Glory pt. 2

The glory of God is not a halfway thing.  It is full.  It is rich.  It is all-consuming.

So often, we live life halfway.  We trick ourselves into thinking that we are living life in all its fullness, when in reality we are living in just that--reality.

Why live in reality when you could live in spirituality?  When you could defy the odds of life and the world and everything that is plastered into our brains that life is all about when we could live with Jesus.  Here on earth.  Living with Jesus and by Jesus and for Jesus.  In every single part of our lives.

This summer I learned a lot about putting Christ at the center of my life.  Not the "number 1" thing in my life, but at the absolute center of everything.  Our lives are so categorized into different segments and parts and here is my friend life, my school life, my sports life, my relationship life, my church life, my job life, my relaxation life, my Facebook life, even.  Life becomes so segmented and while God is so very near and dear to us, He becomes near and dear to us only at our convenience, only at the parts we let Him in.  We pick and choose where and when we want Jesus to be the main parts of our lives.  Jesus does not pick and choose when He loves us. At all.

Jesus does not love us halfway.  He loves us fully and completely and unconditionally and all the time and when we do not deserve it and when we feel Him the least and when we love Him back.  He does not choose to love what we do at school but not really care about what we do at home or at work or even at church because at church, you know, He can turn a blind eye since we are at church so we must be doing good, we must be living life fully.  No, no He does not love us halfway, He does not assume we are fully displaying His glory.  He makes sure of it.  He searches the depths of our hearts and our intentions and our failures and dreams and desires and shortcomings and plans.  He is jealous for us and attacks and wrecks every single wall that is in the middle of us and Him because He loves us that much.  He uses things that are painful to us because He knows better than us.  He sees these little areas of our hearts that we keep from Him and He goes after them relentlessly, because He wants all of us, and not half of us.

How much does it sadden Jesus to see us only receiving half of His love?  He gives freely to us and we do not take it.  His love came at His own price, a price we have to stop to consider, a price that brings us weak to our knees and causes our eyes to be lifted to Him and Him only and yet He does not make us pay for the phenomenally expensive love.  He gives it all to us freely.  And we only take half of it.

Jesus did not just die on the cross.  He did not just do half of the job and leave us to sulk and mourn and be sad because our Savior, though He died for our very sins, making us halfway joyful and halfway appreciative, just died and left us to wonder what we do next, oh no.  Instead He rose too, making this selfless act of love complete, giving us the Holy Spirit through the power that overcame death and the grave and no one could do that with only half the effort.  He loved us so much that He died and rose.  Not just one or the other.  Not just half of it.  He completed it.

And yet we see this love and we stifle it, we smother it with ourselves and our own desires because as long as we have enough Jesus to make us feel justified and give us that little tingling feeling inside then we are doing exactly what God wants us to do.  No.  We were not designed to live life halfway; we were not designed to only let Jesus into parts of us because that is not how He created us!  He is not a halfway God and His glory is not made to be halfway displayed through us because it is just that--GLORY.  It is full and rich and all-consuming.  It cannot be cut up and divided into pieces and appointed to certain parts of our lives.  It does not have a roll-over effect where if you display the glory of God in one part of your life more than another, it equals out and covers up the shortcoming.  No.

So now we see that even the things that make us the happiest leave us the least satisfied when Jesus is not in the center of it all.  Our lives are not shelves.  There is no structure or categorization or segments.  We cannot pencil God out of our schedule, even just for the day, because our time is different than His because I am pretty sure He is the Creator of time itself, therefore it is all His.  There is God and there is His glory and unless we submit to it in every part of our lives we will not know the fullness of God.  We will not be satisfied.  Because we are not living in the way that He created us.

We were created to display His glory.  That is why were were made.  So when we hinder that in the slightest sense, it becomes magnified and eats away our skin like acid until we finally stop the burning and say, "You can have this part of me!"  These parts that we keep to ourselves all add up and we see, then, that when we do not let Him have even the smallest one, the one that hides behind the bigger ones in the back and act all innocent and quiet, it begins to charge its way to the forefront of our lives and consume the bigger and more apparent holes that we have until they all mesh together and we are so far gone that we have no idea how we got to this place and we are miserable.  Because we were not created for this.  We were not created to hold back.

Every day is a new opportunity to let the glory of God consume new and hidden parts of our lives and these shelves that we have set up in our very souls come crashing down into one big mound of life that we get to stand on the top of with God in triumph and say "Hallelujah!  You have won the victory!"

The victory of the grave, the victory of our souls, the victory of our very lives, yes, He has won it.  And so we learn that even the faintest hint of segmentation is fatal.  It kills us.  It eats away at us.  And though it may be masked, though it may look pretty and lovely and good for us, even if we come across it every day and it is all smiles with this thing, we will never be satisfied.  Because we were created for God and when He is not there, we are not being fed with the very bread of life that was made solely and exactly for us.  We will continuously feel empty because we were created to display the glory of God in its fullness.  So displaying only half of it may look appealing to others, it may be good enough for a pat on the back or for some affirmation from yourself or a justification for that lie you keep telling yourself, since you look good.  You look good in this area!  But that is not life.  Life is not about you looking good.  It is not about you looking anything.  It is about how God looks.

May we stop living this life halfway.  May we not be comfortable with giving God only parts of our lives.  May we be holy and pleasing living sacrifices to the Lord our Father in Heaven.  May we, as a body of believers, give Christ our bodies.  Not just our limbs or our eyes or our ears or nose or fingers.  May we give Him our bodies, church, to together create the ultimate body that is the Body of Christ.  May we display the fullness of His glory together. Amen.

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. 2 Corinthians 10:31

You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. Psalm 16:11

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship. Romans 12:1

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Epehsians 3:17-19

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Glory pt. 1

I have learned so much this semester.  And lucky for me, I am now home for about a month with little to no standing obligations but to relax and enjoy the stillness of life.  So, that means I will have much more time to try to sort out all that God has done for me this semester.  This is an impossible feat, but the beauty of life is that we get to live trying.  That's why it's life and not eternity.  That is life, to constantly search for the beauty and the glory of God.  And in eternity we will see it in all its fullness.  That is eternity.

And that is one thing God has been teaching me this semester-- His beauty and his glory and all that He is.  Oh my, I cannot bear to look at the world, at earthly things and fleeting things and just things.  They become vain to me and right before my eyes everything turns to nothing compared to this new glory that has been revealed to me.  I see it everywhere.  And I want to forever live in the search for more of this glory.

The world is such a juxtaposed place.  If you know me, you know that juxtaposition is one of my favorite literary terms ever and I cannot believe I just wrote this sentence.  But it is true.  Juxtaposition means the act of placing close together or side by side, especially for contrast.  Think about it.  Think about the stark contrast.

This is about to blow your mind.

God, the ultimate artist, carves this earth with His hand, this beautiful earth with clouds stretched across the sky and canyons that swallow even the largest person whole and trees that are skillfully placed on the perfect hill so that the dynamics of vertical to horizontal effectively display the beauty of its Creator even in just one passing glance.  He spoke it.  He spoke grass so green that it compels us to run over it, to grab it, smell it, pull it, lie in it and look at the skies. Skies that burst into colors that we could never dream of recreating, no matter how many paints we squirt and mix together, the kind of colors that make your heart melt on the drive home from a long day at work.  Mountains that lay plastered against the sky only to enhance the effects of their boldness and solidity.  Their heights scream at us.  The ocean, with waters that engulf us, depth that deepens our very souls and even our heaviest burdens in those moments seem to look like the smallest little issue compared to the vastness of it all.  We get lost in it and its stillness with simultaneous perseverance represented through the aggressiveness of the waves and that is what we see.  These creations were made to bring about these reactions in us.  They were not just made to look at.  All this took some thought.  This world contains intricate detail that is strategically developed to reveal to us the Creator's glory in the best and clearest possible way.  And we miss it every day.

And then we see us.  These broken and fragile beings, so small that even words are too long to describe our state.  We know nothing and yet we think we know everything and even that makes us smaller and smaller.  It all adds up onto us.  We consistently reject and deny our Savior time after time and we blatantly disobey the very one who made us and saved us.  We look at this Artist's creations and spit at them, toss them aside.  We long for other things, we throw ourselves at people, items that we were not created for.  We have no strength in us and no fight in us and no power in us and the only way we are even living and breathing is because of someone else, some other power.  We have done nothing on our own and yet we try to do everything on our own.  We are wicked.  We are vile.  We are stained.  We are hypocrites, skeptics, cynics.  We are sinners.  We are at the mercy of God above.  And what a mercy it is.

So God placed us, these barbaric creatures described above, on this wonderfully made earth.  It makes us seem even smaller and even more like just dust and ashes when we zoom out and see these little black dots on this absolutely breathtaking canvas.  How did we get here?  Dirty and small and broken people.  Spotless and massive and beautiful earth.  He placed us here to greater display His glory.  How juxtaposed we are.

Praise be to the Lord Almighty!

But then there is this other viewpoint.  This paradoxical explanation that also persists to display the glory of God.  Because God is really good at making things that seem to make no sense make sense.

Here we are.  Redeemed and made complete and alive in Christ.  Our sins washed away and he grabs our hands at the well and gently helps us up and tells us that He knows all the things that we have done but we are made new.  He makes us in His image.  He cleanses us of every impurity, even the ones hidden deep within ourselves, the ones that our closest friends and relatives either don't know about us, or see and despise in us.  And He sees those things in us and loves us anyway.  He wrecks the walls of pride and guilt and shame and all the ugly, ugly things about us and rebuilds us in splendor and glory and purity.  He makes us, the vilest of all the creatures, into beautiful things.  He uses us, totally undeserving, to display His mercy and His love.  He washes away our sin with the blood of Jesus Christ.  He constantly resurrects us and shakes off our dust and makes us beautiful.  He makes us beautiful.  He pushes our brokenness aside and makes us whole again.  And He does this day after day after day.

And he sends us out.  Into this world.  This world full of sin and materialism and idolatry and greed.  This world full of war and suffering and pain and so much distortion that even the prettiest things of this world are hidden deceits of the devil himself.  No one is safe.  Mass chaos and destruction fill the earth.  Hate is more real than love and even the true love that does exists stands firm under conditions and reciprocation and selfishness.  Fear overshadows us and the ghosts of timidity haunt us and now on this earth we are told to live and love through tolerance and acceptance which are really synonymous for passivity and idleness.  Everything is messed up.  Everything is masked or skewed or taken out of context.  People resent people.  People resent God.  People resent people resenting God, so they keep Him to themselves.  The Spirit is stifled, smothered and even worship is questioned for its haughtiness or non-traditionalism.  Genuineness and sincerity are ambiguous.  Brothers and sisters become our cynics and skeptics.  Everything is wrong.  We can't escape it.

New people.  Bright with His light, shining in the splendor of His majestic presence in our very souls.  This earth.  Loud with its vanity, taunting us with the trickery of deceit ingrained in its very core.  There must be a reason we were here.  He placed us here to display His glory.  How juxtaposed we are.

We are aliens here.  Just look at the contrast.

In both of these views, this thing I call the "Double Juxtaposition" or "The Juxtaposition Paradox" or "The Juxtaparadox" (actually, I just made all of those terms up)...anyway.  In each of these views, we are not perfect.  We are dirty sinners, but we are made beautiful in Christ.  We were created to be that way.  We are created to do those things, to submit ourselves to the Creator, and in each different perspective, that is how His glory will be maximized.

No matter which way you look at it, His glory is to be revealed through us.  That is why we live.  Think about that.

But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.... Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made." Isaiah 43:1-3, 5-7

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