Researchers say that we learn most of what we will become by the age of six. However, only beginning at that age do we begin to understand our cognitive learning process and take an active involvement in it. Perhaps there is a much deeper truth here than we imagine!
As we start our formal learning, we begin developing a process for understanding our culture, human civilization, and other people within the constraints of words, images, and the spoken language. This process continues for our lifetime on this earth.
In the life of the Christian, some place along this cultural process, lives are interrupted by what we refer to as the "call of God." This call can change our whole life's learning process, but then again sometimes it doesn't. At this point free choice enters into our understanding and becomes part of our educational process.
This call is much more complex than what the religious paradigms of piety and revivalism would like us to believe. It may include what religion calls a "salvation experience," however more than evangelical religion would allow us to admit, this is the point where God begins to make us aware of our adoption as His sons and daughters.
Western civilization teaches us that by some mysterious evolutionary process, we have developed the ability to freely choose our options from an ever expanding universe of choice. I suppose that makes some sense within the limitations of fallen man's conception of choice, but that does not make it truth. Free to choose, we are able to murder the unborn fetus. But that free choice then only adds either to our hardness of personality, or gives us the opportunity to understand guilt and suffering in a new way.
While we are on the subject, there is currently an excellent commercial on American television by a national abortion rights organization. The essence of that piece is that choice is the greatest freedom. Contrary to this worldly wisdom, so excellently portrayed, no Christian voice lifts a finger to suggest that choice is not the ultimate freedom. Where is the evangelical voice bringing home the point, self control is not only the greatest choice, but also God's gift of ultimate freedom?
If this were not bad enough, just a short remote click away, church leaders eagerly promote their ministry on one of our ghetto serving Christian networks. Is it any wonder that the message of Jesus Christ's freedom finds little place in contemporary society. President Bush speaks about a war on the forces who want to eliminate personal freedom. And during this conflict the only voices that can bring about true freedom for all of mankind, are too busy doing their own thing to show up for the war. If the church is unwilling to promote any type of sacrifice, where is the world going to get any understanding of the concept? I suppose this also kind of makes you thankful that God really isn't into exercising His reproductive rights.
Life choices, whether society calls them good or bad, are used by God to reeducate the Christian into a new understanding of life from God's purpose, and gives us the eternal perspective as one of God's children. This calling begins to develop within us the concept of true freedom. Freedom from the bondage of sin and death. This culturally abortive process, many times painfully disrupts our self serving lives and narrows our universe of worldly choice. But only within that universe of God's grace, do we begin to understand the true bondage of worldly sinful pursuits and the promise of true freedom that God's calling allows us to experience.
Free from our temporal bondage, we begin to understand the concept of eternal destiny and the gift of our own creation. As much as we would like this to be an instant process, God begins to strip us of layers of cultural education and replace them with the garments of everlasting gratitude. It is a slow and many times painful process.
Forgiveness, in its truest sense, really begins with God's forgiveness of our sins, replacing them with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That justification, is our basis for our legal adoption as children of God. To the extent we understand this legal procedure, we begin to imagine what piety and revivalist experience can never capture. Within this understanding of justification, sanctification passes from something I do for myself, into something God does for His glory and my edification.
As justified children of God, childish pietism and revivalism, is replaced with child like faith. Self serving religious and worldly knowledge is replaced slowly with God given wisdom. These are the processes by which God reeducates, or recreates us into the image of Jesus Christ. In that process we learn that much if not all the stuff we learned in church, outside of the gospel itself, is based sometimes on complete lies, but more often than not, the limited understanding and shallowness of contemporary religious culture and personalities. We are the products, not of great religious evolution, but sad degrading religious entropy.
While our Christian religion and much of its leadership is bound by this degrading process, the child of God is not. This is God's process of reformation, true revival, or as I like to call it, restoration. The extent we experience that reword, is limited only by the extent we understand our new Godly nature. That nature is based in love, but that understanding must be appropriated through the choice of forgiveness.
In the Bible, most of the examples of forgiveness and forgiving relate to the nature of God to forgive the sins of man. Jesus Christ was sent into the world as the revelation of that forgiveness. Much of the world and most of the church understand this. Amazing grace saves every "retch like me" not only within the communion of saints, but also within the worldly communion of the self justified
While some passages of the Bible speak of man forgiving his fellow man, forgiveness is generally presented as statements of fact, without any incorporation of universal rules of law or exhortation. In Matthew 18 we find an example of a deeper teaching on forgiveness, but for the most part, understanding of the true nature of forgiveness, is left to the choice of the individual. In that respect, it rises from the pages of scripture. Hence, only through the knowledge of scripture does the wisdom of forgiveness of our fellow man permeate our child like faith and eternal wisdom. God forgives us, as His children we have been given the choice how and if we forgive others.
This concept however, is of prime importance in healing the land based on our subject in 2 Chronicles 7:14: If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
Just as the calling of God moves us beyond our own understanding of life, the calling can also move us beyond a lot of the knowledge we have learned in our educational process, both secular and religious. As that knowledge is converted into eternal wisdom, we learn much of knowledge is of limited eternal relevance. It is based on real world observations by limited human beings, and is therefore limited by the constructs of time, space, and the teacher. Time and space we can do little to effect, but we do have a choice on what we do with the teacher. We can truly despise him for the despicable low life he is, or we can love him for the despicable low life he is. It is our choice, but that choice is based entirely upon our understanding of our own ability to forgive. This is the incomparable choice that God gives to His children. It is not something that is available to the world as a whole, for they truly do not function in true freedom. Only the truly free are truly free to forgive.
Fifteen weeks ago, we began this series in a response to the attack by terrorist on the World Trade Center in New York, September 11, 2001. Since that time in this country there has been an anthrax attack through the Postal Service by some still unknown perpetrator, and the crash of a jet bound for the Dominican Republic, which some reports say might also be linked to terrorism. In Israel, Yasser Arafat seems to have determined to make himself a martyr for the foolish attemp at the destruction of the Israeli state. In Afghanistan, the news reports that the war is over because of the destruction of much of the Taliban infrastructure, but not many of their, or the al Qaeda terrorist capabilities have been defeated. The locations of Osama bin Laden and many other terrorist leaders are unknown.
In this series we have looked at gold refining as a method similar to persecution and tribulation. God uses these methods to change His children from the image of this world into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. Just how this works, by whatever word you choose to use, will manifest itself in the lives of individuals and society as a whole. What the future holds, is not known to us today outside the pages of the Bible. While much of Christian enterprise seeks to determine the signs of the seasons from many biblical passages, we will limit the end of this series to just two:
Luke 18:8b Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?
2 Thessalonians 2:3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for [that day shall not come], except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
From these passages, the lack of faith and the falling away can only come from the conscious choice of Christian individuals to turn from the way of Christ for some reason. Now it is easy to say that these manifestations of the community of the church are brought about by refining, tribulation, and persecution. That is what we all have been taught to believe is true. It its also something that we believe intuitively makes sense. But is this truth, or just knowledge based upon faulty paradigms of secular and religious teaching?
I would like to leave with you that it is not the means that demonstrates our conversion into the eternal gold of Christ's image, but the test of forgiveness, the flash in the pan when pure gold is heated to its melting temperature and then left to cool. When we think back on all that stuff we learned in high school, church, college, graduate school, the military, work, marriage, family, its a wonder we can think at all. This of course reminds me of the Paul Simon song "Kodachrome" from the 1973 album "There Goes Rhymin' Simon."
A much better album title, from my perspective, and from a perspective of a worldly understanding of this series on healing the land, was his 1975 recording "Still Crazy after all These Years." One song from that album, which really doesn't rise to the intellectual level of most of Simon's music, is the song "Fifty ways to leave your lover," until you learn that it was really a song he wrote to teach his son how to rhyme. In that context it fits well within the constructs of all his music.
Within the paradigm I have tried to illustrate in this series, there are probably more than fifty ways to hate your brother and the church, but there are infinite ways to forgive and love him also. Through the process of refining, however that may unfold, the question remains, just has Pontius Pilate judged Jesus Christ, how would we as the person of Pontius Piety, judge the evangelical church today? Do we seek justice, do we provide mercy? The two are really linked in the Bible by rule, and only in the Bible, by the concept of forgiveness. Do we hate, or do we forgive all the wrongs that we feel that God and man have brought (or will bring) into our lives?
Keeping within the construct of teaching us how to rhyme, as Paul Simon did his son, I have come up with a couple of renditions of that famous song. As a child of God, the choice is clear, forgiveness of others. Within the constraints of not only God's, but also our own understanding of judgement and mercy, forgiveness is the paradigm for this world in this new era of living with terrorism and personal refining.
So I leave you with the words of a song, actually two sets of lyrics for the same song. The choice is God's incomparable gift to His family, may we all become refined enough to make the right choice!
Fifty ways to hate your brother
with thanks to Paul Simon
"The problem is all about the dead", the devil said to me
The hate is easy if you follow me logically
I'm here to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to hate your brotherHe said "it really is my habit to intrude"
Furthermore I hope my meaning makes you lost and misconstrued
So I repeat myself, its my nature to be rude
There must be fifty ways to hate your brother, fifty ways to hate your brotherJust stab 'um in the back, Jack, use my old plan, Stan
I'll be your decoy, Roy, just listen to me
We'll sabotage the bus, Gus, you need to gossip much
Dissension is the key, Lee, for bondage to meHe said "it comforts me so to see you in such pain"
I wish there was something I could do to make you cry again
I said, I witness that, but would you please explain about the fifty waysHe said, "why don't we both just get drunk tonight"
And I believe, in the morning your head will be screwed up right
And then he kissed me and I realized damn he was right
There must be fifty ways to hate your brother, fifty ways to hate your brotherJust stab 'um in the back, Jack, use my old plan, Stan
I'll be your decoy, Roy, just listen to me
We'll sabotage the bus, Gus, you need to gossip much
Dissension is the key, Lee, for bondage to meInfinite ways to forgive your brother
with thanks to Paul Simon
"The problem is all your fault", Jesus said to me
Forgiveness is easy if you take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free
There are infinite ways to love your brotherHe said "it's really not my habit to intrude"
Furthermore my mercy and grace are often misconstrued
So I repeat myself, forgive me if I seem crude
There are infinite ways to love your brother, infinite ways to forgive your brotherJust cut 'um some slack, Jack, use God's plan, Stan
No need to destroy, Roy, just listen to me
Love on the old cus, Gus, don't need to discuss much
Forgiveness is the key, Lee, and get yourself freeHe said "it grieves me so to see you in such pain"
Just give up your hatred and you will smile again
I said, I appreciate that, but would you please explain about the infinite waysHe said, "why don't you just get a good nights sleep tonight"
And I believe, in the morning you'll begin to see the light
And then He kissed me and I realized He is always right
There are infinite ways to love your brother, infinite ways to forgive your brother.Just cut 'um some slack, Jack, use God's plan, Stan
No need to destroy, Roy, just listen to me
Love on the old cus, Gus, don't need to discuss much
Forgiveness is the key, Lee, and get yourself freeAmen.
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