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I was recently reading John 13, and it occurred to me that maybe I've been taught this passage incorrectly all my life.
It seems as though I grew up with the notion that there was a servant who traditionally came and did the washing of the feet, and that for some reason or another, this servant never showed up.
It seems as though I grew up with the notion that the disciples sat looking at one another with expressions of disdain, wondering which of them would choose to take on the job of that servant, and that Jesus, seeing that none of them was willing, stepped forward and did the job.
Perhaps I was never taught those things; perhaps I just assumed them. Or perhaps they were simply implied in the teaching I received.
Regardless, upon re-reading the text of John 13, I'm not sure those assumptions are reasonable. In fact, there is no mention of a servant who didn't show up, nor is there any mention of any disciples thinking about who was going to wash the feet.
When we imagine the passage that way, I think we do a discredit to the demonstration of servanthood which Christ was giving his followers. I don't think Jesus waited long enough to see if one of the disciples would volunteer. I don't think he even waited long enough to find out if a servant would show up. Maybe a servant did show up, and was horrified to discover that Jesus was already doing his job for him!
Because no good servant waits to see if someone else will do his job for him. The servant dives in without hesitation, because the job needs to be done.
The scripture tells us that he simply got up from the table and did the job. And perhaps, as much as the fact that he was willing to do it, the fact that he did not seem to hesitate ought to be a lesson and an inspiration for me. "You also should do just as I have done to you," he tells us (John 13:15).
Don't wait for someone else to serve. Dive in first, and get your hands dirty before anyone else even has a chance to get started.
If you've been following the content of this site for very long, you've probably noticed by now some of my hobbies, because I do write about them from time to time. I like to play the violin and the guitar. I like to climb mountains. And I like to to paint.
Interestingly, each one of these hobbies has, in some way, changed the way I view the world.
Because I like to play music, whenever I hear music, I don't just sing along with it, I notice how it is structured. I notice the timing, the bass line, the percussion, and a lot of things that I never would have noticed before I started learning to play a musical instrument.
Because I like to climb mountains, I can't even drive down a country road without noticing every single mountain in the distance, and being amazed by their beauty. Strange...before I started climbing, I never even noticed those mountains.
And since I've started up painting again, I can't go anywhere without noticing the brilliant, vibrant colors all around me, and thinking things like, "What color paints would I mix together to get that particular shade of blue?" or "I wonder if this scene would make a good starting point for a painting?"
I think it's interesting that each of my hobbies has, in one way or another, heightened my awareness of the world around me. I didn't start climbing mountains because I always thought the mountains were so beautiful. Nor did I start painting because I noticed and understood color and structure and composition.
No, it was the other way around. My appreciation for mountains, my understanding of color, and of beauty -- these things came after a lot of hard work on my part. The work came first, and then the understanding and the appreciation.
You might not have realized it, but the Christian life is very much the same way. I occasionally hear Christians pray, "Reveal yourself to me," but really, that's sort of a lazy prayer, because Jesus already told us the circumstances under which He reveals Himself to us:
If we want to more deeply understand God, and the work He is doing in this world, it doesn't just happen. It happens because we have his commandments, and are doing them. And we are doing them because we love Him.
The work comes first, then the understanding. I never would have come to such a deep appreciation for mountains without first putting a backpack on my shoulders and doing some very hard work. I would never have understood music so well if I hadn't spent so many hours doing tedious scales and exercises.
Do you want to understand God? Do you want Him to reveal Himself to you? Don't just sit around waiting for it to happen. Put your nose to the grindstone and actually do his work, follow his commands. Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it is sometimes discouraging, and yes, there are sometimes a thousand different things you would rather be doing. But do God's work with the same stubborn determination that a musician practices his scales, or a hiker keeps on climbing, no matter how tired he gets.
In the long run, the benefits are worth it, because bit by bit, God reveals Himself, His character, His love, and His work to us.
And that's more wonderful than the tallest mountain, the most beautiful song, or the most magnificent painting.
Recently I had a chance to visit with Nate, a young man who used to travel with me and run my sound system when I went out to preach, sing, and do ventriloquism. We were reminiscing about some of the things that used to happen when we were "on the road" together, and we recalled that it was not uncommon for people to say to Nate, "We sure do appreciate you and your dad coming today."
To which Nate would reply, "He's not my dad."
Frankly, I never saw much resemblance between us, and since I was only thirteen years older than him, I found it a bit disconcerting that people would think I was old enough to be his dad.
The day after I visited with Nate, day I took my nephew Daniel to a basketball game that our local Christian academy was competing in. During the half-time break, I took Daniel to the concessions stand, so Daniel could buy a cheeseburger. When the lady behind the counter gave us our food, she said, "Here's your cheeseburger, and here's your dad's french fries."
Once again, I don't think there's that much resemblance. But those two back-to-back events started me thinking about family resemblances. Do you look like your father? Your mother? What about your brothers or sisters? Do your children look like you?
Did you know that the Bible has something to say about family resemblance? It's true!
Colossians 1:15 says that Jesus is "the image of the invisible God," and "the firstborn of all creation." Think about that for a moment. God is Spirit, and as such, we cannot see him. But when Jesus Christ came to earth, he came as a man with a physical body. So what does it mean that Jesus is the "image of the invisible God"? That he physically looks like God the Father? Of course not! There is a "family resemblance" between God the Father and God the Son, but it is not a physical resemblance.
When Jesus came to earth, it was so we could see and understand the character of God. When we look at Jesus, when we read of His life, His deeds, and His sacrifice, we are seeing the character of God being lived out perfectly.
But that's not the only thing that the Bible says about family relationships. In 2 Corinthians we are told:
Nice little progression, isn't it? Jesus is the likeness of the invisible God, and we are to be transformed into the likeness of His Son, Jesus Christ. In other words, when people look at us, they ought to be able to see our family resemblance to God Himself!
What do you think? Is your character like the character of God? Or does it leave a lot to be desired? How does your character change to be more like His? Well, the answer is right in the verse: we behold the glory of the Lord. How much time do you spend looking on Jesus Christ, through reading of Him in God's Word? Take time each day to read of Him, and allow yourself to be transformed more and more into His image.
Just for fun, let's begin today with a short test of your eye-brain coordination. Ready?
Take a look at the image shown here, which is just a tiny snippet of a photograph I took recently. What do you think it is?
Keep thinking (and no fair scrolling down too far while you think!)
Okay. Did you guess that this is a close-up of a bit of sky? Or maybe the ocean? If you guessed either of those things, you were wrong.
Actually, that is a close-up of a snowy field. Amazing, isn't it? Who knew that snow was so dark, and so blue! A little bit later on I'll show you the actual photograph, so you can see it in context.
And really, context is the issue I wanted to talk about today. This year I picked up an old hobby that I left behind years ago...painting. (You can view some of my artwork here: Glimpses of Eden.) Because of that, I've been paying a lot more attention to light and color than I normally do. I've found that there's an interesting difference between what your eyes see, and what your brain interprets.
Here's the picture, so you'll have something to look at while you read:
When your eyes view the bottom of the picture, they see dark blue, but somehow between what your eyes are seeing, and what your brain interprets, you don't consciously think that you're looking at something that's grayish-blue; your brain says, "Oh! A white, snowy field!"
In fact, if you compare the color of the field (even the part that's not shadowed by a tree) to the color of the house, you will realize that there is nothing white about what you're seeing!
What a difference context makes. And context makes a huge difference in the way we read and understand scripture as well. This is why, as I've been traveling to churches this year, I've been encouraging people to read God's Word in such a way that they get the big picture -- the full context of what God is saying to us. When we only read it one verse at a time, we can easily be deceived into thinking it says something that it really doesn't, just as you might have been deceived by the little snippet of a photo at the top of the page.
When I start out painting, I need to understand the full context of the scene first, and then, after fully understanding what I'm looking at, I can then focus on the details of the colors and the shadows and the highlights.
In the same way, if you plan to study a book of the Bible verse by verse, be sure to take the time to read the whole book first -- maybe even a few times. Getting the big picture will help you understand what you're looking at, and it will help prevent you from misunderstanding and misinterpreting the smaller bits.
This morning I went out snowshoeing. Because we've had a mixture of snow, rain, and freezing rain recently, there were stretches of my trek where the rain had washed down the hill, forming a smooth sheet of ice on an uphill grade.
Now, if I hadn't been wearing my snowshoes, I would have found it just about impossible to make it up that slope without sliding backwards two feet for every foot I moved forward.
But my snowshoes have vicious-looking sawtooth crampons on the bottom, that do a great job of digging into the ice and giving me the traction I need.
I didn't slip even once, on my way up the hill, or on my way back down.
As I was walking, I thought of two verses. One of them was a verse I read just yesterday, from the book of Psalms. Psalm 73, speaking of the wicked, says:
The Psalm tells us that those who live with unrighteousness might appear to have it all together, they might appear to be on solid footing, but in reality, they're like someone on a sheet of ice without snowshoes. Sooner or later, no matter how "together" they seem to be, they'll slip up, and everything falls apart.
Now, if I were to ask you, "How do you avoid that slippery place?" you might be tempted to answer, "Don't get involved in unrighteousness." That's not a bad answer, but it's actually not what the Psalmist says. In verses 2 and 3, he writes:
Isn't that interesting? The Psalmist says that it is envy that almost put him on the slippery slope. That makes sense, doesn't it? It is our envy that causes us to take the same shortcuts the unrighteous take in order to reach our goals.
I guess that means contentment is like a good pair of snowshoes. I wouldn't want to be without it!
Today as I was driving from South Paris, Maine to Gray, Maine, I was thinking about how much more enjoyable the drive is, now that all the road work has been completed. Back before all the road construction, if I needed to go from South Paris to Gray, it seemed as though the drive took forever. The road twisted and turned around every little hill and obstacle along the way. Now it's much different, and much nicer.
Why do you suppose the road used to make all those twists and turns? A good guess might be that the original road builders didn't want to build over the hills, and they didn't have the resources to carve through the hills. So building around was the only option left. Now, as you drive that road, you see rock faces which are a testament to the fact that the road has been carved into the sides of the hills.
As I think about this, I'm reminded of John the Baptist, and the message he was commanded by God to deliver to the people:
In the days of John, roads were difficult to maintain through the wilderness -- perhaps they were even as awful as our Maine roads during the winter and spring! But what if the king wanted to travel across the countryside? Surely he wouldn't follow the same dizzying pattern of twists, turns, dips and rises that everyone else followed? No, heralds would go out before him announcing to the people, "The king is coming! Fix up the roads! If it passes through a valley, raise it up! If it passes over a hill, lower it! We want the king to have a perfectly smooth and comfortable trip."
Make no mistake about this: when John said, "Make straight the way of the Lord," what he was really saying was, "The king is on His way!" When the king comes to visit, everyone's lives are disrupted. The people understood this, for they asked John, "What do we need to do to get ready for His coming?" John's answer, though simple and straightforward, was certainly a disruption to the way they lived their lives: Be generous, don't be a cheater, don't be a bully, don't lie about one another, and be content with what you have.
Jesus the King dwells with us daily -- does His presence disrupt your life at all? Or do you simply live life as though He is not there at all?
I realize it has been a while since I've posted anything new here. Life has been very busy and hectic the last little while, and may become even more so for awhile. More on that another time!
For now, I do have another illustration of a Bible principle. The principle comes from Matthew 15:11, in which Jesus talks about what defiles a man.
For a change of pace, I've posted this one over on my creative writing website: Fifteen Minutes of Fiction. It can be found here: A Clogged Drain.
In our "pluralistic" society, people seem to be very comfortable with the idea that no one religion has the corner on truth, and that there are many ways to get to heaven (if heaven does, in fact, exist). As a consequence, members of any one religion are made to feel as though they are being arrogant and narrow-minded if they suggest that their religion is "true." In the midst of all of this, Jesus's statement found in John 14:6 makes people feel very uncomfortable.
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," Jesus says, and you can almost hear the capital letters at the beginnings of each of those words. "The Way," he says, not "A Way." And to make matters worse, he then has the audacity to say that no one can get to heaven except through him. Not only is He the Way, He claims He is the only way.
So people tend to look at Jesus and say, "That's pretty arrogant and small-minded of him to suggest he's the only possible way."
Not arrogant and small-minded at all. Why can Jesus say things like "no one can come to heaven except through me"? Because he owns heaven. Paul tells us in Colossians 1:16 that Jesus is the creator of heaven. It belongs to HIM!
If you stop by to visit my home, who gets to decide whether you are invited in? I do! It's my place. And if you have chosen to disregard and disdain me, is it unreasonable to think that I wouldn't want you to live in my home? Of course not!
The real arrogance is for mankind to think "I will spend my life in pursuits other than the pursuit of Truth, and at the end of it all, I'll just assume that there's an eternal dwelling ready for me."
I love thunderstorms. I love to sit and watch the bolts of lightning that streak downward in stunning displays of light and power. But after yesterday, I don't think I'll ever look at lightning the same way again.
I was driving down Route 3, on my way home from a week as the Bible teacher at Camp Fairhaven, and the thunderstorm warnings came on the radio. I smiled. Then I watched as bolt after bolt of lightning flashed across the sky in the distance. The stikes were quite far away.
Or so I thought.
Then, suddenly, as I was zipping along at 50 miles per hour, the most extraordinary thing happened. There was a bright flash of light, a sudden bang (much more than a clap or a boom -- this was deafening!) and my car seemed to lift up off the roadbed and slam back down about a foot to the right of where it had been a second earlier.
For a moment I felt as though both my brain and my heart had shut off. The shock (not electrical) of the moment was really quite astonishing. It took me, perhaps, two or three seconds to realize that my car had just been struck by lightning. Though the electrical shock had passed through the metal shell of the car and left me untouched, it was several minutes before my hands stopped trembling and my breathing and heartbeat returned to normal.
And now, I don't think I shall ever enjoy a thunderstorm in quite the same way again.
I was thinking, as I continued driving home, that we often think of sin in the same way that I think of thunderstorms. Sin entertains and amuses us. It fascinates us. We think that we can dabble in it, stay on the fringes of it, and remain untouched by it.
But sin is far too powerful for us to "dabble" in it. As frighteningly powerful as lightning is, sin is just as powerful, and just as deadly. Sin has a way of catching us off-guard when we least expect it, and striking a blow that can ruin our lives.
Numbers 32:23 says that eventually, sin will always catch up with you, and in one of his great debates with the Pharisees (John 8:34), Jesus said that whoever commits sin is a slave to sin.
Did you know that sin had such power?
For the most part, I suspect that most Christians don't have enough of a good and healthy fear of sin. When it comes to sin...don't dabble. Steer clear.
In a previous entry, I wrote about chess, and compared the universe to an enormous chess game. An excellent chess player makes moves that are incomprehensible to me because I don't understand all the complexities of the game. The universe is infinitely more complex than a chess game, but fortunately, God is infinitely wiser than the best chess player, and we should not be at all surprised when we don't understand the "moves" He's making.
As I think about chess, and how a novice plays it (and when I speak of novices, I'm thinking primarily of myself!), a novice player will often treat his pawns as though they are unimportant. He will throw them in the path of other pieces in order to tempt his opponent into weaker positions, or he will trade them indiscriminately in trying to improve his own position.
No wonder we speak disparagingly of pawns, saying someone was "just a pawn."
But if we think of God as the greatest of all chess players, we must remember this: in God's view of the universe, there is no such thing as "just a pawn." The Bible teaches us that God loves each one of us, and each of us is valuable to him. Need proof of that? Remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:26. In essence, Jesus says, "Look at the birds! See how God takes care of them! And aren't you even more important to God than the birds?"
In other words, if God doesn't think of even a bird as "just a pawn," you can rest assured that he values you very highly indeed!