Sense the Flow of His River

2/14/2012

Martin: I’m taking this literature course, and one of the assignments was to record what you did in the last week, so I wrote down everything I did in the last week. Basically, the whole thing was that I read Walden, a paper by Thoreau, and the whole idea was simplifying life. So, I wrote it, and I was saying to Dad, I don’t really know how to simplify my life. The best thing I could come up with was, “Well, I saw I did a lot of stuff during my week and jumped from thing to thing. So, I guess one way to simplify my life was not to jump from thing to thing.” This whole thing kind of reminded me of that. This would be a better way to do that.

Craig: Yeah, this would be a lot better! You can almost get an information overload on “good” stuff, too, I was thinking. We’ve got iPads and iPhones and this and that and all this good stuff. Do you take the time to let that be real, instead of just bouncing to something else that’s a neat thought or quote or whatever, but to really let something take hold.

Mark: The sensitivity to feel the difference is a really big deal in things like that. Paul talked about two, or at the most three, prophets, in the same context as “When revelation comes to the second, let the first one sit down.” It’s exactly that point. The information overload of having seventeen prophets have something to say...

Craig: All good stuff...

Mark: It’s all great stuff—and everybody goes home nuts! They don’t remember a thing that happened.

I think it’s the self-discipline, the control of self, to say “That’s enough for now! I don’t need to know the news for every week, or every day for sure. If I can’t go a week or two without picking up my iPad, there’s probably something wrong with me. I’m probably mishandling this tool.” The ability to know God and the flow of His river well enough to be able to sense the eddy currents... Where are the ripples? What’s happening? What’s interfering with the flow? I need to let this go. I need to have the control of self to not let the objects and the things and the stuff and the information interfere with the flow of the peace of God. The River of God is peaceable. He’s the Prince of Peace. And if I’ve got too much going on, then that simplification... energy or God’s whisper in the Garden? It takes a bit of a commitment to even know the difference between the two. If a hundred good things are going on, that doesn’t make it good. It doesn’t have to be good just because all hundred things are good. If you can’t hear God’s whisper in the Garden anymore, then you’ve missed God, and that can’t be right. It can’t be worth it.

On that same note, it’s easy to confuse the idea of service with the idea of love. Those two things aren’t the same! You can serve without loving. I don’t know that you can love without serving, but boy, it’s really easy to think that I’ve loved people today because I’ve served them today. Loving is a much more quiet thing than serving is. There’ll be some overlap for sure, but “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” The process of loving people means that you’ve got to have enough control of self to have the time to do it. You’ve got to have enough peace in your heart to be able to take a deep breath and look at them and love them. If it becomes appropriate to serve too, that’s great. But don’t mistake service for love, because you can be the most sacrificial, good person in the world and never look anybody in the eyes, never feel what they feel. That would be a poor counterfeit for love! So, again, kind of the same principle. You can be so busy with the “good” stuff that you miss the really good stuff.

Steve: One of the things I used to do with work is to say, “Here’s when you can call me and when you can’t. Here’s a list of five things.” They’d come in at 7 o’clock when the nightshift started, and I’d start getting calls from that shift.

Mark: It’s a refreshing thing, but you can’t allow yourself any regrets. That’s a key to it too. It’s like, I’m making a choice to do this, and there’s nothing that can happen that can make me regret having done that. That’s the trust factor. “Well, I forwarded my phone for some block of time, and the place burned down.” So what? It’s the choice that you made, and it was the right choice for your spirit, for your life, for your future, for loving others.

Steve: No regrets.

Mark: No regrets. And then you find out that whole shopping center got condemned, and you would have lost the store anyway. You’ve got to trust that God works everything together for the good. And even if you haven’t the slightest idea how that could be true, it just had some ripple effect that God was aware of. You did it for the right reason, and no regrets. Whatever happens, happens. It’s in God’s hands.

It doesn’t mean you just arbitrarily do that: “It’s a spiritual thing to start forwarding your phone at 7 o’clock every night.” Well, maybe today it is, tomorrow it’s not. That’s part of being in touch with God instead of religious. You don’t live by some set of artificial guidelines that make you feel more “spiritual.” That’s junk. God’s a living God. There’s a dynamic. He’s a Person. Therefore, we relate to the moment. “Give us this day our daily bread.” It’s relating to the moment and trusting that you can hear His whisper in the Garden, as opposed to substituting the religion of, “We all forward our phones and do this starting at 7 o’clock every night.” Not so! Today you do, tomorrow you don’t. But being able to listen to God is a fruit of the Spirit. In other words, it’s in the Wind. Pneuma is the word for “Spirit.” It’s the same word as “pneumatic” or whatever. It has to do with wind. So, a fruit of the Spirit is a fruit of the Wind. It can’t be a rule and still be the Spirit. It can only be religion. And then you start comparing yourself to yourself and being prideful, comparing yourself to others, condemning them. The fruit is not love. It is true that we need to be able to do that, but even that is a dynamic rather than a rule or a judgment or anything like that. It’s just a very fresh, “Give us this day our daily bread” sort of thing. When everybody lives that way, it works out really cool. Miracles happen.

Larry: It’s real applicable to me. There’s stuff at work that I enjoy doing—kind of a new business line, researching. And I get into this thing. It’s just difficult. And I can feel it: pick up that book one more time and it’s a problem. I’d almost rather it be, “I can do it one hour a day, and two on weekends,” but it needs to be what you’re saying, because it’s just religion if that’s the case. It needs to be that I just know that if I get into that again, that’s sin. I need to turn it off.

Mark: And He honors that. It’s one of those things. It’s not like God “trades” us, exactly. We’re familiar with faith being “the evidence of things hoped for, the substance of things unseen.” Were familiar with that definition of faith. But the Hebrews writer goes on to talk about the fact that He’s a “rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” When you understand the process of “this would have been fun, but no” or “this is stressing me, but no”—when you understand that’s a gift you’re offering to Jesus—that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, “Him” being the operative pronoun and object of it all. It’s not exactly a sacrifice when you know that God is rewarding you for a gift you are offering to Him. If He didn’t reward us at all for offering Him the gift, so be it. He gave us the gift of life in the first place. When you’ve done all, you’re still an unprofitable servant. We’re doulos, we’re slaves. Of course, we’re going to do that. We’re slaves. It’s that simple. We’re not gods, we’re slaves. It’s that simple. But beyond that, knowing His character—that’s why it’s the evidence of things hoped for and unseen—is that He’s also a rewarder of those that take that chance and step out on the end of that limb where there’s something we wanted, and we had control of self…there’s something we feared, and we had control of self…there’s something we feel responsible for, but it’s too much, and we have control of self. He actually rewards that. There’s payback. It’s not like we’re trading Him, but it is His nature to notice when we did something for Him. That doesn’t go unnoticed with Him. He’s a Person.