Mind Games

“Listen, O Israel!  The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.  And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.  Repeat them again and again to your children.  Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.  Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders.  Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. [Deuteronomy 6.4-9]

I know I am not Israel per se.  However, I still very much believe I can learn a whole lot from following the mandates above.

While I do encourage my children (now grown) from time to time regarding the ways of the LORD and I do occasionally have conversations both home and abroad that directly involve the LORD, I still feel like I fall miserably short in loving the LORD with all my heart, soul, and strength.

Yes, I have faithfully blogged here (sometimes good ideas, sometimes pure nonsense) for well over seven years - and that alone has greatly increased my daily thoughts about and awareness of God and His Word.  I like to think I have experienced the most solid spiritual growth of my life during these past seven years ...but have I really?

I could attempt to console myself and any readers of this blog that we are all okay.  However, when all is said and done, that is not my call, but the LORD's.  His standards, as detailed above, are pretty high.

Modern psychology would have us all to believe that we cannot live or thrive in the low self esteem that God - the God of the Bible - would naturally lead us to conclude about ourselves.  Psychology calls it "low self esteem" and treats it as a prevalent problem to be overcome.  The Bible however calls it "humility" and ranks it among the highest goals in life.

We have been hyper-conditioned to believe that we are basically good and that we therefore deserve "better."  May I just suggest here that anything (and I mean anything) that causes us to leave off humility and instead embrace our "rights" (to whatever - peace, love, credit, or hamburgers) is contrary to the LORD GOD.  Period.

When Jesus told about the two fellows who came to God in prayer, one a saint and the other a sinner, it was the humble sinner that was justified in God's sight - the one whose self esteem was shot - the one who had come to grips with the fact that he was useless and deserving of nothing good whatsoever - but still faithful enough to cry out to God.

Unfortunately, because of Adam & Eve, none of us are capable of pleasing God by being good enough.  The entire story of the Old Testament reveals this clearly - God kept pouring on the rules and man kept successfully breaking them.

However, even though it appeared at first that following the rules was God's plan, it quickly came to view that God had another much greater plan.  Making or following rules did not give God or man respectively the opportunity to reveal genuine relationship to one another.  Grace and faith however opened an unprecedented realm of pure relationship - grace revealing God's love and faith revealing man's humility.

Is not faith then the ultimate display of humility?  "I cannot do this..."  In other words, I am incapable - and furthermore, I even acknowledge my hopeless insufficiency to contrastingly declare that God is generously all-sufficient.

I think we all need to 'get off our high-horses' and get back to true humility.  Anything else is just mind games.

Father, I realize fresh today that I am nothing without You.  You are my everything.