The Midnight Church

As we come to the end of another year, many people take some time out to analyse their lives. Every sensible man takes a moment, at least, to look back on what they have done, what they didn't do, what they accomplished, what they didn't, how many new year resolutions they managed to keep, what good they did , what bad etc etc. For the Christian it is a time of thankfulness, to be grateful to God, most importantly because they are still breathing, and for His faithfulness to them during the year. Sadly, we as Christians, often neglect to fully appreciate our dependence on God, not only for fulfilling our materials needs, but also for sustaining our spiritual life. We might never forget to thank for his blessing, but we do often forget to thank God for the fact that, if we are still clean in a dirty world, its because of Him, not us. Self-righteousness in the church causes terrible damage. Philip Yancey illustrated the fact very well in an article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY entitled, 'The Midnight Church'. Written back in 1983, I think nothing much has changed in the last twenty five years. Its about time we get the point, we should be looking up to Him, rather than looking down on people.

THE MIDNIGHT CHURCH
by Philip Yancey

Its members consciously lean on each other

I attended a unique "church" recently, one that exists without a denominational headquarters or paid staff and yet attracts millions of committed members. Its name is Alcoholics Anonymous. A friend had invited me during a poignant conversation in which he confessed his problem to me. I'd like you to come with me," he said, "and I think you'll get a glimpse of what the early church must have been like." When I pressed him for details, he simply smiled and said, "Come, You'll see."

At 12 o'clock on a Monday night I entered a ramshackle house that had been used for six other sessions already that day. Acrid clouds of cigarette smoke hung like tear gas in the air. I soon sensed what my friend had meant in comparing A.A. to the early church: a well-known politician and several millionaires were mixing freely with unemployed dropouts and dazed-looking-kids who wore Band Aids to cover needle marks on their arms. The group conveyed obvious warmth, and conversations tended to be intimate and intense: alcoholics can expertly cut through a facade of polite aloofness or feigned strength.

When we went around and introduced ourselves, it went like this: "Hi, I'm Tom, and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." Instantly everyone shouted in unison, like a Greek chorus, "Hi, Tom!" Then Tom, and each person there, shared a personal progress report on his battle with addiction. For many, these fellow members are the only prople in the world who treat them with care and respect, and even a ritual can have profound meaning.

Quaint phrases such as "One day at a time" and "You can do it" decorated the dingy walls of the room. My friend mentioned that those archaisms hint at another similarity to the early church. Most of A.A.'s received wisdom is passed down in the form of oral traditions from its founding members of more than 50 years ago. Nobody much uses A.A. 's up-to-date brochures and public relations pieces. Mainly, they rely on an old book called the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which tells the stories of the early members' lives in stilted, almost King Jamesian prose.

A.A. owns no property, has no headquarters and no consultants and investment counselors jetting across the country. Its founders intentionally built in restrictions to kill off anything that might lead to a bureacracy. They believed their program could work only if kept to its most basic, intimate level: the relentless support of one alcoholic giving his or her life to help another. Yet A.A. has proven so effective that 250 other organizations have sprung up in deliberate mimicry of its program.

There are good historical reasons for the parallels to an early church structure: the Christian founders of A.A. included a conscious commitment to God as a mandatory part of their treatment. The night I attended, everyone in the room repeated the 12 principles, which acknowledge total dependence on God for forgiveness and strength. In the testimonial time , it was jarring at first to hear people use religious terms equally in profanity and in expressing their dependence on God - both with utter sincerity. Agnostic members often first substitute the euphemism "Higher Power," but after a while that seems inane and they revert to "God."

My friend often reflects on what he calls "the Christological question" of A.A. A deeply committed Christian, he has put his intellectual faith in abeyance while struggling with simple survival. The A.A. "church," which has none of Christianity's underlying doctrine and centrality of Christ, keeps him alive. The Christian church seems irrelevant, vapid, and gutless to him. He is not alone, for others in his group tell stories of rejection, judgment, "a guilt trip." A local church is the last place they would stand up and declare, "Hi, I'm Tom, I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." No one would holler back, "Hi, Tom."

My friend admits he will find his way back to the church someday, and he has not abandoned the doctrine. In fact, he says A.A. has resolved for him some of the most troubling paradoxes of the faith - the free will determinism conundrum, for example: How can a person accept full responsibility for actions knowing that family background, the economy, and hormonal imbalance all contribute to to that behavior? A.A. is unequivocal: it requires every alcoholic to admit full and complete responsibility for all behavior. Rationalizations are forbidden. Or take the doctrine of original sin: It will take maybe 10 seconds to convince an A.A. member of that doctrine at which so many balk. A.A. members express the truth every time they introduce themselves. No one is ever allowed to say "I was an alcoholic."

For my friend, immersion in A.A. has meant salvation in the most literal sense. He knows that one slip could - no, will - send him to an earthly death. A.A. members have responded to his calls at 4 A.M., finding him in the eerie brightness of all-night restaurants where he has been sitting for hours at a formica table filling a notebook with the sentence, "God help me make it through the next five minutes." Now he is approaching the one-year anniversary of his last drink - an important milestone by A.A. reckoning. And yet he knows that 50 per cent of those who reach that milestone eventually fall away.

Standing inside A.A. and looking with a curious observer's eye at the local church, my friend wonders about the plinth of undergirding doctrine on which his new "church" rests. Meanwhile I stand inside the local church and looking with a curious observer's eye at A.A., wonder instead why A.A. met his needs when the local church did not. He had attended a progressive church that offered a similar climate to that found in A.A. There too, millionaires mixed with dropouts and members offered acceptance, not judgment. Why was it not enough ? I asked him to name the one quality missing in the local church that was somehow provided by A.A. He stared at his cup of coffee for a long time. Then he said softly one word: dependency.

"None of us can make it on our own - isn't that why Jesus came?" he explained. "Yet most church people give off a self-satisfied air of piety or superiority. I don't sense them consciously leaning on God or each other. An alcoholic who goes to church feels inferior and incomplete."

He sat in silence for a while; then a smile began to crease his face. "It's a funny thing," he said at last.-"What I hate most about myself, my alcoholism, was the one thing God used to bring me back to him. Because of it, I know I can't survive without him. Maybe God is calling us alcoholics to teach the saints what it means to be dependent on him and his community on earth."

What do they think of me?

John Donne penned the words, 'No man is an island, entire of itself'. We are taught that man is a social animal. We have to be around people in order to survive. And what others do, how they interact with us, affects us greatly, even determines our behaviour. Perhaps one of the greatest of all questions we ask ourselves is the question: What do they think of me? What is the opinion of other people about me? Do they like me or not? Do they think I am beautiful or not? Do they thinks I am 'cool' or not? We tend to spend our lifetime trying to 'fit in' the culture around us, we labor to develop an image of ourselves which would be acceptable and appreciated by people around us. We all want people to like us. And we tend to go great lenghts in order to achieve this objective.We make sure our clothes are current fashion, we listen to popular music, we try to keep up with the latest gossip, all beacuse we don't want to be left out of anything.

In the world today, where Christians are considered 'anti-everything', it is quite impossible to fit into the life around us. There are certain things a follower of Christ cannot do, certian things he should not hear or see, certain words he should not speak, certain places he cannot go. Where does he fit in, then? Jesus said, "If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you".(John 15:19,NIV)

Yet,the question still nags me, and I believe it nags us all as human beings; what do they think of me? As a Christian, called out of the world, I still want the world to like me. The opinion of other people around me is extremely important.I still ask, what do they think of me? So what do I do then, do I go on living, saying things like 'I don't care what anybody thinks about me', yet deep down I know that I really do care...
or I can turn to Jesus.... What would He have done? What did he do? No deep meditations required. The scriptures tell us, to my great relief, that Jesus too, asked this question. Three gospel writers, (Matthew, Mark and Luke) record that Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do the crowds say I am?"
They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life."And then he asked them,"But what about you?", "Who do you say I am?" and Peter answered, "The Christ of God." Luke records that, eight days later, Peter, James and John accompany Jesus to a mountain to pray, and they hear a voice from heaven saying 'This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.'

I see an answer to my question in these scriptures. What do they think of me? Jesus starts with the crowds, he gets a mixed response. Jesus doesn't discuss their response, it seems to me he wasn't especially interested in what they had to say, probably because he knew, that for every person that likes you, you'll find a multitude that hates you. And here's lesson 1: Never mind the crowd, you can never please them all. The fact that Jesus repeats the question when asking his disciples goes to show that, he was far more interested in what they had to say. Lesson 2: The opinion of people closest to you is very important. I believe that's because they know you inside out, they see the real you rather than an image the crowd sees. And even if one of them appreciates who you are (like Peter among the disciples), you're on the right track. And finally, consider the voice from heaven. I do not believe Jesus needed to hear that God the Father loved him and was pleased with Him;his disciples needed to hear it. So God made sure that they heard Him clear, and here we learn the most important lesson: Make sure you are pleasing God, and He'll make sure that those around you know well what they should think of you!
Its about time I start asking myself, 'What does God think of me?'.

The Rich and the Famous

Surveys reveal that the top two aims in life of the current generation are, riches and fame. Ask anyone in the street today what his life’s ultimate goal is and you’ll most likely hear the reply ‘I want to be rich so that I can have everything I want, so I can live in comfort, ‘I want to enjoy life’ or ‘I want to be a celebrity, I want to be on TV’.

What about the ordinary Christian, what is his aim in life? If asked, I think most will reply something similar to ‘I want to glorify God through my life, serve others, show God’s love to others ’etc etc.. and these are, in fact, what the true calling of a Christian is. But many times, as a Christian, I find it difficult to resist the temptation to join the quest for riches and fame. It seems as being denied those things on earth is too great a cost for following Christ.

Take fame. Harold Kushner wrote, ‘I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending, that haunts our sleep so much as the fear that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived ’. I believe that this is strikingly true, even though we might not like admitting it. Naturally, we want the world to remember us long after we die; we want it to love and appreciate us while we are here and to miss us when we will be no longer around, for whom we were and what we did. We want the world to acknowledge our greatness, we want to be famous. I think no one wants to die in some obscure corner of the world, where there’s no one to mourn him. In the world today, everyone aspires to take centre-stage, to be paid attention to, to be taken seriously. It is not uncommon in newspapers today, to read stories about teenagers committing suicide when they failed to reach the stardom they aspired for.

And riches. All over the world, people get killed over money. We all would like to live in a little more comfort than we are now. And that ‘a little more’ never gets satisfied. If I just had a little more money so I could just have that, I would be satisfied. But that satisfaction never comes. Many people tell themselves: I don’t want to be filthy rich, I just want to have enough money so that all my needs (and that of my family) are met and I don’t have to look up to anyone else. This too is self-deception; it is extremely difficult to distinguish between needs and wants, especially when you have enough for both.

So, does following Christ mean that I would never become a famous person, I might never be remembered and I would never enjoy all the comforts that money brings? I am convinced that more likely than not, this would be the case. Throughout the Bible and Church history, we rarely find a prosperous saint. God’s kingdom always works in the reverse: the first shall be the last, whosoever wants to be the greatest should become a servant, blessed are the poor, the meek, the oppressed....

Why does God want us to live a life of being ‘unknown’ and poverty? As I thought about this question, I realised that God does not want us to live in poverty, but he does want us to live a life of dependence on Him; and riches and fame more often than not, hinder such dependence. That is why Jesus said, ‘Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and He will give you everything you need’ (Matthew 6:33, NLT). Philip Yancey remarked, ‘People who are rich, successful and beautiful may well go through life relying on their natural gifts. People who lack such natural advantages, hence under-qualified for success in the kingdom of this world, just might turn to God in their time of need. Human beings do not readily admit desperation, when they do the Kingdom of heaven draws near’ (from The Jesus I Never Knew).

I remind myself of these things every time I am tempted to join the race for fame and riches. Riches; God promises us eternal riches in heaven that are not destroyed by moth, rust or thieves. On earth he promises to supply all our needs, and bless everything we have if we just learn to trust Him. And fame; God turns the tables on that as well. Michael Jackson is now mourned but will soon be forgotten, replaced by some other celebrity. But how many fishermen, not intelligent scientists, nor philosophers or great kings, how many ordinary fishermen of the first century have their names written down in history? Only twelve, as far as I know, and all because they were followers of a man called Jesus.

Why Jesus did not shout 'I've had enough of you, you foolish men!'

Reading through the gospels, I was amazed at how patient Jesus had to be, not just in his dealings with the religious leaders and the general public of his time, but also with his hand picked band of twelve disciples. In fact I am of the opinion that they probably tested his patience more than any other group of people. Consider the following examples:

Jesus and and his disciples are travelling in a boat after Jesus has finished a long day of preaching, one of His greatest sermons, the sermon on the Mount. Jesus falls asleep in the boat. A storm arises. Notice, the disciples go wake Jesus and say, 'Teacher do you not care we are drowning?' Jesus gets up and rebukes the storm, the wind ceases and the waters are calm, He then rebukes his disciples: “Why are you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith?”(Mark 4:40). This isn't the first time they have seen Jesus perform a miracle, Luke records Jesus healing five different people within a few days before this event (Luke 5-8).

Another busy day for the disciples (Mark 6). Jesus sends them out to preach, 'And they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick, and healed them'. The disciples are delighted with the new power given to them. They then see Jesus feed five thousand people with tow fishes and five loaves of bread. He then sends his disciples to the other side of the lake to get some rest while he stays behind to pray. Early morning the disciples see Jesus come to the boat walking on the water, they mistake him for a ghost and are terrified. Jesus calms them down and gets into the boat. The are still awe-struck, The Message bible adds ' They were stunned, shaking their heads, wondering what was going on.' Then Mark explains why (7:52): They had failed to understand the miracle of the feeding the five thousand; their hearts were too down to get this one.

The very next chapter of Mark tells of another interesting episode. The religious people complain his disciples don't wash their hands before eating, He answers 'There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man'. When the crowd has left and the disciples are alone with Jesus, they ask him what he meant. Now, Jesus has to put it into plainer words again: "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? 19For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.' (Mark 7:18-23)

In Mark 8, the disciples push him even further. Jesus has just fed another 4000 people with seven loaves of bread. The Pharisees come to test him asking him to show them a sign. Jesus tells his disciples to be careful of the 'yeast' of the Pharisees and Herod. They are in a boat and the disciples have forgotten to bring bread, they have only one loaf. So after a discussion and reasoning among themselves, they come to the absurd conclusion that Jesus must have said this because we have no bread.

Over hearing their conversation Jesus asks them, "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don't you remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?" "Twelve," they replied.
"And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?" They answered, "Seven." He said to them, "Do you still not understand?" (Mark 8: 14-21)

And then, there is the discussion between Jesus and His disciples recorded in John 14. Its Jesus last night before his arrest and crucifixion and he is eating the passover meal with is disciples. Now the disciples have been with him for some three and a half years of his ministry. They have seen sick healed, demons flee, multitudes fed, dead raised, storms silenced and most of all they have heard him teach. Now, after having hinted at it many times before, Jesus clearly tell his disciples about his death and resurrection.

John 14: Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. 2 In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And where I go you know, and the way you know.”5 Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
The Father Revealed 7 “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.” 8 Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” 9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works. 11 Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves.

There are many other examples in the gospels where the disciples refused to believe Jesus, so much so that even after his resurrection, Thomas had to put his finders in his wounds in order to believe. I am sure there must be many other such discussions between Jesus and his disciples that have not been recorded as not everything could be written down. But from what we read, I find it amazing how Jesus dealt with his disciples. Not once do the gospels record that he got irritated, short-tempered and frustrated with his disciples. Not once is it recorded that Jesus was so annoyed with their disbelief that he shouted at them and told them to go away and leave him alone because he was tired of them. Not Once. When I picture myself in this scenario in place of Jesus, I believe my attitude and dealing would have been very different from Jesus', with his disciples. I probably would have given up on them altogether, saying 'they'll never learn anything!'.

So how did Jesus manage to be so patient with his disciples, I wonder. How does he manage to be so patient with me? Why doesn't he ever say 'I've had enough of you!', why is it that His well of patience, grace, mercy, and forgiveness never runs dry?

I believe it has to do with how Jesus saw people. He did not see his disciples as who they were or what they ought to be based on what he wanted them to be like, but rather he saw them as what they will be. Jesus saw beyond the weaknesses of his disciples, he saw that each of them had potential, He knew they would change the world. And that is why it did not bother him that they were far from ideal, that is why he did not place extremely high expectations on them and he wasn't disappointed when they failed Him. Jesus saw them as masterpieces in the making, clay in the potter's hand; they were under construction and God was at work. And Jesus also knew that any good work of art takes time to complete.

Our behaviour would be a lot more different if we treated everybody the same way God treats us: clay in the potter's hand, masterpieces in the making. If we could imagine what the person we don't like would look like when God's finished working on him, it would give us the patience to bear him for now. God did the same for me. Romans 5:8 says, 'But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us'.

Jeff Lucas makes the point very well: 'Perhaps it's as well to know that God is not waiting for me to be complete before loving me. He considers me his workmanship: scaffolding, broken tiles, wonky bricks and all. ........The people around you, who have the capacity to make you scream, should probably be wearing a red triangular road sign around their necks-as should we all who are his apprentices. 'Take care-God at work' ' (from lucas on life)

If pride is the greatest sin, what do I do about it?

One of the laws of nature is that to stop a force an equal and opposite force is required. I am of the opinion that similarly in the Spiritual World, the greatest sin could be defeated only with the greatest virtue. So what is the greatest virtue? The greatest virtue is what we Christians call 'the greatest commandment'. When a lawyer asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, Jesus replied, ''Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.... 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these"(Mark 12:30, 31). Jesus went on to say that all other commandments are based on these two. What does love have to do with pride, one might ask. Isn't the opposite of pride humility or meekness? The Bible tells us that humility is one of the qualities of Love. The apostle Paul's wonderful exposition of Love in his letter to the Corinthians is one of the most famous passages of the Bible. 1-Corinthians 13:4-7 says: 'Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.(NIV)' The Message put it like this:
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut, Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

So how does love manage to keep us away from pride or a 'swelled head'? I believe the answers simply lies in the fact that true Love is selfless. It 'isn't always "me first," ' and it is never self-seeking. The moment we begin to realise that its not all about me, we can finally begin to move in the right direction. As always, the World has distorted God's principles into thinking that we are to love ourselves before we can love others. It teaches us to feel good or work towards feeling good about ourselves: our body, our appearance, our lifestyle; never mind the dying neighbour. Any Internet search would reveal thousands of books that fit into self-help, self awareness, and self-motivation categories. The greater we love ourselves and the harder we try to make ourselves happy, the more miserable we feel (take the like of any celebrity). It is only by giving love to others can we receive Love ourselves. and it is only by loving others more than we love ourselves can we keep away from falling into the dark pit of pride. Jesus said 'There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends' and he showed the greatest Love by laying down His life for us. Though we may never reach this greatest degree of love, but we do move a step closer every time we lay just a small part of our lives (a few hours perhaps) into loving and caring for someone as much as we love and take care of ourselves.

The Greatest Sin

So what is the greatest sin? Most Christians agree that greatest sin is the first sin, the root of all evil: Pride. That is where sin entered into the world, in fact it defined sin for the first time.

Lucifer the arch-angel, had the desire to take what wasn’t his: the glory of God. In fact, he wanted be god. and so he rebelled against God, was defeated and cast out of heaven. ( Regarding Lucifer God says in Ezekial 28:17, ‘Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth’)

Ever since, every sin has pride at it’s root: the desire to be god. After Lucifer’s downfall, it was pride that caused Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, and from then on has caused mankind to fall into sin. Pride causes one to think highly of himself, to consider himself better than everyone else, as a result of which he begins to think that he should have control of everyone and everything; he wants to be god; god of others, god of himself and god of life itself. And this is where he is ruined, when a man becomes so disillusioned with himself that he can’t even see his true self, there is not much hope he can see anything else. Then ‘it’s all about me’ becomes his purpose in life. I once heard Ravi Zacharias say, ‘do you know what song they’ll be singing in hell? they’ll be singing I did it my way!’ .

It is a scary thought to think about what the Bible says regarding pride. It says: God fights against the proud. (This fact is so important it is mentioned three separate times in scripture: Proverbs 3:34, James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5, )Imagine God, at war with you. You don’t stand a chance. The Bible says ‘if God is for us, who can be against us?’ (Romans 8:31). I believe the vice versa also holds true. If the Almighty God turns against you, there isn’t much hope of anything in your favour. You’ll lose every single time. Pride is that serious a sin. (Here are a few examples: ‘The LORD tears down the proud man's house’ Proverbs 15:25, ‘ The LORD preserves the faithful, but the proud he pays back in full’ Psalm 31:23 (NIV))

But the problem is, whether we admit it or not, we all struggle with pride. It is one of the things we inherit in our sinful nature. But through God’s grace and His son, Jesus Christ, we get a new nature. Only then can we even begin to tread the long and hard path that of humility. Yet even as Christians, we tend to fall into pride every now and then, most of the time without realizing it. That is why this sin is more dangerous than any other, we can spot pride in another in an instant, yet fail to see it ourselves. When I needed help in this area of Christian life, God used C S Lewis to teach me. It is some of the best Christian writing on the subject, you will ever read. I’ll let him take over now.

The Great Sin.
From Mere Christianity by C S Lewis

I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
Does this seem to you exaggerated? If so, think it over. I pointed out a moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others. In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, 'How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?' The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive - is competitive by its very nature - while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. The sexual impulse may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. But that is only by accident; they might just as likely have wanted two different girls. But a proud man will take your girl from you, not because he wants her, but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than you. Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.
Take it with money. Greed will certainly make a man want money, for the sake of a better house, better holidays, better things to eat and drink. But only up to a point. What is it that makes a man with œ10,000 a year anxious to get œ20,000 a year? It is not the greed for more pleasure. œ10,000 will give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy. It is Pride - the wish to be richer than some other rich man, and (still more) the wish for power. For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride. What is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation go on and on, demanding more and more? Pride again. Pride is competitive by its very nature: that is why it goes on and on. If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison - you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity - that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride - just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
Before leaving this subject I must guard against some possible misunderstandings:
(1) Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says 'Well done,' are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased him; all is well,' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.' The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of Pride which shows most on the surface, is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a child-like and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human. The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks. But the Proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says 'Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl at her first dance? No, I am an integrated, adult personality. All I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals - or my artistic conscience - or the traditions of my family - or, in a word, because I'm That Kind of Chap. If the mob like it, let them. They're nothing to me.' In this way real thorough-going pride may act as a check on vanity; for, as I said a moment ago, the devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity.
(2) We say in English that a man is 'proud' of his son, or his father, or his school, or regiment, and it may be asked whether 'pride' in this sense is a sin. I think it depends on what, exactly, we mean by 'proud of'. Very often, in such sentences, the phrase 'is proud of' means 'has a warm-hearted admiration for'. Such an admiration is, of course, very far from being a sin. But it might, perhaps, mean that the person in question gives himself airs on the ground of his distinguished father, or because he belongs to a famous regiment. This would, clearly, be a fault; but even then, it would be better than being proud simply of himself. To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
(3) We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His own dignity - as if God Himself was proud. He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble - delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are. I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress off - getting rid of the false self, with all its 'Look at me' and 'Aren't I a good boy?' and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.
(4) Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

(The excerpt from CS Lewis’ writing was taken from http://www.btinternet.com/~a.ghinn/greatsin.htm)

What Jesus treaded on….

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) a famous 20th century  Irish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, wrote these words:

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

I don’t know what the literary interpretation of this poem is, but as I read these lines a picture came to my mind all of a sudden, the scene described in all four gospels, referred to as ‘The Triumphal Entry’ and celebrated commonly as Palm Sunday.

Luke describes the scene in chapter 19 (NKJV):

²⁸ When He had said this, He went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. ²⁹ And it came to pass, when He drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mountain called Olivet, that He sent two of His disciples, ³⁰ saying, “Go into the village opposite you, where as you enter you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Loose it and bring it here. ³¹ And if anyone asks you, ‘Why are you loosing it?’ thus you shall say to him, ‘Because the Lord has need of it.’”
³² So those who were sent went their way and found it just as He had said to them. ³³ But as they were loosing the colt, the owners of it said to them, “Why are you loosing the colt?”
³⁴ And they said, “The Lord has need of him.” ³⁵ Then they brought him to Jesus. And they threw their own clothes on the colt, and they set Jesus on him. ³⁶ And as He went, many spread their clothes on the road.
³⁷ Then, as He was now drawing near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen, ³⁸ saying:
      “‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the LORD!’
      Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

Think for a moment. These people were willing to put their clothes on the dusty road to Jerusalem only to be trampled upon by a donkey Jesus was ridding. Clothes are something we hold dear; at least most people do. They cover our nakedness, make us look respectable and protect our body against the weather. And since this was a special occasion, these people might have been wearing their best clothes. And yet they laid them down, at the feet of a donkey.But then again this was no ordinary person riding a donkey, it was the King of Kings. And while many scholars of the law and religious people of the time did not recognize him, these simple folks did. And they sure knew how to honour royalty. So they  spread their clothes at the feet of the donkey in order to honour His Majesty, the Son of David.

 

Now back to the Yeats. Like all good poetry, he makes a simple but implicit statement. He thinks that there is something more precious he can lay at the King’s feet than merely beautiful clothes. Infact, it is the one thing we hold most dear, our dreams(He calls it the only thing he has). And then he beautifully writes

   “I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”

 

The message here: humility, Total Surrender. Picture Jesus riding a donkey, picture your dreams: a prosperous career, comfortable job, money, wealth, comfort, nice car, big house, lots of fun etc. and Now picture those dreams being trampled upon, those dreams being crushed. If a man crushed our dreams, we would be out to kill him for causing such terrible pain. But can we ever willingly let someone crush our dreams? YES, we can, and that is what God demands: total surrender. It is a slow and painful process, but a requirement for all those who want to remain in the eternal Kingdom of Christ the King. CS Lewis wrote that except Christianity,  no other religion in the world regards humility as a virtue. We repect the powerful, the strong and the mighty. But  it is when we have reached the ultimate standard of humility, when its no longer about ‘me’, when my dreams are not my dreams, when my life is not my own, and neither my will ‘I will’, and when we’ve left all our hopes and dreams at the feet of Jesus,  it  is only then that we wake up to reality, from dreamland, only to realize that the dreams that Jesus trampled are no longer dreams. They have become reality!

Jesus said that he who loses his life finds it. I believe that applies to dreams as well. When we submit our dreams, our plan and ambitions to Jesus, they are not cast aside, they are made more beautiful then we ever imagined. Many people believe dreams to be the work of our imagination. Well, if that’s the case, then its even better if we let God take care of our dreams. He’s got the biggest imagination, He created an  100 million forms of life on earth alone!

My bouts with temptations and lust

The past few months have been extremely difficult for me. Someone has said that you never know how much you believe in something until it becomes a matter of life and death to you. Everyone’s faith is severely tested at some point or the other, even Jesus wasn’t spared from that trial. And so I had a desert experience of my own. Satan continuously tempted me to fall from the level of holiness God desires from us and I kept falling into the trap and giving in. I felt like the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans,

“For I endorse and delight in the Law of God in my inmost self [with my new nature]. But I discern in my bodily members [in the sensitive appetites and wills of the flesh] a different law (rule of action) at war against the law of my mind (my reason) and making me a prisoner to the law of sin that dwells in my bodily organs [in the sensitive appetites and wills of the flesh].O unhappy and pitiable and wretched man that I am! Who will release and deliver me from [the shackles of] this body of death? O thank God! [He will!] through Jesus Christ (the Anointed One) our Lord! So then indeed I, of myself with the mind and heart, serve the Law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” (Romans 7: 22-25, Amplified Bible)

I became quite disgusted with myself for my inability to resist the desires of the flesh which I know were wrong. Now, if you know you are sinful person and you continue to commit one sin after and another, it doesn’t bother you that much. But when you are a born again child of God and are striving to live a righteous life and then you realize that you keep committing the same sins over and over again it is quite irritating. (the words in proverbs 26:11 are quite disturbing “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly”). Confused and burdened with my misery, I needed to hear from God. And as always God spoke, not directly, but through a book. I was re-reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, recently, and came to this:

“We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask for forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the other hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”

C.S Lewis further says,

“God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and the perseverance of our will to overcome them.”

It was so encouraging to read this and know immediately that God is telling you something, it left me overwhelmed. Ok, honestly, my problem was not perseverance, it was self dependence. I had prayed to God to help me in this area of my life a thousand times but I realized that I wasn’t really depending on Him. I too, had an illusion about myself, the illusion that I did not have a problem with that particular sin. And when I myself proved me wrong, I thought I could overcome it myself. I would pray for his help, yet depend on my own will-power/self-control to deliver me which, of course, would fail me every time. And all throughout this experience God was teaching me to depend on Him, to realize, that it is His grace and mercy that sustains us from falling and not our own efforts. God was teaching me to ‘Be still, and know that I am God’(Psalms 46:10). I recently read a poster saying “Sometimes God clams the storm.. Sometimes He lets the storm rage and calms His child”. I find this to be very true. Has the storm clamed in my life, no, i don’t think it will till we get to heaven with our bodies transformed, but I have learned to trust God more. To depend on His strength and not my own in the everyday battles of Christian Life. To really believe in the words of the famous hymn “T'was Grace that brought us safe thus far...and Grace will lead us home.”

The standards of Christian life are unattainable in our own strength, and any attempts at them in our own strength always fall short. Only God could foresee our hopelessness and since He loved us too much to leave us like this, He sent His son to pay the price of our freedom from bondage to sin.

For some people total dependence on God is quite easy, for others, like me, it is sometimes very difficult. But thank God, in His great love for me, He does not spare the rod, and uses it when necessary to get me on the right path. To remind me every now and then, when I get my head too high, that indeed I am nothing without Him.

I know that temptations would continue to come, but I also know that the river of love, grace and forgiveness will also continue to flow, always.

Seeing Like Jesus, the Scarlet Letter and the labels we put on people

How do we make a judge a person?  We judge them by what they have done in the past. We develop a mental picture, or a personality profile about every person we become acquainted with, based on something we know or have heard about that person, such that whenever we see him/her, our mind seems to say ‘remember what he did..’ or ‘you know what he’s like’ or ‘remember what so and so told you about him ’. And it is this judgement that determines our behaviour. If we know him to be good, our behaviour becomes good, if we know him to be bad or we have heard about how bad he is, our behaviour towards that person becomes bad.Now that is how we humans see, judge and treat each other.

But How does God see man? How did Jesus see the common man? It becomes pretty obvious if we study His life. If Jesus saw and dealt with people like we do, He would have been a very lonely man all His life on Earth. Because He could look at a person and look into his past , present and future all at the same time, he would know precisely the all the things I had done, was doing and would do. And I am sure no one has a record to be proud of, because we all have fallen one time or the other. And that is why I say, he would not have had any friends. but that is not the case, Jesus had many, many friends and the number keeps growing. Why? Because Jesus saw men differently. Unlike us, Jesus saw underneath the skin of sin we wear, He saw beyond our mistakes. He saw each man for what he truly is: Made in God’s likeness. and as God is good, goodness is also found in His likeness,(that is) in Us. And that is why knowing all that He knew about us, Jesus was still able to love us. That is why Jesus, seeing crowds following Him, had compassion on them and healed them. That is why  Jesus sat on a rock and wept for the future of a city that was going to mock and  kill him. That is why He was able to call His disciples one by one knowing very well that each of them would desert him in His need. And that is why well knowing how many were going to deny him, mock him, and reject him in the ages to come, he was still willing to lay down his life for all mankind. Its because he saw men differently, he saw glimpses of His father in all of us, and it filled Him with love. True love, selfless love and the forgiving love.  And until we learn to forgive we can never see like Jesus saw. Until we learn to forgive, we will find fault with everyone on earth. Oh, we could learn to see like Jesus saw, loneliness, envy and enemies would disappear.

I don’t know what inspired it, but Nathanial Hawthorne wrote a fascinating tale entitled The Scarlet Letter in 1850, which is very relevant in this context. It tells the story of a young woman named Hester Prynne in mid-17th century Boston who commits adultery with the  town’s minister (Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale) while her husband is away as a result of which a daughter is born. As punishment for her great sin and the fact that she refuses to disclose the identity of her lover the town magistrates order her to wear a scarlet (red) letter "A" on the bodice of her dress, so that everyone can know about her adultery. They also have her parade through the town displaying her scarlet "A"  and then make her stand on top of the town scaffold (a public stage) along with the illegitimate child. She is forced to wear that scarlet letter like a badge on her dress for the rest of her life.

As the story goes on, the unforgiving town she lives in is reminded of her sin every time they see her, and the sight of that sinner fills them with hate for her. and so she and her daughter live a lonely and secluded life in the outskirts of town. when children would see her they would ask their parents why the lady is wearing the letter ‘A’ and the story would then pass to another generation. If all the guilt and shame of her sin upon her wasn’t enough, the burden of the scarlet letter made sure she sank.  Even her acts of charity which she does for the towns people never seem to fade away her sin of ‘Adultery’ from the minds of the people. And even though Hester Prynne is repentant of her ‘moment of weakness’ that town remains unforgiving and unforgeting.

This story paints a powerful picture of how we are today. We too have mentally placed labels on people. Him ‘T: thief’, her ‘B: Bad character’, Him ‘C: cheat’, P: proud, L: liar, H: Hypocrite and the list just goes on and on. We have our own scarlet letters placed on people based on what they have done in the past. and each time we see them, the scarlet letter reminds us of what they did, we judge how they really are and are unforgiving. It fills us up with hate and we want them to pay for it. But remember that is not how Jesus saw people. Otherwise, he would not be able to see any of us, we would all be head to toe in letters, big scarlet letters, each one a reminder of some sin we have done or will do. No, He saw me for what I was made to be. Perfect and Holy. Made in God’s Likeness.

If there is one thing we need to change, this year, it is our sight,  our view of people. we need to learn to see people like Jesus saw them ‘see them like they really are!’ and ‘not what we think they really are’. For a change this year, ignore the scarlet letters, stop putting labels, forgive, forget and see the good, the likeness of God in everyone you see. You will make lots more friends, many of your problems would no longer remain and most of all, you’ll get a special label from God, one that will say ‘S: This is My SON in whom I am well pleased’.