Green Pastures and Still Waters
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Have you ever needed an attitude adjustment? I’ve needed a quite a few over the past 14 months. It’s not easy to get a bad attitude converted. And, the longer we keep a bad attitude, the more we justify whatever it is that put us in the mood in the first place. Oswald Chambers once wrote something like, “Moods don’t go by praying, they go by kicking!” I know what he meant but sometimes the only way to kick them is by praying! We have to invite God into the narrative that is feeding the bad attitude and let Him speak to us so we can speak to ourselves in ways that are true. Sometimes we have to allow others to speak truth to us. Pastor Bouman had to give me a little pep-talk to help me out of a bad attitude just this week. I need all the help I can get because my mind so easily drifts to secondary things. What we need primarily is the attitude or the mind of Christ. It is a fight to keep that attitude. Apparently the church at Philippi was struggling with some internal disunity, they had some attitude problems. Paul’s appeal to them was Christo-centric. In other words, he appealed to them on the basis of what they had in Christ and what they knew about Christ. The passage we’re studying this week is one of the most beautiful and clear descriptions of the nature and example of Christ that we will find anywhere in the Bible. I hope you will join us in person or on-line.
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What we put in the blank matters. It is our nature to put secondary things in the blank and it is the nature of Jesus to let us try. Whenever I hear someone say, “That’s what it’s all about,” I know what they have in the blank at that time. Football. Nascar. Family. Hunting. Winning. Money. Leisure. The problem is, secondary things are temporal things and whatever temporal things work their way into the blank either leave us behind or we leave them behind. When we put Christ Jesus in the blank, we have Him now and more of Him in the future. Joy is the by-product of keeping the Primary Person in the primary place. He will never leave us nor forsake us. He is the same, yesterday, today and forever. He is “merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abounding in goodness and truth…” Yet, I confess, I fight most days to keep Christ Jesus in the blank. So many other things try to play “king of the hill” in my heart. I have to remember what Paul said, “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.” That is the only way the equation works. It is the nature of the human heart to give in and the nature of Jesus let us try—but He will take His rightful place in the whisper of a prayer, “You are the way, the truth and the life!”