I shaved!
I'm visiting my parents villages this weekend, should be fun! Also, next sunday I'm going to play drums in church! This shouldn't be a problem, but their music is very rhythmic so pray for me! :P Things are going well, I'm just in a mode of learning and observation right now. Attending Tyembara/French classes 3 nights a week, involved with the music team at church, establishing relationships. Today I laid down the guitar for "Nous Les Enfants" with Mêlée at Radio Sinai and I will begin tracking drums on my laptop today as well. It's in French right now, and he wanted to re-record it in Dyula and Tyembara for the radio.
This week has been spent with a lot of quiet time reading the Word and “Shadow of the Almighty.” Not that I am hiding myself in my room, but it’s that barely anybody is home during the day, either gone to school (if the prof isn’t on strike) or to “travaille au magazine.” Several evenings during the week I go to church for Senefo/French language classes, where I am also getting little lessons on Balophone playing as well and am building some new relationships. At times I have found myself questions what I’m doing here, feeling that because I’m not very active during the day right now I must be wasting my time. However, God gave me some encouragement this morning by allowing me to understand something which He wants to accomplish in my during this season. God has been opening my eyes to a lot lately – seeing the world more as He sees it – and I am finding much growth and inspiration in my quiet times. I have taken back to creating and studying music, and to memorization of the scriptures. God has been re-awakening in me a hunger to know the Word better, to “rightly handle the Word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15). Not that I am ignorant of the Word, but that I ought to know it better still. I know that at the Throne of God, there will be some of “every tribe, tounge, and nation” present, and if I am to do my part in making that happen, I would do well to be prepared “in season and out of season” as Paul says later in Timothy 4. I see this as meaning that I ought to know the Word well enough to speak into people’s lives correctly regarding any issue – whether a correction, rebuke, or an encouragement.
After reading about the life of Jim Elliot, a couple of different themes from the way he lived his life stick out to me. In my quiet time I did some study and some thinking on these themes, and here is a bit about what I got from that time:
Right now I am thinking of Psalm 37:4, “Delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” I don’t think this means that He will give us whatever we want, rather that our desires will be in line with His Will, and He will be faithful to give us those things. I like Jim Elliot’s commentary on this verse:
“It does not say He will give you what you want. It does say He will give you the want. Delight in Christ brings desire for Christ. He gives the heart its desires – that is, He works in us the willing (Phil 2:13). That is why we can say in John 15:7 ‘Ye shall ask what ye will…if ye abide.’ The branch takes its sap from the vine, the same surges the vine feels then become the surges of the branch. My will becomes His, and I can ask what I will, if I delight myself in Him. Only then can my desire be attained, when it is His desire.”
So what are my desires? Do they take root in a life-pattern of active submission and prayer, or are they my own lofty ideas? What does my daily routine look like? Do I delight in God, or do I find myself delighting in the gifts more than in the giver? Good questions to ask oneself while examining the heart’s motives.
In Matthew 10:37-39 Jesus says, “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Again in Luke 14:26-27: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
Both passages get at the same idea, and here is the essence of them both: carry your cross and follow Jesus ONLY. If I am putting anything in my way as an obstacle between me and a sold-out life for Christ, then I am not worthy of Christ. But that just demonstrates the beauty of the Father’s marvelous grace! When Jesus said these words He knew that nobody could ever actually be worthy of Him on their own power, since afterall, “there are none righteous, not even one (Rom 3:10).” However through our faith in Christ, we are dressed with His own righteousness and declared worthy before the Father. So, we are worthy of what? Just think of what He calls us! We become worthy of being called His children, His bride, His friends, His sheep, His heirs, His ransom-purchase, His alone! We are declared worthy to be in His presence, to enjoy His fellowship face to face, and to adore Him!
What does taking up your cross look like? Well that’s a different story for everybody, but I know that it entails death, because the cross was an instrument of death! And not a quick death either – but rather a slow, bloody, agonizing death. Jesus is calling us, as Paul phrases it so many times, to ‘put to death’ the things in us that are not the workings of the Spirit of God in us. This can be anything: immediate desires, hopes and dreams, habits, ways of thinking and attitudes, how we treat each other, and so on. It takes prayer and hard work and submission to God, just as Christ did, to carry your own cross. If our natural reaction is to get rid of that which harms us, then it can only be a supernatural reaction to intentionally bear the cross of Christ – that is, the desire to do so has to be because the Holy Spirit is working inside of us. God assures us that this life of “living sacrifice” is a spiritual act of worship, and that He will make sure it is worth our effort in the end.
So what about hating your family? That surely doesn’t sound like the Jesus we all know, and indeed, it isn’t. In Exodus 20, the Word of the Lord was given to Moses, which says “honor thy father and mother.” This apparent conflict is actually no conflict at all, because what Jesus is proclaiming in Luke 14 is not that we ought to hate anybody. Remember that Jesus Himself says that hate for another is the same as murder in the eyes of the Father. Rather, it is in comparison to the vastness of the love for God that you ought to have for Christ that your love for family (and anything or anyone else) pales in comparison, even being regarded as “hate” in light of how you regard Christ. This means also that when you, loving Christ and obeying Him above all else, are tempted by others to follow a different way that You should by nature reject that which is not of the guidance of God. No matter how tempting the idea, no matter how trusted the person who spoke it, the desire and decision to obey the voice of God overrides all else.
So how do the “desires of my heart” and these other two passages relate to my life right now? I know I must put to death my own desires, regarding them as hated compared to how I regard the Will of God in my life. I believe that when I am walking in the center of God’s Will for my life, that my desires will naturally be in-line with those of the Father. Thus, my desires can become His desires, just as the surge the branch feels becomes the surge the vine feels. So then how do I “discern God’s Will” for my life? I think that Christians, especially in the States, spend an awful lot of time trying to figure this out. In the end, it is the person who delights in Christ that is going to be walking in His will. Spend less time doing things to figure out the Will, and spend more time being God’s, and being with God. Not that the doing isn’t important, because it is, but it is secondary to the being.
God is a lamp for our feet, illuminating what is in front of us, and a lamp doesn’t light very far. God doesn’t give us a flashlight with which is expose the darkness way out ahead of us. Except in the case of divine, prophetic revelation, I don’t think it possible to “discern” the Will of God in regard to the future, because the future is not what we need concern ourselves with. Rather, we only need to know what the Will is for right now. If we seek the Will of God, we must believe Jesus (John 7:17) and be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Rom. 12:2), only then we will “be able to test and prove what the Will of God is” (Rom. 12:3). That’s amazing, it says we can be certain of His will. If there is one thing I learned from the life of Jim Elliot, it is what it looks like when a person walks in the Will of God for their life. He lived Romans 12:2 out in his life with great success, and is a great role model for others seeking to do the same.
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