Malachi 1:1-2:16
Tokenism. If there is one thing that is certain to wreck your faith then it is tokenism. Tokenism knocks at every one of our doors. It pleads that it will make things easier for us - it will get things more in balance. But the Lord doesn’t want us ‘in balance’; he wants us leaning hard into him. So what does Tokenism look like? First of all it looks half-hearted in worship. It worships in a way that suits it - only when it wants, only to the extent that it wants, only for as long as it wants. It offers defiled food - it sings without meaning it, it shows up late, it keeps checking its phone throughout housegroup. Tokenism worships God with a coin but it keeps the purse-strings in its grip. And secondly tokenism looks like divorce. Tokenism tells us that we can observe our faith without obedience, we can fulfill our calling without a fight. Tokenism says that if a relationship is in trouble then it is not worth the effort - maybe God wasn’t in it after all. It denies that God actually heard the marriage vows. It denies that in flesh and spirit we are his. And so it wrenches us free of any sense of obligation to those he has given us. But the Lord hates tokenism. Because tokenism wrecks us while we remain blind to the damage. So we need to beware of tokenism. And some of us need to repent.
Revelation 6:1-17
The Spirit can make this clear to us. The Spirit can lead us into the truth in this. Which is a good job because most of it is lost on me. The trouble seems to be that John’s brain would not have had the ability to grasp the incomprehensible majesty of what he was witnessing. And his language would have been woefully inadequate to describe that fragment of splendour that his brain had managed to grasp. And my mind is neither intellectually nor spiritually refined enough to bridge the cultural and religious gap between John and myself in order to discern the tiny slither of God’s awesomeness that his language was communicating. And so I feel I need to approach this passage with extreme humility, humbly seeking the Spirit’s guidance and only making very tentative advances in the direction that I think he is showing me. And this morning I think that direction is reverence before the Lamb. Heck, if the likes of President Bashar Assad and Lady Gaga and Warren Buffet and Fernando Alonso are all going to hide in caves and among the rocks of the mountains in an attempt to escape the gaze of the Lamb then I think I better show Him some reverence as well. I think I better also recognise the power of his throne and pay some serious regard to his great day of wrath. Because no matter how it is going to happen and no matter what it is going to look like, I think it is clear who is going to be running the show. And I’d like to get on his side before the day comes.
Psalm 143:1-12
My soul thirsts for you... but it also thirsts for a grande cappuccino. Why am I so conflicted?
No comments:
Post a Comment