Tears of the Oppressed

"I observed all the oppression that takes place in our world. I saw the tears of the oppressed, with no one to comfort them. The oppressors have great power and the victims are helpless. So I concluded that the dead are better off than the living. And most fortunate of all are those who were never born. For they have never seen all the evil that is done in our world."

This is Solomon talking at the beginning of Ecclesiastes chapter four. After I read this I sit and wonder what it is that Solomon had seen and what it is that Solomon had experienced that would lead him to saying this. I just can't believe it because Solomon is the king, he's at the top, he couldn't have it better, yet he's sitting there saying that it's better to be dead than living in this world! I am left completely speechless because I wonder how many of us have felt the same way before.

This reminds me of his father, David. David was called a "man after God's own heart." He was also the king. I mean, the KING! I don't know if I can stretch that out enough. THE KING! This guy was at the top, but look at what he writes in Psalm 6:

"I am worn out from sobbing.
Every night tears drench my bed;
my pillow is wet from weeping.
My vision is blurred by grief;
my eyes are worn out because of all my enemies."

Does this sound like the king to you? I mean, I guess he could be upset about a battle earlier that day. Apparently he has enemies that are bothering him, but something that would get him this upset... This guy is the king, he's on top, but his heart has sunk low, his bed is dripping with tears, and his eyes can't even see because of how distraught he is. Do you ever spend nights like this?

This makes me think of yet another guy who is king and he just breaks down in grief and despair. This takes place in Matthew 26:

"Then Jesus brought them to an olive garden called Gethsemane, and he said, "Sit here while I go on ahead to pray." He took Peter and Zebedee's two sons, James and John, and he began to be filled with anguish and deep distress. He told them, "My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and watch with me." He went on a little farther and fell face down on the ground, praying, "My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will, not mine.""

Personally, I think this part was harder for Jesus than actually being on the cross. In the Gospel of Luke it says that "he was in such agony of spirit that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood." Clearly the hardest thing Jesus went through was on the cross when God had to forsake him and all the sin he was taking on, but I think ranking right up there after it would be this scene right here. Jesus is in this garden filled with grief at what he knows he's about to go through. Jesus decides to pull some of his best friends off the the side to pray with him and then he falls face down to the ground to pray.

Does this seem right? Jesus, who is God in the flesh, so distraught and upset? Is this possible? Jesus is king of all creation and he is seen here crying drops of blood. He is seen here filled with so much grief and so much anguish.

Jesus is experiencing so much pain, it makes me wonder why we doubt that he could understand what we're going through down here. It makes me wonder why we could doubt his knowledge of "all the evil that is done in our world." The truth is, if you are feeling oppressed there is someone to comfort you, for Jesus has gone through the very same thing. David who's pillow was soaked with his tears of grief ends his Psalm with these words,

"The Lord has heard my crying.
The Lord has heard my plea;
The Lord will answer my prayer."

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Quotations taken from: Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, Psalm 6:6-7, 8-9, Matthew 26:36-39, Luke 22:44

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Free Slaves

Last week was Spring Break, so it's been a little while since our last lesson. Just a small review: We left off in Ecclesiastes 3 where Solomon says that people should just enjoy themselves, but that we should watch what we do because we will have to answer to God. Then I mentioned in Romans where it talks about the change that takes place within us after coming to God. This lesson is going to center around that change and a common misconception we can get.

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Under the new testament we are forgiven. You and I both know that God's grace is enough to save us, enough to cover all our sins, and that Jesus' sacrifice was enough. Because of this knowledge that we've been saved it seems like Solomon's conclusion of "have a good time" is a great one to come to. This is where that passage in Romans comes into play because it's there that God tells us that this way of living is completely wrong.

Because of this God doesn't seem very appealing to us sometimes. Sometimes letting Christ into our lives can seem more like adopting a list of rules that we suddenly have to live by. It seems like forming a relationship with God might be more like chaining ourselves down because we won't be able to do all the things we could before. Becoming a Christian seems more like becoming a slave.

This is funny to me because six times in the new testament various authors of the epistles call themselves slaves. Whether it be a "slave of Christ" or "slave of Jesus" or "slave of God," they refer to themselves as slaves, which seems ridiculous because I thought God was offering us freedom. I've been told that God was setting us free. Scripture says time and time again that Christ and the Holy Spirit set us free, but from what?

It isn't the freedom to go out and do all these sinful things in the world which we gain, it's a freedom from those things. Have you ever noticed that things of this world tend to tie us down? That there is a gravity which bonds our feet to the ground? It isn't the ability to commit these things that we need, it's the ability to sustain from them. The sinful nature within us is always weighing us and pulling us down so that we become slaves to it. It's in Romans 6 where it says, "Our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For When we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin."

The truth is, we're always going to be slaves to something. Because if it is something outside of ourselves that gives us value, that gives us meaning, that tells us who we are, then we will always devote ourselves to that thing. That thing, whatever it is, will become our master and we slaves to it. In 1 Corinthians it says, "Are you a slave? Don't let that worry you--but if you get a chance to be free, take it. And remember, if you were a slave when the Lord called you, the Lord has now set you free from the awful power of sin. And if you were free when the Lord called you, you are now a slave of Christ. God purchased you at a high price. Don't be enslaved by the world."

So really, it's your choice. What do you want to be a slave to? Do you want to live in sin and let the gravity of this world keep you in chains? Or do you want God's freedom from that? Will you devote yourself to God and let Him become your graceful and loving Master? It's your choice. And I couldn't say it any better than Peter does:

"You are not slaves; you are free. But your freedom is not an excuse to do evil. You are free to live as God's slaves."

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Quotations from: Romans 6:6-7, 1 Corinthians 7:21-23, 1 Peter 2:16 NLT

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Light of Eternity

"My brilliant friend Mitch says that light, unlike anything else in the universe, is not affected by time. Light, he says, exists outside of time. He tells me it has something to do with how fast it travels and that it is eternal." -Blue Like Jazz

"The faster you move, physicists have found, the less you experience time. And if you move at the speed of light, you will never age; you are outside of time; you are an eternal creature. But ... you and I, made from molecules, cannot travel at the speed of light and cannot escape time, at least not with a body." -Through Painted Deserts

"There are bodies in the heavens, and there are bodies on earth. The glory of the heavenly bodies is different from the beauty of the earthly bodies. The sun has one kind of glory, while the moon and stars each have another kind." -1 Corinthians

I don't know if you're making the connection between all these quotations. The idea that light, this thing from the sun, is beyond the grasp of time is really intriguing to me. It seems like if traveling the speed of light could make us live forever many many people would attempt it, but as it says our bodies are made of molecules therefore depriving us of our ability to be eternal. But this sparked another idea in my mind. "Someday we won't have these bodies anymore, the Bible says that very thing!" It says that "when we die and leave these bodies we will have a home in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands."

So, with all this in mind I consider the fact that God has made with his very hands a body for me to reside in all of eternity. This concept is filling my mind and I cannot contain it. Eternity is something I cannot even begin to fathom. "Time has pressed you and me into a book, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was." God has created us for eternity, but because of the brevity of our life we cannot understand it.

Ecclesiastes three tells us that "God has made everything beautiful for its own time." and that "He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end." Because we cannot understand all that God has in store for us. Solomon concludes that "there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to enjoy themselves as long as they can."

So, what does this mean? Are we to go out and party all the time? This sure does sound like what Solomon is telling us. He is telling us to enjoy the things that this world offers us while we can. He is telling us to have fun while we're still here. Later in Ecclesiastes he says, "Enjoy every minute of [your life]. Do everything you want to do; take it all in." But then he warns us: "Remember that you must give an account to God for everything you do."

Solomon tells us to enjoy ourselves while we are here on earth, but that we should bear in mind the fact that we hope to spend eternity with God one day. So we should enjoy ourselves but remember the change God made in our hearts when we formed our personal relationship with Him (Romans 6 reminds us that we were buried and have died to sin); we should let God's glory shine through us by the things that we choose to do.

"If there isn't some glory being shone through us by somebody who has authority, we'll be dead inside, like a little light will go out and our souls will feel dark, like nothing can grow there ... What if, in the same way the sun feeds plants, God's glory gives us life?"

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Quotations taken from: Blue Like Jazz* p.13, Through Painted Deserts* pp. xi, 60, 1 Corinthians 15:40-41, 2 Corinthians 5:1, Ecclesiastes 3:11,12, 11:9, Searching For God Knows What* p.108 --- *by Donald Miller

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Personal

It seems like we have a problem. Because if formulas and three-step processes don't lead to God, then that means that what we need is a relationship, something personal.

Forming really personal relationships seems to be really hard for a lot of people to do. First of all its hard to find the right people, I know that has been a hard thing for me ever since the "Resolutions" series. But, secondly actually opening up to someone and forming that trust bond with one another is hard to do.

I know a girl who told me the other day, "I only let people know me a little bit. Everyone knows some parts of me, but no one knows everything." It's like she's scared. Because she's doing this she feels safe, because no one knows her completely. It seems like she's hiding, but in a sense we all are. Whenever I went into driver's ed for the first time there was a line of chairs that everyone sat in to wait to go into the classroom. I walked up to the chairs to sit and I noticed that everyone was sitting in every other seat so as not to be sitting next to someone they don't know. We all have ways of hiding in public social situations. We just latch our iPod to our ears and we're officially cut-off from any awkward social situation that would force us to let someone into our personal life, to let someone get to know more about us.

The idea that God wants to get to know us personally is a scary thought. There's this psalm that makes me see God's longing to know us as something much more as a love story. It reminds me of when Donald Miller says that "The God of the Bible seemed to be brokenhearted over the separation in our relationship and downright obsessed with mending the tear." The psalm I mentioned is Psalm 139, it speaks of God as though He is always thinking about us, like a girl with a crush who's obsessed with getting to know everything about that guy. The psalm says:

"How precious your thoughts about me, O God!
They are innumerable!
I can't even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand!
And when I wake up in the morning,
you are still with me!"

God is in love with us and He spends so much time thinking about us and wanting to know us. It's not like He doesn't know us, because just before saying that in the psalm it says:

"You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed."

Clearly God knows us. He can just take out His book and look up what has happened and even what's about to happen in our lives. But God wants us to be personally involved with Him. Here's what Donald Miller has to say:

"I realized that. Jesus was always, and I mean always, talking about love, about people, about relationship, and He never once broke anything into steps or formulas. What if, because we were constantly trying to dissect His message we were missing a blatant invitation? I began to wonder if becoming a Christian did not work more like falling in love than agreeing with a list of true principles ... It seems like something else has to take place in the heart for somebody to to become a believer, for somebody to understand the gospel of Jesus. It began to seem like more than just a cerebral exercise. What if the gospel of Jesus was an invitation to know God?

Now I have to tell you, all of this frightened me a bit because I had always assumed a kind of anonymity with God. When I saw myself in heaven, I didn't imagine sitting at the right hand of God, as the Scripture says, but I pictured myself off behind some mountain range doing some fishing and writing a good detective novel. But if the gospel of Jesus is relational; that is, if our brokenness will be fixed, not by our understanding of theology, but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only heaven knows. Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's with feet like trees and a voice like a rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation. It's exciting if you think about it. Earthly love, I mean the stuff I was trying to get by sounding smart, is temporal and slight so that it has to be given again and again in order for us to feel any sense of security; but God's love, God's voice and presence, would instill our souls with such affirmation we would need nothing more and would cause us to love other people so much we would be willing to die for them."

It says in Romans that "each of us will have to give a personal account to God." That someday each of us will personally have to open up to God and explain what was going on in our lives, even though He already knows. Someday we will have to open up to God. Why not today? Why not stop being scared and hiding behind the headphones of your iPod and start opening up and become personal.

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Quotations taken from: Psalm 139:17-18,16, "Searching For God Knows What" by Donald Miller pgs 44, 46-47, and Romans 14:12

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Cliché

Click the following to read chapter one of "Searching For God Knows What" before reading the lesson: http://www.donaldmillerwords.com/pdf/searchingchapterone.pdf

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In this search of something more, something that will truly satisfy us and give us meaning, it seems like the only answer is a relationship with God. So, how do we form a relationship with Him?

You might be thinking, "I have a good relationship with God, I go to church every Sunday!" You and me both know that there is so much more than that to a relationship. But this isn't what I want to address. I'm talking about the box of formulas that Christianity has been shoved into. It seems like our faith has become a list of tasks that we have to complete. It turns out there is nothing further from the truth.

Donald Miller spends the first chapter of his book talking about a Christian writer's seminar he attended. While he was there the seminar instructor shares the formula to a Christian book. She says that there needs to be a story of a deep misery, then there needs to be a resolution in which the character discovers happiness and joy through God, the third step is to give a three or four step process on how that character reached God. Don couldn't believe that this lady was talking about fitting the Gospel of Jesus into a formula involving three or four steps. He says, "My friend at the Bible college believes the qualities that improve a person's life are relational, relational to God and to the folks around us ... So it made me realize that either God didn't know about the formulas, or the formulas weren't able to change a person's heart."

Think about how many formulaic things you do in attempts to come closer to God. Maybe you listen to Christian music, the kind that all has the same structure and chord progression of G, D, E minor, C. Maybe it's worship on Sunday where the song leader gets up and shouts a number to the congregation and everyone opens up and blankly stares at the hymn book in song. Maybe you try reading the Bible in search of some sort of three or four step process to find God.

Me and some friends even noticed at Soul Link that there was a formula for the perfect Christian skit. They all consisted of a bunch of completely random scenes and actions that don't seem to be connected to each other at all, and then at the very end it's all tied up with one short simple line about God. Yes, it's a good idea and it works very well, but at some point it becomes a cliché, the same thing that our relationship with God becomes after a search for formulas to reach Him.

What we need to do is seek God, not this idol we've made that responds to clichéd formulas and three-step processes that turn misery into joy.

"I know that people have actually gone from misery to happiness, but they didn't do it by walking through three steps; they did it because they had a certain set of parents and heard a certain song and knew somebody who had a certain experience and saw some movie, read some book, had something happen to them like a car wreck or a trip to Seattle. Then they called on God, and a week later read something in a magazine or met a girl in Wichita, and when all this had happened they had an epiphany, and somebody may have helped them fulfill what this epiphany made them feel, and several years later they rationalized this mystic experience with three steps, then they told the three steps to us in a book. I'm not saying they weren't trying to be helpful; I bring this up only because life is complex, and the idea that you can break it down or fix it in a few steps is rather silly.

The truth is there are a million steps, and we don't even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras, or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy, and His love."

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Quotations taken from: "Searching for God Knows What" by Donald Miller pgs 12 and 14-15

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