Worship While It’s Warm

As my time in Rhode Island draws to a close, I have been very reflective of the events and changes that have transpired over the past 7 years here and overall, the past 14 years in New England.  While there have been pockets of highlights, in general they have been unpleasant years.  I have experienced pain, loss, shifted directions, unmet expectations and disruptions.  In many ways, it has been a wilderness experience for me.

But I am mindful of the fact that God will intentionally allow us to experience dry, dark, painful, turbulent, disappointing and unsettled times.  His goal is to conform us to the image of Christ so we can reflect His love and His glory while on this earth.   When things are going well, it is much easier to manufacture a christian-esque presentation of our life.  It is easier, I think, to slip on sound choices because positive circumstances can give the allusion of benefits reaped for less than adequate decisions.  But because God is more concerned with fruit than with fiction, He renders discipline and this can only be found in troubling times because there is where the stuff that’s really in our hearts comes out and can no longer masquerade as irrelevant issues.   I think Hebrews 12:4-11 says it best in this Message version:

In this all-out match against sin, others have suffered far worse than you, to say nothing of what Jesus went through—all that bloodshed! So don’t feel sorry for yourselves. Or have you forgotten how good parents treat children, and that God regards you as his children?

My dear child, don’t shrug off God’s discipline,
but don’t be crushed by it either.
It’s the child he loves that he disciplines;
the child he embraces, he also corrects.
God is educating you; that’s why you must never drop out. He’s treating you as dear children. This trouble you’re in isn’t punishment; it’s training, the normal experience of children. Only irresponsible parents leave children to fend for themselves. Would you prefer an irresponsible God? We respect our own parents for training and not spoiling us, so why not embrace God’s training so we can truly live? While we were children, our parents did what seemed best to them. But God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God’s holy best. At the time, discipline isn’t much fun. It always feels like it’s going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off handsomely, for it’s the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God.

Confrontation is at the forefront during these times.  We confront the reality of our agendas and motivations and we confront the supremacy of God’s plan and purpose.  And it is here that choices must be made to either relinquish the grip on self-serving expectations with a heart of holy abandonment or to cling ever tighter to self-interest disguised as spiritual and prayerful hope.  We can either draw a line in the sand of the wilderness or sign our names in surrender with the proclamation that God will have His way regardless of the suggested external evidence of inadequacy and unmet needs.

So such has been the case with me during my New England, and especially Rhode Island, sojourn these  last 7 years.  I have experienced disappointments and have come face to face with internal unhealthy attitudes.  I have had to loosen my grip on a selfish and skewed agenda.  But as the Hebrews passage suggests, it has been all about the training and that is a beautiful thing. For it has exposed me to a greater joy and freedom that can only be found by yielding to it.  I have put my signature in the sand and remember what God has done during this time in me.  It reminds me of Moses exhortation to the children of Israel at the end of their wilderness journey found in Deuteronomy 8 to remember that it was all about God and His agenda.