not slain by a warrior). The key here is that we do not get wrapped up in ourselves, in what we "can" and "cannot" do or be; but get wrapped up in God, Who He is, what He does, and what He is doing and being through us. To put it simply: keep your eye on the ball, i.e., God. That was king Hezekiah's foul--He thought he knew what was up, what he was doing. God demonstrated that he did not: "You think you know what's up? Here's the reality. All 'your' greatness, I will give to Babylon."
Do we keep our eye on the ball? Do we live in the reality of God? Do we walk in that light? Do we realize that life is found, not in doing things or being something for Him, but by being swept up into Him (John 17:3)? Do we realize (as Lewis put it) that our lives are "a perpetual Evangel, a story written by the finger of God," and not written by our own finger? Are we ready and willing to stop distracting ourselves with our own stories, our own plans and our own knowledge, and let God take us "further up and further in" to the adventure that is Himself? Are we finally ready to stop flaunting our feathers before Babylonian kings and start letting all become shadows as we stand in the light of His presence? That is true Christianity; that is what it means to be "Christ-like"; that is eternal life. The burning question is, "Are you ready?"

"Let Your Presence, like a fire
Burn all dross and tin away.
Lead me ever away from me,
And take me further up and further in
To You..."
-Jon Vowell

A Small Bit on Worship

"Hezekiah also had said, "What is the sign that I shall go up to the house of the Lord?" Isaiah 38:22

We never see calamities as a reason to praise because we never factor God into the equation. God brings us the calamities as well as the blessings, and it never crosses our minds that problems are an opportunity to watch God work. God saving you out of your troubles is not for its own sake. It is so you have occasion to glorify God, to know the reality of His presence, to know the reality of His communion with us. Hezekiah's healing was not for its own sake or for his, it was not a mere quick-fix or God paying homage to a great king. It was so he could have opportunity to "go up to the house of the Lord" and worship. The calamities and troubles of life are moments to ask, "What is the sign that I shall worship my God." We do not think of them in such a sense, and therefore suffer greatly in spirit and mind.
Perhaps it seems a bit harsh that God sends calamity in order to garner worship. Is He that desperate for praise? Of course not; God is in need of nothing. God does not send circumstances our way to force praise out of us for His sake. He sends circumstances our way so that we may have opportunity to praise (we may ignore Him if we choose) for our own sake. God enjoys our praise, but He does not need it, He is not benefited by it. There are only two persons involved in the praise dynamic: us and God; and if praise is abeneficial to God, then it must be beneficial to us. Our articulation of our appreciation for being created to be able to comprehend His glory in the moment (my definition of worship and praise) is beneficial to us in that, for one, it is a joy in and of itself; and secondly, that comprehension of His glory draws us closer into intimate communion and knowledge with and of Him.

"Draw me close to You.
Through the fire and the rain,
Come hell or high water,
Lead me into Your Presence..."
-Jon Vowell

The Absence of Truth

"...they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth." Isaiah 38:18b

The Truth about God: "And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent." (John 17:3) The presence of Hell is the absence of truth, including truths about God. We can never know Him in any way on this world or in the next if Hell is our primary disposition (and consequently our primary end). A life bound to Sin is a life bound to Hell. Such a life is not life at all; it is a living death, a dead man walking. It is a life with the absence of God; and where God is not, there Hell is. We can never know Him in this life of the next when we are in the pits of Hell: we are cut off from the intimate communion of His presence. We can never know the wondrous rapture of that dance when Hell is within us, and us within it.
The Truth about Ourselves: "O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me." (Psalm 139:1-6) There is only one person Who knows us in every aspect and element of our being, and that is God. To be in the pit is to be cut off from Him, and to be cut off from Him is to be cut off from all knowledge of self. God is the source of self: He designed it, He knows it backwards and forwards, and He knows the extent of the effects of Sin upon it. The only way to "know thyself" is to get back to the source of our self. As long as we are in the pit and the pit is in us, we are in a constant confusion about ourselves. We fly this way and that, trying to "find," "discover," or "reinvent" ourselves. There is only one Who knows us the way we wish to know and be known, and to be cut off from Him forever is darkness forever, and Hell indeed.

"Thy Presence
Is the freedom of Thy Truth.
Lead me into Your Light,
And keep me there..."
-Jon Vowell

Love and Forgiveness

"...Thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back." Isaiah 38:17

How seriously do we really take the love of God? Do we honestly believe that it aves to the uttermost, that it goes beyond the highest star and reaches to the lowest hell? Our salvation could have been simple in execution: God could have saved us out of duty or obligation, or out of a demonstration of sheer power. Instead, however, He did it out of love, a love that sent His only Son through the horrors of death and the gates of Hell itself. Elongated stays in the pit of corruption can turn love into a farce. We must recapture the wonder of a love, "for love is strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame." (Song of Solomon 8:6b) Have we forgotten that God's very nature is bound up in love (i.e., "God is love"), that He is the very essence of intimate experiential knowledge of another founded on intimate communion with that other? Or have we lost that truth behind the mysterious veil that is the word "Trinity"?
How serious do we really take the forgiveness of God? There are two misconceptions that we must do away with. First, God's love cannot be the grounds for His forgiveness. It can be a motive, but not grounds. His love will find a way to forgive, but it is not the reason He forgive us. Get it through your heads and never forget it: God can forgive us because Christ died, and nothing else. Second, God does not forgive like we forgive. That God "forgives" does not mean that he merely overlooks. God's forgiveness is not ignorance, but absolution. In His forgiveness, sin is done away with in its entirety, and we are made before God as though we never sinned. It is an absolute finality, a finality that God's love sought for us and that Christ's death bought for us. God's love and forgiveness are not matters of sentiment. They are heavy things, matters of "deep magic," and yet we carelessly throw them about as worship buzzwords, or live agnostically towards them in practical experience.
Ask yourself: What would happen if you truly lived the weighty reality of God's love and forgiveness? How would your days change if during those abysmal moments you were thunderously struck with the heavy, rugged clarity of this truth: "God loves me, and I am forgiven"? How many strongholds of the enemy would fade like chaff in the wind if we let that truth envelope us everyday? If we let ourselves soak in any of the great truths of God, would we dare stay the same?

"Love takes Eternity in its embrace;
Forgiveness, in its comprehension.
Dare I treat them less than they are...?"
-Jon Vowell

The Inescapable Choice

"O Lord, by [your works] men live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit: so wilt thou recover me, and make me to live." Isaiah 38:16

It is true that our destinies are in our own hands, but there are only two destinies to pick from: into the will of God, or out of it. We may end up in endless possible places: as a missionary, a millionaire, a lower or upper middle class citizen, a happy person with a good life, a horrendous monster, and so on, endless possibilities layered with endless variables, as far as the imagination can stretch and as deep as it can dig. For all the possibilities, however, they all have as their basis one of two choices: with God's will, or without it. Either your life is a living amalgamation of surrenders to the will of God, or you have consistently rejected it and consequently have been consistently left behind by it. Those are the only two ways to go. They both branch out into endless possible paths, but all those endless paths began at one of those two choices, and they take you one step closer to either Heaven or Hell.
Humanity cannot escape that choice, and that is most surely aggravating. I think most people want neither to accept nor reject God's will, but simply for God to leave them alone. Unfortunately, that wishes is granted in Hell, for Hell is God leaving you alone for all eternity. "By Him men live, and in Him is the life of my spirit." Outside of God, there is no life, love, joy, peace, hope, or anything that is "good and green" in this world. As Lewis put it, "God cannot give man happiness outside of Himself," not because He is cruel or selfish, but because "these is no such thing." Life is found in Him alone. No matter what our excuses, any middle ground we invent, even the most logical and noble, leads away to Hell if it does not have God in its equation. We choose either God or not-God, and not-God is Hell. We can choose to reject Him in the end, but we cannot escape the consequence of our choice.

"Life and Light of men,
All other ground is sinking sand..."
-Jon Vowell

A Hard Pill to Swallow

"What shall I say? He hath both spoken unto me, and Himself hath done it. I shall go softly all my years in the humility of my soul." Isaiah 38:15 (Rev. Marg.)

There is a humiliation involved in God's work in our lives, which is why so few people actually ask for His help. Having been ingrained by Sin with a holistic sense of independence and self-centered individualism, God's workings in our lives are an offense to our sensibilities. We do not need help, as far as we are concerned. "Do I look like a sissy to you?" One of the hardest pills mankind has to swallow is Christ's most stern claim: "Without me ye can do nothing." (John 15:5b)
This is why salvation (unwatered down and unfiltered) is so offensive to the natural man. The acceptance of the redemption of Christ is not even possible without a stepping down inside, a realization and admittance to being unable to save yourself. Reception is the hardest thing; it is a total realization and acceptance of the fact that you have nothing to bring to the table--no talents, skills, wit, wisdom, powers, or abilities. You can only receive, and that offends us; we do not want to be paupers, we want to hold onto every last conceit we have. Christ has purchased salvation to "whosoever will," but that "whosoever" must will to accept it. It is no wonder salvation comes to many at the breaking point of their souls.
There was a humiliation involved in Hezekiah's salvation from sickness. For all his powers, the king could not control God; salvation belonged to Him alone. "He spoke, and He did," says Hezekiah, "I had nothing to do with it." That is the hardest attitude to obtain, and it is easy to lose in the practical world. Each time it is obtained, however, there is a marvelous freedom, the realization that not only are you not in control, but you do not have to be in control. This is not your show, it's God, and He is working all things well. We should learn to rest in that truth every day.

"The lowest is the Highest.
From my knees I get to You,
From the dust You raise me up,
From death You bring me to Your Life..."
-Jon Vowell

The Dramatic and the Subtle

"And this shall be a sign unto thee from the Lord, that the Lord will do this thing that He hath spoken: 'Behold, I will bring again the shadow on the sundial, which has gone down with the sun on the sundial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward.' So the sun returned ten degrees on the dial by which it had gone down." Isaiah 38:7, 8 (Rev. Marg.)

God's miracles are not His "bail out" maneuver. He does not do them simply because someone needs bailed out of their problems. He does them for one reason only: to reveal His control of all things and His will for all things. His control is dramatic, but His will is subtle. "This sign shall be so that you will know that the Lord will do this thing that He hath spoken." The dramatic miracle (i.e., moving the sun back ten degrees) was a seal of certainty on the subtle miracle (i.e., Hezekiah's sickness).
Such a thing has happened before. God did not send the ten plagues on Egypt because there was no other way to save His people. The plagues taught Israel, as well as Egypt, Who was in control. They were the dramatic miracle; the grand, subtle miracle of His will was the covenant of Mt. Sinai. No flash, no flair; just God's promise that Israel would always be His people. Why was the promise certain? "I am the Lord thy God, Who hath brought thee out of the land of Egypt." (Exodus 20:2) The dramatic made certain the subtle.
Jesus was the same. The grand, subtle miracle of the Incarnation was preluded by the dramatic of a virgin birth, angels in the heavens, and a star in the sky. The grand, subtle miracle of Christ's ministry was the redemption of the atonement, a redemption hid within the agony of the cross. What purpose served all that flair and publicity, all those calming of storms and the feeding of thousands? So that all would know that He is who He said He is: the Son of God, the Messiah come to redeem all people. Again, the dramatic made certain the subtle.
The grand, subtle miracle of the Christian life is that intimate communion with God (John 17:3, 20-23). There will be moments, if we are awake, when drama comes, when the bill gets paid, when the work gets completed, when the disease his gone, when the unconquerable obstacle is suddenly overcome. We are to revel and glorify in such things, but remember that they are not the keynote of our lives. They are "signs" pointing us to the real keynote. They are but glorious echoes leading us to the real song, a song that is much deeper and more hidden, that is "further up and further in." It is the song of the inner workings of our communion with God, of our union with the most terrifying and intoxicating of presences, a song that will culminate in a crescendo that is never-ending. The dramatic makes certain the subtle: these miraculous things that happen in our lives are precious reminders of the reality of our communion with God. He has not, will not, and shall not forget His beloved; and all these signs make that sure. They are, however, mere taste of the water that we will one day drown in with wondrous rapture.
If you ever find yourself asking how these things can be, watch for or remember when those precious reminders came, and remember that "these shall be a sign unto thee from the Lord, that the Lord will do this thing that He hath spoken."

"Heaven is with us,
In the moment, every moment,
Heaven in the here and now.
What bubbles to the surface are mere glimpses
Of the deeper Life to come..."
-Jon Vowell

Your Tears are not an Offense

"Thus saith the Lord...I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears..." Isaiah 38:5

I hope we do not fall into the foul snare of seeing prayer as mere sober petition. We can act sometimes like our emotions will hinder His presence, or drive Him away completely. "If I am not strong and stable when I talk to God, then He will not listen." If you are strong and stable, then why are you talking to Him? What was true of salvation is true throughout our entire lives: you are not to fix yourself up before you come to God, namely because you cannot fix yourself up. You are to come to Him as you are: fearful, emotional, doubting, angry, and all around broken. Run to Him with your burdens; your tears are not an offense to Him.
It is a lie that levity has nothing to do with God's Spirit. In His presence is the fullness of joy, and at His right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11). God's presence is not a joke, but it most certainly is not deadness either, and too often what passes for "holy sobriety" is merely a self-righteous mask meant to cover true sincerity. "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit," and He does not despise such things (Psalm 51:17). People seem to miss that, of all places, the presence of God is where you can (and should) be real: openly, nakedly real. All your attempts to cover your joys and sorrows merely hinder you from knowing fully the intimate communion of God.

"In Your Presence
There is Mercy,
A place for my fears,
Joys and my tears,
And You despise none of them..."
-Jon Vowell