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Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Pastoral Ponderings ~ The Work of God on Both Sides of the Valley

          One of the things that has helped me immensely in recognizing the work of God, is to so understand the characteristics of God’s work that I can identify those things in my life and others that only God could do.     This is easy when we think of the positive traits of the fruit of the Spirit, [1] or when we think of the Spirit’s work of developing righteousness, peace, and joy in our lives.[2] It is clear that people being “cut to the heart” by the gospel is evidence of the work of God.[3] When someone repents of sin it is confirmation that God has very kindly and graciously led them there.[4]
          There are other indicators of the work of God that we often miss because they would be considered negative traits, or troubling characteristics. However, while sight might interpret what it sees as a bad thing, faith interprets these same experiences as good things, or, at the least, things God is working for good.[5]
          Today I was blessed with a return to a familiar hiking trail, the Beatitudes.[6]
It felt as though I was revisiting a favorite place, but the familiarity of previous experiences along this trail had tuned my eyes to see things I had not noticed before. The expectation of each turn in the trail yielded surprises for the heart as the familiar carried me into the new.
          In my last post, I wrote about how encouraging it is to know God’s perspective of our transformation into the likeness of Jesus Christ. While I so easily fall into the old pattern of seeing what is still wrong with me, God’s focus is on how the little particles of glory he has already placed in our lives are daily increased “from one degree of glory to another.”[7]
          Today, it was as though God wanted to make a clarification. Once he had settled my heart and mind with the consideration of how to think of the transforming work of the Spirit, discerning changes in my life as constantly increasing glory, I needed to consider that this would not always look like a glorious scene. It was kind of like the reminder that the glory of the beautiful rainbow of promise filling the dew-laden sky came at the price of the flood that cleanses lives and makes them new. In the midst of the flood, the righteous may think only of how to get through difficult times. It may feel impossible to believe that the days of downpour are as much part of the work of glory as the days when rainbows appear in the quiet sky.
          However, there is a dimension of God’s transforming work from glory to glory that looks like poverty of spirit turning to mourning, mourning turning to meekness, meekness turning to a hunger and thirst for righteousness, the gracious gift of righteousness by faith turning into merciful hearts, merciful hearts becoming pure hearts, pure hearts becoming peacemakers, and peacemakers becoming those who rejoice in persecution.[8]
          One of the thoughts that really encouraged me this morning was that, each time we come to the Beatitudinal Valley, we have changed. There is only one time we arrive at the entrance to this valley with that initial bewildered, unfamiliar, hopeful conviction of sin that opens our hearts to the Savior in repentance and faith. There is only one time that we experience the powerful, redemptive, life-saving work of the Spirit that transfers us from the “domain of darkness” and into “the kingdom of his beloved Son.”[9]
          However, as Peter, later in life, had to repent of falling into the trap of fearing man[10] long after he had repented of denying his Savior three times,[11] so there are seasons of life when we must travel through the Beatitudinal Valley once again, seeking the transforming work of God to change that one part of our lives that is staring at us in unrighteousness, a cold void of the glory of God.
          As David’s prayer of repentance was his necessary response to the conviction of sin that came over him through the ministry of Nathan the Prophet,[12] long into a ministry that had been filled with the blessing of God in one successful military campaign after another, so there are times when seasons of effective ministry find us needing to repent of pride, self-dependence, loss of first love,[13] or growing lukewarm.[14]
          This is for those of us who find ourselves bewildered by the unrelenting consciousness that there is something wrong inside us that we thought was a done-deal, a finished project of God, a completed flagstone in our pathway through life. I am not alone when I speak of the struggle, and the disappointment, when we find ourselves seeming to arrive back at some place we had already traveled. It can feel to us like we are failing, like we are only walking in circles, like we are making no progress at all, when the fact is that we are growing in glory one degree after another.
          Today I want to encourage us all with the consideration of how God’s work in us can look like repeated experiences of the Beatitudinal journey. And yet, when we recognize these things happening inside us, we must not conclude that we have made no progress. As winter comes to us many times in a lifetime, with no winter finding us the same person as any other time in our lives, so too the seasons of Beatitudinal change may come upon us with far too predictable regularity, and yet we are never the same person going into these seasons, or these sections of the journey, and these seasons and sections are never quite the same as the last time we traveled through.
          I think of the many times I hiked up “The Chief” as a young man. The Chief is a beautiful rock face overlooking the coastal city of Squamish, British Columbia.[15] Few attempt to scale the front face, but many take advantage of the trail that leads up the backside of the mountain.
          There are two things that made each hike up The Chief different from the ones before. One of these things was the weather. I hiked up the trail in hot and sunny weather, in cool overcast weather, and even made one trip in mid-winter, camping out on the snow-covered third peak. The weather conditions made each trip unique, even though I traveled the same terrain every time.
          The second thing that made each trip different from all the others was the people who traveled with me. I don’t think I ever made a trip with the same grouping of people. I can’t remember that anyone made the trip with me on more than one occasion. Each time I introduced someone new to the trail, it became its own distinctive journey. No matter what the other attributes of that trip, the people I was with made it a special experience.
          When I think of the Beatitudinal Valley, there are ways in which it feels like the same journey is in altogether different seasons of the year, or extreme contrasts in weather. Sometimes we hit this journey while going through hurricane force emotions that seem to come out of nowhere. Other times we find ourselves struggling to take another step because of the relentless drought and famine in our walk with God. Still other times feel like we cannot make any progress because of heavy snow, or we are too afraid to move forward because of the oppressive fog that shuts us in from every side.
          What is consistent in every case is that, looking back on these dark, droughtful, despondent times, we discover that a testimony of God’s faithfulness has been written into our very hearts, at least as deep as the last journey took us.
          In fact, perhaps that is my place in the body of Christ today, to tell someone who can’t see any signs that God is working in your present experience of poverty of spirit, or mourning, or resigned meekness, or hungering and thirsting for righteousness, that he really is making us the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are joyful in persecution. Yes, he really is.
          Ultimately, two things come together in this. First is that God’s promise to work all things together for good in the lives of all those he has adopted as his children is just that, a promise. It is a God-promise. It cannot fail to be true, no matter what things look like to our earthly eyes. Faith can see things differently than sight denies with its flurry of kicking and screaming.
          Secondly, the distinctive characteristic of every part of the Beatitudinal journey is blessing. Hear the voice of your Good Shepherd calling to you around every bend, “blessed are… blessed are… blessed are…” It cannot be any other way. Sight whines and complains that it feels like a curse, but the Shepherd’s voice calls to your heart and says, “Receive this as a blessing! God is with you! His rod and his staff will comfort you all the way through! He will lead you beside the still waters! He will bring you into the green pastures.[16] He will quiet your soul with his love; he will rejoice over you with singing,[17] with songs of deliverance that promise you there are better experiences to come. On the other side of the Valley.
          So, the encouragement is not to try harder, but to let ourselves feel just how impoverished of spirit we really are. It is not to pretend to be happy, but to honestly mourn. It is not to look for ways we can fix what is wrong with us, but to meekly resign ourselves to the divine will and take the next step down into the Valley. It is not to try to feel satisfied with how good we are, but to let ourselves hunger and thirst for righteousness with all the feeling of someone dying of starvation. According to Jesus, it is blessing when we feel these things.
          Why is this so? For the simple reason that knowing God better than we have ever known him before is on the other side of the Beatitudinal Valley, and everyone who joins this work of God in their hearts, or in the lives of others, is blessed. EVERYONE!
          So, as I feel strangely joyful in God’s work of grace this morning, settling into that peaceful rest that marks the work of the Spirit in God’s troubled children, I testify to you that it is a blessing to admit how poorly we are doing (should that be where we are today), to mourn anything that is unrighteous about how we are thinking, feeling, or relating to others; to meekly resign ourselves to giving up all our ways of handling whatever we are going through; and to hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God’s ways, his will, and his work.
          While today may seem like a downhill hike through rugged rocks and into the dark recesses of our souls,[18] the downward side of the valley is as much progress as the upward side. Let us settle in our hearts that we will move forward no matter how long those forward steps travel down. It is a valley. The upward side is somewhere ahead. Keep going.

© 2014 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
  




[1] Galatians 5:22-23
[2] Romans 14:17
[3] Acts 2:37
[4] Romans 2:4
[5] Romans 8:28
[6] Matthew 5:1-12
[7] II Corinthians 3:18
[8] I have shared about the Beatitudes in other places so I will not elaborate at this point. Here are the links to some other posts in this regard: The Beatitudinal Journey to Joy: http://in2freedom.blogspot.ca/2013/12/pastoral-pings-plus-beatitudinal.html ~ Poor in Spirit Lambs: http://in2freedom.blogspot.ca/2012/11/pastoral-pings-poor-in-spirit-lambs_22.html
[9] Colossians 1:13
[10] Galatians 2:11-14
[11] Matthew 26; Mark 14; Luke 22
[12] II Samuel 12
[13] Revelation 2:1-7 shows how the Ephesian church, which Paul spoke to so encouragingly in his epistle, had settled into a way of life that was outwardly the same as in the beginning, but with a loss of first love that required repentance in order to restore the people to fellowship with Jesus.
[14] Revelation 3:14-22
[17] Zephaniah 3:17
[18] Be assured that, if this isn’t you, you likely know someone who is experiencing something like this. Likely God will give you a way to minister to them if you ask him to show you where he is working.

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