How dare you?!”
That was the indignant question the pompous religious authorities put to Jesus after he wove his now-famous whip of cords and drove the animal-sellers and money-changers out of the Temple.
“Show us a miraculous sign,” they demanded, “to prove that you have the authority to do what you’ve done here today!”
When Jesus answered, his reply was more for his disciples than it was for his interrogators: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
“It’s taken forty-six years to build this temple,” they replied, “and you’ll raise it up in three days!?”
They completely misunderstood, of course, but they were quite willing to use this statement against Jesus at his trial. The Apostle John explains that the Lord was talking about the “temple of his body” (2:21) and says that when Jesus was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said, and “they believed.”
“Who do you think you are?” the authorities demanded, but by his actions our Lord had already answered. He was the Son of God consumed with wrath at the perversion of worship purveyed by religious profiteers. He was the Son of God angered by the disrespect shown in the holy courts of his Father’s house. He was the Son of God loved by the Father and endowed with all of the authority of the King.
“Who do you think you are?” Jesus was and is the One whose death on the cross would buy our pardon and whose resurrection life would fill us with God’s power.
“Who do you think you are?” He was the priceless and perfect Lamb of God, but there was no “sheepishness” in his defiant act as he angrily herded out the greedy sellers of overpriced, and far from perfect, sacrificial offerings.
This Lamb of God was also the Highest of Priests who would give his blood to open the way for his people into the Most Holy Place itself. He was God’s very Son upsetting the money-changers’ tables and disrupting the profit and the power of the Temple authorities who worshiped only themselves.
Had they been willing, Jesus would have cleansed not just the Temple that day but the lives of those in charge of God’s house, but they would not be cleansed, and they would have no part with Christ. Before long, they would conspire to destroy the “temple of his body,” and three days hence, the most glorious Temple of all would be rebuilt.
What an odd picture though! “Religious” men who had no real relationship with the living God stood near the house of God demanding of the Son of God, “Who do you think you are?”
Maybe the most important question, though, is the one that confronts each of us: Who do we think Jesus is? No answer but, “The very Son of God and Lord of all!” is good enough.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Loving Can Be Costly, But It's Worth the Price
Loving can be hard. Just look in John 11. We’re told, “Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.” (11:5). A lot of loving is going on in this chapter! Love is a wonderful thing, but if we think loving is easy, well, that’s rarely true, and it’s certainly not the case here.
If Mary and Martha hadn’t loved their brother Lazarus, his sickness and death wouldn’t have cost them the price of a telegram (or smoke signals or a runner or . . .) to get the news to Jesus. Nor would it have cost them something far more pricey, buckets of bitter tears.
If Jesus hadn’t loved Lazarus and his sisters, the news of his sickness and, later, the knowledge of his death, wouldn’t have cost the Lord a trip back to dangerous territory, the misunderstanding of His disciples and Mary and Martha, precious tears shed with those sisters, and the unleashing of enough power to literally raise the dead.
If Jesus hadn’t loved Lazarus, He wouldn’t have raised him from the dead, and this miracle would not have been the final straw that caused the chief priests and Pharisees to call a meeting to make plans to kill Him (11:53), plans so serious that Jesus had to withdraw near the desert lest His death occur on His enemies’ time-table instead of on His own.
If the disciples hadn’t loved the Lord, Jesus’ decision to go back to the region where the authorities had recently sought to stone Him would have presented no problem at all: they’d have simply stayed on the safe side of the Jordan. It was because they loved Him that Thomas finally said, basically, “I’m pretty sure going back means that the Lord will be killed by His enemies, and I’m just as sure that if we go, we’ll die, too, but let’s saddle up, “that we may die with Him” (11:16).
Loving can be hard, and a very good case can be made that it’s loving that causes a lot of the difficulty for the folks in John 11 and, come to think of it, for folks like you and me. Maybe, then, we should un-complicate our lives by simply refusing to love. Maybe we should just become cold and unfeeling and cast off love so that our lives will be easier and we can avoid the pain caused by loving.
You know I’m not serious about that. Yes, loving can be hard, but the only thing worse than the pain of loving would be the pain of refusing to love.
Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb and those sisters from their grief because He so loved them. He raises all of His children, His friends, from the tombs of our sin and guilt for one reason: His love. “For God so loved the world” that He sent His Son, and the Son so loved that He was willing to die to purchase pardon for you, for me.
Loving is hard. No one knows that better than our Lord who, knowing the cost, loves us completely, and pays the price.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Our Deepest Longing May Be the Desire To Be Home
We are all on a journey. What is particularly ironic about the journey is that we spend most of our lives trying to get back where we started. We spend most of our lives trying to fulfill our deepest longing, the desire to be home, truly home.
If you think about the journey as beginning with an earthy mother and father, you’re right, of course. But I’d suggest you start farther back. God assures us that he knew us even before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs and that the gift of life comes directly from his hand.
When we are physically born, we are born for sure with the sinful nature that will one day cause us to go our own way and sin against our Father, but we nonetheless arrive in the most sinless, innocent, pure, and trusting condition we humans will ever know here.
No wonder Jesus tells us that unless we become as trusting, loving, and pure as little children, we can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. We grow up and spend most of our lives trying to regain that purity and innocence and loving trust in our Father. We spend our lives trying to regain the capacity for joy and delight and spontaneity that little children are filled with. Maybe we adults feel that loss more than we realize. Maybe that’s one reason we have such a deep longing to be children again in our true home.
Where is our real home? Home is where the Father is. Our longing for home is all wrapped up in our longing to be with the Father. When we see in our human fathers what is best, we’re led to long even more to be with the best Father of all. When we see in our human fathers deep weakness, we’re led to long even more to be wrapped up in the arms of the best Father. We might not put it that way, but the longing is there. We want to find our way home, home to the Father.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ disciples are distressed as he has been talking about leaving them. In the fourteenth chapter, he assures them, “In my Father’s house are many rooms, and I’m going to prepare a place for you so that one day I’ll come and take you to be with me where I am” (Shelburne translation).
Then Jesus says, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.” That’s when Thomas, whose love for the Lord was second to none and who was unwilling to endure the perplexity any longer, absolutely boils over: “Lord, what are you talking about? We don’t know where you’re going, so how in the whole wide world can you expect us to know the way?!”
Jesus’ answer?
“Oh, Thomas, you do know the way, because you know me, and I am the way.”
How do we get home, home to the Father? We follow the One who is the Way to the Father, and, walking with us all along the journey, he leads us home.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
If you think about the journey as beginning with an earthy mother and father, you’re right, of course. But I’d suggest you start farther back. God assures us that he knew us even before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs and that the gift of life comes directly from his hand.
When we are physically born, we are born for sure with the sinful nature that will one day cause us to go our own way and sin against our Father, but we nonetheless arrive in the most sinless, innocent, pure, and trusting condition we humans will ever know here.
No wonder Jesus tells us that unless we become as trusting, loving, and pure as little children, we can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. We grow up and spend most of our lives trying to regain that purity and innocence and loving trust in our Father. We spend our lives trying to regain the capacity for joy and delight and spontaneity that little children are filled with. Maybe we adults feel that loss more than we realize. Maybe that’s one reason we have such a deep longing to be children again in our true home.
Where is our real home? Home is where the Father is. Our longing for home is all wrapped up in our longing to be with the Father. When we see in our human fathers what is best, we’re led to long even more to be with the best Father of all. When we see in our human fathers deep weakness, we’re led to long even more to be wrapped up in the arms of the best Father. We might not put it that way, but the longing is there. We want to find our way home, home to the Father.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ disciples are distressed as he has been talking about leaving them. In the fourteenth chapter, he assures them, “In my Father’s house are many rooms, and I’m going to prepare a place for you so that one day I’ll come and take you to be with me where I am” (Shelburne translation).
Then Jesus says, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.” That’s when Thomas, whose love for the Lord was second to none and who was unwilling to endure the perplexity any longer, absolutely boils over: “Lord, what are you talking about? We don’t know where you’re going, so how in the whole wide world can you expect us to know the way?!”
Jesus’ answer?
“Oh, Thomas, you do know the way, because you know me, and I am the way.”
How do we get home, home to the Father? We follow the One who is the Way to the Father, and, walking with us all along the journey, he leads us home.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Only God Makes Genuine Joy, and He's Good At It!
It’s snowing outside. That suits me fine. I love snow. (It’s also blowing a gale, and that’s not so lovely, but . . .)
I might be tempted to claim that I brought the snow home with me from an “instead of Christmas gifts” ski trip our family took to the mountains last weekend, but I doubt anyone would believe me. Besides that, the folks up there are stingy with their snow, and a good bit of what my family and I were skiing on is snow the folks up on the mountain made themselves.
It’s amazing how much impressive equipment it takes to blow enough water (and lots of it) through cold air to make tons of the white stuff. Not that long ago, only the Lord could make snow. We shouldn’t get too uppity about it. He’s still the only One who can make the right ingredients and most important conditions even for the stuff we make.
Still, snow-making has come a long way, and those big snow guns are impressive. They look like big cement mixing buckets on wheels. Shoot mega-gallons of water into a bunch of highly-compressed fast-moving air, and do it in the right proportions at around 27 degrees or below, and you’ve got snow, and lots of it.
I want one of those things for the house. Of course, I don’t need one that big, but I’ve seen some smaller homemade ones on the Internet that look intriguing. (My wife gets an “Oh, no, what next?” sort of look on her face when she sees me looking at such videos.) We don’t get nearly as much genuine God-given snow as I’d like, and I think it would be really cool (in every sense) to call up the grandkids and say, “Come on over! I’ve got a couple of inches of PawPaw-produced snow already made for you, and I’m making more!”
We had a wonderful time in the mountains, and though God makes beauty in a jillion forms, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful than sights you see when skiing down a snow-covered mountain. I know I’ve never done anything that was much more fun. Best of all is sharing it with the people you love and enjoy the most. Beauty is even better when shared. Skiing together. Riding up the lift together. Talking together and seeing deer foraging under the trees. Waking up each morning with granddaughters hollering out the cabin window, “Hi, duckies!” and watching the ducks on the cold pond respond by paddling over as they know those little girls and an old guy will soon be tossing bread to them. Well, what is better than that?
I can’t bring the mountains or the pond or the ducks home, but I wonder if I could figure out how to make a little snow . . .
You can’t make joy. Lots of people try, with pathetic results. When genuine joy “catches” us, it’s always by surprise, which is one of its best features. God made it that way, and He is so very, very good at it.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
I might be tempted to claim that I brought the snow home with me from an “instead of Christmas gifts” ski trip our family took to the mountains last weekend, but I doubt anyone would believe me. Besides that, the folks up there are stingy with their snow, and a good bit of what my family and I were skiing on is snow the folks up on the mountain made themselves.
It’s amazing how much impressive equipment it takes to blow enough water (and lots of it) through cold air to make tons of the white stuff. Not that long ago, only the Lord could make snow. We shouldn’t get too uppity about it. He’s still the only One who can make the right ingredients and most important conditions even for the stuff we make.
Still, snow-making has come a long way, and those big snow guns are impressive. They look like big cement mixing buckets on wheels. Shoot mega-gallons of water into a bunch of highly-compressed fast-moving air, and do it in the right proportions at around 27 degrees or below, and you’ve got snow, and lots of it.
I want one of those things for the house. Of course, I don’t need one that big, but I’ve seen some smaller homemade ones on the Internet that look intriguing. (My wife gets an “Oh, no, what next?” sort of look on her face when she sees me looking at such videos.) We don’t get nearly as much genuine God-given snow as I’d like, and I think it would be really cool (in every sense) to call up the grandkids and say, “Come on over! I’ve got a couple of inches of PawPaw-produced snow already made for you, and I’m making more!”
We had a wonderful time in the mountains, and though God makes beauty in a jillion forms, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful than sights you see when skiing down a snow-covered mountain. I know I’ve never done anything that was much more fun. Best of all is sharing it with the people you love and enjoy the most. Beauty is even better when shared. Skiing together. Riding up the lift together. Talking together and seeing deer foraging under the trees. Waking up each morning with granddaughters hollering out the cabin window, “Hi, duckies!” and watching the ducks on the cold pond respond by paddling over as they know those little girls and an old guy will soon be tossing bread to them. Well, what is better than that?
I can’t bring the mountains or the pond or the ducks home, but I wonder if I could figure out how to make a little snow . . .
You can’t make joy. Lots of people try, with pathetic results. When genuine joy “catches” us, it’s always by surprise, which is one of its best features. God made it that way, and He is so very, very good at it.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
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