Thermometers and Thermostats

What is a person to do?  One group of analysts extols the improvements in society.  Another deplores the conditions and predicts dire consequences.  Clocks are pictorially set as advertisements for doomsday, moving at minutes and seconds before midnight that begins doomsday.  How is the ordinary citizen to know where we really are in society and time dimension?  Wise persons seek to know the alternative for what they have at the moment on the point at hand, because they know if it is from mankind it is in some way faulty and needs another dimension so to gain better insight and balance.  Sometimes a bad point is measured against a bad point so the issue may be worsened, and the followers stray even further from understanding and solutions.  The intellectual and conduct differences among educated persons of good will are often radically separated – perhaps identified as liberal or conservative.  Even so, the involved humanist faults persons of faith for the differences in religion.  Differences come with the territory and the territory is the earth.  We are human beings capable of right and wrong in thought and conduct.  Life is a complex thing and God is a mystery.  That difficult state was made for us by mankind, free in the providence of God.  We are free to be in or out of anything (with consequences) that comes our way.  In that understanding we go to war to preserve our political context, which we believe will protect our individual rights in the agreement to risk our lives from the control of others than our own citizenry.

God follows a similar pattern of logic.  If we give up some of the extension of human freedom for the protection of that freedom, so I must give up some of the freedom of my human birth kingdom (faulty) for the freedom of God’s kingdom (faultless).  It is a spiritual warfare.  Despite all the complexity the matter is straightforward.  Seek me, God says and you will find me.  Put your faith in Christ, and prove that faith with your obedience to the redemptive life, and the essentials are met.  Faith includes trust.  We grew up in trusting the parental generation, partly because we wanted to and partly because there seems to be no alternative.  In the human context that may not turn out well, but in the spiritual context God informs us that we can try him, and he will meet the better context of our lives in the development of life itself.  In sincerity the person discovers that trust proves to be fulfilled.  It has become so strong for me that if someone were able to prove to me that my Christian faith is misplaced, I would continue to believe it and live by it.  It has become so fulfilling for me, after more than seventy years of life as a Christian, that I would not be able to give it up.  I would presume that whatever God there may be would accept my trust in the only God of the universe and would accept me for whatever is hereafter. Christ has been more than fair.

What was surrendered now seems like refuse to me, as it did to the Apostle Paul: I count everything sheer loss, because all is far outweighed by the gain of knowing Christ Jesus, for whose sake I did in fact lose everything.  I count it as so much garbage (dung) for the sake of gaining Christ and finding myself incorporate in Him. . . . Agree together, my friends, to follow my example.  You have us for a model, watch those whose way of life conforms to it.  (Philippians 3:1-20 NEB)  The Apostle made clear that he is writing for other Christians as well as for himself.  His meaning here is to cast the idea of following Christ in the practical example – the thermostat standard.  All else is thermometer reading.  He has taken the step of freely giving up his private freedom to relate to Christ.  The decision was not totally altruistic.  He cast his motivation in a revealing and magnificent statement, composed in four phrases: That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death (v. 9).  He followed up in the next verse by repeating the resurrection motive.  The meeting of this hope was all persuasive.  In short, he had no regret giving up the independent freedom in natural life that would end for a blessed life that would not end.  It became the devout faith (devout wager of Pascal many centuries later).  It became the faith of Jim Elliot, a college classmate of mine, and missionary martyr, who summarized the whole matter in a statement that may be remembered in the story of Church History: He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep for that which he cannot lose.