I am ignorant. This is hard for me to admit. I don’t feel too bad about it though. Because you are ignorant too. If you aren’t offended yet……read on……it gets worse.

Cindy and I have a dog. He is a fabulous dog. Several people have asked, “When you die…….can I have your dog?” We love our dog and I am absolutely sure that he loves us. Here’s the thing……our dog, Jet, is ignorant too. He is even more ignorant than I am. Compared to us, he doesn’t understand very much. He knows our routine. He knows his jobs. He understands 20 or 30 words. He is a Labrador and he tries very hard to please us. But, the simple truth is that he operates on an entirely different intellectual plane than we do. In a way…….he is childlike. We sent him to obedience school where he learned about authority. Cindy and I are in charge. He has to do what we say. He doesn’t get to pass judgement on our decisions. He trusts that we will care for him, feed him, and shelter him. When we go for a walk, he follows our lead. He doesn’t drag us down the road because he respects our authority. He trusts that we know better than he does where we are going……..where he is going.

If you think about it, Jet is a metaphor for you and me…..in our relationship with God. We don’t have a clue about God’s long range plan. God does things with us and to us. Some of them we like……others, not so much. But, we must recognize that we are ignorant, we are powerless, and we have very little authority. Those things belong to God.

I see a lot of people making plans, building empires, telling us all how it is going to be. But, the simple truth is that we are like dogs on a leash. Our handler, God, is taking us along on his long term odyssey. If we are going where God is going, there is harmony. Everything is OK. But many of us, possibly most of us, are going somewhere other than where God is going. We are like the dog you see trying to drag his owner down the street. And that is a formula for chaos. That is the source of the growing chaos in our culture.

So, the lesson is this:

Accept your ignorance.
Accept your limited power.
Accept your limited authority.
Ascribe that knowledge, power, and authority to God…..where it belongs

Learn to live……to thrive……on your leash.

Heel.

Because the guy holding the leash loves you, is not ignorant, and is going somewhere very good.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Matthew 28: 18, ESV

I form light and create darkness;
I make well-being and create calamity;
I am the Lord, who does all these things.

God, Isaiah 45: 7, ESV

“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him,
a pot among earthen pots!
Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’
or ‘Your work has no handles’?

God, Isaiah 45: 9, ESV

“freedom from pride or arrogance: the quality or state of being humble”.

Humility is the opposite of hubris.

In practice, humility is the art of accurately understanding your importance, your power, and your place in the grand scheme of things. It is knowing and respecting your position in the hierarchy of the universe.

I once heard a story, possibly apocryphal, about Charles De Gaul. After the war, someone passed him on the street and said, “Beautiful Day!”. De Gaul replied, “Thank you”.

Humility is not something that we, as humans, tend to do well. It is in our nature to overrate our power and our importance. We do this both individually and corporately. Usually, the consequences are manageable. We just come off as pompous and pushy. Sometimes, however, the consequences are more dire. Picture the traffic stop where the driver says to the officer…..”Do you know who I am?” This rarely ends well.

I once heard an interview with Robert Dinero. When asked if he believed in God, he replied, “All I can say is that when I meet him…….he’s got some explaining to do.”

The problem is that, at our core, we believe that we, mankind, are the top of the ladder, the apex life form. This takes two forms. The less common form is to deny that there is any higher power. This is the path of the true atheist and it is, at least, intellectually honest. The more common form is to believe that we get to pass judgment on the activities of God. At best, this is intellectually dishonest.

First, let me clarify something. We are not the apex life form. God is. He is in charge……of everything. He either instigates or allows everything that happens in our world…….both the things we call good and the things we call bad. Read Job if you disagree. This is great when good things happen. We thank him when our lottery ticket wins. It becomes a problem when bad things happen……..someone we love dies…..we get cancer. Then we deny God…..we get mad at God. Or we blame it on someone or something else…..free will, Satan, or bad luck. We do these things because we firmly believe that we get to pass judgment on God’s activities. We get to decide whether we approve or disapprove of God’s work. We get to decide if what God did was good or bad. We get to pass judgment on God. We decide if he made a mistake. We believe this idea because, in practice, we do not accept the fact that we are below God on the ladder of authority. In a word……we lack humility.

If we are truly practicing humility, if we truly recognize God’s sovereignty, when we experience something that we don’t like, we say that a bad thing happened, but we recognize God’s ultimate authority, control, and responsibility, and then we do the hardest thing that we are called on to do. We trust God. We trust in his love and in his promise to take care of us…….in the long run. Because God promises, for those who love him, that everything will be OK…….in the end.

If everything is not OK now……then this isn’t the end.

Humility demands trust, trust grows into faith, and faith is the path to paradise……where everything is OK

It is very hard to practice Christianity honestly without humility……..and that is why so many of us struggle.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8, ESV

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

God, 2 Chronicles 7:14, ESV

And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus, Matthew 18:2-4, ESV

Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair.

John 12:3, ESV

I have granddaughters………four of ’em. And I love them to death. Cindy and I recently took two of them out to dinner……..a very expensive dinner at a very nice rooftop restaurant with a stunning view of downtown Cincinnati. They spent the evening glued to their cell phones…….occasionally responding to a question with a monosyllable. I wanted to tell them that the people sitting in front of them were far more important than whatever was going on…….on their phones…….. that their relationship with Cindy and with me was far more valuable than their relationship with whatever app was running on their phone. But, I didn’t. I think that I realized that that battle had already been lost. I suspect that my experience is pretty common. Cindy and I will be gone in a decade or so……..and I suspect that they will not remember much about us.

I will keep trying to engage. I will keep driving a couple of hours to watch their games. I will keep giving……. that is what grandparents do. But, it occurs to me that they have a stronger relationship with their machines than they do with me. This loss of relationship causes me some pain…….but that really isn’t the point. The big problem is that forgoing a relationship with Cindy and me severely diminishes the quality of their lives. And they don’t seem to recognize this. The phone occupies them……but really doesn’t give them much in return. It is an empty promise. Does this sound familiar?

I come back to one of the great truths of life.

“If you want to have a friend………be a friend”.

And that brings me to the point of this post. How much effort do we put into the most important relationship in our world………our relationship with our creator……..our father…….Abba? On the other hand…..how much of our time do we invest in activities……..relationships……like our cell phones…..that give us very little in return……..that promise us nothing in the long run?

I propose a metric to answer this question:

How much time each day do you spend interacting with an app on your phone that does not have a human being on the other end. Compare this with the amount of time that you spend in prayer…….in conversation with God……in reading the Bible…….in spreading the good news.

Pretty convicting isn’t it?

Maybe it’s time to start moving the needle a bit. I’m not saying that you should toss your cell phone……and all of those amazing apps. But, maybe you can spend a little more effort on your relationship with your father. Maybe you can say a prayer of praise and thanks………just before you fire up “candy crush”.

I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than to finally meet Jesus…….and he looks at me and says, “I don’t know you……..go away”. There is no app on my phone that will save me. Only the relationship with God that I have spent years nurturing can do that.

On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Jesus, Matthew 7:22-23, ESV

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Moses, Deuteronomy 6:5, ESV

First……a few definitions:

Impossible:  

Something that just cannot happen……it violates the rules of science and current norms of behaviour.

In A.D. 30 these things were impossible:

Air travel

Circumnavigation

Magnetism

Space flight

Nuclear energy

Telephones

Democratic government

Death:  

Heart and lung function cease>anoxia>cellular death>cell rupture and clotting of blood vessels. The brain is the first thing to go. These changes are irreversible. Reanimation…….resurrection of someone dead for 3 days is physically impossible.

Resurrection:

A person is stone cold dead, perhaps beginning to rot. Then, they re-animate and become fully functionally alive.

This leads to a conundrum.

Jesus was crucified (it’s in contemporaneous historical accounts)

He suffered fatal wounds that were not survivable. For three days, he lay in a tomb without modern medical care.

After three days he was walking around, talking and eating. Hundreds of witnesses saw him……at least 11 apostles were gruesomely martyred because they refused to recant.

These three things cannot exist together…….and yet they happened……..they were documented. How can this be?

Remember the riddle of the father, the son, and the fatal accident? The lesson of the riddle is this:  When you follow a bulletproof chain of logic from a set of facts to an impossible conclusion……..it is generally because you made a bad assumption.

Bad assumptions are things that we accept and believe…….that are not true. What are they?:

Science is complete, it fully explains everything. If science cannot explain it……it isn’t real. It isn’t possible.

If you cannot see, touch, and analyse something……it is not real.

Secular humanism is the belief system…….some would say religion…..that flows from these assumptions. It says that we are the apex life form……we are in charge. So, we make up the definitions that prove us to be right. If a man wants to hang out in a women’s locker room…….he just has to define himself as a woman. We like this power…….we enjoy this power. This is how our culture operates.

BUT
 

There is a duality of reality. There is a physical world and there is a spiritual world. Both are equally real. We operate in the physical realm. God is a spiritual being. God operates primarily in the spiritual realm but also in the physical realm. In the physical realm, he routinely does things that are impossible:

Creation in 7 days

The flood and Noah’s ark

Resurrection of the dead

Jonah and the whale

The contents of any Catholic saint’s resume

 
As a matter of fact……an entity that routinely does physically impossible things..…… is a good working definition of God.

As it turns out, the fact that the resurrection is impossible is critical, because it underscores the duality of reality. It underscores the false assumptions that undergird secular humanism. In fact, the only defense that secular humanism has to offer……..is to deny the resurrection.

The resurrection is the single most important event in human history. It is important precisely because it is impossible. The fact that it is impossible proves that the rules of our physical world are incomplete in some cases…….and flat out wrong in others.

Imagine that a guy in a white robe approaches you on the street and says that he is God and that you need to follow him, obey him, and worship him. You ask “why?” He says “because I talked myself out of a speeding ticket, because I mowed my lawn, because I started a successful business and because I was elected to public office”. It is not likely that you would buy in to his proposition,  because all of this stuff is possible. You and I could do all of these things. But……what if he did the impossible?

I follow Jesus……..not in spite of the fact that the resurrection is impossible……..but precisely because the ressurection is impossible.
 

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Matthew 19: 25-26, ESV

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble…….it’s what you know for certain…….that just ain’t so.

Will Rogers

My wife and I raised 3 boys. They were a little “rough”. She often said to me, “rules without relationship lead to rebellion”. I was pretty good on rules…….maybe 8 out of 10……..relationship…….not so much……..maybe 4 out of 10. And we reaped a bit of rebellion. If you are beginning a family, you should write this down and read it every day. This is one of the great truths of parenting.

It is also one of the great rules of human nature…….and of the Bible.

God’s idea…….his plan A……..was the garden of Eden. It was a place of perfection. In Eden, God and man lived together in a close relationship……..they talked face to face regularly. They walked together. Relationship was the key to Eden. Rules were secondary. In fact, there were only three: tend the garden, name the animals, and don’t eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then along came the serpent. He, Eve, and Adam wrecked it all. God ended Eden and moved on.

God’s plan B……..was an endless list of rules many of which did not…….and still don’t make sense to us. I suspect that they were never intended to. God spoke to Moses……a lot……and to many prophets a little. But, as far as the ordinary man was concerned…….not so much. God lived in the inner room of the temple which only the high priest could enter. In the post Eden Old Testament, rules were the emphasis……..relationship was a minor bit player. And the Jewish people failed over and over. They were punished over and over. To say that the rules didn’t work would be an historic understatement.

And then came Jesus.

For three years mankind experienced the most intimate relationship with God that we had ever known. He taught us, walked with us, ate with us……..even washed our feet. And then he left. After his death he was replaced by the holy spirit. And that is where we are today. The holy spirit is quieter than Jesus was during his three year ministry and less immediate than God was in Eden. The holy spirit is easy to ignore……easy to dismiss. We have to study and seek the holy spirit. We have to pursue it…….we have to reach out. Many of us don’t even try.

Here’s the thing. God’s blessings come with relationship. God’s withdrawal………even punishment follows rebellion. The best times in human history correspond to the times of relationship. On the flip side, during times of little relationship, as a culture, we always slip into rebellion. And we suffer the consequences. Looking at our culture during my lifetime……I can see the truth of this.

So…….what is the lesson?

We must study and seek the holy spirit. We must build a relationship with God the Father, Jesus the son, and also with the holy spirit. If we can do so individually and also as a culture, we can avoid rebellion and tap into God’s blessing.

Unfortunately, our culture has other ideas. The facts show that we are slipping away from relationship and drifting into rebellion. This will ultimately lead to the withdrawal of God’s blessing……..and the introduction of his punishment.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

Jesus, Revelation 3:20, ESV

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

Jesus, John 15:5, ESV

He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:10-13, ESV

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

God, 2 Chronicles, 7:14, ESV