holiness

Reading: Exodus 19, Mark 9

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you will be my treasured people. Exodus 19:5

This is my Beloved Son. Listen to Him. Mark 9:7

The Lord is very very gracious. He made a promise to the children of Israel, “If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you will indeed be my treasured possession among all the people, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Ex 19:5 & 6. 

“All the people answered together, ‘whatever the Lord has spoken we will do’” Ex 19:8.

The Lord knows what we are made of. “He knows our frame. He remembers we are but dust.” Psalm 103: 14. But we should be, we could be much better than we are. When He tells us to do something, the things He tells us to do are doable. But, we all need help. If something is not made dramatically real, we’re quick to forget its reality and thus its consequences. 

So, out of great kindness, the Lord gave the Israelites a small display of His holiness. Thunders and lightnings and a very loud trumpet blast terrified the people. “Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke as the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly.” Ex 19: 18.

After this manifestation, the Lord gave His ten commandments which are the specifics of what was required of the Israelites to keep their end of the bargain with God.

Holiness is hard to define. It can only be understood through experiencing it. But a few aspects of holiness are cleanness, separateness, soberness, preciseness and consecration. 

One of the primary reason we Believers meet as a church is to experience God in His holiness. Our communion service seems a particularly holy service. We prepare ourselves for the meeting by confessing and thus cleansing ourselves. It is a very separate meeting from any of our other life events. (Outsiders find it particularly odd.) It tends to be a patterned and a sober meeting.

Jesus gave three of his disciples a display of His holiness on the Mount of Transfiguration. “His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became white as light.” With Jesus were Elijah and Moses. The disciples were very pleased. “It is good that we are here,” said Peter. He suggested they memorialize the event with three tents for the three holy men. But the Father would have nothing of it and a voice came out of heaven. “This is my beloved Son, listen to Him!” Instantly the whole scene was gone.

When I was in college, with some friends I attended a high Episcopal Church for a short while. I loved the seeming holiness of the meeting. Every aspect of their church meeting was precise and sober. The Scriptures were read with the majesty of their meaning. The personality of the officiating priest was hidden as he recited from the ancient Common Book of Prayer. His sermons were intentionally not original but were from the Anglican masters. Each person in the congregation knew when to stand and kneel and what words to use when called to respond.

Everyone took the same pew each week. Sharing our pew were always three men in black suits with black hair slicked back. These three men always slipped away the moment the service was over, but we imagined them to be Chicagoland gangsters. Regardless, no one in the congregation was interested in communicating with us college kids, and the pastor smiled at us aloofly as we told him know how much we enjoyed the services. From our youthful perspectives, it was a holy church but without any fellowship.

Holiness is all about God. God is holy. He cannot be other than holy. As believers, our great desire is to one day be in glory and see the Lord in the beauty of His holiness.

But I think the reason God shows His holiness to us here on this earth is to help us to be His special covenant people—the ones who are careful to listen to His voice so as to be obedient. Experiencing His holiness is to aid us to be obedient. And obedience is all about being in relationship with a loving and Holy God, and being in relationship with His covenant people.  

Question: What do you think? 

advice

Reading: Exodus 18, John 3

“Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you.” Exodus 18:19

“Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3

Let me give you some advice, said Moses’ father-in-law. “The thing you are doing is not good. Now listen to me and I will give you counsel.” Exodus 18:17

If I were Moses, I would try to change the subject. Moses had been getting all his advice, his instructions from God Himself. Did he really need to hear the opinion of his father-in-law, a Midianite priest whose religious credentials, at least to me, seemed questionable?

But we read, “Moses listened to all that he said.” Ex 18:24  He followed his advise precisely.

Most weekends we have groups using Story Book Lodge Christian Camp where my wife and I live. So, when I do work that needs to be done around the camp, it’s not unusual for someone to come by to see what I am doing. And, it’s not unusual for that someone to offer me advice on how to better do whatever I might be doing.

One Saturday morning I was using my chain saw to cut wood for our woodstove when a tall, muscular man with his ten year old son stood in front of me and put his hand out to signal me to stop. The man said it was unacceptable how I started my chain saw by holding it between my knees. “That’s very unsafe.”  He took my chain saw, put it on the ground, held it with his foot and pulled the cord. “That’s how you start a chain saw.” He then showed me how each log needed to be pulled out of the pile and cut individually. “It’s a safer and more efficient use of the saw,” he said.

“Thank you,” I told him, hoping he would go away. But he insisted I demonstrate that I understood his advice by starting the saw several times with the saw on the ground. I also had to pull one log at a time from my pile, shut off the saw, stack the pieces I had cut, and pull the next log from the pile.

Needless to say, I do not heed this man’s advice. Never, to my dying day, will I ever start my chainsaw by holding it on the ground. 

When someone gives advice, that person is telling you that you are doing things wrong and you clearly need his intelligence to do things properly. That means accepting advice is generally painful. 

As a young man, graduated from college less than a year, my father saw I was not in a good living situation. He said to me, “You need to come home.” At that time, this advice was not painful. I did need to come home. I was there for a short while and was then able to go on to a much better living situation. 

We had a good friend who we saw was about to make a very poor decision. We gave him good counsel, but he told us he was God’s man and he only took advice from the Lord. Others talked to him. He said if there was someone out there with greater spiritual maturity than himself, with better spiritual credentials, he would listen to that person. Amazingly, there was no one out there who could meet those credentials for him. He went through with his decision. The result was trouble; to his family, to his friends, and especially to himself.

The Lord Jesus offered unsolicited advice to Nicodemus. “You must be born again.” John 3: 7 Talk about painful. He was telling Nicodemus that his life was so far off the track that he must start completely over again—all the way back to birth. 

From what we later read about Nicodemus, he must have heeded our Lord’s advice—to his great advantage!

Question:

From whom will you accept advice?

oh no!

Today's reading: Exodus 17; John 5

But the people grumbled against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? Ex 17:3
But he answered them, "It was the man who healed me, that man said to me, 'Take up your bed and walk.'" John 5:11


The book of Exodus is the “Oh, no!” book.

Time after time the Israelites were hit by really bad situations, situations that in any case but their own would have been disastrous.

In Exodus 17 we read of all 2 million of them in the middle of the wilderness. They were really thirsty  and there was no water anywhere near. In this desert area, the only thing the people could see were rocks.

Oh no! What could they do? The Bible tells us the people quarreled with Moses and demanded, “Give us water to drink.” They were getting ready to stone him.

Moses said, “Why do you quarrel with me, and why do you test God?”

God instructed Moses to pass on before the people and strike the rock which He designated and when he did so, enough water poured out to care of all the needs of consternated Israelites. Moses named the place Massah (testing) and Miribah (quarrelling) because they tested the Lord saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

The Israelites should have known better. It made no sense at that time for them to be so distraught, for at that very time God was providing them breakfast every morning (with manna) and supper every evening (with Quail). It was only a week or so after God had walked them through the middle of a sea on dry ground while drowning the pursuing army. And immediately before that, they had witnessed the amazing 10 plagues that God had inflicted on their Egyptian slave masters.

Oh no!” is not how any of us who are Believers should ever react, to anything. Like the Israelites, we are promised special attention. As the apostle Paul tells us, “If God be for us, who can be against us? If He did not spare His own Son but gave Himself up for us, how can He fail to lavish upon us every good thing?” from Rom 8:32 & 33.

We do know that. I know that. Again and again the Lord has dealt with me better than I could have ever imagined. We had a son who was wayward. Time and time again something would happen to him and I would cry out, “Oh no! not again.” But today my son is doing very well and every time I think about this son, I think, “The Lord is too good to us.”

I just lost my job. Frantically I tried to figure out what to do next to bring in enough money for my family. Overabundantly the Lord has supplied. Then yesterday morning it appeared we had misplaced a $200 Target gift card. My heart sunk. I thought, “Oh no! Who’s to blame for this fiasco?”

In the Gospel of John we read of an invalid who lay, “with a multitude of others” at the pool of Bethesda. He was there because this was a magic pool. Whenever the pool’s water stirred, the first one in was healed. This man had been an invalid for 38 years so who knows how many times this poor man exclaimed, “Oh no!” for he missed it again! Jesus came by and asked him if he wanted to be healed. He explained to Jesus his sad story, and told Him how very unfair it was that someone always got in ahead of him. I think Jesus may have finally had to interrupt the man’s story to say to him, “Rise, take up your bed, and walk.” Which he did and he was healed. But it was on the Sabbath. And just his luck, (he always had the worst of luck) some of the religious Jews happened to come by. “What are you doing?” they asked him. “Don’t you know it is unlawful to carry your bed on the Sabbath.”

 Oh no! Now what? What could he say? He explained to them that it wasn’t his fault. It was this guy who healed him. “He told me, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’”

It is true, we Believers do live in two quite different worlds. Though our real home, our real citizenship is in heaven, as long as we are mortals on this earth, bad things do happen. (Be kind. Don’t go explaining to someone who is presently going through Job-like trials that, “All things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose.”) The Psalmist tells us again and again, there are times when we just need to wait for the Lord.

Paul writes, “What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation? Persecution? Famine? Nakedness?” None of those things sound that good to me. But I do know something about the love of Christ. And I do know His love is something we can depend upon to make things good—really good.
So, for me, for you, for all of us who are Believers; let’s be done with our “Oh no’s!”

Question: What is it in our Christian and American culture that causes us to exclaim, "Oh no!"?    
Do you have something in your life that once caused you great anxiety but that you now are able to trust the Lord with the outcome?