After all the changes that took place in the past few weeks we knew that God was shaking us up as a squad for a reason. As a whole I think a lot of us had hit a wall and become comfortable with where we were at. As we looked to the future and what we wanted to change and how we wanted to recast a vision for where we are heading, we couldn’t completely put our finger on what God was telling us. We had a bunch of great ideas, but when we discussed how we wanted to present them to the squad something wasn’t meshing. We wanted our community to be abandon everything, be more intentional, be more vulnerable, to be more unified, but when we thought about how to get people to buy into these things we realized you can’t force these things on people.
So what is it then? What is at the root of everything that we’re trying to get to? When we took a step back we realized we were really bad at love. When Jesus boiled things down to the two greatest commandments, he said, “Love God, and love others.” That seems so simple….right? Well, that’s what we thought. But the more we looked at our lives we realized we were really bad at both of those things. We didn’t know how to love God or the people in our community. If we had a handle on these things, all the other things would fall into place…we’d view nothing as our own and realize we are simply stewards of God’s resources, we’d want to go deeper into people’s lives to see who God created them to be, we’d be more open because when we open up real community is built and God works best with broken people, and we’d come together as a integrated body for the single purpose of seeing God’s glory. This love that God calls us to is anything but easy. It calls us to sacrifice and to lay down all of the rights we think we should have.
Last month this verse kept coming up over and over for me.
Ecclesiastes 12:13
Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
Solomon spends the whole book of Ecclesiastes talking about how his entire life was spent building ornate building, trying to acquire more material things, searching for wisdom, and doing whatever he pleased, but how it was all meaningless. At the end of the book the wisest man to ever live sums up everything he has learned…Fear God and do what he says.
So what does God say? In the NIV the phrase is to obey God’s commands…sure we have the Ten Commandments, but I think Solomon is referring to more than just this set of rules. I think a lot of times we set up this list of what God says: go to church, have quiet times, give to charity, etc… but what we’ve really done is skewed what God says. He doesn’t say go to church, He says be the church. He doesn’t say have quiet time, he says to pray without ceasing. He doesn’t say give to charity, he says count everything as loss for the sake of following Him. Mathew 15:8-9 says that people honor God with their lips but their hearts are far from him. Their teachings are simply rules taught by men. Jesus was asking why the Pharisees broke his commands for the sake of their traditions. They weren’t obeying God. They were skewing his commands so they could set up a shell or mask that tradition allows so that they could appear Godly. We do this too; we set up this shell, this lower standard because we don’t want to follow God completely. We only do the parts of what God says that are covenant for us. Is that really love? Is there really any sacrifice? After everything that happened I’m realizing that I’m tired of only appearing Godly…I want to be Godly. Fear God, do what he says…God teach me how to love you and others…teach me how to walk in obedience.
