Hammer on Anvil '

I am in Wisconsin visiting family, so my dear niece, Catharine, is filling in for me today. You will love it!

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I stood in stunned silence and stared at myself in the hotel-room mirror. This was a very big problem. I replayed the previous 45 seconds in my mind a few times and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Why do these things happen to me??? I breathed a heavy sigh and went to the room next door where my parents, husband and son were waiting for me.

My mom took one look at me and immediately said “What’s wrong?”

“I just flushed my glasses down the toilet.”

“You did WHAT?”

“My glasses fell into the toilet when it was flushing and they are gone. They went down. I couldn’t get them.”

I had to explain the sequence of events a few times because it was just so…bizarre. I’d bent over to pick something up off of the bathroom floor while the toilet was flushing. My glasses, which were pushed up on top of my head while I did a few makeup touch-ups, fell off into the industrial strength flush of the hotel-room toilet and in a second they were gone. GONE.

Fourth of July had given us the perfect excuse to escape the scorching desert heat of our home in Phoenix and head north to enjoy higher elevations and cooler temperatures. We checked into our hotel in early afternoon to freshen up before heading out to enjoy the evening celebration. The “incident” occurred shortly after we arrived, and with no “backup” on hand I was nearly blind for the remainder of our trip. When I say “nearly blind” it’s only a slight exaggeration. I’ve worn glasses since kindergarten and I am terribly, terribly nearsighted. While I enjoyed our evening of festivities and fireworks and our hike around a scenic (or so I'm told) lake the next day, it was difficult and at times frustrating to not be able to share in much of what my visually UNimpaired family was enjoying.  Never again will I take the gift of corrective lenses for granted!

But, better physically blind than spiritually so.

Jesus showed great compassion and love for the lost, but his interactions with the scribes and Pharisees took on a very different tone. In Matthew 23, in what could be best described as a “rant” on the Pharisees, Jesus calls them both hypocrites (6 times) and blind (5 times). They had become so caught up in rules and legalism that they’d abandoned the true reason for the law in the first place – guidelines for a life of holiness that allowed communion with God. For many of them, their faith consisted of nothing more than religious showmanship that fed their selfish pride, and God was simply a vehicle for status and self-aggrandizement.

It is so easy to be critical of the Pharisees. We read these words and feel an identification with Jesus' righteous anger towards men who would rather see a crippled man continue to suffer than rejoice in a miraculous healing that "broke a rule" of Sabbath rest.  Men so devoted to the rules that they were completely blind, not only to the love and compassion and awe-inspiring miracles of Jesus, but to His identity as their long-awaited Messiah.

In verses Philippians 3:4-6,  Paul addresses his own walk in the robes of the Pharisee.  He had the right lineage, the right training, the right lifestyle, and yet he says:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith  Philippians 3:7-9 (emphasis mine)

As I read this passage, I had to ask myself "Am I living out my faith inspired by the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord?"   Paul was acutely aware not only of the magnitude of Christ's sacrifice on his behalf, but also his own unworthiness. It is only when we realize those two things in concert that we can begin to fathom a faith like Paul's and live it out for ourselves.

Simply put, the faith of Paul the Pharisee (then called Saul) was all about how great Saul was. The faith of Paul the Apostle was about how great GOD is.

The same goes for us when we seek to follow Christian rules rather than follow Christ. Legalism keeps us so obsessed with who we are that we miss who God is. We just as well flush our spiritual glasses down the toilet and satisfy ourselves with the notion that we live a pretty good life most of the time, checking the right boxes and NOT checking the wrong ones (Devotional time? Check! Cursing? Nope, not today! Hooray, victory!) Really? Is that why Jesus died for me? Just so I could live out the "be a better person" rules a little more successfully?

Living out the faith Paul talks of here is a very different thing. When we begin with the realization that any notion of righteousness we lay claim to cost Jesus his life (we can never check enough boxes to be good enough for a Holy God) we are able to approach our faith from a place of humility and gratitude. As Christ-followers, our lives should be examples of vibrant faith, inspired by the love of a Holy God and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

My prayer is that we as Christ-followers would live lives that bring Him glory, that we would be vibrant testimonies to what God can do even through a shambles of a human-being (in my case, anyway!), and that we might reflect Him more and more clearly every day.