“You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself. If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”
– Galatians 5:13-17
God has done a great thing for us. The creator of the universe did not wait to find out how sincere we are or how devout or religious we might be or how well we understand the Bible or any other religious book. In fact… God hasn’t even waited to find out how interested or willing any of us is to even take all this faith stuff seriously. God has simply decided. Decided what you might ask…
This…
God created the heavens and the earth… along with the seas and all their creatures and at the top of all God could muster is us… humanity… the people… the nations… none of us being here of our own desire… but being here all the same. You can find more detail in the Book of Genesis.
The Psalmist wrote… ‘the Lord is my shepherd… I shall not want. He leads me to green pastures and besides still waters and restores my soul.’ Again… God’s decision.
And then there was this message from the Gospel of John… ‘for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…’ out of goodness, grace and necessity.
You see the Bible is a book of the greatness of God and the very shortcomings of God’s people. We have the biggest of identity crises… being created in the image of God… yet wanting too often… to BE God. And then there goes God again… making this decision for us… saving us from ourselves because God knows us better than we know ourselves… knowing full well what kind of people we are… what is strong or weak about us… what is in full view and what we hide… and still God comes out of what seems like nowhere… actually out of nothing… and says… “I am the Lord your God.” We didn’t ask. God decided… writing those sacred words on stone tablets for Moses to give to a wandering people… chiseled into rock in God’s own handwriting… words spoken to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob many years before… always wanting us to be free to love God back and to mirror that relationship by loving our neighbor!
I shared in a conversation recently where a young man was asked at the dinner table… ‘what makes you happy?’ and the reply was unexpected… as he said… ‘what makes me happy is doing nothing.’ And all I could think of was… ‘how could that be? Doing nothing is doing something!’ It’s kind of like the kid who said, “I want to live in a world where there are no rules!” not realizing the impossibility of living in a world where there are no rules would mean there is still one rule… that being… “there are no rules!”
Our nation… the US of A celebrates 250 years of existence this weekend. We call this ‘the great American experiment’… as 250 years is a blink of an eye compared to the history of humanity… yet here we are… living on an ever shrinking planet in the midst of God’s universe… with what now seems to be bigger problems… as we find ourselves witnessing the battles of nations as well as the battle within ourselves… free not to do whatever we wish but free to …as St. Paul wrote… serve one another humbly in love! Faith matters! Enjoy the fireworks… and let YOUR light shine!
