Three Necessities Of Wisdom

I'm having this problem. Often as I approach the end of the workday I get all excited thinking to myself how productive I will be once I finish working. I plan out some great blogpost full of wit and practical wisdom. However, I walk upstairs to my apartment, sit down on my bed take off my boots, lie back and my well laid plans muddle themselves up and are forgotten in the battle against the desire to just sit and not move or think for awhile. Of course there is a healthy place for simply sitting and resting, as there is for making plans and sticking to them no matter how tiresome the process.

Tonight though I'm going to blog and we'll just see what happens. We have three things that are necessary for wisdom. Theory, method and practice. Theory is the primary concept. Method is the means of realizing that concept. Practice is the ability to actually implement the method. A theory is that food is necessary for the body. Method is a plan to prepare food and input it into the body. Practice is my actually capability to cook and prepare what my theory has told me is important. People can be very skilled but never get anywhere because they don't know what method to use. People can have all the write concepts and never accomplish anything because they don't know how to make plans.

As a human being I am weak, incapable and often plain wimpy. However as a Christian I am empowered to understand and live the theory, method and practice of the ideal human life. First by the Father who represents the theory. He knows whats wrong and what needs to be done to fix it. Secondly, my methodology comes from the Son who lived a human life as an example that we might follow in His steps. Essentially the method of fixing the problems we face is to receive the cross and all that it means and bear it in accordance with Jesus' commands.

And here we often stop and get frustrated, or guilty, or confused or lazy or all of them combined. We know that humanity is broken and only on a path to self destruction. We can see through secular history the slow destruction of the image of God in the human being. We recognize our brokenness and our need for a Savior. We accept the overwhelming evidence that points to Jesus as a real life Being who lived and worked in real time and made claims and promises and predictions that could be tested and have been tested and have been found trustworthy. And so we set out to model ourselves after whatever sort of lifestyle we think of when we hear the name Jesus. But we can't do it, we get messed up and disappointed and sidetracked. Which is why we need the third person of the trinity. The Holy Spirit. To be possessed by the Holy Spirit is a confusing topic and one that I don't come close to fully understanding. I did recently read a thought from C.S. Lewis which I found very helpful. He says,

" For each of us the Baptist’s words are true: “He must increase and I decrease.” He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise. For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only in so far as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls."

The Holy Spirit is what enables us to actually do what Jesus commands us to do. We are called to be perfect and God does not command us to do impossible things. By ourselves we can not be perfect. With Him we can become perfect and more, moving on from perfection to perfection in a never ending journey of glorious victory. I end this post here. I hope you will not forget theory, method and practice. You can be the best at one and be a useless human being. Let God teach you to be good at what you are bad at. Instead of focusing only on your strengths open yourself up to God's power and humble yourself as He works in us to make something beautiful and glorious out of plain old me and you. 

Relationship With God (Obedience)

Every relationship has a recipe. Every recipe has its essentials. Recipes also have subsidiary ingredients. Like you can make English tea without sugar and milk it just won't be very good. You can make a pie without filling and take great pictures of it but as soon as you try and enjoy it's taste, the pictures won't look as tasty anymore. Some people try to have a relationship with God but they miss alot of the subsidiary ingredients. Say a person believes in Jesus and is trying to obey Him but they've forgotten that obeying Jesus is supposed to be something that we want to do, not that we just have to force ourselves to do. They have the necessary ingredients, faith and works but they've missed the joy that makes a relationship with God sustainable. Other people can look from the outside like their relationship with God is vibrant, like the pie with no filling but once you bite into that person you realize how they are just an empty crust.

Anyway, so this post is about ingredients for relationship with God. Several come to mind right away, things like faith, love, hope, discipline, prayer, time, desire and others. Faith in a triune God who is just and merciful and loves His children and always keeps His word. Love for God and for the things that He loves. Hope in God's promises. Discipline of ourselves for we are stupid creatures of habit that will continue destroy ourselves by eating at places like McDonalds and watching shows like Family Guy and sleeping in past twelve oclock and knowing more about current celebrities than we know about past leaders and on and on. Prayer to communicate with God. Time spent with God and with His people and with His creation. Desire to see God glorified and honored. Obviously, no relationship with God is the same, so how much of these ingredients and in what order they are combined will look differently depending on the person.

One specific ingredient though that I read about earlier is obedience. Obedience is a simple concept but it is often terribly difficult in practice. Meaning, it's not complex when the Bible says forgive your enemy but it's often a really painful and emotional process. It's not complex when Jesus commands us to be baptized but it can be awkward and embarrassing for some people. Anyway, in Luke 17:11-19 Jesus is traveling and is met by ten lepers. They ask Him to have mercy on them. He doesn't really respond to their question. He doesn't say yes, or no, or if you do this and this and this than I'll have mercy on you. He gives them a specific command. He tells them to go and show themselves to the priest. Now the priests would be the ones who can officially declare someone a leper and therefore an outcast or if a leper had been healed they could declare them officially clean. So essentially what Jesus is doing is saying to these men go and act like your clean. I know your body is still destroying itself and your still covered in oozing sores and puss but I want you to go to the priest and tell them that you are healed.

I know several people, actually, I take that back, everybody in the world sins. Some people ask God to forgive their sins, which He does but they don't feel it. And than they sin again and they wonder why they did it. Than they get stuck and just kinda wait in their sin for God to fix them and forgive them and generally they are just sorta confused and feel bad and want in some sense to be better because they know experientially how sucky sin is. What I think Jesus is saying to the lepers and what hes saying to you and me is that He has and is and continues to have mercy on us. What we need to do is get up and start acting healed. Yes we still have the habits of our sinful ways just like the lepers still had the visible signs of their leprosy. But what does the passage say?  "And as they went, they were cleansed." We don't become pure by sitting around waiting for Jesus to cleanse us. It's in our obedience to His commands that we experience the benefits of His mercy. Jesus had mercy on the lepers, probably even before they asked. They couldn't experience the healing power of His mercy until after they got up, and walked in obedience to His commands.

I think we need to take a lesson from these lepers. We need to stop sitting in the woes of our own situation and humbly obey the merciful commands of our savior. I believe that in obedience is the cure to our sin and all the negative consequences of our sin. God rarely ever just zaps somebody into holiness or purity or joy or love. He  does though provide counsel and prescriptions it's up to us though everyday to decide how we going to obey. C.S. Lewis said,

 The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn’t stayed put and all has to be done over again."

And so we have this choice, everyday to decide will we go and show ourselves to the priest? Will we, despite feeling depressed, give praise to our King who makes the moon shine and the birds sing in the morning. When we feel guilty will we thank our savior who poured out His blood that we can walk in newness of life? When we feel discouraged and alone will we remember Jesus when all His friends left Him to face the most trying night in human existence, alone, and remember His words, "take heart, for I have overcome the world." In obedience the lepers found a cure for their illness. As we walk in obedience and experience freedom from our sin let's not forget to be like the Samaritan leper who returned and gave praise to God who is the author of our healing. For it is not the action of our obedience that gives power to heal but the person being obeyed who provides all that's required.

Go in peace in the faith that makes us well.

Life Update

After living at home for twenty years and two months I actually managed to acquire a working position which has transformed my day to day existence into something terribly reminiscent of what I think adults usually have in their lives. I live at Radnor Hunt Club in Malvern PA. The oldest fox hunting club in the US. I am employed by Susie Beale who rents space from the club and operates a full service equine facility. This is her website I have lived here for two weeks and I feel like I've been here for months and months. My current position is simply a thirty day trial period determining whether I am  good fit for a longer six month working student position. So my life is full of newness and I'm going to share some with you. 

Here is a list of all the sorts of new things I have in my life

1. My own room. It's nice. 

2. An apartment. I live above a barn with haylofts on both sides of the living space. 

2.5 Two housemates who I knew nothing about prior to moving in.

3. 60+ hour work week. 

4. A different landscape. I live in Malvern PA. 

5 The street signs here are white with green letters. 

6. A whole new sort of coworkers who are different in age, ethnicity and worldview than me. 

7. I have more to do than time to do it. 

8. I don't have very many sit down meals. 

Yeah so it's weird and new and sometimes scary and sometimes exciting and sometimes annoying and sometimes hard and sometimes fun but really, honestly it reminds me alot of life at home. On the surface things have changed. I can't read or write or pray or build relationships as much as I used to. Deep down though nothings really different. Each day still begins with new challenges and each day God provides grace for each circumstance. Each day I can go to bed thankful and humbled. Thankful for what God did for me and humbled by the reality of what tomorrow would be like if He decided to take a day off. I interact with different people but each conversation is still an opportunity to love that person. "Lord how can I show You to this person?" Is still the defining perspective when dealing with people. 

A normal day for me here has six constant aspects, although, depending on weather, shows and divine intervention days sometimes become abnormal. 

1. Waking up (usually happens 5:45) 

2. Feeding and T/O (7:00) horses get fed and T/O which means turned out. The horses that were out all night get taken in and a new batch of horses are rotated out into the pastures to get sometime in the sun. Than I muck stalls for a few hours. 

3. T/O (11:00ish) After four hours or so the morning horses are brought in and any horses that didn't get let out already are led out. After the new horses are rotated out I'll generally clean tack(bridles, saddles and girths) for people who have been exercising the horses. I'll usually go for lunch around 1:30ish 

4. Feeding 2:30  The horses get fed again. The late afternoon I'll groom any horses that need to be groomed that day which can be as few as six to as many as fourteen. 

 

5. Night prep and T/O. About 4:30 I usually start getting the horses ready for the night. Depending on the weather the horses need blankets. The horses that go out for the night also where boots to help protect their hooves. Than I'll T/O the night horses which on a normal night is twelve going in various groups to seven separate fields. . Usually lessons will go until 6 and students will hang around until 6:30ish so after they leave I am basically done. 

6. Night Check The last thing that gets done happens around 9:30 when we go and take a last look at all the horses. Give all the horses some hay for the night and just basically check to make sure no horse really hurt themselves and is bleeding out. 

Goodnight for now, Enjoy this song. I hope to write again later his week continuing on with the theme of relationship with God.