Righteousness Ain’t No Church Lady

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When jazz musicians use the term, righteous, they are describing music that is harmonious, in a groove, following the established principles or rules of music but using those rules to launch a new, delightful and creative line of music that is a real treat to the ear and soul of the listener.  Sadly, when the terms, righteous or righteousness, are applied to a Christian context, too often the associations made are more about the uptight “Church Lady” from Saturday Night Live.

Dana Carvey as The Church Lady

Dana Carvey as The Church Lady (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is nothing righteous about being a prude.  Religious, frowny-faced, so-called righteousness stems from the impossible attempt to be good enough for God.  As we have  discussed in the previous posts it is impossible for us humans to act in harmonious, righteous ways with God when we are disconnected from His Spirit.  You cannot harmonize with music you can’t hear.

But when God “lives with” a person (Isaiah 57:15), He establishes the connection with His Spirit.  He does so to “revive” him, to bring him to life in a new way, thus enabling him to live with the best and most beautiful kind of righteousness.   Righteousness does not come from human effort; it is a gift from God.  Here is how Paul explained it:

But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. Romans 3:21-22a

Paraphrased, this says that the ability and tendency to live in tune with God’s beautiful music comes from Him, the Old Testament (the Law and the Prophets) explained had to happen.  This harmonious and beautiful capacity, righteousness, comes as a gift to those who put their faith in Jesus.  Paul describes it later as “walking in the newness of life.”(Romans 6:5)

See dat?  This is the exact opposite of the commonly held notion of what happens to a person who trusts Jesus.  You don’t become an uptight, holier-than-thou, pinched-face church lady.  That’s not real righteousness.  Instead, you discover a new life from God that emerges from inside, with increasing righteousness – in the jazz sense of the word!

 (To read these posts in a logical order, click on the “New Here?” page above, or on THIS LINK)

Jamming in God’s Band

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If you have been following these posts, you know I’ve compared “dead” humans to dead cell phones that have lost their signal. (You can read all the posts in the right order HERE.)  In Isaiah 57:15, God said He wants to connect us to the signal of His Spirit and “revive us,” bring us to life.  (See “In a Nutshell”)  The problem with that analogy is that humans think and decide; cell phones are machines and only do what they are told.  God did not create us to be robots who blindly follow rules, but to be connected to Him by His Spirit in a harmonious way.  Here’s how He described the process of “reviving” us to Ezekiel:

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Ezekiel 36:26-27

God’s plan is not to control us like machines, but to “move us,” from the inside out, by giving His Spirit in us to motivate our new, responsive hearts.  See that?  Here’s how Paul describes it:

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will,  Romans 12:2

The end result of this process of being “revived” by God’s Spirit, is not to become automatons who woodenly follow God’s rules, but living beings who, by being in tune with God, act in sympathy with His principles.

A shot from a 2006 performance by Peter Brötzm...

A shot from a 2006 performance by Peter Brötzmann, a key figure and doyen in European free jazz (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Time for a different analogy:  Beginning music students study and practice scales, because in music, scales are the “rules.”  Accomplished jazz musicians improvise in harmony with one another, not by playing scales, but by following the principles of the scales to make their music “work” together.  When a jazz musician plays a solo in a particularly harmonious and exciting way, the others say “That was righteous!”  God isn’t looking for robotic obedience to the rules, He’s looking for people who are in harmony with Him and with His principles, so much so that the way they improvise in life is “righteous.”

Chew on that…

You Choose: Rules or Rest?

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Religion may make you feel good, but it doesn’t work.  Religions tell you what you have to do  to be okay with God.  Religions give you the rules to follow so you can make the connection with God happen.  But God says He makes the connection, that He will live in our hearts to bring us to life (Isaiah 57:15 – See “In a Nutshell”).  But He doesn’t do that for the religious; He does it for the “lowly and contrite.”  Religion gives you a score and tells you how well you are doing.  Lowliness puts you in touch with the reality that you can never measure up to God’s standard of righteousness – not even close.  Lowly people hunger for righteousness; religious people tend to think, “I’m not perfect, but I’m doing better than those other guys.”  Jesus comforted and loved the lowly.  He had fits with the religious.

This is not a new problem.  700 years before Jesus, God criticized the religious people because they were making up rules for people to follow to get to God.  He said,

“For it is: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule, a little here, a little there.”  Very well then, with foreign lips and strange tongues God will speak to this people, to whom he said, “This is the resting place, let the weary rest”; and, “This is the place of repose”— but they would not listen.  So then, the word of the Lord to them will become: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there— so that they will go and fall backward, be injured and snared and captured. Isaiah 28:10-13

God intended for our relationship with Him to be characterized by rest, not rules.  Coming to  God was intended to be coming to the resting place, the place of repose.  But humans wanted rules, so we could be in control and so we could keep score.  So God said, “Very well then, have it your way.”  And God’s Word for the religious became distorted into “do and do, rule on rule, a little here, a little there.”

But for the lowly, for those who know they can’t measure up by following the rules, God comes and lives with them, reviving their hearts.  Jesus says, “Let Me be in charge; you come find rest in Me.”

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Matthew 11:28

You can have it your way.  Which way do you choose: rules or rest?

Resetting Your Receiver

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The Rockies were playing the Diamondbacks but the only thing on my TV was an error message: “searching for satellite signal…”  The help screen suggested my receiver needed to be reset.   There it is, folks, a great metaphorical description of the human condition!  We need to be reset.  We are dead, disconnected and searching for the signal, searching for the Spirit of God.  That’s what makes Isaiah 57:15, where God says He will “revive the spirit of the lowly,” such great news.  To revive means the same as to reset – to do what is necessary to connect the signal and bring us back to life. (If you don’t follow this, check out “Dead Man Walking”) 

But, maybe you don’t feel so dead.  Maybe you are wondering if this idea fits with the rest of the Bible.  It not only fits, it’s the whole point.  In the first few pages of the Bible, Adam and Eve stopped trusting God, were banished from the Garden of Eden and prevented from getting to “the Tree of Life” (Genesis 3:24).  That is a picture of their spiritual deadness, the condition of all humankind.  But the last chapter of the Bible shows a picture of how that condition will be reversed, for those given “the right to the Tree of Life” (Revelation 22:14)!  Spiritual deadness and how it can be reset or revived is the basic theme of the Bible.

John wrote of Jesus: “In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4).  The thing that was different about Jesus was that He had life.  He was not spiritually dead, like everybody else.  Moreover, He was “The true light that gives light to every man” (John 1:9).  Jesus taught that this life and light is in the Spirit: “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life.” (John 6:63).   

Jesus knew we were spiritually dead, but could be reconnected.  He said:

“I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. John 5:24  

He came to reset us.  Now, if getting my TV working were only that simple…

Dead Man Walking

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God says, in Isaiah 57:15, He will live with a person to revive him, to bring him or her back to life (see: “In a Nutshell”).  We asked, in what sense are we dead?  Why do we need to be revived (see: “The ‘Why?’ Question”)?   The answer has to do with the makeup of a human being, and how that makeup became damaged.

Humans are like animals in that we both have bodies and souls.  Our bodies are all the physical stuff we use to get around on the planet, our hardware.  Our souls are the software that we use to run the hardware, our minds, emotions and will.  Our minds and emotions think, “Man, I’m craving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!”  And then our will decides to make one and eat it.  Our souls (mind, emotion and will) tell our bodies (hands, arms, legs, teeth, etc.) what to do.  Humans and animals alike have hardware and software, bodies and souls.

But humans were designed by God with the capacity to be connected to Him by His Spirit.  Just as our bodies are designed to be operated by our souls, our souls are designed to be informed by His Spirit.  To use the previous example, His Spirit says, “It would be cool to go make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and share it with that hungry guy over there.”  The soul “hears” that and then controls the body to do that.  Getting hungry?  Go ahead and get a sandwich; I’ll wait…

So then, an animal has two parts: hardware and software – body and soul; humans have three parts: hardware, software and signal – body, soul and spirit.  We humans compare to animals in the same way cell phones compare to calculators.  Cell phones and calculators both have hardware, run by software.  They both do interesting things, using only hardware and software.  But cell phones also receive information from an invisible signal, process that signal, “inform” the software to make phone calls and use the internet.  When cell phones can’t receive that cell signal, we say they are dead.

Human beings are designed to be in steady contact with God by His Spirit, His invisible “cell signal.”  But our ability to receive that signal is broken.  In that sense, we are dead, spiritually dead.  Our souls, our software, senses that something is missing, something is not working right; which is why we spend so much of our energy trying to fix it.  Anywhere you go on the planet, religions tend to dominate what people think about and how they live.  But we cannot fix the connection because we are dead (and vice versa!).

How did that happen?  It is explained in the first couple of pages of the Bible.  God told Adam, “On the day you deliberately disobey Me and decide you don’t need Me, on the day you think you know better than what I have been telling you, on that day you will surely die.”  Well, He didn’t say it exactly like that; it had to do with eating the fruit and all that.  You can read it for yourself, but that is the essence of it.  Adam did disobey God, and he did die that day.  It wasn’t his body that died; his hardware didn’t die.  His soul, his software, didn’t die; he was still able to think and feel and decide.  What died was His spirit, his intimate connection to God.  He lost the “signal,” like a dead cell phone.  Adam became spiritually dead, he and all his descendants (that’s you and me).

Now go back to Isaiah 57:15, where God says He “lives with” the contrite and lowly in order to “revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.”  That means He connects the cell signal of His Spirit to those people to bring them back to life – real life.  There is a whole bunch more to this… We’ll get back to it next time.

Tears and Prayers

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The question posed at the end of the last post (see “The “Why?” Question”) asked, “in what sense are we “dead?””  The bombing in Boston has put a sad and urgent punctuation mark on that question.  Obviously something is “broken” with us humans, something dead that should be alive.  But, rather than continue with that line of thought today, it’s time for quiet reflection, for tears and prayers… 

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Matthew 11:28

God bless you.

The “Why?” Question

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Isaiah 57:15 can be seen as the key to the message of the whole Bible.

For this is what the high and lofty One says — he who lives forever, whose name is holy: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite. Isaiah 57:15

The question we raised last time (see: “In a Nutshell”) was why?  Why would the God of the universe, the One Who “lives forever,” Who exists beyond all time and space “in a high and holy place,” also live “with him who is contrite and lowly”?  Set aside the “who” question – what is it about the contrite and lowly – and focus on the “why?” question.  The idea seems preposterous, that Almighty God would somehow choose to inhabit humans.  Remember the vast size and scope of His Creation, and what a tiny speck our whole solar system is in that universe?  Even our Milky Way Galaxy, at a mere 100,000 light years wide, is only a tiny speck in space.  

English: Artist's conception of the spiral str...

English: Artist’s conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way with two major stellar arms and a central bar. “Using infrared images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way’s elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why would God care about a certain life form on earth, much less arrange to live in us?  King David asked that question, roughly 3000 years ago:

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?   Psalm 8:3-4

The answer to the “why?” question is given in  Isaiah above .  It is ” to revive the spirit … and to revive the heart …”  God does it to revive us. The original word translated, revive, means “to bring something back to life!”  It means to take something that is dead and make it alive.

Chew on this: If God lives with someone to bring him or her back to life, it follows that this person must be dead.  But she or he is also “lowly and contrite,” attributes that cannot belong to the dead.  Dead guys don’t have character traits.  So then, in what sense are they (are we) dead?   Stay tuned…

In a Nutshell

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In the last couple of posts, I’ve been ruminating on the majesty and awesome “bigness” of God, of how His position as the Creator of the universe necessarily puts him way beyond anything we are equipped to imagine  (See the posts under “The Majesty of God” category).  When you consider Who God really is, it is astonishing to read the following verse from Isaiah, a verse that I believe is the key to the whole Bible.  It contains the message of the Bible in a nutshell:

For this is what the high and lofty One says — he who lives forever, whose name is holy: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite. Isaiah 57:15

There is so much in that short verse I’m going to take it in small chunks.  But for now, consider this: Almighty God, Who created the vast universe, says that He lives in a high, holy place – call it Heaven – no surprise about that.  But He also lives, He says, with certain people.  Who?  Not those who are important enough, or rich enough, or smart enough, or famous enough, not even those who are good enough or religious enough; He lives with those who are lowly enough!  Why would God do that?  Why would He want to live with any human being on this tiny planet?  And why lowly people?  Chew on that…

Getting a Grip

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Grasping the enormity of God is impossible; He is too big, too much.  We do well to only get a small grip.  We know He exists; we just can’t wrap our mind around Him.  For a number of years, my response to the impossibility of fully knowing God was to tell myself (and everybody else) that there was no God.  I’d say, “I’m not going to believe in God unless I can fully understand Him.”  Then my seatmate on a plane said, “Buddy, if you can fully understand it, it isn’t God.”  Good point.  And, there are a lot of things we don’t fully understand (like, for me, how this blog thing works) and yet we know they exist and use them.

That guy’s remark helped me stop being such a skeptic, and dare to be a real skeptic in the original sense of the word.  “Skeptic” comes from the Greek word, skopos, which means to look deeply and carefully into something to ascertain the truth of it.   If you think about it, it’s much more exhilarating to look into things you do not understand fully.   That’s why it’s fun to watch a child learning about soap bubbles.  That’s why it’s exciting to swim with dolphins.  That’s what motivates scientists.  Probing what we do not fully  understand fills us with awe and wonder.

God exists.  He created everything, knows everything, has power over everything.  And for some reason we cannot fully understand, He loves you.  We cannot fully grasp God.  But get a grip on Him and let your heart be filled with wonder and awe.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.   Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV)[1]

[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984 (electronic ed.). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Oh My God!!!

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“Papa, wake up!  You have to see this!”

I fought my way out of a dream and gradually put the world back together.  We were in a small cabin on the northern shores of Lake Michigan.  The last few embers of the evening’s fire were winking in the fireplace.  Must have been after midnight.  My daughter pulled at my sleeve and whispered, “Get Mom and come down to the lake, quickly!”

We stumbled down the darkened steps, gripping the handrail by the path and emerged out onto the rocky beach.  Stretched out above us were vast curtains of emerald green, flashing brightly and undulating as though moved by an unseen, powerful hand.  The stars were so vivid they glittered on the surface of the lake and yet they paled behind this spectacular display of Northern Lights.  My heart ached as I tried to absorb such incredible beauty.  It was so grand, so beyond explanation or description.  We hugged ourselves against the chill breeze and gaped, spellbound.  Just that day we had reveled in our mighty plans – swimming, sailing, hiking, cooking.  Now we knew we were impossibly small and powerless, irrelevant.

Maybe you remember the first time you saw pictures from the Hubble telescope of the vast expanses of space, the purplish clouds of stuff that turn out to be uncountable galaxies, each one of which would dwarf our Milky Way.  If you have never seen these, click this: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/galaxy/magellanic_cloud/pr2006055a/large_web/

Try to imagine how much bigger the universe is than the small slice of it you are seeing.  If our solar system was superimposed on that picture it would only be a tiny speck.  Stand on a midnight shore and look up into that picture.  Let your heart be still and stretch your imagination.  Try to “see” that deep, that far.

Now, read this:

Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded? He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
Isaiah 40:21-22