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Life, Death and the Law

25/5/2021

It is rare to hear a reference to the Ten Commandments in Anglican communion services now, or at least in the Anglican parish where I attend church. As with so much in the Anglican church, they have been oh so politely ignored in the hope that they would disappear without disturbance. Because the Ten Commandments are disturbing. In Romans 7, Paul ties himself in knots trying to explain that the law is death, or . . . or . . . or perhaps a sort of life, or well, something to do with sin perhaps but, anyway, not at all a Jesus sort of life!
I suspect Paul meant well. Fortunately the gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever practices and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17-19)

Well, that's pretty alarming, especially as I do not keep the entire Mosaic code. As God has so far called me to keep only the Ten Commandments, I try to avoid thinking about the jots and tittles, but I do take this text to mean that the Ten Commandments at least - if not the full quiver of 603 laws - are very much to do with a Jesus sort of life.
God has shown me again and again that the Ten Commandments support life, not death. Even without years of personal experience of this truth, I would anyway struggle to accept that God brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt and the house of slavery - brought them into freedom, holy covenant and the promise of nationhood - only to shackle them to death. No, the Ten Commandments are the laws of life; they are a very precious gift - a blessing, not a burden.

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Law as Destiny

11/7/2018

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God has shown me how to pray and meditate on the Ten Commandments in several different ways, offering wonderful new learnings and deeper understanding. Recently God invited me to pray the Commandments over myself as prophetic declarations.

“You will have no other gods beside Me.”

“You will not make for yourself false idols.”

“You will not take My Name for emptiness.”

“You will remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.”

“You will honour your mother and father.”

“You will not murder.”

“You will not commit adultery.”

“You will not steal.”

“You will not bear false witness against your neighbour.”

“You will not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour.”

For good measure I proclaimed over myself, “You will love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength and, yes, you will love your neighbour as yourself.”

What a revelation and what sweet relief. For ‘Keeping the law’ read ‘Aligning with your destiny’. How can the law be a burden? It is a part of becoming who we are destined to be.

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The Pain of Forgiveness

30/6/2018

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Don’t get me wrong, I love the Lord’s Prayer, but…

That ‘but’ relates to the line in the prayer referring to forgiveness: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. It has always worried me to think that in praying those words I might be praying for my own condemnation, because if God’s forgiveness of me is going to be a match for the forgiveness I offer others then without doubt I am in big, big trouble.

Jesus underlines the connection between God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others elsewhere in the gospels. In Matthew 6:14-15 Jesus says, ‘For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ In Mark 11:25 Jesus says, ‘And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.’

I know God will forgive me if I truly repent (see for example 2 Chronicles 7:14), and I am entirely comfortable with that style of forgiveness: just me and God; no third parties. But I also know that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and so I have been prepared to tackle the issue of forgiving others.

It has been hard work, and until this week I thought I had made progress.

Using as a yardstick whether there is any lingering sense of hurt or judgement when I recall certain people or incidents, hand over heart I can claim to have pretty much forgiven some behaviours that today we would call workplace bullying. I have experienced this twice in my career, with very negative outcomes, taking on board the bullying as a sign that something was wrong with me and becoming very reserved in my relations with people as a result.

Having managed to get to the point where I was able to remain undisturbed when recalling some of the things done to me, and could even imagine myself smiling warmly at the perpetrators, I announced to myself, ‘By George, I think I’ve done it’! And it did feel good. I thought quite confidently that I could now safely navigate past remembrances without kitting myself out in the mental and emotional equivalent of kevlar protective gear, a crash helmet and safety boots.

But…

My morning prayer routine usually includes the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. While meditating yet again on the line about forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer I began to think about my newly achieved forgiveness of those bullies. I ran my mind over my memories, just to check there was no frisson of reaction. So far so good. Then I got to thinking about how – although I might have forgiven those people, although if I met them again I might actually smile and greet them and mean it when I inquired, ‘How are you?’ – I still could not imagine wanting to be in relationship with them.

A classic case of forgiving without forgetting.

Is that the kind of forgiveness I want from God? Absolutely not! I long for the kind of forgiveness that we are promised, the forgiveness that forgets (Isaiah 43:25), that puts our sin away as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). I was appalled at the thought of being forgiven but no longer able to experience close intimacy with God. Alive, but to all intents and purposes, dead.
I cried out, terrified, ‘What can I do?’, and the answer came immediately: ‘Stop thinking about yourself.’

I realised that I was working on forgiveness out of the perspective of my own pain. My focus was me. But Jesus invites us to love others for the simple reason that God loves them, and He shows us what it is like to love as God loves. If we want to align ourselves with God, we need to want what God wants and love what God loves.

I pray that as I focus on God, God in His grace gives me the gift to forgive.

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Time Lord #2

7/1/2017

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Anyone who has read even the minimum of material on this site will be aware that I meditate regularly on the Ten Commandments. I humbly thank God for giving me this task, as it is a source of continual blessing and refreshment and, from time to time, offers what seems to me a deep insight into God’s ways.

I have shared before on God as Lord of time. Recently, God gave me a revelation on how time is structured through the Ten Commandments.

No doubt you have heard or read testimonies that the Ten Commandments are necessary to social order. Most people would accept that we are all better off if there are restraints on anti-social behaviours like murder, theft and bearing false witness. Families, and therefore society, work better if we honour our parents and keep faith with our spouses. And we are all better off if we don’t give way to destructive thought patterns like envy. The Commandments also provide us with rules for spiritual order: put God first, be mindful in the way God’s Name is used, and keep God’s Sabbaths.

This separation of the Commandments into three distinct areas of relationship – God, family and community – can be misleading, because all the Commandments are inter-related: our relationship with God is governed by all of them, and so is our personal and social happiness. Nonetheless, it is useful to group, ungroup and regroup the Commandments as a way to learn more about them.

It is while I was considering the Commandments as laws to ensure the health of human societies that I had the revelation of the Commandment to remember and keep the Sabbath as a law that maintains the fabric of time. As with the physical laws – like the law of gravity, which helps keep us and our belongings usefully anchored to the surface of the Earth – the Ten Commandments govern the proper operation of human endeavour. Unlike the physical laws, they do not work independently of us, we have to co-operate with them: we have to keep them, to keep them working properly.

We can see how failure to keep the Commandments has led to a progressive breakdown in spiritual and familial relationships and in civil society. Similarly, we have a sense that time is passing faster and faster and faster, and that there is never enough of it. Quite simply, time is not working the way it should because not enough people are keeping the Sabbath.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, because time depends on it.

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The Love Test #2

20/2/2016

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Why is it that spiritual insights are always accompanied by such a sense of surprise? Surely it is a phenomenon worthy of investigation. Let me share my latest surprise since applying the Love Test (described in my previous post).

One of the expectations of regular measurement is that we will be charting movement, either negative or positive, or lack of movement. Naturally, as I repeated the test, I was hoping to see the levels of love in all the domains of heart, soul, mind and strength creeping upward. Nothing. This particular ship of love was becalmed, and 'holding steady' began to sound less like an encouragement and more like a death sentence.

Gradually the colours of love began to lose their sharp focus and what I saw instead was the white areas in the gauges begin to take on solid form. What I had originally perceived as an emptiness, or a vacuum, was actually a murky swamp of heavy matter, bearing down on love. A comparison of perceptions reveals all:

Jesus said: ‘You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can’t worship God and Money both.’ (Matthew 6:24, The Message translation.)

I realised that what I was measuring was not my love of God but my love of Mammon – whether Mammon was my own strength, my possessions, love of self or any other thing I put above God. Suddenly I could see rebellion and lack of surrender in all their dark and ugly reality.

The second thing I realised was that there are no half measures – or thirds or quarters or any less-than-whole portions – when it comes to loving God. It is all, or something very far short of wonderful.

For one nano-second I had a glimpse of what happens when all those gauges are overflowing with love: the kingdom of Heaven is in you, through you, around you, above you and beneath you. It fills your mind, your heart, your soul; it fills your lungs and cells and pumps through your veins. It is your only strength and your only life.

All your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength, says God. Of course. It is what is best for us.

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The Love Test #1

8/8/2015

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I don’t know about you, but a lot of what I hear and read in relation to love of God is about how much God loves me. I can’t recall hearing a sermon or reading in a book about the command for me to love God. Certainly I’ve never read a lot of clues as to how to go about loving God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 20:30). Yet, according to Jesus, it is the first and greatest commandment.
Jesus provides us with some interesting insights into the problem. We’re to love God more than our families (Luke 14:26), and more than our lives, as Jesus does (Luke 8:21; John 14:31). Jesus also teaches us that a practical demonstration of love for Him and, through Him, for the Father is to keep His commandments (John 14:15, 21, 23-24) and to heal the sick, feed those who hunger and thirst, and visit those in prison (Matthew 25:40). In fact, most sermons I’ve heard deal with the commandment to love God by exhorting the congregation to focus on the second great commandment: to love one’s neighbour as oneself (Matthew 22:39).
Can we measure our love for God solely by our love for our neighbour, as expressed in good works? Somehow that just doesn’t seem to capture the passion behind the command to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s soul, all one’s strength and all one’s mind. We know what ‘all’ looks like because Jesus demonstrates it. To me, an attempt to match the ‘all’ of Jesus is rather like planning to ascend Mount Everest, without an oxygen tank and no friendly Nepalese guide; it’s beyond imagining.
As I pondered the question of loving God more, what I was able to imagine was a little test for myself. The results are below.
As you can see, I wasn’t too hard on myself. But forget the level in each gauge: it is the relativities that tell the real story.
I’m more optimistic about the way my soul loves God because I am absolutely certain God has planted a seed of desire for God within me. What’s more, I know God grows that seed without any help from me (Mark 4:26-28), even though I may inhibit the full potential for growth. And often I do actually feel love for God – warm, sweet, joyous love – so I know my heart is engaged, even though most of the time my actions declare I love myself more.
Taking the temperature of mind and strength I found to be very encouraging. But they are so weak, I hear you say. Yes, they’re incredibly weak, but they’re areas where I can clearly see a way forward. Since reading Joyce Meyer’s Battlefield of the Mind, I am much better at noticing when my thoughts are running counter to God and resetting their direction. This is an area where plenty of practical strategies are freely available. And those strategies can be easily adapted and applied to the strength with which I apply myself to building a relationship with God. For example, putting God first by putting a higher priority on prayer and bible study each morning. There’s a long way to go, but the start of the journey gives cause for hope.
I invite you to take the ‘Love Test’. Just as we get regular blood pressure and other health checks, we can test our spiritual health, too. I have prepared a template that you can print off and fill in. Feel free to pass it on.

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The Name

31/1/2015

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In Volume I of The Schocken Bible, Everett Fox translates Exodus 20:7a as ‘You are not to take up the name of YHWH your God for emptiness’.
I found this translation to be a revelation!
I was more familiar with the translation of the third Commandment which reads, ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’. I’d always interpreted that as not using the Name as a swear word, and had never really bothered to seek for meaning beyond that. But it had always been like a loose thread my mind would pull on, especially as the Lord's Prayer begins, 'hallowed by Thy Name'. Wondering what I was praying with those words would inevitably bring my thoughts to the third Commandment.
The Fox translation, and the notion of not calling on God or referring to God in an empty way, revolutionised my prayer life.
It can be so easy during a church service, when prayer is corporate, to fall into the habit of reciting the prayers rather than praying them, to choose sound over substance. Now I hold myself accountable for whatever I pray. If I call on the Lord, then my intent is communication. And just as if I were addressing anyone directly, I expect God to respond.
So this third Commandment is yet another instruction in how to maintain a close, loving relationship with God. It is very hard to take God for granted or to maintain the pretence that God can be neatly contained when you are being mindful of the way you are using God’s Name.

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Time Lord #1

18/1/2015

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Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘God is not in things of space, but in moments of time’. Sometimes I am blessed with the experience that there is no space where God is not present, but it is an insight into time, not space, that I wish to share with you today.
At a seminar I attended recently, participants were encouraged to bring everything to God, including every problem, no matter how small. I realised I rarely took work problems to God.
I am very conscious of how God helps me in my work, for which I am deeply grateful. I express that gratitude often, but seldom do I discuss with God specific work issues in detail. I will take people problems to God, when I want to overcome hurt or my own judgemental attitude, for example, but for the most part I am still tempted to believe there are some things I can handle on my own, and that there is no need to ‘bother’ God about them.
Yet in the seminar I was hearing that the God who keeps count of the number of hairs on my head is vitally interested in every aspect of my life and eager not only to help, but to companion me every step of the way. Of course, I already ‘knew’ that. ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’ is one of my favourite hymns!

Oh, yes, I knew it. I just wasn’t living my life as if I knew it!
The notion of resting in God by taking everything to God had immense appeal. It was a big effort to attend the seminar as I was very tired, so I needed little persuasion to allow a problem to present to my mind in the belief I could shift the burden of it.
What surfaced was a problem endemic to the nature of my work: time. I work to deadlines, and the stress of trying to meet them is partly due to a sense that there is not enough time to get the work done. I realised that, in a deeply debilitating way, I was living out of a sense of poverty, of lack.
I should have known that God was the solution. It’s obvious. Did God not create time? Is God not the Lord of time? And did I not have this demonstrated to me every Sabbath, the day which Heschel describes as ‘Spirit in the form of time’?
Not only does God own the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps 50:10), God owns time. God makes time and so God can freely give it away. There’s plenty more where that came from! And so it was that God blessed me there and then with all the time I need – not necessarily all the time I want, but there is time enough, God assures me, for all that needs to be done.
It is now a week since the seminar and there have been several occasions each day to remember this promise and rest in it. And my lifestyle is changing. I know there’ll be plenty of time for all that needs to be done, so I check in with God that what I’m doing is exactly that - what needs to be done. I’ve always appreciated the Sabbath as a sacred blessing, a gift. Now that God has also gifted me all the minutes in every day, they’re too precious to waste!

What a Friend we have in Jesus,
  All our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
  Everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
  O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
  Everything to God in prayer!

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Feed My Sheep

31/10/2013

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. . . Jesus said to Simon Peter, 'Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?' He said to him, 'Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.' He said to him, 'Tend my lambs'. He said to him again a second time, 'Simon, son of John, do you love me?' He said to him, 'Yes, Lord; you know that I love you'. He said to him, 'Shepherd my sheep'. He said to him the third time, 'Simon, son of John, do you love me?' Peter was grieved . . . and he said to Him, 'Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you'. Jesus said to him, 'Tend my sheep'. (John 21:15-17)

Recently I attended a conference of educational leaders which began each day with an early morning ecumenical church service or multi-faith reflection.
On the third morning, the reflection was led by a priest who told a story that had been passed on to him by a friend, a veterinary surgeon who regularly volunteered in Third World countries. Pivotal to the story was the picture on display – a framed quarter-portrait of the child Jesus who was, as I remember it, holding a lamb closely to his chest. Jesus, portrayed as the Shepherd. The image appeared to have been mass produced, but was rich in decorative detail and had a pleasing composition. The frame – perhaps about 17 cm wide and 25 cm deep – showed wear and tear in a few places.
The priest’s friend had been in Vietnam just after the Vietnam War, helping with the reinstatement of animal husbandry practices in war-ravaged rural areas. In one household that the friend visited, once the family learnt that the Viet Cong would not be returning they brought out from a secret hidey-hole in the floor of the house the icon we in the reflection group were now viewing. It was explained that all Christian religious practices had been forbidden under the communist regime. The icon, a symbol of the family’s faith, had been kept hidden for years in spite of the threat of severe punishment if found. The family then presented the icon as a gift to the man who had gifted them with the assurance of their liberation and he, in turn, had passed it to the priest for safekeeping.
It was a powerful story, and powerfully told. The picture in its battered frame created a bridge to connect our hearts and minds across time and space to a small family within the same faith dimension. I was touched and inspired – as I think I was meant to be – by the family’s refusal to forget their faith and the simple, although dangerous way they chose to remember it. And, of course, I was aware of how much I take for granted the freedom of religious expression I enjoy in Australia.
At the same time I was deeply grieved, and deeply angry. I thought of Jesus and his gift of the eucharist. Knowing that he was going to his death, even so, he taught us how to take into ourselves his presence, his strength, his peace, his healing power – all in a simple ritual that has the appearance of a shared meal. ‘Do this and remember me.’
That Vietnamese family, and perhaps hundreds of others like them, had had access to a supremely powerful and very present symbol of their faith. No icons required. No danger. No risk. The death penalty already paid. I was grieved for the family but I was even more anguished for Jesus. How often and how long must Jesus suffer our disregard? How many times must he give, and give, and give again, only to be ignored?
Anger raged through me against those churches which not only assume an authority to determine who is fit to come to the Lord’s table but which also claim exclusive rights for their priests in preparing that table. These churches are wrong. The monopoly they would wield over Jesus’ body and blood does not tend Jesus' lambs. It more resembles the actions of those pegging out a prime piece of real estate, with all the usual attendant arguments over ownership, boundary lines, development approvals and rights of access. For those who attend these churches, the rents are very steep and, as we see with the Vietnamese family, the tokens of occupancy may even carry risk of physical death.
I do not accuse these churches of brokering outright spiritual death but, when it comes to the eucharist, they are surely guilty of inflicting on their flocks a severe form of spiritual starvation.
Jesus came so that we might have abundant life (John 10:10). Some churches could be doing more to help share it around.

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Keeping the Sabbath

14/7/2013

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'Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.' Hmmm. The whole issue of holiness seemed just so big and inscrutable that it was with quiet relief that I was able to put it to one side and turn instead to the task of determining exactly when I should be keeping the Sabbath.
I had a vague understanding that in the Jewish faith the Sabbath was celebrated from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. (I was later to learn this understanding was very vague indeed!) I knew the Sabbath was not celebrated in the Anglican Church and instead the 'Lord's Day' was kept on a Sunday, but was often referred to as the Sabbath. Was there a choice in this? Was one day as good as another? Reading the Bible it seemed to me there was no choice. The Sabbath was created holy by God and it was our job to remember it and keep it holy.
To resolve the issue of timing I decided to see if I could feel the Sabbath. I was prepared to keep it and so it was in the vessel of willingness that I launched forth into the week, alert for any subtle changes that might be interpreted as clues. I was certainly not prepared for what happened. From noon Friday I began to sense a pull, a kind of suction, drawing me into a vortex of . . . what? Whatever it was, I knew I was entering the Sabbath, and it was wonderful! When I fetched up on its shores at around dusk that Friday, I wept. Thank you, God! O thank you! To be so blessed, and to know it, to live it. What a gift!
Much later I was to come across Rabbi Abraham Heschel's beautiful little book, The Sabbath, in which there is a story that confirmed my experience:

Once a rabbi was immured by his persecutors in a cave, where not a ray of light could reach him, so that he knew not when it was day or when it was night. Nothing tormented him so much as the thought that he was now hindered from celebrating the Sabbath with song and prayer, as he had been wont to do from his youth.
Beside this an almost unconquerable desire to smoke caused him much pain. He worried and reproached himself that he could not conquer this passion. All at once, he perceived that it suddenly vanished; a voice said within him: "Now it is Friday evening! for this was always the hour when my longing for that which is forbidden on the Sabbath regularly left me." Joyfully he rose up and with loud voice thanked God and blessed the Sabbath day. So it went on from week to week; his tormenting desire for tobacco regularly vanished at the incoming of each Sabbath. (Pages 21-22)

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IT IS WRITTEN
May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.
Psalm 19:14

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Hi! As you'll gather from my first blog entry, 'The beginning of happiness', God called me to keep the Ten Commandments some years ago. Thank you, God! Here you'll find some musings about the journey. I'd love to hear about your journey with the divine, too. - Lyndal Wilson

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