I'm Undone...Stepping into Brokenness

I'm feeling a bit indifferent to things as I write the blog this week; off the back of a busy weekend there is always a delicate balance with our temperament, emotions, tiredness and our willingness to accommodate new experiences or even tolerate existing situations. There are the day-to-day pressures to do with whether we have enough money before pay day, the issues related to family life and the exchanges that occur within our bubble of reality.

For the Christian, we have the added dimension of grappling with our sense of purpose in the world and the challenge to become more Christ-Like. The problem with this is that as we try to move closer to God in our relationship with him, his light shines onto areas we have tried to keep a lid on, and we become a mess! If you've ever heard someone say come to Christ and all of your troubles will be at an end, then they have sold you an incomplete policy and you should have read the small print.

Our problem is that our desire and our ‘will’ are in conflict with the will of our Father in heaven. It’s the age-old problem that has afflicted civilisation since life emerged from what the scientist amongst us might call the primordial gloop. Recognition of a creator God is the first step towards evolving our attitude towards other sensibilities, rather than our own self-centred nature which would exist even if we rejected God and had, as Darwin would suggest, to survive by being the fittest. I read a quote from a commentator in the news that went a bit like this: ‘I think I know there is a God, I just don’t want to believe in him because it will prevent me from sleeping with whomever I like!’

Research has shown that the ancient Egyptians believed in many gods’ that controlled the various aspects of life: fertility, harvest, water, health, protection, the sun… the Pharaoh himself was also a god who was king. As king, he was able to subjugate people to his will, ask for taxation and in return, makes a promise to care for the people through large public building programmes to promote security, health and sanitation, horticulture and food, and the protection of the people through the mobilisation of an army.

The great civilisations that archaeologists discovered in regions such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the study of their cultures, has revealed a types of Kingdom pattern or code, that we still use as the foundational principles for the way we live our ordered lives today. We don’t have any kings that rule over us in quite the same way as the past, with royalty being replaced by an elected government. Nor do many countries have such nationalistic tendencies that the population is subjugated to a set of conditions or behaviour’s that service ruling elite. You can see that in those places where political or religious ideology exists for the subjugation of people, such as in North Korea or Iran, the totalitarian hold that these authorities have over the people, are designed to regulate their behaviour through their autocratic direction over them.

We have been appalled at the treatment of protesters in Turkey recently (June 2013), who feeling powerless in their situation has taken to the streets. What started as an eviction of protestors over the redevelopment of a public park, spilled over into arguments about the freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the government's encroachment on Turkey's secularism?

In Brazil (June 2013), one million people have taken to the streets because of an initial change of fares in public transport which would lead to financial difficulties affecting many of the poor that it served. Brazilians have been demanding better health and education services, saying they are fed up with paying relatively high taxes and feel that they do not get enough back from the state. Protesters are also angry about corruption and scornful of politicians.

In the UK, we don’t really demonstrate about many issues related to welfare, but we do protest against injustice and for groups in search of equality. Generally in the western world, un-democratic governments are very alien to our experience; we find it hard to accommodate the principles of their commissioning, and it dictates a lot of the direction for our foreign policies. We have no such restrictions in how we can express our freedom of speech and our free will to do what we wish; to enjoy that which we want to enjoy, and be consumers of our cultural and intellectual achievements. In essence, we have each become our own king and queen… a phrase that we use in the UK is: ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’. It is very apt at describing how we have retreated into our own sense of individualism.

So when an institution or authority challenges our behaviour, we can become quite anarchic in our approach to their accusation when not previously used to it. Especially when we perceive that we have done nothing wrong because of the values we hold within our own sense of personal integrity; to do the right thing. I have to admit to having been caught speeding twice in my driving career. In the UK we have a 70 mph limit on dual carriage way roads. I was overtaking a slower vehicle and a second car was pursuing me along the road; my speed crept up to 74 mph just as I approached a forward facing camera. The person pursuing me roared off into the distance and I was stuck with a fine.

A second time I was on a visit to my home town of Morecambe. During my youth and early driving career, a local road had a 40 mph speed designation. One October when the clocks had just gone back an hour, I was travelling along this very road back to Southend when I caught-sight of a policeman holding a laser speed measurement gun from the side of the road in a lay bay. I was following a Taxi that was travelling much quicker than I was, and I had been undertaken (illegal in the UK) by a local who clearly thought I was driving too slowly. I was doing 38 mph in what I thought was a 40 mph zone, when in fact the speed had been reduced to 30 mph on the road simply by removing the 40 mph signs! I got done for speeding… my thoughts were: ‘What about the other drivers, did they get caught too? And if they didn't  get done,why have I ‘got-done and they haven’t..?’

When you read through the account of my ‘brush-with-the-law’, you can pick up on my defensive language and my efforts in pointing out the mitigating circumstances that might have led to me being let-off from my offence. But in the eyes of the law, speeding of any form is wrong, hence the ability to enforce speed through the use of a machine, rather than the judgement of a watching human eye. We like to think that we can be our own enforcer of personal standards and I happen to think that I am a pretty good driver with no accidents… so I prefer to believe in my mitigating circumstances more than I want to believe in the rule of law… ‘Who are they to tell me I am wrong?’

I had to take it on the chin… I had made a mistake; I wasn't in receipt of all of the facts; ignorance of the law or an unknown change in the law isn't an excuse for not abiding by it. It is clear from my example that as people we don’t like to be told we are wrong, and we question the judgements past onto us from those in authority. Some people see God in the same way as the enforcer of law, holding a big stick, when we are not certain that we agree with his position on certain aspects of our lives. Others see God similar to the totalitarian state, trying to enforce his own set of values onto our lives by restricting what we can say and do. This is how the Pharaoh sought to control the Egyptians through declaring his status as one of the gods so that he could rule as king.

The church in the past has done a reasonable job of instilling ‘Christian’ moral values onto our increasingly secular society, but more and more, these values are rejected because people have rejected the people that represent these values; people have rejected the moral authority behind them, and in so doing, rejected the author. Just as I can argue mitigating circumstances for the quality of my driving at the time of being caught, we can also argue more difficult and complex situations in life, in the same way. We believe in our own integrity and the level of understanding that we have reached through our education and experience, believing that we have got it all sorted. Saying ‘Sorry!’ as Elton John once sang, is a very hard thing to do because we don’t want to admit that we can make mistakes. There is a mixture of pride and a loss-of-face that as emotional people, we find hard to stomach.

There are many examples where people avoid saying that they ‘got-it-wrong’ preferring instead to believe in their own values and interpretation of their accountability to others rather than consider the consequences of their actions on others… Since ex-US President Bill Clinton’s almost impeachment at his affair with Monica Lewinski, we have developed a unique post-modern view about many aspects of the choices we make, compared to the social etiquette of the past.

For Bill Clinton, it was the issue surrounding what constituted for sex… but we have all developed culturally in the same vein, and are equally implicit with the sorts of decisions we can make when it suits us. When we take something from work because we think they won’t miss it or that they can afford to lose it; when we claim falsely on tax returns, personal expenses or deliberately aim to get something from another through falsehood; or more recently, ask someone else to take our speeding tickets so we can avoid loosing our driving licence… These are just a few areas where our moral compass hasn't always read true-north.

When we become more tolerant of indiscretion, we allow another layer of our moral virtue to evaporate; to become the norm. When these virtues have had a spiritual of Christian basis associated with it, then there appears to have been in the UK at least, a greater enthusiasm to abolish of repeal something that is considered today to be anachronistic. I have already viewed stories of professional Christians having their conduct challenged where their personal view is considered to be contrary to the laws of equality or inclusion. The ‘Same-Sex’ marriage bill has already created a new form of inequality in that those who disagree with the law are unable to express their view in the public setting where they are in the service of an employer.

The Christian world view differs to those of more secular ones, because the source to the understanding of our nature is through our association with a creator God, rather than within our own conscience. Christians do not accept that ‘man’ has the moral authority to determine the direction of our civilised society, because we are all intrinsically broken. What we mean by this is that our core nature is somehow corrupted. We make bad choices in favour of good ones when it suits us to do so… we are damaged by many things in life that cause us to make sometimes irrational, sometimes ‘driven’, and sometimes foolish decisions…  

An expression in use in the English language is; ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison.' This idiom is used to explain where two people can differ on the simplest of ideas, and yet when we talk about the law, one view is always carried forward as truth through the relegation of some other ideal. This is not a fair basis for governing our lives; we are not the kings and queens of our own destiny. What an inflated opinion of ourselves we must have if we think we are worthy to sit in judgement over others? How have we developed our ability to make judgements over others if we have first not received that authority from a moral source? There is enough inequality in the world to realise that humans in authority, presiding in judgement over others, is not necessarily a fair or just cause.

In a creator God, Christians are able to use a moral code that is devolved not from our own understanding, but from God who is able to make judgements about us and through whom is qualified to define truth from falsehood. We can recognise this due to the Godly code that is woven into the very fabric of society. In return for our faithful obedience to God, he enters into a covenant agreement that was established through father Abram and the nation of Israel, and is gloriously displayed in the life and death of his Son Jesus.

God defines his covenant promise to us as timelessly as the kings of the ancient near eastern cultures did. More spectacular is that when we read through the account of when God rescues his people Israel from the hands of the demi god Pharaoh in Exodus, the story tells of how God first systematically defeats the power of the Egyptian gods by eliminating their influence on the culture, and establishing himself as the one true God against whom all other gods are found to be false. As King, God personally vows to offer us security, provide for our needs, protect us from our enemies, and heal our afflictions, all in return for our worship… it sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

‘So why must I worship God?’ you might say, ‘Who is God that I should do that?’ Well the answer to that question is through his actions. You might counter this statement by asking: ‘What actions has God done in this world to make me believe him?’ The answer is simple: God first chose us… he chose to love us first. ‘How do you know that?’ you might say… well I have only one name for that, Jesus.

We love each other because he loved us first. If someone says, "I love God," but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don't love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their Christian brothers and sisters. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has become a child of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves his children, too. We know we love God's children if we love God and obey his commandments. Loving God means keeping his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome. For every child of God defeats this evil world and we achieve this victory through our faith. 

(1 John 4: 19 – 1 John 5: 4)

In Jesus we have all of the authority and the security we need to recognise truth and righteousness… righteousness is where we strive to be free from doing wrong; to be morally upright. In recognising that we are morally bankrupt, we accept God’s judgement of our present state and enter into a relationship where he teaches us how to live. We cannot achieve righteousness on our own… only Jesus could achieve that. In so doing, Jesus is the doorway through which we enter into God’s grace.

Since we believe human testimony, surely we can believe the greater testimony that comes from God. God has testified about his Son. All who believe in the Son of God know in their hearts that this testimony is true. Those who don't believe this are actually calling God a liar because they don't believe what God has testified about his Son. And this is what God has testified: He has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have God's Son does not have life. 

(1 John 5: 9-12)

So when people ask why they should seek out God, then the answer comes in two forms: ‘What do you see God doing in your life?’ and ‘What do you see God doing in the lives of others?’ We may have had a bad experience of those who say they believe in God and yet do not show it in their actions, but please don’t let their humanity cloud your judgement of who God is. As shown in the first scripture above, Christians are called to love and serve one another because Christ first loved and served us.

Secondly, the answer lies within us. I have to make a choice to observe what God would have me do. I have to accept that I might not be right, and I need to ask Jesus to remove my arrogance and pride and be willing to hear his testimony. I can only do that when I recognise the truth of who Jesus really is, rather than what I may have witnessed through my experiences of church.

We have the reassurance through his grace that he died for this sole purpose, and that this action points to his integrity. This integrity now dwells in my heart through the presence of his Holy Spirit in being a lamp to my feet, pointing out the true pathway for my life amongst all of the hazards that come my way. On this truth, I can truly build my life as he is the chief cornerstone on which we can build: "Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself." (Ephesians 2:20) In order to receive more of his Spirit, I need to enter into a deeper relationship with Jesus, and let him have that part of me that resists. He gently breaks the idols I have set up in my life through his love and his grace; and replaces it through the restoration of my soul that fills me with an eternal joy.

So as I stated in the beginning of this blog, the more that God reveals my brokenness through the work of the Holy Spirit in my life, the more I learn to cling to the cross of Jesus. The result of this encounter is that I can become more ‘real’. I become more real because I put aside my foolishness and seek the reassurance of his mercy towards me. I know that through his care, I will make the right choices that will enable me to do right by people, and right by myself. No longer will I be a slave to my selfish ambition, but be free to do his will, and in so doing, receive the blessings of an eternal Father who has proven his power in the creation of the universe and who has granted me with the gift of an eternal life.

The hard part is always in making that first step towards what you know is right. Often we can get side tracked by the pressure of modern life; the pursuit of wealth or fame; the security of a home and the joy of family; the thirst for knowledge and academic achievement; the charitable work with the poor and needy; and our support of the infirm and the disabled. We cannot earn God’s love by trying to live well by those we see who are in need… All of this is for nothing if we haven’t got the love of Christ alive in our hearts.

 

Whatever it is that you place your trust, how much greater would the blessing be by having the rock of truth to build upon? Take that first step of faith; reach out and claim your inheritance by looking towards Jesus and see what he has done. John the Baptist when he was imprisoned and awaiting the sentence that was to remove his head, sent his disciples to Jesus to ask him if he was the one to come. This is a bit like in the film the Matrix, where Keanu Reeves’ character Nero, is presumed to be a chosen one to lead their civilisation to victory. In the film, Nero goes to seek the wisdom of the oracle, but here in this story of Jesus from Luke’s gospel, Jesus responds to John’s disciples by asking them what they had observed: ‘The disciples of John the Baptist told John about everything Jesus was doing. So John called for two of his disciples, and he sent them to the Lord to ask him, "Are you the Messiah we've been expecting, or should we keep looking for someone else?"

Now you've got to remember, John is Jesus’ cousin. When his mother Elizabeth was visited by Mary, the mother of Jesus, John leapt in his mother’s womb at the presence of Jesus: 'At the sound of Mary's greeting, Elizabeth's child leaped within her, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.’ (Luke 1:41)  Luke wrote this in his gospel because he was a doctor and for him, it revealed who Jesus is. In his gospel, Luke goes on to write: ‘At that very time, Jesus cured many people of their diseases, illnesses, and evil spirits, and he restored sight to many who were blind. Then he told John's disciples, "Go back to John and tell him what you have seen and heard-the blind see the lame walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is being preached to the poor. And tell him, “God blesses those who do not turn away because of me.” (Luke 7: 18-23)

In recognising that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, we need to repent of the way that we have previously lived, and ask for his forgiveness. We need to stop arrogantly presuming we have learned all that there is to know; we can pilot our own destiny through our own sense of right and wrong programmed into our consciousness, thank you very much! We need to recognise that we do get it wrong, and we are in need of God… and you know, he will be there in an instant, drawing alongside you, bringing comfort, peace and forgiveness. He will put you back on your feet, and show you how to walk in faith.

Only then will you know true peace. Instead of being bound by our broken reality, we can fix our hearts and minds on the promises of the King. One day there will be a new heaven and a new earth. There will be no mourning there, no more tears and no more pain; sickness and death will be banished, and bitterness and hatred will be extinguished; we will receive new bodies and be restored as co-heirs into the kingdom of God. As we pray today, ‘You’re Kingdom Come’, we invite the father into our reality to begin the process of change in this world, for the glory of the next… come be a part of it.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”

And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!” And then he said to me, “Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.” And he also said, “It is finished! I am the Alpha and the Omega—the Beginning and the End. To all who are thirsty I will give freely from the springs of the water of life. All who are victorious will inherit all these blessings, and I will be their God, and they will be my children.” (Revelation 21: 1-7)