It may at first seem anti-intellectual that faith precedes sight.  This idea could get us into the wayward mess that claims in faith (rather arbitrarily) a million dollars for a worthy cause and then claims God is bound to come through.  The right idea, however, is that the things that God makes abundantly clear to us in Scripture are things we may not immediately ascertain but we will see them after we determine first to believe what is written.  I can choose to believe in the goodness of God and then His beauty shine in every corner.  Or I can disbelieve and seek my fortune in cynicism and scorn.  I can choose to believe that prayer is something I am called to do and then I will begin to see clearly the mystery that God is working behind the scenes.  Or I can sit in my intellectual snobbery and tell myself I’m too smart for such practices and feel contented in my sterile, miracle-less world.  Faith is not plunging into the irrational.  Faith is hearing what God says and taking it seriously – and afterwards, seeing what he means.

The startling revelation was not that the son was a sinner – everybody knew that.  The startling revelation was in the mind of the son when he finally awakened to this fact about himself.  It is easy to hide from our own sin.  We can, as the younger brother, relegate sin to some distant future preoccupation as we distract ourselves with our present goals and lusts.  We can, as the older brother, relegate sin to some past deliverance as we stand upon our present perfection.  It is difficult to be sinners in the present tense.  But when we are convicted of a sin and our heart is opened to admit it, this is a moment of grace.  Repentance then is the resulting act of turning back to God and when this happens, the father delights to welcome us home.

A hired shepherd has no stake in the sheep.  It’s just a job – a means to an end.  Similarly, those who involve themselves in Christian things lose interest when it stops being immediately beneficial.  It is a matter of heart.  Is God worth sacrificing for?  Is my spiritual life worth standing for?  Are other believers worth fighting for?  Or is it all something I’m involved in until something better comes along?

God revealed Himself to Moses with the self-proclamation “I Am”.  It spoke of His eternality and immutability (unchanging nature).  No Jew would have dreamed of applying this term to anyone else other than the God of the burning bush.  When Jesus proclaimed, “Before Abraham was I Am,” the Jews reeled in shock as they scrambled for rocks to stone the blasphemer.  It was the insane ravings of a lunatic unless, of course, it happened to be true.  The church affirmed this shocking claim and theology was born flowing forth from the proclamation “Jesus Christ is Lord” where “Lord” pointed back to “I Am”.  Jesus is that name whose pronunciation and spelling got lost over the years due to the reverence people had for the Name and the reluctance to write it down.  Jesus is Lord, YHWH, Yahwah, Jehovah, I Am.  Today, when Jesus walks into the storms of our life, we don’t have to be afraid.  The eternal, unchanging God is here.

Fear can lead us to lash out in anger or it can lead us to simply give up in despair.  In Christ, we are not to fear as we are given not the spirit of slavery that leads to fear but the spirit of adoption that cries, “Abba Father” (Romans 8:15).  Nevertheless, this seems hard to grasp since the financial challenge, the conflict or the genuine weakness still exists that made us afraid in the first place.  Here is the escape from fear:  I am weak.  God is great.  This problem is His responsibility.  Prayed as often as needed, this affirmation moves ownership of the situation off or your shoulders and upon the shoulders of a sufficient God.

In the second book of Confessions, Augustine spends much time thinking of an adolescent act of joining his friends to steal a neighbor’s pears.  The truth was the pears weren’t any good.  They were fit only for pigs.  Augustine already owned pears that were much better for eating.  He realized that the love for the sin itself was what drove him. The draw was to commit an act of omnipotence.  This sin was attractive because he could imitate God by choosing an act of power.  The reality, of course, is that this act of sin left him with nothing – worthless pears.  Sin always gives this same illusion.  We are attracted to it because we think that in making our choice, we can do a better job of meeting our own needs and getting what we really want.  In reality, sin leads us to a room that we discover, to our dismay, is empty.

Israel was all about fasting as a demonstration of self-denial and austerity.  The fast that the Lord chose, however, was one of extending a gracious heart to those weaker than you.  It is easy to argue that these weaker ones will spurn our gift using it to fuel their own sense of self-entitlement.  This may be true, but it misses the point.  Are we saying there is no one to whom we can extend a gracious heart?  Don’t worry about the problem cases.  As we seek to deny our interests in a way that those who are weaker are lifted up, helped and healed, God will give us light and will lead us further on His path.

God’s attributes is a vast flow of goodness.  He is as the endless sky, the majestic mountains, and the bottomless sea over against a narrow, dark room.  It is the only true pursuit over against the shallow constraint of self-centered preoccupation.  The lie is that sin is an equal, opposite option to the pursuit of God.  This is simply not true.  There is no comparison.  God is the fountain of life.  Outside of Him, there is nothing worth having.

Only the most insane would scale the face of Half Dome without ropes and spikes under the assumption that they will never slip.  It is easy to fall into the trap to think that I have “graduated” from grace and now I can climb the rocks without assistance.  But we never graduate.  I am one slip away from a disastrous fall.  That doesn’t mean that I spend my life in worry and fear.  It means that I take the next step in life relying in and depending upon the grace of God.

For those who struggle with self-righteousness and find their thoughts continually sliding into judgmentalism and criticalism, the cross is the place to turn.  It equals all humanity at its foot.  It reminds us that the sin and the rebellious streak of our heart have made us all unworthy before God.  We depend upon His grace.  For those who struggle with self-depreciation and muddle through the swamp of self-loathing, shame and scrupulosity, the cross is the place to turn.  It lifts us up from the shameful place it found us.  It restores us to nobility and servant-authority greater than from which Adam fell.  It tells us we are more than head-bowed pardoned criminals but restored as children in the family of the Father.  Whatever way we want to misperceive our place, the cross can order our thinking again.