One of my favorite quotes is from Oswald Chambers. He writes: “The things we are going through are either making us sweeter, better, nobler men and women; or they are making us more captious and fault-finding, more insistent upon our own way. The things that happen either make us fiends, or they make us saints; it depends entirely upon the relationship we are in to God.”

We are continuously “made” by what we are going through. According to Chambers, we can be “made” into one of two persons: a fiend or a saint.

It’s interesting that one of the most popular MTV shows is entitled “Made.” In this show young people share who they would like to become that in many ways is quite different from who they currently are. So, for example, one young person may be gifted at non-physical activities and decide he wants to become a wrestler. So, he is given a coach who works with him over a process of time and brings him to the place of becoming who he would like to be but has never had the courage to become.

I believe we have an innate desire/need to become made into the image of Jesus Christ. Many of us perceive this need through crisis and the experience of salvation. Others of us may never know (unless someone shares the Gospel) that this Jesus is who we are created to be like. Still some may know the goal of life, i.e. becoming like Jesus, but choose to be “made” into something/one else.

It was Thomas Merton (monastic hermit in KY back in the 50s and 60s) who often commented that we become more truly who we are. I’ve seen this to be very much the case in the lives of people. If one moves down the road of fault-finding… over time… that person becomes a fault-finding person ever more so. If one goes down the road of anger, that person becomes an angry person… etc… etc…

Who are you becoming? Who are you being “made” into by what you are going through? A fiend or a saint? Note, the ability to become a saint (more like Jesus) depends, according to Chambers, upon the relationship we are in with God.

Pastor Tim

Proverbs are wisdom sayings. That means they are meant to not only be read/heard… but mulled over and meditated upon. Kind of like the saying my grandfather often used when he referred to someone in deep thought. They were “chewing the cud.” We are called to chew on God’s Word the way a cow might chew on a good lump of grass. Literally going over it and over it and over it until we’ve chewed it thoroughly and taken it in.

I enjoyed chewing on Proverbs 14:12 this morning (am I implying I’m a bovine to a certain degree?). This wisdom saying says the following: “There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death” (NLT). A path is something that is definitive. It’s clearly seen and affords a person an opportunity to travel on it. A path follows its own course (in other words you’d be hardpressed to travel on two paths at the same time). A path also goes a certain/particular direction. So one path will bring a person one place and another path will lead that same person to another place. This saying says that all of us have paths before us. The issue at hand is DISCERNING what kind of path we are encountering. That’s the gist of it and it’s more difficult than it might seem.

One of the assumptions we often hear is that if the door opens (i.e. a path is before us) we have only to assume it’s there because of God and walk through it/on it. We rarely hear of people saying… this door is open to me (i.e. I could take this path before me) and it looks like I could have a good run of it if I took it… but in praying about it I’ve learned that although it appears good it’s not what God has or wants for me. The first is easy to jump headlong into… the second requires time, prayer, thoughtfulness… and in the words of Proverbs… WISDOM.

In other words, we are more apt to judge a path before us in terms of how it seems and rarely if what it seems to be may or may not actually end in something good (good as in Godly). I guess we have simply to stop and be reminded that before we don our hiking boots and gather up the walking stick in hand… we had better take a good hard second look, and, for that matter… a third, fourth, and fifth look to make sure that what seems right doesn’t end in death.

4-29-08
2:15PM

Proverbs 13:20 says: “Whoever walks with the wise will become wise; whoever walks with fools suffers harm” (NLT).

I woke up this morning and read this verse as a part of my morning time in God’s Word. As I was reading this wisdom saying I couldn’t help but think of the recent incidents involving several teenage girls who savagely cornered and beat-up a peer of their’s out of a desire to upload the video footage on You Tube. Aside from all the nuances of exactly what the appropriate measures are legally for those who committed the actions and those who aided and abetted them, I think this proverbial statement has a lot of merit for people of all ages.

The simple reality is we become in many ways who we “rub shoulders” with. I think this holds even more weight given the fluidity with which young people can interact with more and more people they may not truly know through the use of technology and mediums that were unavailable to previous generations. A tenuous reality is afforded to most young people in that they can walk with people of all sorts without their parents or loved ones supervision or in-depth awareness. So it’s no longer a matter of simply asking one’s child, “Who are you going out with tonight?” Now it’s a matter of asking “Who are you in touch with at any given moment of any given day or night?”

Proverbs 13:20 reminds me that as a father I have to count it a primary priority to understand who my kids are “walking with.” Are they walking with the wise or are they engaged in relationships with the foolish? The one leads to wisdom… the other leads to harm.

Are we willing to involve ourselves in the difficult (and sometimes messy) experience of getting to know the ways in which our kids are getting to know others in this fallen world? Further, do we ourselves assess our own relationships with the filter of pondering the influences we open ourselves to?

Those who make it a point to walk with the wise become wise themselves. Those who journey with the foolish open themselves to the way of harm. Who are we walking with? Who are our kids walking with?

Pastor Tim
4-22-08
2:25PM