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Immanuel Baptist "On the Journey" Articles |
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On the Journey- January 12, 2005-
Jamie Broome
The Limits of Deception
It requires
a great deal of something to resist the call of God. I wish I knew
exactly what this “something” is. Is it fear or courage? Is it
stubbornness or honesty? Is it rebellion or doubt? I honestly do not
know. Yet, I have been a minister long enough to have seen the many
disguises this resistance to God wears. Whatever the source of this
resistance it requires us to believe that we are able to deceive God,
the one who cannot be deceived.
This past
Sunday evening, in our study of Jeremiah, certain passages hooked me.
God describes, in these passages, his relationship with his chosen
people who have left him to seek meaning and significance for their
lives in other places. God, I believe, puts into words what the people
would have never said. Listen to God, in these passages, and ask
yourself if you have the guts to say these things aloud to the creator
of the universe. God observes: “For long ago you broke your yoke and
burst your bonds, and you said, “I will not serve!”[2:20]
God has experienced rejection: “For they turned their backs to me,
and not their faces.” [2:27b] God senses a betrayal of his
faithfulness: “Why then do my people say, ‘We are free, we will come
to you no more’?”[2:31] Recognizing insincerity in his presence, God
chides his people: “How lightly you gad about, changing your ways!”[2:36]
Finally God calls their hand, “Now I am bringing you to judgment for
saying, ‘I have not sinned.’”[2:35]
For the life
of me, I cannot imagine anyone saying these things to God. If God’s
grace and love ever seized your heart, how do you refuse to serve him?
If you ever experienced his acceptance, how could you turn your back to
him? How do you come to presume that your freedom means you no longer
need to respond to him? What sort of arrogance has captured our hearts
when we refuse to acknowledge our sins? You see, I suspect, we never
actually say these things to God. We do not have whatever it takes to
say these things! We communicate these things nonverbally. Our decisions
and our actions reveal the true intentions of our hearts not what we
say. In the end, we are only deceiving ourselves if we believe we hide
from God our real thoughts and feelings about our relationship with him.
With these
things in mind, I think I have solved the mystery of why we avoid
reading the scriptures. We avoid them because we discover in reading
them that God knows too much about us. Truly, the human heart hides
nothing from him. Even though he first speaks his words to ancient
peoples, they leap off the page convicting us of the assumptions we have
made. Yes, the human heart is deceptive. We do come to believe in the
validity of our excuses and rationalizations. Our ultimate deception is
that we convince ourselves that God accepts them as legitimate as well.
One of my
confidants assured me that there is another reason we want to avoid
reading the scriptures and responding to God’s call. She captured our
unspoken response to God this way, “We do not want our lives to change!”
It seems we take this stance because we assume God’s change would be
detrimental to us. Yet, in the deep of night when we must face
ourselves, we realize our lives are not all we hoped they would be.
There are ragged edges, strained relationships, hollow activities, and
an inescapable anxiety about us and our place in the world. Fearing
change, we also express out doubts that God in Jesus Christ can really
give us abundant life—joyful and meaningful life. Resisting change, we
reveal our suspicion of Jesus because we really cannot accept that those
who lose their lives for his sake and for the kingdom will find them.
Though we know in our souls the failure of our attempts, we cannot find
whatever it takes to trust Jesus with our living.
In all my
musings in this article, I am confronted by an apparent paradox that I
cannot understand, “We claim to trust Jesus Christ for our eternal
destiny, yet we are unable to trust him in our daily living?”
Day-by-day, we attempt to say we trust God for the gift of eternal life,
but, in our decisions and our actions, we seem to trust only in
ourselves. Of course, we would never say this aloud. May we respond to
God in Jesus Christ, so we may leave behind our deceptions.
jamie
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Website last updated: Wednesday, February 2, 2005 Website Related Questions/Comments: Chris Cash-ccash@vci.net |
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Immanuel Baptist Church - 3465 Buckner Lane - Paducah, KY, 42001 - 270.443.5306 - www.immanuel-paducah.org |