Forgetting to Blush

Our pastor says that we have spiritual lockjaw.  When an opportunity comes to speak about the things of God in a non-church setting, we clam up.  I was thinking about this the other day when, predictably, the phone rang.  And I did it.  I stopped short of what I might have said had I been in church or with a believing friend.  I measured my words so that they became palatable.  When it came time to show my love for Christ, I took a step back, lowered my head, and blushed.

And I remembered...

Mary took a pint of nard and poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped his feet with her hair.  And the house was filled with the fragrance of perfume.--John 12:3

Mary did not measure the perfume she used.  She did not stop short of extravagant love in wiping Jesus' feet.  She didn't think first of what the others present in that room might think or how they would receive her actions.  Neither did she do it to poke them, to remind them of their own failings.

She simply loved her Lord.  She could do nothing less.

We are taught how to talk to people about Christ.  We are given phrases, even whole scripts with proofs and logical argument.  We are told to prepare our testimony so that we will know what to say when we have an opportunity.

I am beginning to think that we have got it backward.  Spiritual lockjaw is not an obstacle to be overcome.  It is the result of shallow love. 

I know this because of my love for my husband.  When we walk into a room, I am proud to walk visibly beside him, to hold his hand, to praise him, even to embrace him if the opportunity presents itself.  I do not think twice about this.  It is pure joy. I never measure its cost.

When I measure the cost of my love for Christ, I do so because my love for Him love lacks depth.

I say that Jesus is my Lord, my life, my deepest love.  I really do say this.  But, in the clinch, I don't act like it.

I must come to Christ without artifice, just loving Him out of the richness of our intimacy, an intimacy even deeper than that I share with my husband.  If this love, this intimacy, exists in private, I will not measure it in public.  Its fragrance will fill every room I enter, every situation He brings.  

In the end, I lack not the courage to testify about my God.  I lack a love true enough and deep enough to banish the idea that expressing love for my God takes any courage at all.

Those Who Can't Do

Familiarity breeds contempt.  Hmm.  Some old sayings have merit don't they?  I never considered that this one might have application in the kingdom of God, though.

His Law.  His Word. They become very familiar after awhile.

Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.--Matthew 5:20
I desire to do your will, Oh God.  Your Law is within my heart.--Psalm 40:8

God wants us to keep His Law deep inside, to make it a very part of us: to live it, breathe it, and speak it before we even have to think.  But didn't the Pharisees do that, too?  They spent their days in the Law.  They studied it, interpreted it, taught it.  They wore it, for heaven's sake.  What went wrong?

The Law became familiar, so familiar that it made them contemptible.  

God made the Law as a bulwark, a stronghold to run to.  The Law is God in that it describes the boundlessness of His love and the limits of His pardon.  If we want to find Him on earth, we have only to run to His Law and rest in His Word.

But if we take the law unto ourselves, begin to administrate it from our own flesh, we become Pharisees.

God's law resides only in God.

God proclaims it, God administrates it, God reveals its meaning and the way it is to be understood in practice.  The Law must live in our hearts, but its origin remains in God's.

If we had remained sinless, the Law would have been enough--even one law, the one by which we were not to taste the knowledge of good and evil.  But it didn't work out that way.  God had to expand on the Law so that we could finally begin to understand it.  And then when we still didn't understand, the old teachers expanded it wider and wider, thinking that at some point, they would find the sweet spot between strict enough and good enough that would make the law theirs.  They didn't.


God's Law and His Word remain forever His sovereign property.  We share them only by grace.

The Pharisees did not understand this.  In fact, they, as teachers, may have benefited from another old saying:  Those who can't do, teach.

Transfer by Touch

Then Moses said, "Now show me your glory!"--Exodus 33:18.

Moses had a lot of nerve.  If God showed His face, Moses knew he would die, but he didn't care.  He wanted to see God.  He REALLY wanted to see Him.

And God showed Himself.


God shows Himself to us, too.

We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only, who came from the Father full of grace and truth--John 1:14

Sometimes, I lose sight of God's plan.  He wants us to see Him.  He wants to transfer His glory to us, to make our face glow with His splendor.  Moses asked for it and got it.  Why don't we?

Like God's relationship with Moses, our relationship with Christ is one of gradually assuming His glory.  Moses knew this.  God Himself tells us that He wants this for us.

Father, I want those you have given Me to be where I am and to see My glory, the glory you gave me because you loved me before the creation of the world.--John 17:24.
We, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory...--2Cor 3:18

Christ intended that we share the same glory He got from His Father and He knows how to transfer it.  He passes it on by touch.  We share God's glory by proximity to Christ.  He wants to make us glow with it.  He wants to give us a beautiful piece of Him, His reflection, His likeness.

God is love, but He looks like glory.

Where His Treasure Is

When my mother passed away, she left me her pearl necklace. Heavy, creamy, and perfectly matched, it is beautiful and valuable. It's value, however, does not come from its fine quality or luxurious feel. 

Mother always intended for me to have this necklace; she saved it especially for me, but she didn't particularly want me to think of the pearls when I wear it.  She wanted me to remember her.  The necklace serves as an appropriate inheritance because it served her first as her treasured possession.

God has a treasured possession, too.  God's treasured possession is us.

They will be mine, says the Lord Almighty, on the day when I make up my treasured possession.--Malachi 3:17

In the same way that Mother wanted me to wear and make known what she most valued, God says we are what He most values, and He wants us to be known as His for all the ages.  We are what the Creator of the universe passes down through the generations.  We belong to Him, and He wants to show us off and share us.

Like Mother's pearls, God has worn us next to His very skin.  Some of Him has rubbed off on us and He shows us to the world.  "These," He says, "are mine."

 As God is our pearl of great price, so are we His.

Here is the Church

"Oh, she's a work in progress..."
"God isn't finished with me yet..."
How often have we used familiar words so casually?  They're true enough, but what are we really thinking?

Building evokes grand plans for the future, and God uses them as images for lives of faith intentionally. Putting brick on brick brings hope.  Nailing together fresh 2x4's reminds us that we believe both in beginnings and in completions.  


You will call your walls Salvation and your gates Praise.--Isaiah 60:18

Yes, God builds in us something corporeal and firm, something that He expects to stand forever.  We are His temple, and He says we are to be known as Salvation and Praise.  We do not stand as just any common building.  We rise forth as His temple.

You, also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.--1 Peter 2:4-5

God provides both the blueprint and the building materials: faith, love, forgiveness, redemption...all of it.  He places his wood and brick in us one on another over the foundation of His Son and He expects us to stand.

Remember what goes on in a temple:  repentance, restoration, prayer, praise, sacrifice.  This is what is supposed to go on in us.

Remember that childhood game..."Here's the church, here's the steeple..."?  You and I are the church that stands as God's landmark.  You and I are the steeple that calls people to prayer and worship.  You and I welcome the people that throng to our gates. 

God builds on us through His own perfect will and for His own glory.  Unlock the doors, fling them open.  God lives in us.  Work in progress, indeed.

Anywhere But Here

Some circumstances just stand out in life.  Like signposts punched into the crossroads of days, they mark places we don't forget.

One of the markers in my life came from my sweet stepmother Maggie.  While my father suffered from Alzheimer's, getting progressively sicker and more difficult and unpredictable, she served him patiently and with almost seamless love.  It cost her, and she grew thin from it, but somehow, the weariness rarely showed on her face.  She smiled and comforted with hardly any visible personal distress.

One day, when I asked her how she was doing, she took my hands, looked me in the eye, and said, "I don't ever want to be anywhere but here."  Years later, I still find that absolutely amazing. It seems like I spend so much of every day's space thinking about somewhere else.

I confess impatience with life.  It's not just that life brings trouble.  It's that life is so often so darned, well, ordinary.  And I am willing to do the mundane, but in the process, I sure expect something significant and enlarging and ALIVE.  But life doesn't work that way.

When the woman saw that the fruit was good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.--Genesis 3:6

Eve had the same problem as I do.

I constantly look here and there for something better than what I have, thinking that life is bigger than what lies right at my feet. But God has already shown me the path of life. He says so.


These are the days of my life.  Right here.  Right now.  Just as they unfold, the beautiful and the mundane.  If I don't live them, waiting for something different,  I will not only miss the grand and lofty, I will miss everything.

These days, every one of them, are gifts from God.  I need to live them, expecting beauty not because of what the days bring, but because of who God is.  The wonder of days, after all, does not come from their own unfolding hours; it comes through God's ordination.  

Days have beauty simply by virtue of their creation by God. That is why I rejoice and am glad in them.

I have come so that they may have LIFE and have it to the full.--John 10:10 (my emphasis)

I do not ever have to wait one more minute for life to begin.  It races by second upon second.  I spend it as I talk or write or love.  I also spend it while I grumble or argue or look around somewhere else.  Life is my Lord's wonderful gift, unwrapping itself with each breath.

Breathe in, breathe out.  Live. Now.

Looking Both Ways, Part 2

As pleasant as memories can be, God does not want us to look behind. God has prepared for us  another vision. Part 1

We are the temple of the living God..."Therefore come out from them and be separate," says the Lord.  Touch no unclean thing and I shall receive you.--2Corinthinans 6:16-17

On the day I first truly understood my sinfulness before God and was broken by it, He set me apart.  On that day, I walked, or more  correctly crawled or crept, into God's throne room  and I return there daily to be refreshed.  As I approach Him, He infuses me with Himself with the intent of separating me from everything and everyone who is not part of Him. 

He means to make me like Him, the way He originally created all men.
This is what He wants me to see.  He not only offers me healing, he offers me holiness.

I must concentrate wholly on God, seeking to please Him, soaking up moments with Him, listening to Him so that I can obey, repenting for my failures before Him.  Where I am preoccupied with other concerns, past or present, I do not let Him take hold.

All the people in my life are important, but not I cannot focus on them.  They are the platform upon which I demonstrate God.  That is why He brings them.  

As I draw near to God, He shows me His character for the purpose of changing mine to resemble Him in the way He originally created me.  My arena in which to accomplish this are the people and circumstances He ordains and, in the process, as I succeed, He is glorified. 

The Lord God not only fills the rearview mirror with His own dear face.  If we are looking, He fills the windshield, too.