Having to Wait

Isaiah 40:31 NASU

Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.

   

Are You Tired of Waiting?

The other day I forgot to make a sandwich for lunch but had a bag of walnuts and blueberries and cashews so I made that my lunch.  Walnuts and blueberries are considered “super foods” by some nutritionists and I had more than enough in my bag to satisfy my appetite.  When I got off work though and headed back to the church to build the sermon for today I was hungry.  In five minutes I would be at the office where I had soup and broccoli waiting for me but I did not want to wait.  I could not wait.  I pulled off the freeway and went to McDonald's because I had to have onions and ketchup and American cheese food and a couple of pickles with a beef patty that may or may not be all beef and two buns of white bread.  Of course there was nothing reasonable about my decision to satisfy my hunger that way; it was much smarter to have waited and had that broccoli and soup.  Not all of us are good at waiting though!

Do you ever get aggravated about having to wait?  Are you ever frustrated by the slow driver who won’t move out of your lane and let you pass?  Have you gotten uptight about someone who speaks too slowly and had to fight the urge to finish off her sentences?  Are you the one who grinds his teeth when a movie or video is buffering?  Do you ever turn to the back page of a novel because you can’t wait to see how it ends?  Are you unable to carry on a conversation without looking at your phone?  Have you ever been frustrated by more than three people in your line at the bank or the store?  What do you do when you are put on hold?  Do you wait patiently for the person to return to the line or are you ready to hang up after a few minutes?  Have you ever snapped at someone who made you wait for an unreasonable amount of time?  Is “wait” a four letter word in your dictionary?

One of the more misunderstood terms found in the Bible is “lust”.  We think of it almost exclusively as a term about sex and sexual attraction but it is much more encompassing than that.  Lust is the determination that you must have something immediately.  We lust because we are unwilling to wait for God’s order of things.  We don’t have what we want and so we lust.  The emotional reaction most closely connected to lust is anger.  You will see it in a check-out line and at the dinner table.  I don’t get what I want when I want it and I get mad.  Even the satisfying of a lust can generate anger.  Some of the most bad-tempered human beings are those who will not wait but always demand they get what they want when they want it.  You see this clearly illustrated by the son of King David who wanted his half-sister and would not wait for her to ask their father to let them marry.  Instead he raped her and immediately afterward became angry with the girl and had her thrown out of the house.  But he (Amnon) refused to listen to her (his sister), and since he was stronger than she, he raped her.  Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her. Amnon said to her, "Get up and get out!" (2 Samuel 13:14-15 NIV) Nothing is so dangerous as a lust that has been satisfied for more often than not it warps the human personality and makes it irascible.  Cain who became furious that God liked his brother Abel’s sacrifice more than his and rather than taking the time to offer a better sacrifice the next time, in a fit of rage generated by an unfulfilled lust killed his brother.  Nearly every single ungodly moment of anger can be traced back to a lust, whether it is satisfied or left unfulfilled.

We even see lust in so-called “spiritual matters”.  It is not unusual for Christian people to get angry with God when He does not give them what they want when they want it.  Countless numbers of once God-fearing people have left their Christianity behind them because they got mad that God did not answer their prayers.  When Jezebel asked her husband Ahab why he was so sullen, it was because he could not get a landowner to sell him his vineyard.   He answered her, "Because I said to Naboth the Jezreelite, 'Sell me your vineyard; or if you prefer, I will give you another vineyard in its place.' But he said, 'I will not give you my vineyard.'" (1 Kings 21:6 NIV)  How many Christian people have reacted in the exact same way to God when He would not give them what they wanted when they wanted it?

There is an enlightening verse in Isaiah that expresses precisely how God makes His people spiritually and psychologically strong.  Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary. (Isaiah 40:31 NASU)  The Hebrew term translated “wait” is rooted in the idea of a rope being stretched, pulled to its limits.  Wait means precisely that.  Those who develop God’s strength and endurance wait for the Lord like a rubber band being pulled back so far it is in danger of snapping.  Throughout Scripture God’s people are told to wait for God.  Wait for the Lord and keep his way. (Psalm 37:34 NIV) I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.  My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. (Psalm 130:5-6 NIV)  It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. (Lamentations 3:26 NIV) 

The New Testament encourages God’s people to wait upon God also.  For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?  But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:24-25 NIV)  The fundamental quality of all hope is waiting.  Without waiting, hope is not real, a concept rather than actual act of faith.  Lust and ungodliness are to give way to waiting for God.  For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.  It teaches us to say "No" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope — the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, (Titus 2:11-13 NIV) Waiting though is not a passive acceptance of delays in life but an active participation in God and His personality. Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. (Jude 21 NIV)

If we did not know that God is love and all He does with us is rooted in love, we would perhaps pass judgment on His way of dealing with us.  Just consider the pattern we see in Scripture.  Noah waited one hundred years for God to finally flood the earth.  The Hebrew people waited four hundred years for the Lord to begin to bring them out of Egypt and the terrible slavery they endured.  For seventy years they suffered from the captivity after the Lord drove them out of Israel.  Hundreds of years they waited for a Messiah to come and bring them salvation.  Forty years Moses had to wait before the Lord finally gave him his assignment of leading Israel out of slavery.  Abraham waited sixty years before he had a child and his wife Sarah waited seventy years.  Isaac had to wait until he was sixty before God let him be a father and Jacob was forced to wait more than twenty years before he could return home.  Nearly every time God wants to do something important with a person, He makes that one wait, sometimes for an intolerable length of time.

Consider again our oft quoted verse in Isaiah 40.  Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary. (Isaiah 40:31 NASU)  This verse is widely misunderstood!  The common thinking about it is that if we just wait long enough for God, finally He will give us new strength and enable us to persevere in whatever task we face.  That is not at all the point of this teaching.  The wait is not the delay to getting God’s help and strength; it is the means by which it comes.  It is in waiting upon the Lord that all He has for us is put into place in us.  Isaiah the prophet makes this clear in the sixty-fourth chapter. Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him. (Isaiah 64:4 NIV)  Waiting is not what brings about our transformation but waiting for the Lord is the way He changes us.  Prayer is nothing more than waiting for the Lord.  It is giving Him access to us that He might pour Himself into us and as we pray, for whatever it might be, God gives us new strength…the strength that is Christ Himself.

We wonder why God doesn’t instantly give us everything we ask of Him.  What a childish way of seeing prayer!  Prayer is the means by which God and His strengths become a part of us and as He pours Himself into us through prayer, what our Lord wants for us and for those we care about comes in His timing.  Sometimes as we pray and wait for God, our Lord makes it clear He does not want those things we are asking for ourselves and others and it is a stormy time for us as we learn to accept it.  Yet even then, God’s strength and patience and hope and peace get worked into us and we stop being impatient, self-absorbed children and grow mature in our Lord’s invading personality.   Why does God make us wait for Him?  It is because He wants us to have supernatural strength and peace and contentment and these great workings of God take time to be worked into us…the time we spend in prayer as we wait for Him to finish what He has already started.

Frustrating Circumstances

It is sometimes expressed and many times thought that if something is tough or dangerous or psychologically distressing, it cannot be God's will.  That is the theology of children.  The Bible is filled with examples of His people laboring without reward, success or encouragement of "a brighter day".  Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel come to mind!  Paul often stayed where he wasn't wanted but did not assume the Holy Spirit was taking him elsewhere.  David spent ten years wandering about without a home  and no clear indication that  he would ever get to where he hoped to be and yet he still was the Lord's anointed and the chosen future king of Israel.  The Lord brings us through many side trails and tough spots on our journey;  although it may seem like we are wandering aimlessly or off track, we may be precisely where God wants us.  God's greatest servants had a "vagabond" quality to them.  They often seemed to be out of sorts with what they thought was "God's plan" for them.  Joseph did nothing wrong ( even if he may have been a bit arrogant) to warrant his years in prison and in fact it was the rightness of his life that opened the door to imprisonment.  Would we tell Joseph that he was not aligned with God's plan for him and should find some other direction for his life when he was responding to the needs of the Baker and Cupbearer?  Did he "miss the boat" as he delivered meals to his fellow prisoners or was Joseph working within the full orchestration of God's will?  We grow weary of our labors, wondering if we have fallen out of line with God.  Because it is hard, our frustration builds and we start swinging our head from side to side frantically looking for some way out of our troubles.  Jesus said that we were to come to Him when we were weary and heavy laden and He would give us rest.  He might move us along or keep us right where we are but either way, it is Christ who is our rest and not the change of course.    To "trust in the Lord" is not for the fainthearted.  There are times when it seems far more rational to make up a new plan and step away from the hardships we face.   Year ninety-nine of Noah's ark building project may be similar to what you are facing today.  Be careful not to throw away all God is doing in and through you because you are frustrated by your lot in life.

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.   Romans 8: 20-21 NIV

Championship Pedigree

Have we caught a glimpse yet of just how monstrous our sins are and how monumental God's forgiveness is?  Perhaps a small bit of perspective is needed.  For one hundred years, Noah and his family worked on the ark that would protect them from the coming flood.  Apparently, no one thought much about the impending rain storm.  They were busy with cooking and hunting and farming and making a life for themselves.  But the most important thing, the approaching deluge was never pondered seriously by anyone except maybe Noah's family.  It was preposterous perhaps; insignificant certainly.  When the forty-two boys ridiculed Elisha and called him an "old baldhead", they were completely unprepared for what followed.  The two female bears that mauled them were the furthest things from their minds.  That is because they had no respect for the prophet of God and were oblivious to the power he possessed.  We can be thoroughly unaware of the immense iceberg before us because we are not scanning the horizon for danger.  The danger we face currently is the gross neglect of contemplation of Sin and its relationship to us.  We pass it off as a mistake or two, as an error in judgment and God declares it much worse than that.  Sin is the complete corruption and ruin of humanity and it is due to a mind saturated in rebellion against God.  When once we grab hold of the realization that Sin is far more horrific than we can conceive and that for God to overlook it is as idiotic as putting a loaded gun in the hands of a toddler, we will begin to hold to a rational view of life as it is.  Our Lord , by dying upon the Cross, evaluated the condition of humanity and determined that if He loved us, He must save us from our sins.  Save, we must use in the sense of pulling a drowning child out of the water or giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to a heart attack victim.  God has saved you out of mercy, not pity, not necessity, not obligation but out of real kindness and love for you.  You are not a victim, God was the victim.  So now you are the victor and He the champion of the world.  Consider what was accomplished when our Savior poured out His blood upon the Cross.

Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha).         John 19:17 NIV

The Dogs of Your Winter

It is simply unheard of within scripture of someone with great faith not being tested in that faith.  Try as you may, you will not come across a God beacon who avoided being sorely tried.  Noah, Moses, Ruth, David, Daniel, Mary, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Paul; they all were sent careening off the cliff at some point and you will also come upon your own cliff.  It may not appear suddenly but could gradually arise but you will face it if your love of Christ is actual.  The most comfortable life there is right now is the one without hope, without promise.  Hope is not for the pagan or the atheist but only for the one going through the fires of faith.  If you want to look around at all the pitch dark souls wandering around without Christ and long for their settled existence, you certainly can.  But it would be like Noah's wife perched in the ark ruminating over how easy her aunt has it back in the village.  You are going to face tremendous trials that will bark at your faith but that is all they can do...bark.  The trials have no bite for they cannot get at where you are...hidden with Christ in God.  You are dead and that is what the Lord declares  you to be.  Imagine a great bear snarling at the Lord Jesus Christ glorified.  It is as ridiculous as your trial besting you.  The Lord has you and yes your faith is being tested but that is just the beginning of birth pains for you as you triumph in them and come out victoriously to your place in the pantheon of God's great hall of saints purified by trial.  Resist the urge to envy the untroubled.  Nothing can take away the joy you possess ultimately and it doesn't need to be dispossessed now.  The trial will pass but you will stand and stand with a smile gracing your face as you look back upon it as a toothless barking dog .  Be resolute in your determination to trust Christ fully at the moment the hounds come after you.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.    Colossians 3:3-4 NIV

The Success Myth Visited

One of the most ubiquitous myths circulating through the Christian community is the success doctrine.  Many of the most popular Christian speakers are perpetuating it and we are quickly approaching a point of no return regarding it.  What seems so credible, that God wants every Christian rich or successful or free of life-long encumbrances is in fact not just a shaky proposition, it is antithetical to the normal Christian experience. 

What makes this doctrine most disturbing however is that it promotes what scripture seems to scream “avoid!”  If it is true that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, then why would so many believers make such a concerted effort to make a go of being that rich man?  Is it possible that success is not a goal at all for us; that it is in fact our most dreaded outcome?  Consider the arguably three most successful men in scripture: Solomon, David and Noah.  All three of them fell apart at the end.  Noah, who literally had the entire world to rule as his own is known at the pinnacle of his success as a drunk who despised his indolent son.  Is that what we want?  Solomon became at best a polytheist and at worst a debauched agnostic once he attained his world-wide renown as the most brilliant man in the world and wealthiest of his time.  Could that be our goal?  David, the greatest of all Israel’s kings and mighty conqueror of nations at his zenith could not control his lust long enough to prevent the ruin of not just one but two families.  Is that the success we seek?

Is the success gospel a gospel at all if it pushes us away from godliness and true dependence on God?  The successful people mentioned in the New Testament are either despised for their arrogance and pride or revered for what they gave away.  Zacchaeus, Barnabas and the women who supported Jesus’ ministry were all wealthy but are honored for their release of their riches rather than for their attainment of them.  The Rich Young ruler was not lauded for his success; he was pitied for his unwillingness to be rid of what he had.  King Herod was despised for priding himself in the acclaim he won and in fact suffered miserably in the end because of it.  Success is not an end and often not even a means within the economy of heaven.  If God keeps us from it, we are blessed; if He gives it to us, we are only as good as our willingness to part with it for Christ’s sake.  Nothing ruins as terribly as wealth; nothing purifies as completely as poverty.  Above all though is the love of God and the hunger after righteousness for then you will be filled.  Even wine has its limits.  Once you are drunk, where do you go from there?  It is the same with success.

Not A Hero Concluded

Noah on the other hand is known for three qualities. He was “adeek”—righteous, just. Second, he was “tomime” He was complete, whole, sound, integrated. In other words, inside and out, Noah did what was right. Third, Noah “walked with God”. It is the exact same expression used to describe Enoch…also in Seth’s line who did not die but just disappeared from the world at for the time was a very young age (a mere 365 years old). Literally it reads that he walked himself fervently with God. The gist of it is that Noah pushed an intimacy with God, worked at it, made it important.

Noah’s credibility on the world scene was negligible. He had none of the acclaim of the Nephilim, was culturally irrelevant and for a hundred years looked like a fool. Noah was the antihero, the Napoleon Dynamite of his age. Our time is one of jostling for power, posing for mirrors, clamoring for attention and Noah was the antithesis of this. In an era when no one had ever seen rain, let alone believed in its existence, Noah clung to a faith in God that was nonsensical yet he built his life not on thoughts of world-wide floods but on a craving for God. A good reputation did nothing for him. A hundred years building an ark takes out of you the pangs for acceptance and acclaim. Give one man enough time pursuing God and he is at peace with the most astounding of circumstances.

I am not sure what I would have thought of Noah if I knew him back in his day. I probably would have considered him just plain odd. But I know what I think of him now. He is all I want to be. Skip over to the ark for just a moment. It too was nothing to look at. It was just a giant box. No beautiful engineering lines, no slick cabins or lovely dance floor. It was just a big wooden box 547 feet long, 91 feet wide and 47 feet high with planked off compartments inside to separate out the creatures. Noah’s sole task in life, above all else was to get himself and his family in the ark. Regardless of what else may go well or badly for him; that was it. Hide yourself in the ark. We sometimes complicate life far too much with our goals and plans and responsibilities when it is the one thing that must happen.

If we can take a small liberty with scripture and make a comparison that seems apt, it is that Christ is our ark. If we do nothing but hide in Jesus, regardless of how everything else may turn, we have lived. But if we do not hide ourselves in Him, it does not matter what we do with ourselves, it is all in vain. What else did the Apostle Paul mean when he reminds us that because of our faith in Jesus Christ, we are dead to everything that was before? For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Colossians 3:3-4 NIV) An interesting detail of the ark is that you could not be partway in it and live. You were either all the way in or completely out. There was no hanging on to the side for long.

We are completely hidden within Christ and saved or we are outside Him and totally lost. Every part of us is that way, every act of ours is that way and every thought of ours is that way. Hidden in Christ and saved or outside Him and perished. Imagine Noah, as so many are with God, straddling the opening and just happy to be around the ark. Many believers have the same form of faith. Just enough of Jesus to be near Him; just enough devotion to keep Him in view and no more they insist. How much of the ark did Noah need to preserve his family? How much Christ will preserve yours?

Last week my blog tracking stopped. In other words, I could not see how many were reading my blog and for all I knew no one was looking at it. All I was left with was a desire to write in God and a hope He wanted to be with me as I did it. The assumption that the value of my life is based on what someone else, anyone else thinks of me is absurd. Leo Tolstoy once famously wrote, “Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!” There is one thing you need to do each day and every hour that is more important than anything else you attempt. Figure out a way to hide yourself in Jesus. We surely may look like stumblebums at times and how we do it may make us the anti-hero, but we have no other way to live.

Not A Hero Part Two

Return to the two lines. The line of Cain is identified by two markers. One is the mention of vocations. Three in his lineage are remembered for their careers. Adah a son of Lamech was the father of all who live in tents and herd livestock. Jubal is the founder of harp and flute playing and Zillah, a third son of Lamech was skilled at forging iron and bronze tools. The second famous link to Cain’s lineage is murder. Both Cain and his descendent Lamech are registered man-killers. Now contrast that to Seth’s line which like Cain’s is described in a linear fashion…only one son per generation in the line is mentioned, the one through whom the family tree is established Cain’s stretches to Lamech, the murderer; Seth’s to Noah. In Seth’s tree two in the line are known for “walking with God’. No murderers mentioned in Seth’s lineage. No “walkers with God” are registered in Cain’s line. The distinction between the two is pretty clear. One line seems to be the sons of man, Adam as it is put literally—Adam the sinner. The other line is the sons of God—walkers with God.

The early history of mankind was marred it would seem by the blurring of the lines. Walkers with God (those of the spiritual lineage of Seth) left off their devotion to Yhwh and began to intermarry with the murderers (the spiritual lineage of Cain). Now we can be reasonably certain that there were far more in the world population than just those who fit into the family lines of Lamech and Noah. But it would seem apparent that there were two camps among all the peoples of the world—those who looked to God and those who didn’t. As generations developed over time, the followers of Seth became intrigued and infatuated by the beautiful women who were followers of Cain. It was a bit like what happened much later when many Israelite men were seduced by the Moabite women and led astray into sin. Sethians married Cainites and mankind was thrown into moral depravity.

Our age of relativism has fooled us into thinking that blurred lines are a good thing. The mixing of cultures, the combining of ethnicities are amalgamated into the acceptance of religion hazing. What is fascinating to consider is that every ethnic group was located in these two first people—Adam and Eve. No one with any shade of skin or shape of nose or size of lip or thickness of eyelid can be placed outside this one perimeter. We all are from Adam and Eve. Therefore mixed marriage is the essence of humanity as first formed. What is not accepted is the mixing of faith. The marriage of Sethians to Cainites did not result in a missionary race of God-seekers who won over the Cain line. Instead what resulted was a Cainite world with just a few Sethian survivors clinging to the last scraps of faith. By the time Noah came along, the entire world had been converted all right. But not to God.

Recently I received an email from a friend who told me that as long as she remained married to her husband, her devotion to God plummeted. His faithless lifestyle made her less and less like Christ. God in Malachi 2 insists that the whole purpose of marriage is to raise up Godly children. The lesson of Genesis 6 is that when the sons of God marry the daughters of Adam, those children do not make it. The occasional Noah may result but that is an aberration, not a normal outcome.

Not only were there two lines of people at this time, one expanding and the other diminishing, there were two ways of seeing them. The heroes of old were called Nephilim. They were, as the Hebrew puts it, “the strong ones, forever men of a name”. Known everywhere for their power, the Nephilim were universally admired. Just recently, the basketball Kobe Bryant was given a thunderous ovation by the 90,000 attending the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing. Why? Because he has basketball power. Our Nephilim are movie stars, political candidates, CEOs, and world class athletes. The Nephilim, we are told, came out of the union of sons of God with daughters of Adam and despite the flood survived to continue shaping the culture of the world.
To be completed Tomorrow.....

Not A Hero Part One

When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth--men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air--for I am grieved that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

This is the account of Noah.

Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.
Genesis 6:1-9 NIV

One of the more interesting controversies that some might well argue has no bearing whatsoever on the interpretation and understanding of scripture has to do with the sons of God marrying the daughters of man. Who were these sons of God? Why was it so bad they married the daughters of Eve? Many argue that the sons of God were angels who developed an attraction for beautiful women. The children that resulted from these bizarre unions were the Nephilim. Of course there is no support for this anywhere in scripture and intuitively this whole possibility seems noxious. But regardless of our personal feelings about the possibility, Jesus Himself seems to dispel this myth. When asked the famous trick question about the resurrection, “If a woman was married to seven different husbands, whose would she be in heaven”, Jesus’ answer was curt. “There would not be any marriage in heaven”, He told the inquirer. We will be just like the angels who also don’t marry and are not given in marriage. (See Matthew 22: 30; Mark 12:25)

So, if the angels aren’t “equipped” for marriage, then who were the mysterious “sons of God”? If you follow the genealogies in Genesis 4 and 5 an interesting pattern appears. There are it seems, only two strands of mankind. The line of Cain and the line of Seth! Now we know that Adam and Eve certainly had daughters and sons other than Cain, Abel or Seth because Genesis 5 tells us that. Why were not those other boys mentioned in the genealogy and their family lines described?
Continued Tomorrow...

Why Noah, Why Not Noah

What is it that went so wrong so quickly with Creation that God made the call to wipe out everything? There are two ways to look at the Flood account. Why did God destroy the world...animals and people? Why did God save a remnant? It is quite easy to just take the righteousness of Noah argument to explain completely God's decision to save His family but there seems to be something running much deeper in the psyche of Yhwh that makes the Noah family and (the Noah creatures?) saveworthy. If success is measured in all the variables I mentioned below, then we are hardpressed to define Noah in a success assessment. He wasn't at all cool like the Nephilim. But there is something more there that cannot be separated from the saving decision of God to hold on to Noah. Yes he was good and right but he wouldn't always be so and the generations that followed made a mess of what they were given. Most of Noah's descendants were nothing to make one proud. But Noah was grabbed and held by God and that is a fascinating consideration. Why? Some might say "why not" but only because they have not considered the pain God suffered over what came out of His Creation...Here is the key verse in all of this discussion. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Genesis 6: 8 NIV Why? What makes God want us when we have so little to offer Him? That I think is the key question that when answered unlocks the mystery of Job and his sufferings. If we get at the answer to why God kept Noah and his family, we can reconcile the troubles we face with the mercy of the Cross and the love God professes for us. Why Noah?

Success?

What does make you successful? The Christian cliches are easy to pull out and mumble mindlessly to those you think need to hear them and yet most of them have felt pretty shallow to me. "Give God your best." "Be faithful!" "Pray and read your Bible." What if you do all that and it still feels like an unsuccessful life? The Christian community certainly doesn't in reality assess life this way. Christian success is built on popularity, likability and doing better than others around you. Blogs are successful based not on how well they are written or designed but rather on how many actually go to them again and again. Even in the Christian community this is the case. Churches, ministries and artistic endeavors are all rated based on the very real success quotients of the world stretching all about us. How many like them, attend them or financially support them is the measure of achievement. We act like the Church doesn't see it this way yet it is so. But then what about the vast multitude who never taste success, never have their blogs read, never preach to crowds, never cut a CD, never gain more than a handful of compliments for their life work. Where do their lives rank? Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie are the John Lennon caricatures of Christian success or unsuccess lived out. But are they caricatures or the way we really do play out the Church tune? This week I am examining Noah and his wasted life. It has brought me to my knees in humble recognition of how far I have drifted from a right way of looking inward. What is a success paradigm I can live with and embrace with joy? Father McKenzie is not that far from my doorstep and I must know what to do about him. I already know what John Lennon thinks...