jasonbwatson

A few days ago I had a young lady–a student at the school where I serve–ask me a question that was, I suspect, far more insightful than she realized, or even intended it to be. She had been in my office several different times over a two day period because of a discipline issue that needed to be dealt with, and her question came toward the end of the last of those visits. She looked at me and asked, “Why do you care so much?”

I confess, I was temporarily speechless. I recognized immediately that it was a powerful question, and I was able to stammer out, “That’s an excellent question.”

My mind began to wrap around the question fairly quickly, and it took me very little time to come to–and express–my next realization. “There is no way I can answer that question without including the Lord in the explanation,” I told her. I did not intend to come across with a holier-than-thou attitude or sound as if I am somehow more receptive to the Lord’s influence in my life than anyone else, but I quickly realized there is no other explanation for why I care about that young lady, or anyone else for that matter.

After all, if it were not for the Lord, my relationship with Him and my desire to serve Him, why would I care? What anyone else does with their life would matter to me not at all so long as it did not interfere with what I wanted to do with my life. If a young person wanted to skip school every day, get high on drugs, get pregnant or father a child out of wedlock, or ______________ (just fill in the blank with whatever), I would not care.

As I think about it further, this is the exact mindset that the world has. The “I’m okay, you’re okay” approach and the entire idea of relativism is premised on the notion of you do your thing, I’ll do mine, and as long as they don’t conflict, who cares? Taken to an extreme, of course, even in the opinion of unbelievers, this is considered a disorder. A person who cannot form a healthy relationship with someone else is likely to be diagnosed with an attachment disorder. In fact, I had a mental health professional tell me once, in her attempt to put the severity of the disorder in a particular young man into layman’s language, “If the two of you were walking down the street and you got flattened by a tractor trailer, his reaction would simply be, ‘At least it wasn’t me.’”

Jesus was different. He came to the world and set an example that was completely different from the one set by anyone else ever before. He did care about those who were different than Him, who were rejected by society, who were considered unworthy of the time and attention of anyone else. In other words, lots of people in Jesus’ time did not care about anyone else.

So, why do I care? Well, Jesus said, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15, ESV). And what are His commandments? He answered that question, too:

“But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets’” (Matthew 22:34-40, ESV).

So that’s it–I care because I love Jesus, and He has commanded me to care. Fortunately, He has also, through His Spirit, given me a heart that really does care. But without Him, and without His influence, as much as I hate to admit, I would probably have had to answer that young lady by saying, “I don’t care. In fact, I couldn’t care less.”

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” Galatians 6:7-9 (ESV)

When I started working at the children’s home there was a man named Jerry Tucker on staff. By that time Jerry was working full time in the kitchen, but he had been a pastor before coming to the children’s home and had been a houseparent before moving into the kitchen. He had a great relationship with the kids, and I think one of the things he enjoyed most about working in the kitchen was that he had the opportunity to interact with all of the kids. Jerry used to talk to the kids all the time about the Law of the Harvest. When one of them would be in trouble for something or have an unpleasant consequence occur because of something that they had done he would simply say, “Law of the Harvest!” It did not take the new kids long to know that while Jerry might empathize with them, he wasn’t going to excuse their choices or let them try to get off the hook, either. He wanted them to learn as quickly as possible that there was rarely anyone else to blame but themselves for the results of their choices.

The Law of the Harvest comes from Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia, specifically in the verses quoted above. It is a lesson that is important for young and old alike, and it is applicable at every age and stage of life. Every action or choice has a consequence. We tend to think of “consequences” as negative, but a consequence is basically a synonym for result, and if there were no result to a choice there would be no point in making the choice. One could even argue that if there is not a difference of consequences pending then there is in reality no choice to be made. So the two go together. From an early age parents teach children about the Law of the Harvest, though rarely in those words, of course. As soon as they are mobile children are taught where they can and cannot go, what they can and cannot touch, and so forth, and typically they are told and/or shown what the consequences of their choices will be. Sometimes, of course, parents make every effort to make a choice for their children, realizing it is much better in the long run to eliminate a choice than to allow the child to reap the harvest of sticking a fork into an electrical outlet.

As we grow up, the number of choices we have to make the weight of the consequences for those decisions only grows. Sure, there are relatively insignificant choices to make each day like whether to have toast or cereal for breakfast, whether to wear khakis or corduroys, whether to have the mashed potatoes or the macaroni and cheese. But there are choices with far more serious consequences, too. The hope of every parent is that their children have been trained and equipped to make those decisions carefully and wisely, and that they will seek help and advice from intelligent and mature individuals, not just whoever is around or whatever seems popular.

Young people don’t always make good decisions. Let’s face it, not-so-young people don’t always make good decisions, either. Whatever our age, though, we must not be surprised when our not-so-good choices yield not-so-pleasant results. Paul says God is not mocked; in other words, God will not allow us to make stupid decisions and not experience the results of those decisions. Sure, sometimes we don’t get caught the first time or even the one hundred and first time, and sometimes we feel like there have been no negative results to our choices. That’s not because God doesn’t see or care or know, it is simply that, like a harvest, some seeds take longer to produce their harvest than others. Paul says that whatever we sow, we will reap.

Thankfully, we serve a God Who is able to transform our harvest from something worthless to something good. He is able to equip us to plant new seeds that produce new crops than the ones that come from sowing in the flesh. But He will not forcibly replant our crops for us; we have to yield to Him, to want to do things His way. Unless and until we do, we need to remember the Law of the Harvest…what we sow, we will reap.

Most mornings I eat breakfast alone. My wife is awake, and usually makes the coffee, but because I head out shortly after 7:00 my children are usually either just getting up or are not up yet. But as I am getting my breakfast ready I almost always pour my coffee into a mug that says “Greatly Blessed.” It is a tremendous way for me to start my day…a much needed reminder that I am, in fact, greatly blessed.

The words on the mug come from a song written by Bill Gaither and Larry Gatlin. It is a simple song, a bit repetitious actually, but the words are valuable reminders of who I am and what I have to be thankful for.

The chorus, for example, goes like this:

Greatly blessed, highly favored
Imperfect but forgiven child of God

It repeats that line twice. But the truth in those two simple lines is powerful. I am imperfect (believe me!) but I am also forgiven. That in an of itself is an incredible blessing and would be worth getting excited about all by itself.

But look at these words from the verse:

Standing upright, on God’s good earth
I’m counting my blessings, great things He has done
I’m fighting the good fight
With the blessed assurance
That the battle is already won

The second line always reminds me of one of the great hymns we sung often in the churches I grew up in: Count Your Blessings. That song includes the line, “Count your many blessings/name them one by one/and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” I don’t think the hymn writer means that we will be surprised by what God has done in the sense that we did not expect He could do it so much as we will be surprised, when we really stop and think about it, how much God has done. In other words, when we slow down enough to pay attention to all the ways in which we have been blessed, and continue to receive God’s blessing every day, we will be surprised. Surprised primarily because we will likely have to say, “Wow! I hadn’t even realized/thought about that!”

But the Gaither/Gatlin song continues wit the reference to fighting the good fight. We are, of course, fighting a spiritual battle here on earth, and Paul himself references having fought the good fight. What a blessing it is to know that the battle has already been won! There is an old Southern Gospel song written by Roger Bennett that says, “I’ve read the back of the book, and we win!” Praise God! The battle, and more importantly, the war has been won! Christ died, but He rose again, and in so doing He conquered death, hell and Satan. We will continue to struggle and battle in this life until the Lord returns or calls us home, but, to quote another Gaither song, “we can face uncertain days because He lives.”

I am greatly blessed!

In our house there is a bottle of hand lotion that sits just outside of the half bathroom attached to the master bedroom. Sometimes when the weather is particularly cold my hands get chapped, so I will use this lotion. Usually I use it before going to bed, but sometimes will use it at other times, as well. A couple of weeks ago I put some on just before heading to the office. I think it may have registered in passing that it was a new bottle, but I paid no attention to it. I honestly could not tell you what kind of lotion had been there before; I never really paid any attention to the kind. So I rubbed the lotion in and went off to work. Not too long thereafter I was sitting at my desk working on something and one of my hands was up around my face. I may have been adjusting my glasses, I don’t know, but suddenly and instantaneously my mind jumped to being at the beach.

Now, thinking about the beach during a South Dakota winter is not a bad idea, actually, but (1) the winter has been quite mild, and (2) the beach had not crossed my mind at all before that moment in recent memory. So what happened? Well, it turns out that that new bottle of lotion outside my bathroom has SPF 15 sunblock in it. Quite helpful, I suppose, for those whose hands have a tendency to get sunburned! But the fragrance of sun block reminded me immediately of the beach. Why? Because for my entire life I have vacationed with my family on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and before heading from the hotel room or the beach house across the sand to the ocean we would put on sun block. So years of having the fragrance of sunblock so closely associated with the sun, sand and waves has built that memory groove into my mind. The concept is the same as Pavlov’s dog salivating upon hearing the bell after the food had followed the bell for so long. Odds are pretty good that the smell of sun block will cause me to think about the beach for the rest of my life.

The sense of smell is incredibly powerful, isn’t it? I imagine we can all think of favorite smells…smells that are likely associated with a place or a food that we particularly enjoy. We can probably all name some very unpleasant smells, too. And the same smell can create a different reaction among different people, some positive, some negative (or even revolting).

The Old Testament refers often to the use of incense in the worship of the Lord. There was a place in the temple for incense to be burned, and the there are several accounts where there were serious consequences for the improper burning of incense. There is also a psalm of David, though, in which David prays to the Lord, “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you.” David was pleading with God to hear his prayer but also expressing his desire that his prayers would be like a pleasing aroma to God.

My encounter with the sun block-infused hand lotion got me to wondering. I wonder, to continue David’s analogy, if each person’s prayers have a unique aroma before the Lord? And if so, I wonder if my prayers are like incense…like a pleasing aroma that causes the Lord to think fondly and favorably of my petitions and praises, just like the scent of the sun block caused me to think fondly of the beach? On the other hand, I wonder if my prayers are ever like an unpleasant aroma before the Lord? When I am so focused on self, forgetting to praise Him or to seek His will and instead treating Him like a cosmic bellhop, I wonder if my prayers are more like a horrendous and stomach-turning stench?

My hope, like David’s, is that my prayers would be like incense before the Lord.

Philippians 1:10: “…so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ” (NASB).

In the Greek language, the word translated “approve” referred to assaying metals or testing money for its authenticity. Having knowledge and using discernment enable the believer to distinguish between the pure and the impure, the valuable and the worthless, the authentic and the counterfeit. When mining for precious metals the valuable metals are intertwined with rock and sediment that is often of no value, and it is necessary to separate the two in order to eliminate impurities and isolate the valuable metal. Likewise, we live in a world in which we are surrounded by and bombarded with impurities and worthless dross. We are called to approve only those things that are excellent–true, and God-honoring.

The word “sincere” in this verse, when understood in its original context and meaning, provides what I find to be one of the most fascinating word pictures in Paul’s writings. In Greek the word translated here as “sincere” means genuine, and in Latin it means pure or clean. There are many historical accounts of the prevalence of this word among pottery makers in the Roman empire. Pottery making was a lucrative business. After all, there was no plastic, and thus no Tupperware or Ziploc bags. Many of the storage containers we take for granted today did not exist, and pottery was used for the majority of storage. As with any business that proves to be lucrative, many people wanted to get in on the pottery business, and whenever there is competition there is usually a price war, too, as sellers try to beat their competition.

Pottery, of course, is shaped and then cured in an oven. Well-respected and high-quality potters would inspect their pottery after it cured for any cracks in the pottery. Items with cracks would be discarded, and the potter would start over. Of course, this meant that the price of his pottery was higher, because it was a more time consuming process to ensure that only quality pots were produced. Less honorable potters, however, would fill the cracks in their pots with hot wax, and then glaze or paint the pot, thus concealing the filling. This enabled them to sell their pots at cheaper prices, because damaged or imperfect pottery was not discarded.

Since finished pots looked the same to the naked eye whether they had filled cracks or no cracks at all, it became important to test the quality of the pottery. The way to identify if the pottery has wax-filled cracks was to hold the pottery up to the sunlight. If wax had been used to fill cracks, the bright light of the sun would reveal the filled cracks. As this practice grew, makers of fine pottery would mark their pottery sine cera, or hang a sign over the doors of their shops that said sincerus. This were indicators that the pottery was genuine…without wax.

So, what about the application? Just as the pottery had to be held to the light of the sun to reveal any imperfections, we must regularly hold ourselves up to the light of the Son. When we do so, we will discover our imperfections. The question is, when we find those imperfections, what do we do with them? Do we fill them with wax and cover them up, putting on an attractive outer covering? Sadly, many of us have mastered the art of concealing our imperfections. We look great on the outside, we do what we are supposed to do, say what we are supposed to say… Jesus had very harsh words for people like that…people who look great on the outside but are hiding sinful attitudes and imperfections on the inside. If we want to be sincere–if we want to be genuine and without wax–we must, like the honest potters, refuse to cover up our imperfections and instead do what is necessary to be genuine. Obviously we cannot “discard our pot” to the extent of throwing our lives away literally, but we can discard our “self” and allow the Master Potter to remake us. When we live for self and try to do things our way we are filling our cracks with wax. When we die to self and let Christ take over, then we can be marked sine cera.