Ezekiel 40:28-41:26; James 4:1-17; Psalm 118:19-29; Proverbs 28:3-5
“What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.”
“Open for me the gates where the righteous enter, and I will go in and thank the Lord. These gates lead to the presence of the Lord, and the godly enter there. I thank you for answering my prayer and saving me!”
“Evil people don’t understand justice, but those who follow the Lord understand completely.”
There is an easy and a hard way to do most anything. However, the two sometimes get confused along life’s way. The typical tendency is to select the path of least resistance precisely because it appears the less difficult. That often means trying to take what someone else already possesses. In so doing, we forget and/or soon learn that not everything that is expedient is necessarily easy or proper. Not every difficult thing requires the most time and energy, either. Sometimes, the very best we can do is the best we can do. But inevitably, there are cold and empty souls who refuse to accept that fact. They are the living parasites of our age.
While I want to be careful about painting with too broad a brush, there are way too many humans who would rather take something from someone else than earn it for themselves. This denies them personal dignity, and leads to all sorts of inter-personal problems and conflict. But more important, when we covet, plot and steal (even when we say we are just taking advantage of an opportunity), we corrupt ourselves and expose our own emptiness. It usually ends up being the most difficult option over the long run in other ways, too. The cost may not be calculable in dollars and cents, but whenever we take something that does not belong to us, we still pay a price. The currency most often is a piece of our souls.
A singular characteristic of humans is our drive to expand our territories and influence, our quest for the feeling of personal significance, frequently without regard for the impact our efforts have on others. I’m not talking The Prayer of Jabez here. (That’s asking the Father to be part of the solution.) I’m talking simple, insatiable greed, a ravenous insecurity we think can only be satisfied by conquest, and more stuff. For example, when it comes down to it, more wars are fought over territory than ideology. We may say we fight for a principle, but we really want control of the land… or the athletic field, the Boardroom, the Church Finance Committee or the classroom.
Wherever we are, few of us ever take kindly to what we see as competition. Competition only makes sense, however, when there is not enough to go around. So we need to honestly ask ourselves what our competitive natures say about the depth and reality of our faith.
The conclusion is inescapable: the more competitive we are, the less faithful we are likely to be. If we see the world as a place of diminishing resources, we will live in fear, desperation and insufficiency. We will never know peace. If we ask the Son for what we need, however, he promises to supply our needs and a peace that passes understanding.
It all comes back to one thing: conquest is not about beliefs. It’s not about faith. It’s about greed. And it’s an exceedingly futile and vain thing. Try as we might, we can never fill our own emptiness, or convey upon ourselves any true eternal significance.
Why, then, would we not ask God for help and blessing before trying to take control ourselves? There can only be a few credible answers. We don’t know a God to ask. We’re afraid He’ll ask why. We worry He’ll say no. Or, we do not want to depend on any spiritual being we can neither see, touch or feel physically. We want to play in our home ballpark or not at all.
Again and again, Scripture tells us the sufficiency of the Lord outstrips anything we can imagine. There’s no need for us to play Crusaders. Manna from heaven; a pillar of fire; the parting of the Red Sea, all remind us that Yahweh never runs on empty. He always stands ready and willing to bless us if we will just turn to Him and ask. Still, like Jacob, we stubbornly insist instead on coveting and usurping the blessings of others for ourselves. Out of such efforts can only come more covetousness, jealousy, anger and insufficiency. For you see, no matter what man can accomplish for himself, or what He can steal or take away from others, it will never be enough. We cannot fill the God-shaped void at our center by ourselves. We have neither the tools nor the knowledge of exactly what is meant to fit there.
Competitiveness is the enemy of compassion. Envy is the antithesis of contentment. Perfect love casts out fear, but fear can do a pretty good number on any love that is not founded on the completeness of Christ. It is high time we give up the silly idea that we can make something of ourselves. The only way to achieve the eternal is to ask for it. We do not need to be jealous of those who already have the security of Christ, and we do not have to wrest it away from them to experience it ourselves. We just have to be humble enough to ask rather than to demand, to receive rather than grab.
No comments:
Post a Comment