Dressed To Serve

"Be dressed in readiness, and keep your lamps lit.

"Be like men who are waiting for their master when he returns from the wedding feast, so that they may immediately open the door to him when he comes and knocks.

"Blessed are those slaves whom the master will find on the alert when he comes; truly I say to you, that he will gird himself to serve, and have them recline at the table, and will come up and wait on them.

Luke 12:35-37

Often times when I go about my day I hear verses in my head from my morning readings. Usually the verses are the ones I understand the least.

he will gird himself to serve

As uneasy as it is to understand, God has called his people to be slaves, the slaves of all. What is even harder to understand is the way Christ styles himself to those who wait faithfully for him: he returns dressed to serve them and they recline at his table.

However much these men become slaves for Christ, it really is Christ who has become a slave for them.

that they may immediately open the door to him when he comes and knocks

Often times we think of godliness as a slow process that increases gradually (perhaps without being noticed) until it has ripened fully. The passage here speaks about an immediate readiness.

The slaves do not build up a lifetime of strength so they are able to open the door at the very end. The faithful slaves are ready all along, and they are ready at every instant.

May God work within the ones He has chosen, that they may be ready to serve their Lord and that they may be ready to be served by their Lord. May their hearts be ready at the moment He comes for them.

Quite The Contrary

Life only seems shallow when it is understood in a shallow way.

Once upon a time there stood a tall, giant of a soldier. He was regarded as a champion by his countrymen and a terror to his enemies. When he passed by, no one looked down on him, but in a secret way he looked down on himself.

In this life it is not the talented
   who find success,
And the true judges do not favor
   the strong.
In times of trouble
   only the poor in spirit are victors,
The ones who are soothed
   in the most inward place.

No illusion is stronger than the illusion we create to fool ourselves.

There once was a baker who made a batch of cupcake batter using the finest ingredients. When he was about to pour the batter into the cupcake pan, he noticed the cupcake bins in the pan were too shallow.
'If I bake these confections in there, no one will be able to taste the cupcakes.'
So he found a new tray with deeper bins in which he filled the cupcake batter.
'Take the old cupcake tray,' He said to his servant, 'And throw it away.'

Love transcends every human law.
It is the authority by which God reigns over all things.

Don't Bet Against Yourself!

Pete Rose, a baseball player and manager for the Cincinatti Reds, achieved a number of lofty accomplishments in his career -including three World Series championships. He is considered to be the person who popularized sliding into base on a steal.

Perhaps the most well-known aspect of his time with the Reds was his agreement to stay permanently ineligible from baseball following allegations of gambling.

I understand very little about baseball myself. I wouldn't even say I have a favorite baseball team. So it could very well be that gambling -as innocuous as it may seem to me- is better left out of baseball.

That being said there is something about Roses' gambling practices which deserves attention: he always bet on the Cincinatti Reds ... and never against them.

This distinction seems shallow to many. What difference does it make if he bet for his team or against it?

Like the characters in the Bible who attempted to communicate with demons, those who have bet against themselves have often found (in a very disturbing way) exactly what they were looking for.

In someways it is hard for those who have heard the word "faith" from childhood to have a good understanding of exactly what it means. It can sound common, safe, politically correct, but the Bible says faith is focused on something that is unproven, unverifiable, and unknown.

To have faith is in some ways like betting in such a way that you are already certain of repayment. This is difficult for us to understand with our flesh and bone understanding ... if there is little or no external confirmation about something, how does someone have any confidence it will happen?

This simple question reveals the mysteriousness of faith's strength.

Faith is not an achievement of calcuation, observation, and persperation. Faith is a willed state of understanding. A person does not think or feel or work his way into a state of faith. A person cannot receive it from anyone else. It is something he or she decides, and they cannot receive it from someone else.

... and whatever is not from faith is sin.
Romans 14:23

In contrast to faith, bad faith is a state where someone places a bet believing that they will most likely lose or have already lost. This kind of active doubting -in all its undesirability- is actually very common.

For example, suppose someone enters into a business partnership with someone else. Suppose they secretly buy insurance to protect their investments in case the business fails. Then suppose they begin taking actions that some would interpret as being against the interests of the business.

Although such an act has a host of legal names (insurance fraud, conflict of interest, etc.) they are all symptoms of a larger problem: betting against yourself, and the market continues under the assumption you will not do it.

Legally speaking acting "in good faith" is a suffecient condition for legal justification. This means that if you really have consistently and whole heartedly done your best, no prosecutor or interest can rightfully bring charges against you.

I am no lawyer, and I have no desire to be one, but I observe this very practice of betting against yourself all the time. I have committed this mistake myself, and I believe every human being is guilty of it before God.

For example, suppose a man wishes to have sex with a woman (yes, I assure you it has happened). Does this man find the woman to be beautiful? Does he find a lasting beauty in her? If he does, he should marry her. I've heard married people have twice as much sex as single people. If he doesn't find her attractive, why does he want to have sex with her?

But men frequently have sex with women they are not married to, and the Bible says that such people will never enter life if they refuse to repent. Why do men do this?

Often times men believe that if they have found a truly wonderful woman -a marriable woman- that she will not really want to be married to them. As soon as such a woman uncovers the true identity of the man, she will file for divorce ... or so the wicked men think.

And so we see that beneath the signs of confidence in wicked men there lies a great deal of doubt and self-loathing.

Suppose some man says, 'Sure, this woman is beautiful, but I doubt she will stay beautiful. I have no ethical way of finding fulfillment. All my options lead to ruin, so I might as well live out my days in desperation and pleasurable doubt.'

Such are the thoughts of humans, and this is exactly the way we are separated from God -who refuses to be pleased with a single person if that person doesn't believe God rewards those who earnestly seek him.

The man who doubts the lasting beauty of such a wife is betting against himself. He may doubt he will be able to find fulfillment in any other way other than through surface attraction. He is gambling that he will stay forever a slave to impressions, appearances, and -in a word- deception. Such a man is not only the epitomy of unhappiness (as we all have been), he is ethically and spiritually dead.

Often times women in relationships differ in the appearance of their error, but the true standards of justice have no knowledge or concern of appearances.

Many women suppose men will never love them for who they are. Such women began to take desperate measures: talking much too forwardly, undermining their modesty, and offering to barter against the ethical in exchange for attention -or what they consider to be attention (indeed the men who 'attend' to such women are actually attending to their peripherals).

And so the women who offers to move in with her boyfriend bargains (between the lines) that no worthy man would ever want to live with her in a worthy way. In bargaining thusly how unworthy she becomes to others and especially to herself!

Consider the way Christ described the father's response to the son who did not squander his share of the inheritance. The son who did not run off protested that his father had welcomed back his brother. The father did not say, "Stop thinking about your own interests. You'll never have those things anyway. You should bet against yourself."

Instead the father responded, "You are always with me, and everything I have is yours."

The son who did not run away had made a bargain. He was to some extent bargaining that he was some sort of lesser inheritor -that his father did not want to extend to him his possessions.

The father assured the son who did not run away with the inheritance by telling him he had a lot to gain through his investments. In truth everything that the father owned was already his!

As believers in Christ we are called to live in such a way that we really believe God has good things in store for us, that He has not abadoned us, that our confident wager in the death and ressurrection of Christ will pay off for us in a way that far exceeds any investment or 'sacrifice' we made in coming to Jesus.

So if you want to live a righteous life, hold firmly to the belief that God rewards those who earnestly seek to please Him ...

... and don't bet against yourself!

The Hostage

Earlier Episodes:
Episodes 1, 2, 3
Episodes 4, 5, 6
Episodes 7, 8, 9
Episodes 10, 11, 12
Episodes 13, 14, 15
Episode 16
Episode 17