Dear Cell, last Friday we tried to thaw our hearts from the frigidness of indifference. If the purpose of life is to live life with a purpose, then indifference or apathy is the antithesis (opposite) of living life with a purpose. The worst conviction in life is to have no conviction or to be “convicted” by nothing. When asked the question, are there things that I keep feeling inner promptings to pursue? some of us could not come up with anything. It was a literal blank slate or tabula rasa. Worse still, we have become tabula Teflon. Let me explain this description.
We all love to cook, or at least love to eat what is cooked. We are familiar with the cooking material Teflon. It is a flat plastic found at the base of a frying pan that prevents burnt food from sticking to the pan. It is of course easier to fry where nothing sticks to the pan. But in the lingo of conviction, that description is far from being a compliment. The sad thing is that for some of us, nothing really sticks in our hearts. We attend church services, belt out worship songs, listen to sermons and offer ourselves to the ministry but our hearts remain like tabula Teflon, where nothing seems to influence our thoughts and actions. We are drifters, spiritual vagabonds, going on life untouched, unfeeling. Some of us are consciously aware of this insidious form of apathy but choose to add more apathy to apathy by doing nothing about it. In the end, questions like what would I do if I knew I had only six months to live? When my life is over, what will I be glad I did? What do I really do well? come unstuck from our hearts and we pass away conviction-less.
For these people, the hardest thing to do is to make new-year resolutions. Their resolutions are never fulfilled because they only pay lip-service to these goals. If goals are dreams with a deadline, then these people are dreamers for life. They do not feel the urgency of their goals and they remain unaffected and unmoved by their dreams to take that all-important step to make a difference in their lives. This brings me to the point of this letter. The opposite of indifference is to make a difference and this is where we have to take a spiritual retreat from the busyness of our life, the hustling and bustling, the toiling and feuding, and reexamine the beliefs that we have accumulated all these years as a Christian. For some, we need to do an overhaul of our belief system, to weed out the clutters, and to look at our Christian life from another perspective.
Yesterday, we talked about the struggles of Abraham and his son, Isaac. We all know the story. To put it bluntly, it is a story about child-sacrifice. But what made it even harder for Abraham to offer Isaac as a human sacrifice was the contradictions in God’s promises to him. Imagine, being told by God that you are going to be the Father of a great nation, and your descendents will be as innumerable as the stars in the nocturnal skies, and having the faith and endurance to wait until you are over a hundred years old before the promise came to pass when your ninety years old wife gave birth to your one and only heir to the throne. Then, imagine further that when your precious boy reaches puberty, the same divine creator commanded you, in no uncertain terms, to slain your beloved son to Him as a sacrifice. Well, I guess on that fateful day, witless Abraham was speechless and poor Isaac was clueless. But was “capricious God” heartless?
Beloved, I have a confession to make: I used to think that He was. God was playing with Abraham’s life, toying with Isaac’s and getting a twisted kick out of it. I used to think that God was exploiting Abraham for his own pleasure, making a drama out of a poor soul’s life and enjoying every inch of it. God’s command to sacrifice Isaac was tantamount to telling a cancer patient that his cancer is in remission only to laugh out loud later with these words, “Gotcha? Just pulling your leg!”
Allow me to sidetrack. This week I have learned that knowledge without conviction is arrogance or ignorance. And conviction without knowledge is fanaticism. Let me deal with the first part only: Knowledge without conviction is arrogance or ignorance. Beloved, I count myself as reasonably knowledgeable. I am a voracious reader. My interest ranges from politics and world affairs to economics and even history of witchcraft and pagan religions. But all that knowledge without conviction is true ignorance. Why? Because when the heart remains untouched, the mind can only know and not truly experience. There is therefore a big difference between merely knowing and living out what you profess you know. The former is self-aggrandizing. The latter is life-transforming. The Bible reserves the worst rebuke for the former class of Christians, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power.” (2 Tim 3:1-5)
In short, Christians who do not practise what they believe have a “form of godliness” but do not have the power that comes with it. In my view, that is true ignorance, that is, an ignorance devoid of the power to change oneself and others around him.
With this in mind, let’s go back to Abraham. Although I openly admired Abraham’s faith to follow God’s commands all the way to Mount Calvary, I secretly doubted God’s goodness and His sense of fairness. How could God make such a macabre request that ran completely and directly opposite to his promise to Abraham? I came to this view because I only knew God from what I’ve read about Him in the Bible and had therefore failed to experience Him and His love in a personal way, with conviction. This is where what I’d said earlier applies fully: Knowledge without conviction is true ignorance.
When I opened my heart to the ministering power of His spirit, I gradually understood to a certain extent the significance of God’s command to Abraham. I came to see the sacrifice of Isaac in a whole new light or perspective. In other words, I finally realized that it is not so much about the “blind faith” or the tough faith of Abraham, or the tragedy of Isaac’s sacrifice. The moral of the story goes deeper than that. It is about Jesus and God’s compelling love for us. You see, most atheists would read this account and judge God as having murder in his heart or at least, charge God with attempted murder or murder by hire (using Abraham as his personal assassin). My counter is this: If God had wanted to murder Isaac, he would have either done it himself (which is much quicker and less messy) or get Abraham to sneak up to Isaac when he was asleep and plunge a knife into his heart. But God did neither. And here is the message.
God deliberately made Abraham walk Isaac all the way up to the hills of Moriah. The journey took a back-breaking three days. As we are aware, this is the same hill that Jesus would be sacrificed at Calvary two thousand years later. The walk was painful for Abraham. But it was even more painful for God. For God knew in advance that He would restraint Abraham’s hands from taking Isaac’s life, but He will not restraint his own hands from taking his beloved son’s life at the Cross of Calvary. This is the pain that God had to go through when Abraham took the walk with Him to the hills of Moriah. It was a lesson that God didn’t want Abraham and any of us who reads this painful account to forget. And the lesson is this: whilst Isaac’s life was spared, Jesus’ life was not.
When God stopped Abraham from taking Isaac’s life, He commended him for his faith and said, “…Now I know that you fear (love) me since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” Beloved, are we able to say back to God in the face of Jesus’s gruesome death on the cross these same words, “…Now I know you (love) me since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”? If love is action, not mere words, then God has indeed proved his love for us by offering Jesus as a sacrifice for our salvation and freedom.
This then is the crux of the message of Abraham’s story. God is trying to demonstrate His love for us in the most personal, comprehensible and humane way. His call for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac was to allow us to experience vicariously the compelling love God has for us. And the only way to experience it to the closest degree possible is for us to imagine the pain and agony of taking something that is precious to us, something that we cannot live without, and giving it away completely and irretrievably in the same way that God had allowed Jesus to be killed by His creation. In the end, it was men who had murder in their hearts, not God.
When God put Jesus, His only son, on the cross, He only had us in His mind. The compelling, overriding mental preoccupation for God was how to reconcile us back to Him once and for all. God made the calculation, the agonizing deliberation, when he walked with Abraham and Isaac to the hills of Moriah and deemed it worthwhile to offer his most prized “possession” in exchange for us and us alone. Beloved, doesn’t this make us reconsider our faith a little? Doesn’t this make us want to take our faith more seriously?
At this juncture, God is asking us this question: Can I walk with you, son or daughter? God wants to take this walk with us to the Hills of Calvary. He is asking us to bring along our most prized possession in this journey. He is asking us whether we are prepared to do what Abraham did. That is, whether we are prepared to offer to Him what we have mistakenly thought was indispensable in our life in exchange for a lifetime of blessing that will more than compensate what we will be giving up. In other words, are we willing to give up our material possessions, our career, our successes, or all our earthly idols, for God and trust that God will in return bless us manifold? This is of course a tough question and a difficult challenge and it is very personal to those who will, at some point in their Christian life, face with the existential compulsion to answer it.
Our earthly idol may be money or the love of it. It could be the insatiable appetite for earthly titles, fame and possessions. Like the rich young ruler, Jesus issued the same challenge to him and we all know the sad outcome in Luke 18:22. The rich young ruler lacked the one thing that was required for him to follow Jesus. This was the same one thing that was lacking in the life of Martha. For the rich young ruler, it was his wealth. If he had followed Jesus, he would not have lasted long because his heart was somewhere else.
As for Martha, it was her busyness that kept her from enjoying a rewarding relationship with Jesus. It is said that we all live in a rat race of ever-increasing desires for success and wealth, an ever-descending spiral for fame and self recognition, and an ever-expanding circle for love and companionship. And yet, after achieving all that we have aimed to achieve, possessing all that we have set our mind to possess, we are still no closer to finding a sustaining, lasting peace in our hearts. There is still something lacking, something that just doesn’t feel right. I know this not so much from personal experience but from reading the honest and sincere confessions of wealthy people who have attained all that society has to offer to them. Most of them are still incurably unsatisfied and endlessly striving for the next new thing that would give them an interim sense of peace, hope and security. Alas, all is but a mirage and nothing could truly give them an anchorage of peace, hope and security. Beloved, what is the one thing that you lack, or the one thing that you are unable to let go?
The irony about the rat race metaphor is that ultimately, when we finally have it all, that is, everything that others could only dream about, we are still nothing but a “rat” in the race. To transcend that, to rise above the “rat” metaphor, we need to take that all-important walk with God to lay our earthly idols on the sacrificial altar. It is at this altar that God will whisper these words to us, “If you put me above everything, I will put you above everything.”
Let me end with this quote that coincides with the theme of this letter from the writings of a renowned philosopher, “There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”
Have a warm, meaningful December holiday.
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