Time Out

Revelation 12:14 NIV

The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent's reach.

Have You Been Sent To Time Out?

When I first arrived at the college where I would earn my degree, I came by plane, was picked up at the local airport by a college representative and dropped off at the dormitory where my room was on the second floor.  Carrying my two suitcases up the stairs, I was all alone.  I did not meet anyone in the lobby.  No one was in the hallway on the first floor; no one was in the hallway on the second floor.  I came to my room, which was empty except for two beds, two dressers, a sink and a phone on the wall and I tossed my suitcase on the floor and began to unpack it.  My roommate would not be arriving for two days.  I pulled the blanket and sheets out from my suitcase, made the bed and lay down on top of the covers, wondering what it would be like to go to school here.  Outside my window, I heard laughter and male and female voices chattering.  It sounded like there was a party going on below my room and I wasn’t invited.  I cannot say what is more lonesome.  Being alone in a great circle of emptiness or being by yourself when you can hear the crowds having fun without you.    That night, without a single soul to keep me company, two thousand miles away from my family, my church and my friends, I felt like I had been sent to time out.

“Time out” as an expression has shifted in meaning over the years.  It used to mean “taking a break”.  In basketball or football it is the term used for regrouping and talking about what to do next as a team.  It also has been the idiom for going off and having fun; taking in a movie, hanging out with friends, going dancing, eating at a restaurant.  The field of psychology embraced the term as a descriptor for a mild punishment given to a youngster who is disruptive or disobedient.  If a parent sends a child to time out, it means the child is ordered to go sit alone for a certain period of time in a boring place and “learn a lesson” about how to act properly.  Not many kids like being sent to time out and rarely do we adults either.  “Jail time” is the grown-up version of it.  A boring, inconsequential job is too.  Many of us feel like from time to time we have been sent to time out and it generally isn’t something we like.

The Bible is filled with examples of its most famous people stuck in time out.  Imagine what it must have been like for Joseph, the son of Jacob to wind up in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and languish there for twelve years.   What about Sarah, the wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac who was left behind in camp at the foot of Mt. Moriah as her husband took her only child off to make a sacrifice to God somewhere out in the mountains.  She had to have noticed the taunt and grim expression on Abraham’s face as he shuffled away and wondered what was about to take place and why she couldn’t go with them.  Thomas, the apostle, suffered a sort of time out when for seven days he lived with the disappointment of being the only one of the Disciples not to see Jesus alive after He had been crucified. How about Moses and his forty years of time out after he had to flee Egypt and live in Midian?  Was it not a time out for Jacob, the father of the Jewish nation when he had to run away from his brother and live in near slavery, serving his uncle Laban as a shepherd?  How about the time out Mary, the mother of Jesus, experienced when she left her home in Nazareth to go stay with her cousin Elizabeth because she was pregnant and not married?  David wandered about in the desert wilderness of Israel almost ten years trying to avoid capture because the crazy king Saul wanted him dead.  Was that not a time out?

We almost always assume that when we are in time out, it is something terrible or at least frustrating.  Our time outs keep us from what we like doing, make us wait for something we want, take us away from exciting activities others get to enjoy.  When God engineers our time out, we don’t know what to make of it.  Is He cruel?  Am I out of favor with Him?  Have I lost my best and most productive years?  Am I wasting my life?  Sometimes and we must be open to seeing this is so, we are absolutely off base when it comes to understanding our circumstances. 

In 1889, a publication called The Literary Digest had this take on the automobile.  “The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course come into as common use as the bicycle.”  Dr. Alfred Vlepeau, speaking for the medical community in 1839 wrote, “The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera.  It is absurd to go on seeking it today.  Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.  To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.”  It was only seven years later that anesthesia was introduced into the medical world.  One more example to make this point!  The “Father of Radio”, Lee De Forest, in 1926 insisted, “While theoretically and technically television will be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

Even the brightest and most highly educated among us can be and have been thoroughly wrong.  You too are wrong if you think God is wasting your time because you are in time out.  God cemented Mary’s faith in Him and His plan for bringing the Savior into the world while He wasted her time at Elizabeth’s house.  David developed a theology of what a good and faithful king should be when God wasted his time in the desert.  Jacob learned how painful it is to be deceived and the value of integrity when God wasted his time at his uncle’s house.  Moses learned patience and confidence in God when God wasted his time in Midian.  Sarah learned hope and trust in God’s goodness when God wasted her time as she waited for her husband and son to return.  Joseph learned mercy and forgiveness when God wasted his time in the Egyptian prison.

We are mistaken if we think this promise of God’s is just about the future!  It is about now, today.  For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV) Our Lord knows what He is doing with you at this moment, with the time He is wasting now.  You may not have any idea what that plan is and He may not tell you but Christ has thought this through and He has every detail, every moment that seems so wasted plotted out so that you will be exactly the sort of person He wants you to be when He gets this done.  Why did Jesus waste so much time being an infant, and then a child, a teen and a young adult?  Why not just be settled on earth as a man fully grown, get those disciples and in only three years save the world?  It is because God had a plan and for Jesus to save the world, He had to be a human being in every way…and that meant wasting His time being born, growing up and dealing with all the frustrations and pleasures of being an actual human being.

God has your life thought through in His mind and He has you right where you need to be so everything He wants to make of you can and will be accomplished. The Mona Lisa took time.  The Sistine Chapel took time.  The Golden Gate Bridge took time.  And you also take time to finish or to put it more precisely, to perfect.

What Is God Doing With Me?

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 NIV

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

What is God Doing With You?

I had such a rough time of it a few weeks ago!  I was the substitute teacher for a high school geometry teacher and it did not go well.  Several of the kids refused to put away their cell phones, students refused to do the class work and instead talked loudly with their friends.  Two tried to guess what my other job was and listed several that clearly were intended to insult me.   A number of the kids laughed openly at me for insisting that they become quiet because others were working.   I spoke with a few kids just before class was over and they told me that despite how bad it was, the class was much worse and far noisier when the regular teacher ran the classroom.  Somehow that did not make me feel any better.  It seemed so oppressive, so purposeless, this work of going into classrooms where the students have no interest in learning and did not respect the authority of the teachers. What was the point of that?  Who chooses that kind of life?

I have asked the question and perhaps you have too.  What is God doing with me?  Maybe as you sit at home and reflect back upon your day, you wonder about God’s plan for you.  Is there really something He is doing with you or are you just a number in a huge crowd of wandering souls?   Perhaps you have read books about finding the purpose in your life but still wonder about where God is taking you.  You have had good moments and tough ones and everything seems awfully random and disconnected.  So what is God doing with you?  Can you make sense of what has happened in your life?

Many teachers cite the example of an obscure figure found in the Old Testament as the pattern for how God deals with His favorites.  Tucked away in 1 Chronicles 4 is the much loved account of the ephemeral Jabez.  All we know about him is that the Bible says he was more honorable that his brothers and that his mother gave him the name “Pain” or Jabez because she had a rough delivery giving birth to him.  Famously, Jabez at some point begged God to make him prosperous.  "Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain."  (1 Chronicles 4: 10)  Hasn’t nearly every one of us prayed similar prayers?  “Dear Lord, improve the lot of my life and take away all this bad stuff I face!  Make me successful!”   What is so wonderfully delicious about this account is that we are told, God granted his request.  Isn’t that uplifting!  Our Lord made Jabez’s life pleasant and strife free.  He was promised success and prosperity.  That is what we all want.  No wonder so many Christian writers have taken this story as the blueprint for God’s plan for us.  Despite the fact that nowhere in the text does the Lord say this is His universal way of dealing with people who are “good”, it is touted by a number of popular Christian teachers as the expected life plan for those who live decently and follow the Bible.

Not surprising, few promote the central figures in the New Testament as examples of how they want God to work in their lives.  Paul in particular is on almost no one’s top ten list of experiences they want for themselves, not when you take into consideration his own account of what he faced.  Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.  Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. (2 Corinthians 11:24-27 NIV)

Rarely do you find someone who says, “I want to be beaten with rods and whipped nearly to death.”  We would much rather have it like Jabez without health problems and living comfortably.  Yet again, the Bible does not say that Paul is the expected blueprint for each life.  Let us consider Jesus’ actual words of what He plans to do with every one of His people.  "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. (John 17:20-21 NIV)  There it is; God’s plan for you.

We discover in this prayer of Jesus that there are two parts to where God is taking you.  First, He is going to make you united with God’s people.  Just as close as the Father and the Son are, He plans on making you with every other born again man, woman and child.  Regardless of station in life, national or ethnic background, God is going to develop trust, love and holiness in your relationship with the rest of the Church.  This is a monumental task and will take quite a bit of re-working in us.  He must cleanse us and purify us for this to happen because we are prickly and self-centered but it will be done.  Nothing short of a miracle can make us as close to others as the Father and the Son are to each other but that is of course God’s will and our Savior’s prayer.

The second part of this prayer is a stunning revelation.  God is going to make you as close to Him as the Father and the Son are to each other.  For this to take place, our Lord is not going to build on the strengths you possess.  He is going to completely re-work you so that there is not an inch of rebellion in you, not a gram of disobedience.  That will take some doing because we are doubters who question the Lord at every turn.  We think we are far wiser and more understanding of what we need to be happy and it pains us sometimes to follow Him.  All of that is being worked out of you.  You will grow to trust Him completely and love Him devotedly as God works in you.

The Apostle Paul summarizes perfectly God’s plan for you.  Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18 NIV)  It is not God’s goal for you to be successful although that might take place.  It is not God’s goal for you to make a great income although that might take place.  It is not God’s goal for you to be healthy although that might take place.  His goal is to do something with you that will last forever; that will purify and perfect you so that you can live with God and other Christians in complete unity.  If that means that you lose all you have, lose your health, lose your friends and live without what the world says is important to be happy, then that will happen.  It happened with Paul.  It happened with Job too.  Every experience you have, every circumstance you face has one goal to it.  God is using it to make you perfectly fit to live with God and His people forever.  Nothing will stop our Lord from accomplishing this with you.

Every evil strand of selfishness and pride must be removed from you if you are to be in perfect unity with God and His people and our Lord will do what it takes to get them out of you.  Greed and arrogance must be taken out of you too as well as complacency and independence.  Christ will move heaven and earth and give you every experience and relationship needed to make you fit for your life with God and His people and each of us is unique and God’s way of working into us His love and peace and faith is dependent upon what He sees must be done to complete His work of salvation in us.  Never fuss over how your life is going.  God knows what He is doing with you and in the end, you will be perfect in every way that matters to the Lord who died to save you.

Earthy Lives What Are We?

Genesis 2:7 NIV

…the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

What Does Your Earthiness Say About Your Worth?

My senior year in high school, I took the highest level of math our school offered.  Everyone in the class was planning on attending a major university and were counting on a good grade to enhance their chances of being accepted or getting scholarships.  That is, everyone except me.  I am not sure why I was in the class; I had no intention of studying, I guess I just thought it would be a fun class to take.  The teacher was the strictest in the school.  Her name was Miss Sims and she was it seemed in her seventies although looking back she was probably younger than that.  Everyone called her behind her back Sargent Sims and she definitely fit that nick name. She had a practice of each class making one of the students go to the blackboard and in front of everyone work out a problem from the homework.  Having the last name Walkup was convenient for me although I knew the time would come when eventually my name would be called.  It was.  Of course I had not done the assignment and although I listened carefully to all that went on in the class, I had no idea how to work out the problem she gave me.  I slowly wrote the problem out on the blackboard, then began to just stare at it.  I may have thought that if I stalled long enough, Miss Sims would help me.  She did not.  She left me there to “hang in the wind”.  Finally Miss Sims called to me from her throne, “Mr. Walkup, you don’t know what you are doing, do you?”  I shook my head “no” and with all the stiffness her personality possessed, Miss Sims sent me back to my seat.  My friends looked over at me with pity in their eyes, embarrassed for me.  I just stared straight ahead, feeling like dirt.

To compare someone to dirt is to imply he or she is worthless.  And if you are “dirty”, it means you are morally corrupted.  Have you ever felt like dirt?  Perhaps you were a failure in athletics or your grades weren’t good.  Maybe you loved someone that did not love you back.  Perhaps you got mad and were embarrassed afterward by some of the things you said.  Have you been fired?  You probably felt like dirt then.   You might have gotten drunk or high and afterward felt like dirt.  Maybe you took an entrance exam or a placement test and didn’t do as well as you hoped.  It could be that you don’t feel respected.  Has there been a time when you felt like dirt? 

As we started to discuss this last week, the Bible indicates that all of us should feel like dirt and for good reason.  We are.  The first of us was made out of the dust of the ground and everyone since is descended from that man of dirt.  The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7 NIV) Should we be embarrassed?  Does this make us automatically inadequate?  There is something critical to remember when we consider how we were created. The dirt is the fundamental building block of everything God put together for us.  The creatures are from the dirt, the plants are from the dirt and of course earth itself is from the dirt.  Unlike the angels, the demons and Satan, we are connected to everything of earth.  It is our glorious heritage to be linked to all that we see and touch and smell and taste and hear.  God could have created us completely separate from this universe, a distinct outsider but He did not.  He created us a part of it.  We will return to this but it cannot be overstated that God made earth our home by creating us a part of it.  We are perfectly fit to do what our Lord made us to do, rule over the earth and make it bend to our will.  God blessed them (Adam and Eve) and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." (Genesis 1:28 NIV)  Remember, Satan was cast down to the earth: we were made part of it.

Now we must address the matter of our humiliation. Being earthy is to our glory but sin brought our disgrace.  After the Lord made us from the earth, the Lord breathed spirit into us.  Immediately we became what the Bible calls a living soul or “nephesh”: spirit and earthiness together.  We were, unlike any other being, the glory of God and the glory of earth combined.  Nothing else in the universe or beyond the universe could make that claim…not the angels, not Satan and not even God was both.  We were glorious, glorious with God, glorious with perfect earth.  To understand our humiliation, we must rethink what happened for Moses when he went before God in His glory.  The very first time Moses came into the presence of God, something about his body, his earthy body changed.  When Moses finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face.  But whenever he entered the Lord's presence to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out. And when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, they saw that his face was radiant. Then Moses would put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with the Lord. (Exodus 34:33-35 NIV)  

It must have been spectacular for Moses to experience his body transformed in some supernatural way by being with God.  But why did Moses put the veil over his face after he met with God and the people saw the radiant transformation caused by God’s glory?  The Apostle Paul tells us Moses was embarrassed by how the glory faded.  We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. (2 Corinthians 3:13 NIV)  How very human of him; when he realized that he could not retain, due to his sin the radiance being with God provided him, Moses covered his face so he would not be embarrassed by everyone knowing it.  We assume that Adam and Eve desperately tried to cover themselves because they were humiliated by their nakedness in regard to their genitalia.  The Bible never says that.   It simply says that they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness and later after handing down the consequences of their Sin, the Lord made clothes for Adam and Eve because of their humiliation in being naked. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. (Genesis 3:21 NIV)

There was in the bodies of Adam and Eve something of God that may have been as dazzling as the face of Moses or of Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration.  There he (Jesus) was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.(Matthew 17:2 NIV) The purity of body built by the hand of God is not known to us now but could it have been any less glorious than was Moses’ body when he met with God for just a short time?  When the glory of God left the bodies of Adam and Eve, they were appalled by how horrific their fall and all they could think of doing was covering their once glorious bodies.  Sin did not make Adam and Eve suddenly naked; sin made Adam and Eve unfathomably lifeless in their looks.  What is most horrific in regard to our bodies now is that we no longer even give a thought to our lost glory as God’s special creation; we pay far more attention to is the lust our bodies generate in one another.

Now we must in a much too cursory manner describe how God’s plan for putting humanity together as both earth and spirit worked out in the undoing of all the damage Satan’s rebellion against God brought to the universe of humanity.  When God became fully human, completely earthy, He did so for one purpose.  God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV) Our Lord became sin, not just sins but Sin in its entirety.  This could not be done spiritually; it could only take place in the earthy realm of humanity.  In the body of Christ, that earthy body, the Sin of mankind was taken and then crucified.  It was not through angels or any supernatural force that God took apart Satan’s hold on the universe but through a human being, a human being made out of dirt, out of earth that our Lord ruined Satan.  Satan, and the demons that joined him, cannot be brought out of their rebellion; as just spiritual beings and that is all, they can only be sent into hell.  But people, earthy people can have their sin taken out of them which is what God was able to do when He was crucified.  Once Christ rose from the dead, Satan was completely wrecked because he no longer has death to keep humanity from God.  The body of creation can be remade, and the resurrection of Jesus confirmed it, and so the victory of God as man became also the victory of man as earthy soul, completely remade without sin and God will do this.  Not only that, God can come into our body and join us in it so that His spirit can empower our spirit to live out the perfect life of Christ in actual ways. 

Because of what Jesus Christ did in an earthy body which has its origin in dirt you can be a perfect overcomer of sin in actuality and not in some mythical, imaginary sense.  Unlike Adam who failed in perfection and holiness, you will not fail.  You will live out every word of God’s commandments, every word in the Sermon on the Mount and you will love perfectly God and all the people you have in your life.    The Great Society of perfect union with God and all His people will come to pass because our Lord became an earthy part of us and in the cataclysmic work of His crucifixion and resurrection we all are joined in what He did.  This work of God’s salvation starts now.  With Christ our Savior part of us, we can today work out what God has worked into us, holiness and real love.  Never say you can’t when God in you says you can.  Paul was not just blowing steam when he said to you, “I can do everything through Him (Christ) who gives me strength.”  (Philippians 4: 13 NIV)   Unlike the demons and all spiritual beings in rebellion against God, you can in your glorious earthiness be made new and live a perfectly holy and good life.  In Christ, you can do what is right and have all the joy of Christ working in you.