Funny, the little things God does to me. I'm on the programming team for our new pre-teen ministry. Yesterday's lesson was on the 10th commandment, "You shall not covet." This morning, I was looking for some notes I made when we went to a retreat at the Ozark Conference Center in August, and I found a journal entry that I made in the back of that notebook early one morning of the retreat. I had forgotten how recently I had been struggling with this very issue.
Here are some of my notes from that morning:
I come to places like this with the beauty of your creation all around me, and I am in awe of you. I am drawn to Isaiah 6: 3 "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory." I am reminded that "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Ps 19:1). Your creation proclaims your glory to "all the earth" (Ps 19:4). This idyllic scene before me reminds me of Ps. 23. I sit here and see the green pastures and the still waters and remember your provision for me and mine.
And yet I wonder why I don't feel this every day. Every day of my life I am surrounded by the evidence of your glory, your love, your provision. But every day, I look right over those things and want. Not want in the sense of lack, but want in the sense of covet. I am taxed by this tenth commandment. I covet everything I see.
Paul speaks of contentment in Phil 4:11-13. Paul had learned to be content in any circumstance by leaning and relying on you. I look at this world around me, I think of you as shepherd, and I wonder how I could be discontent as your child. How can I see the provision in the creation and want more? How can the superficiality of the world tempt me to covet when I am surrounded by the evidence of your hand? How can the creator of this universe, and all that I can and cannot see, not be enough?
I Tim 6:6-8 "But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that."
Job was distraught over all that he had lost. When he prayed for forgiveness at the end of his struggles, he did it not knowing that God would restore him. He repented and stayed true to God, and then God gave him twice as much as he had had before. He didn't praise God for restoring his wealth, he praised God for God's majesty and power. That's where I fail. I praise God and I thank him for his provision without realizing that his provision is around me, in me, at all times. This body, these tiny cells, are enough to praise him for. Everything else is just covetousness. If I can't be content with this life, then why would God give me more? So all the schemes of man to gain wealth are fruitless because they lead to nothing. "Godliness with contentment is great gain."
In the story of Jonah, God provided what was needed, but not what Jonah wanted.
Jonah 1:17 "But the LORD provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights,"
Jonah 4:6-8 "Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, 'It would be better for me to die than to live.'"
Being in the belly of the fish seems like a punishment, but God used that to SAVE Jonah so he could continue to grow. God does that with me too. He provides what I need for spiritual growth, but it's not always what I want or what I think is best.
The reason I write these musings from a month ago is that they are so alive in my mind today. I sometimes feel so inadequate to be teaching kids when I struggle so much with the same issues that I'm teaching them about. But I know that it's God using my service to grow me, and I find another reason to praise him.
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2 comments:
Who better to teach these teens than someone who has experiential knowledge of the subject matter! You go girl!
Diane
April, your comment to Fundamentals was a "no-reply," but I am guessing you are the same April whose posts at ThinkChristian.net lead to your own blog. (If I am writing to the wrong April, please let me know). Your reference to God making a woman out of a man reminds me of some interesting clarification I have been getting from an Orthodox Jewish rabbi on the original Hebrew meanings of the first five books of the Old Testament (in Jewish terms, the Torah). He tells me that the word which has been translated into English as "rib" was tzela, and it means "side." The original image of God was (necessarily) androgynous, so when God took one side out of the original adam, what remained was ish (man) and from the side He removed God made isha (woman). So "she shall be called woman because she came from man" has a close parallel in the original Hebrew, she was called isha because she came from ish. But ish is what remained after isha was removed from adam, not something made from a subordinate part. This is also consonant with James Watkins speculations on why God is bent out of shape by homosexuality: it simply does not reunite the adam.
Have you looked up Francis Collins's book The Language of God? He is very good at explaining his own Christian faith and his work on the Human Genome project, not as two separate worlds but as a consistent whole. Very secondary to that, I have some more material on the subject of Biblical basis for evolutionary biology at http://www2.xlibris.com/WithGodAllThingsArePossible.html. (Shameless self-promotion that, but the very few people who have read it think it is pretty good). I think you are right that denying evolution is simply setting future Christians up, as the denial that the earth moves around the sun did earlier generations. Collins makes a very good point that we should never rely on finding God in the current gaps of scientific knowledge -- those gaps may be filled, and if God is God, he will still be God, and we will still need him, no matter how many gaps we fill.
Of course if God had made us out of bubble gum, he would first have to create bubble gum, whether by decree, by a series of chemical reactions, or by waiting for us to invent the stuff, then taking some of it back in time. I think C.S. Lewis's observation (through the mouth of Screwtape) about prayer also applies to Creation. He said that if a prayer is answered, there are necessarily certain physical things that occur, so it is possible to observe those events and conclude "See, it would have happened anyway." Thus, an answered prayer can be as good as an unanswered one in proving that prayer doesn't work. When astronomers, paleontologists, geologists, study how the universe, the earth, life on earth, came to be, of course whatever God did would result in a series of physical steps, which we could observe. Our observations neither prove, nor disprove, that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." We have that only by faith and revelation.
Siarlys Jenkins
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