Day 55: The Biggest Liar

Photo by Alex Bruda, via www.sxc.hu

Jeremiah 17:5-6

New Living Translation (NLT)

Wisdom from the Lord

⁵ This is what the Lord says:
“Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans,
    who rely on human strength
    and turn their hearts away from the Lord.
⁶ They are like stunted shrubs in the desert,
    with no hope for the future.
They will live in the barren wilderness,
    in an uninhabited salty land.

***

Do you know what the most often repeated piece of terrible advice is? "Follow your heart!" That is by far the worst thing you could ever do. Why would anyone think it's a good idea to let their emotions be their guide when they keep getting hurt? Maybe it's just a human condition that we like to live on a roller-coaster. We tend to want what we want because it makes us feel good.

Or does it?

What happens when we fall in love? We put all our trust in the other person. We experience this high of infatuation that we think will last forever. That person becomes the center of our entire world. Our life revolves around pleasing our newest love. We anticipate that person meeting our needs, protecting our hearts, and encouraging us in personal growth.

But what inevitably happens is that our new love is incapable of meeting all our needs. We have put them on a pedestal, expecting them to fill the role that only God should have in our lives. As time drags on, and we grow as individuals, we often grow in separate directions. Our lover may forget to express enthusiasm; Or worse, may resent how we've changed. In the end, and there is always an end when we put our faith in another person, we're going to end up an emotional basket case. When we finally pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, we realize how much time we've wasted.  Maybe we want to forget and move on. But we aren't going to forget. Our experience may have crumpled us, but it's still a part of us, and we have to rebuild our life. But how?

By letting God reshape us.

The Lord gave another message to Jeremiah. He said,  “Go down to the potter’s shop, and I will speak to you there.”  So I did as he told me and found the potter working at his wheel. But the jar he was making did not turn out as he had hoped, so he crushed it into a lump of clay again and started over.  

Then the Lord gave me this message: “O Israel, can I not do to you as this potter has done to his clay? As the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand. (Jeremiah 18:1-6 NLT)

Have you ever watched a potter at work? It's really beautiful, and fascinating. He starts with a lump of clay. Maybe it's a new piece, maybe it's a piece that has been used and discarded and is now being reworked. Either way, it's a bit of a rough start. The clay, which has already been pressed and squished and flattened and finally shaped into a wedge, gets thrown down onto a wheel. Then a little water is poured on it (we've all experienced rain in our lives) and the potter smashes the cone shaped wedge flat. Then he pours more water on, and surrounds it with his hands, pushing and pulling as the wheel spins, to center the clay. The centering isn't always easy, but it's critical to the process, because otherwise, the clay would wobble so much during shaping that it would never become what it could be.

Once the rough stuff is over, the potter then uses the most delicate of touch to guide the shape of the vessel that is forming. It is such a beautiful and artistic process that it doesn't even appear that there is any undue pressure involved! No force! The clay seems to grow almost entirely on its own from a lump of mud into a vase, or bowl, or pitcher. But it's not doing it alone. Without the gentle touch, an almost imperceptible pressure from a palm or fingertip, the mud would just sit their spinning in circles, never becoming anything.

This is how it is with us. If we stay on the spinning wheel of life without allowing God to shape our lives, we're never going to become the beautiful creation that He desires us to be! Our only hope is to learn to trust God to provide for us, encourage us, and protect us, instead of the lover who will inevitably let us down and break our heart.

But where's the high in that, right? It feels so good to fall in love. What's so wrong with depending on someone else for our happiness?

What's wrong with it is that it's all a lie. We can't trust our heart to do what is best for us because it can only see what it wants to see. God, on the other hand, can see the mud-pie that you were, the malformed, misshapen dirty mess that you are, and know exactly how to fix it. Only He can see what a gorgeous piece of work you can become. And only He can match us with the perfect companion to enhance our existence. Our emotions can't do that. Our heart will always lead us astray, because it has blinders on. 

“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things,
and desperately wicked.
Who really knows how bad it is?
But I, the Lord, search all hearts
and examine secret motives.
I give all people their due rewards,
according to what their actions deserve.” (Jer 17:9-10)

I don't usually embed videos into my blog, but I know my words didn't do justice to the description of a potter forming his clay. You really have to see it to appreciate how gentle the process is. So humor me. Watch the video.

Day 41: What God Wants

Bertram Mackennal [Public domain]

Psalm 51:16-17

New Living Translation (NLT)

¹⁶ You do not desire a sacrifice, or I would offer one.
    You do not want a burnt offering.
¹⁷ The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit.
    You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God.

***

This is really a continuation of yesterday. Whereas yesterday I just assumed that perhaps David was inspired to write that psalm after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba, this Psalm really is. Preceding the words of the Psalm are directions for the choir director, and describes this as being specifically about that sinful period in his life.

I think the easiest trap for us to fall into is thinking that God is only some passive, benevolent spirit in the sky that is quick to forgive when we pay a little lip-service to Him. While He is loving, patient, and forgiving, He's also a just God, and He makes His justice known, even to His own children. The consequences of our actions can bring disastrous results, and God isn't one to let us off the hook easily. He wants us to learn from our experiences, and the lessons He teaches aren't easy ones.

How often do we plea with God for this or that, making our requests known, and then like an afterthought, we remember to say "oh yeah, while I'm at it, will you forgive me of all my sins?" I hope I'm not the only one who has been guilty of that. Or maybe we rush through it at the beginning of our prayer; "Oh Lord, please forgive me for having done such-and-such today. Now will you help me out with this?"

David understood what God really wanted from us. In a time when animal sacrifices were required for just about everything, including to cover sins (because the Lamb of God had not yet come to bear that burden), David knew that what God wanted even more than an adherence to the laws of sacrifice was sincerity.

God doesn't want us to flippantly ask forgiveness as though it were something to mark off our to-do list. He wants us to be broken, naked, and deeply sorrowful before Him. Ok, now I don't mean "naked" as in "nude", despite the imagery, I mean He wants us to be totally transparent, not trying to hide anything from his sight or to cover any of our actions with excuses.

We should learn from David's example. He was on his knees before God, begging for His mercy and compassion. He pleaded with God not only to erase the stain of his sin, but to cleanse him of his guilt and purify him from it. He owns up to what he's done, and is so sorry for his actions that he says it haunts him day and night! He can't get it out of his head how he took another man's wife, and then plotted to ensure that the wronged man would be killed in battle. He knew that Uriah's blood was on his hands, and He specifically asks God to forgive him for that. He accepts that God's judgment against him is just, and that he has deserved the price he has paid. Do you remember what that price was? His sin cost him the life of his child. And the consequences of his actions didn't just affect him. Imagine what Bathsheba must have been going through! Sure, she had moved into the palace after losing her husband, but now she had lost her child! She must have felt a lot of resentment towards her new husband, the king. Don't ya think?

As David prayed, he got it. He knew that burning a sacrifice, although required by law, really wasn't good enough. He understood that what would please God far more than going through the motions was for him to offer himself, his own broken spirit and his own broken heart, as his sacrifice. And that is exactly what he offered, knowing that God would accept such an offering and restore David to the joy of his salvation. He wasn't asking that God would simply let him be happy again, He was asking that God would restore his happiness with the kind of joy that comes only from God, through obedience to God.

That is the manner in which we should pray. We screw up daily, so many times that we can't even keep track. Most of the times we don't even acknowledge the things that we do to offend God, because they're so habitual that we don't recognize them as being wrong. But they pile up around us, creating clutter and chaos in our spiritual lives (even if we don't claim to have one) until we completely break down emotionally. 

The only one who can, or will, pull us out of the quicksand is God. And until we are truly, deeply sorry for having strolled into the quagmire in the first place, God's going to let us keep sinking. Things will never get better until we come before God, broken in spirit, and offer ourselves to Him.

Isn't it time?