The Importance of U

Matthew 1: 20 NIV

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

What Makes You Important?

Recently I came to the church office and discovered a woman sleeping on the concrete behind the sanctuary.  She was wrapped in a pure white comforter and had boxes and papers and the remains of her meal scattered around her.  She looked up at me as I went to unlock the kitchen in the back building and she asked me if I remembered her.  It is funny as I get older how often people recognize me but I can’t recall having met them.  After talking a while, I realized that it was not Alzheimer’s that led to my inability to remember her but the fact that we really had never met.  She was young and beautiful, maybe late twenties, early thirties, deeply tanned with bright green eyes and an easy smile.  It was not long though before I began to see what a broken soul she was.  Her past clearly had traumatized her and she was bitter and angry.  Gina kept talking about the demon possessed police who were following her and trying to trap her as well as evil forces that were trying to destroy her.  She was clearly a meth addict, but worse, deranged and emotionally unstable.  I brought her something to eat, gave her access to the bathroom and spent some time listening to her rants and then praying for her to have God’s peace.  After Gina left, I wondered what God wanted to do with her.  Did He have plans for her still?  Was she too wrecked to be reclaimed by God?  As Gina limped away, her damaged leg seemed to offer hope to me that if a doctor could fix her leg, surely God could remake her broken heart.  Perhaps He has plans for her that she can still fulfill?

You too are damaged in many ways, some visible but others hidden even from you.  You care about how your life is going, what it is and what will become of it despite the broken parts of you.  If you didn’t, it would probably be because you are at some level feeling hopeless.  Maybe it matters to you what God wants to do with you.  Perhaps you have thought about His plans for you and how you fit into the bigger scheme of life.  How ready are you for Christ to jump into your conscious thinking and redirect you, shift dramatically the direction you are going?  Do you believe that God has plans for you and that you play a part in what He wants to do?  Are you willing to go where He leads, do what He tells you to do?

Not long ago I spent some time pondering just how immense it was for Joseph, who was engaged to Mary, the mother of Jesus to agree with the Lord’s plan for him.  When Joseph heard from his fiancée that she was pregnant but not with his child, he immediately assumed that she had cheated on him.  Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her (his fiancée, Mary) to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. (Matthew 1:19 NIV)  However, God intervened and sent an angel to Joseph during a dream.  But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:20 NIV)

You have the benefit of being able to look back on all of this through history, knowing the supernatural circumstances of this pregnancy.  Joseph had none of our tools to process what Mary had just told him.  In addition, the vision of the angel was one embedded in a dream and we all know how convoluted and distorted dreams are.  Dreams are not very trustworthy and you cannot be sure what to do with them. Some most interesting conclusions can be drawn from this short description of how God got across to Joseph His plans for him.  Why don’t you consider each of these point by point?

Joseph was afraid, really afraid of the news that Mary was pregnant.  His plan to divorce her quietly was born out of a desperate situation.  How do you divorce someone quietly when you both are from a small village where everyone knows everyone else and weddings are community events that take in the entire town practically?  He would have had to spend months and more likely years to get to the place where he could even wed Mary.  He would not have on the spur of the moment proposed to her; she was his most important investment in life.  It would have scared Joseph to death to contemplate tossing all of that aside and quietly walk away from this marriage without being able to explain the reason behind his decision.  Worse than that however was staying with Mary and having to wait nine months for her baby to be born, knowing the child might not look like either one of them.  How could he explain what had happened to her?

Second, it really was God who was speaking to Joseph in the dream, despite how hard it would have been for him to believe.  The tension would have been difficult to resolve; how to know for certain He had heard from God and it was not just the wild nature of his imagination that put together his dream.  Perhaps he wanted the Lord so badly to intervene and guide him that he concocted in the depths of his unconsciousness a “God moment”.  Plenty of crazy people think they have heard from God…or Moses…or Adam…  Joseph could have lost his mind in his grief over his fiancée’s pregnancy and the dream may just have been an emotional coping device.  It was an act of great faith for Joseph to decide his dream really had come from God.

Third, it was Joseph that God wanted to act as the father of His child.  No one else was selected.  Joseph alone was chosen for this great task of raising and caring for Jesus.  When Joseph looked at himself and pondered the immensity of what stood before him, he could not hunt about for someone to take his place.  He alone had been given the charge and it was his duty to live up to the Lord’s expectations.  No one could take his place.

Fourth, Joseph was a part of God’s prearranged plan.  There was a history to what He was called to do.  At some point, the Lord picked out Joseph and arranged circumstances so that he would be a perfect fit for what the Lord wanted him to do.  After Joseph accepted his part in God’s plan, there was an entire chain of events that would follow that would be directly connected to Joseph and what he did.   This was not an arbitrary determination on God’s part that Joseph might work out as Jesus’ father.  He thought through it all before He contacted Joseph and was all in on being there for Joseph as he fulfilled the task given him.

Fifth, Joseph was a very ordinary human being.  There are no unique qualities described in the text telling us about him.  We know nothing about his intellect, his talents, his athleticism or even his age or how he looked. We could never have known it was him if Joseph walked up to us on the street because we have nothing in the Biblical record to make us recognize him.  His skill set and talent base are irrelevant to the story.   God picked Joseph out to raise His Son and that is all we can say about why He did so.  It would be nonsensical for us to think God did not have good reasons for choosing Joseph, we just don’t know what they were and Joseph most likely did not know either.

You also fit into what God is doing and you too have been selected by Him for something…most likely an entire list of somethings. Why He has chosen you we cannot say.  What your qualifications are for the challenge is irrelevant to you.  This is not something God just on the spur of the moment considered but from eternity He has been thinking of you for this.  No one else is fit for what He has for you or He would have called that person instead.  But how can you know it is God who has given you the responsibility laid in front of you?  You just must!  At some point you have to resolve the tension between believing that God is directing your life and not believing it.  You might be afraid of what is before you, completely befuddled by what you have to do but at some level that only you and God can access you know it is God pointing the way.  No one else may see what you see or grasp what you know is true but you do know God has something for you to do and it is no one else He has to do it.  What might it be?  None of us here know but you will know and you must not talk yourself out of knowing you know.  The Bible clearly tells us the way God has His people do things, how they are to act when faced with the challenges before them.  It is not a matter of how to do what He wants you to do; it is whether you will do what He is showing you to do in the way He has said to do it.

In some way, you fit perfectly into the plan God has for this world and He is certain you can live up to the challenge.  He knows your capabilities, your strengths and weaknesses and He has thought through what He can do with you and through you if you will just accept His challenge.  You cannot know what value there is to what you do nor can you see all the ramifications of following Him.  All you can know and this is the most certain fact you can ever come to discover.  God will connect you to Himself and together you will form a union that is as binding and full of love and joy as the union the Father has with the Son.  Are you willing to be united with Christ in His plan for you?  Are you willing to let Him work through you that you might be joined to Him in His plan for the world?  What do you say to God when He lifts your head up and points out to you the way that you are to go?

The Two Forces Driving Humanity

Ecclesiastes 2:10 NIV

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.  My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor.

What Matters Most To You?

This year I have been working as a substitute teacher.  I receive class assignments by going to a website that tracks my workdays on a calendar.  When a teacher makes a substitute teacher request, it pops up on my calendar and then I can decide if I want to accept the assignment or not.  Some are for half a day and other for six full hours.  Sometimes teachers request me personally but usually the assignments go out to all the pool of substitute teachers and the first of us to accept the job for the day gets it.  Recently I accepted a job working in a kindergarten class at a particular school but within an hour, I was removed from the job and the notice came to me that my services were no longer needed.  I was disappointed to hear this as you never know when a job will come available or even if one will.  A week later another kindergarten class assignment from the same school popped up and I quickly accepted the assignment but again, after a few hours, I was notified that my services were no longer needed.  I had heard that sometimes teachers post jobs and then remove them if a favorite substitute of theirs becomes available to take their class and I grew increasingly offended the more I thought about this.  I had never worked at the school that had these kindergarten assignments and so I was pretty certain the teachers there didn’t know me.  Did the teacher pull the assignments from me because I was a man?  It smacked of discrimination to me!  What also bothered me was that once a substitute teacher accepts an assignment for a certain day that person is locked into it and is not notified of other possible assignments for the same day.  One can decide to not take the assignment later but then that person can’t work that day for any other teachers.  If a teacher cancels an assignment too late, the substitute is prevented from accepting another job for the day.  I began to stew over this and I considered sending the teacher that pulled my assignment an email expressing my feelings about her doing so.  It felt like I was rejected and treated unfairly.  I wanted the teacher to know that I was not just a name on a list but a real person who did not like being rejected or considered not good enough for her class.  I counted; my needs were important and I deserved more respect.

Perhaps you too have felt rejected and wanted to make sure others knew you counted, that you ought to be appreciated.  You have been pushed aside or gone unnoticed.  Have you ever wanted to shout, “Look at me”?  “I can do the job!”  “I should get the promotion!”  “Love me too!”  “Pay attention to me!”  “Care about me!”  Maybe you feel that way now; that your hard work and creativity and sacrifice is not given the value it deserves.  You feel frustrated that you might never achieve your goal, never accomplish in life what you think you should.  You are at a dead end and it is maddening to consider that your life is unfulfilled and you may never reach your potential.  What should you do?  How does one respond to feeling boxed into a corner of lost dreams and anonymity?  Should you in some way “fight back” and reclaim your life?

A pillar of modern humanist psychology is the call for “self-realization”.  By humanist, I mean any treatment of psychology that does not view humanity mechanistically as if people are little more than machines.  Nearly everyone who sees people as really free and independent believes that a goal for all of us is “self-realization” or the very similar “self-actualization”.  It is held by nearly all that we ought to make it our goal in life to assert ourselves, to gain our place of prominence among others and fulfil our purpose.  Many Christian teachers believe these strivings are essential to having a good life.  In fact it is assumed by many that self-realization is God’s plan for us.  We do of course see examples of self-realization being practiced in the Bible; it is not just a modern phenomenon…one could say it goes as far back as Adam and Eve.

Let’s consider each of the three strivings that put together are known as self-realization.  The first, the urge to establish one’s worth is illustrated by King Hezekiah’s actions when representatives of the Babylonian government came to visit him.  Hezekiah received the messengers and showed them all that was in his storehouses — the silver, the gold, the spices and the fine oil — his armory and everything found among his treasures. There was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them. (2 Kings 20:13 NIV)  Most of us would say that there is nothing wrong with asserting ourselves.  We need to let others know who we are and what we have done.  In Hezekiah’s case, he simply pointed out how productive his work had been and the success he achieved.  Hezekiah extended his own reputation by giving the tour of his possessions but forgot something critical in doing so.  He did not gain his wealth on his own. 

A second component of self-realization is the push to gain prominence.  We all believe we should be given the opportunity to make something of ourselves and Aaron and Miriam were not exceptions to this.  The two were frustrated that Moses their younger brother, who was charged with leading the nation of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land was not giving them enough say in the decisions being made.  The nation of Israel needed their leadership they believed and it offended them to not be more involved in how the nation was run.  Miriam and Aaron wanted Moses to show them respect by deferring more to them when he made decisions and directed the people.  Finally their frustration spilled out in the infamous complaint, "Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?" they asked. "Hasn't he also spoken through us?" And the Lord heard this. (Numbers 12:2 NIV)  Is this any different than trying to get a promotion you think you deserve, wanting your husband or wife to respect all you do for the family, being upset that you aren’t recommended for a teacher’s assistant position, getting frustrated for the lack of support you receive in the church motions you present, or being left off a committee because others in the club are move popular?   Who doesn’t want to be known for the good they have done and the insight they have?  The push to gain prominence is natural and normal.

A third component to self-realization is the common goal of wanting to fulfill one’s purpose.  Books have been written on this topic and many have decided this is our most important task in life, fulfilling our purpose.  If we look at Demas from this perspective, we can take exception with the Apostle Paul’s complaint about him.  Paul said of Demas,

“Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica.” (2 Timothy 4:9-10 NIV)  No one wants to be accused of desertion but if you take Demas’s position in this, he was simply fulfilling his purpose.  Who knows why he left Paul?  Maybe his family needed him.  Perhaps he wanted to take up leadership in a church where his talents could be put to better use.  It might be that he had always wanted to be a lawyer and so he was following his dream.  Can we really fault Demas for wanting a change?  Perhaps Demas really did know what was best and he was upgrading the quality of his life.  Can that be criticized?

In every example described we have self-realization exhibited in real lives.  None of these people thought that what they were doing was wrong.  They in fact probably were congratulated by friends and perhaps also family members for making tough decisions to put their lives together.  Self-realization is reasonable and even celebrated yet it is not Christian and not even possible.  For those who decide to build their lives without God, self-realization is normal and natural.  The belief that we stand alone in a world that is sometimes for us and other times against us is growing in popularity but irrational.  The push for self-realization rests upon the belief that in the end it is just me and just you who must decide how we are to live and what we will do about the direction of our lives.  But what if we aren’t alone in this?  What if each of us is more than just one?

There is a declaration the Apostle Paul makes that is rarely taken as seriously as its importance to humanity warrants.  Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NIV)  This conclusion that Paul draws and that we must consider if we are to fully think through who we are and what we are doing with our lives is that each of us is never independent.  Job, despite his misery, realized not pessimistically but realistically the part God plays in each life. Man's days are determined; you (God) have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed. (Job 14:5 NIV)  It is impossible to be in charge of what we do with ourselves if God decides how long we shall live and what will come of our accomplishments.  The prophet Daniel told the Babylonian king Belshazzar that it did not matter what he hoped to get done, the Lord would not let him live until morning and the kingdom he so proudly ruled and worked to preserve would be pulled apart.  “…God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end…Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians."  (Daniel 5:26-28 NIV)  The prophet Isaiah quoted God when he declared the situation each person faces, For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him?  His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?  (Isaiah 14:27 NIV)

Whatever we have planned or look forward to getting done must take into account that how long we live is determined by God.  The writer of Ecclesiastes, whose wisdom is unmatched by those not named Christ or Paul, pointed out that no matter what we accomplish or how close we come to reaching our potential, the entirety of our accomplishments slip from our hands in the end and all we will be left with is our souls, the fate of which is determined by our Creator.  The myth of self-realization is as ludicrous as the belief that the moon is made of green cheese.  Every decision we make must take into account God and what He is doing with us.  The thought that is the most reasonable and rational at any moment is the one Paul offers.  “I am not my own.  I am bought with a price.”  Because this is so, self-realization is impossible.  As we shall see, God not only determines what will be the outcome of our lives, He is a part of every action we take and every thought we generate.  We don’t exist as just self.  There is more to us than that.  And we might add, “Thank God it is so!”

Holiness Revisited

The moment you begin to drift off course and fall into the casual assumption that God isn't paying attention and isn't too concerned with how you are doing things, you must look squarely at the Lord's response to Nadab and Abihu.  The instantaneous reaction to their relaxed approach to manning the Temple is something to shake loose your cool self-assurance.   We speak ferociously of the grace and mercy of God but the Lord did not ponder long in His reaction to those two .    Aaron dared not even stammer a protest at the destruction of his older sons because he recognized Who was present.  Later when the Lord struck Miriam with leprosy for grumbling about Moses, Aaron witnessed once more the profound  violence with which God handles rebellion.   We may be glib about many things in life but we must not be so with regard to God.  He remains  a raging fire even if we see Jesus as meek and mild. (See Hebrews 12:28)  It may take years to erect a superstructure but in only a matter of moments the entire building can collapse in a heap.  God might be patient with you and you could mistake it for indifference but that might be a disastrous determination.  You are in play because the Lord wants you where you are with whom He has you at the time you are there.  Veer off without consideration for the Lord and His interest in you and the wreckage could be terrible.  The severe cost at which God has redeemed you should stop you dead in your tracks.  The sending of Jesus Christ to face what He did, the Son, the Beloved, informs you of just how seriously the Lord takes this matter of what you do and how you do it.  The wretched death of Christ defines the cost at which God lets you go about your business however you do so.  Each decision you make, every casual turn you consider is marked by the bloody crucifixion.  Does God care if you act in faith or disregard His Word?  Ask Mary Magdalene who watched Christ die.  Ask His mother Mary who cringed at the blood dripping from His brow.  Ask John who stood gaping with horror as Jesus  groaned in agony.  If it is true, that Jesus Christ would have done as He did on the blood-thirsty hill if there was only one sinner on earth needing His life...you…, then perhaps you should reassess how seriously you take your actions day in and day out.   Holiness has largely been laid to rest in our age of forgetfulness but the Lord certainly never forgot the value and importance of holiness nor did the women who stood at the foot of the Cross.

But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy."   1 Peter 1:15 NIV