This world is obsessed with shortcuts. We are compulsively driven to “save
time,” “work smarter, not harder,” “be ahead of the curve,” “get there faster,” and on and on. It is easy
to veer off track. I know that, where
driving is concerned personally, every
time I’ve tried to take “a shortcut,” it has turned into a much LONGER cut as
I’ve gotten dis-oriented and ultimately
lost. I'm sure this doesn't just apply to me & my directionally-challenged compadres. I think it has
happened to many Christians in our day.
While well-intentioned:
we want to do more for Christ and His Kingdom, to use our talents, to
meet the myriad of needs we see around us, to address and stand for the many
voiceless in our world, to right wrongs,
turn around the “upsidedownness” that this world’s system has inflicted
on us. Good causes, and definitely necessary, but in the process we often lose sight of the forest
for the trees. I know. I'm speaking first for myself.
One day I woke up and realized that all my “doing,” however I
thought was born of a desire to please the Lord and help this world around me
had turned into “shortcuts” to nowhere.
I became aware of a sense of loss:
where I should have felt fulfilled in doing “the right thing,” there was emptiness, where there should have been joy, there was
instead apprehension. Does God even LIKE
me, much less approve of me? I didn't feel it. After more than 40 years of “serving Christ” I came to the stark conclusion that somewhere along
the way, I have “veered off course,” been deceived by a spiritual shortcut and
ended up more like Jacob of the Old Testament:
surviving and scheming, making my OWN way in the name of God, becoming so arrogant as thinking it didn’t
matter if I read His Word because I KNOW a lot of it from having learned it so
long ago. I had slipped into
unintentional hypocrisy, telling others that Jesus didn’t want them to “do it
alone but in His power” while plowing through often myself with a sense that
“when you first learn to drive, you have to pay attention to everything, but
after a while, it all becomes automatic” and so does our life of faith,
becoming not faith at all but drudgery without joy.
This is a confession.
But as I awoke to this revelation about myself, I remembered Jacob’s
restoration as he wrestled with the “angel” (or a pre-incarnate Jesus, some
theologians say). And as I felt despair
and cried out, “Jesus – do you even acknowledge me as yours – and why WOULD
you?” I sensed His still, small voice
saying, “I wouldn’t be pursuing and wrestling with you if I were through with
you. It isn’t how I work. It isn’t who I AM. I have shown you these things about yourself
BECAUSE I love you and want you to be filled with ME. Only as you DIE to yourself can you be the
carrier of MY will and BECOME the complete YOU that I have always intended you
to be. But the goal is NOT to become
you, but to lose yourself in ME.
This is the GREAT PARADOX of MY WAY. This is why it is only IN Me that one can
find their way TO Me. It is IMPOSSIBLE
to REASON one’s way to God. When you
do, it gets all jumbled up because man’s
reason is not God's way, but in the end leads to death. My way leads to life and joy through My Holy
Spirit. But ONLY as you continually learn of me
through my Word, and OBEY it in small, trusting steps that NEVER end. You never get to the point where you “go it
alone” – that is when you veer off into the wisdom of man.
"Come back to simple, humble dependence on
Me. THEN you will experience my joy for
you and your sense of my presence and pleasure.
This Word is not for you alone but for MANY of my children. Stop relating to this world in a reactionary
way. There are many evils and wrongs
going on and there always will be. Stick
close to me and you will see – individually – how you fit into My plan of
Redemption.
" You – my Body - ARE My Ambassadors, my partners in reaching
out to the world with My love. But not
by REACTING; rather by LISTENING. I know
that being still is the hardest thing that ANY of you can do. But otherwise it will be you, not ME, that
the world will see, and the end will make no difference. People will continue in anger and fear, which
is what I want to RESCUE you all from.
Sit, like Mary, at my feet. “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble
in heart, and you will find rest for your soul.” (Mt. 11:29.) THEN (and ONLY then), when you get up, you
will have the strength, boldness and courage to do greater things than I did,
because of My Spirit directing you and giving you MY resources inside you, which, like springs of living water will flow out of you and not dry up.”
Amen, Lord. Thank you
and I pray – for myself and for EVERY believer – that we would take this
admonition seriously and walk humbly & obediently with our God, and in
doing so, see this world set ablaze with
His love and power, not our weakness which is what has often been seen and as it should be, rejected by the world as it is NOT Christ, and which ends up, as Paul warns Timothy
(in 2 Tim. 3:5) “ – having a form of godliness but denying its power.” That’s why we must stay close to Him and not get “ahead” of Him – as it
comes “naturally” to us. But “natural”
is just another word for our fleshly nature, which will do NONE of us – or the
world around us – any good. It is the
“wood, hay and stubble” that will eventually be burned up. Let us
(and I speak first to myself) stay in step with Jesus in order to be
found in Him and walk in HIS power and love.
THEN we will not be dazed and confused by “shortcuts.”
