To lead means to have seen well. “Into the blind world we
have now descended” Virgil tells Dante as they start their journey into Hell.
If Hell is the blind world then The Church should be the world that is flooded
with sight and light. It took me a while to figure that out. We do not need a
blind guide but one who can tell us “Let me show you what I see.” I really want
to see!!
When Jesus tells us to remove the plank from our eye, He is
encouraging us to truly see. When Elijah prays for his servant it is that he
may truly see.
So, what are we needing to see that we are missing in our
church work today? Isn’t the very point of Redemption that we may enter into a
rest? I am not lazy yet I know that I was designed for Rest, God’s kind of
rest. How can I reconcile the two? The Bible clearly tells us in Hebrews 4 that
God’s children, His people, the only Church He had at the time completely
missed out on the promised land because they did not enter His rest. I wonder
why God rested on the Sabbath. We know that he cannot be physically tired and
need a day of Physical rest. And we are made in his image. Is the Sabbath idea
more than a day of physical rest? He said to rest from your labor on that day.
Well, I do not do enough physically in a day to really wear myself out. I
cannot think of many people who do when you consider what the human body is
capable of. Yet I fall into my pillow each night very weary so there must be a
different kind of fatigue and a different kind of rest that I am missing. So,
why did God rest on the seventh day? He did it to enjoy what he had created!!
In Greek the word for “rest” is skolo and in Latin it is scola. It means to
think on, to contemplate and enjoy. All of those make me very happy and relaxed
just seeing them in print and saying them to myself. The actual translation
means leisure and celebration! Now, this
next thought intrigues me and may cause most American, democratic, industrial-revolutionized, modernist,
progressive minds to really go tilt: This word for leisure, scola, is where we
get our word for school! Who would have thought? I mean, I don’t think there are
too many people who equate the words school and leisure. I happen o be one of
them, however, as I am a life-long learner and get great pleasure from the
contemplation of ides and learning does indeed mean celebration to me! We need
a day, a time, a lifestyle of being able to work very hard but then to
contemplate with great joy what has been produced, what we are living in, to
rest. It is not a rest where we legalistically sit and twiddle our thumbs so
that we can religiously check off, “Yep, I rested. I did not do any work” Maybe
great physical exertion on the Sabbath is actually a part of the great
contemplation and enjoyment for some. The idea is to experience and emulate
God’s example of True rest. Jesus said in Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for
man, not man for the Sabbath”.
Celebration time. Enjoying the
Journey. I love it!
Yet we are a total world of work. We are creating workers.
We prize and esteem great workers and stamp them with success and lure them
with money and material goods that they will have to work all the harder just
to maintain and keep. We are happy with our Industrial Revolution and the
factories we have sullied our land with- the Elementary, the Middle and the
High factories. We desire to see numbers, quantitative values and general
assessments that are easily measured yet suck the celebration and contemplation
out of each product or person. Is this what we have also done to church
leadership? Reduced it to a quantitative science? Are we wanting to merely
create great church workers who can turn out acts of service, better bulletins,
increased numbers of team members and more logged office hours rather than
producing pure fruit of quality. I desire Quality over Quantity. I actually
believe that one begets the other but we have it the wrong way. There must
first be quality cultivated. Love for the individual and not what they can
produce or quantify. Our purpose in equipping people
sometimes feels like it is just equipping in order to see what we can get back
out of them for the church’s sake rather than simply equipping them for their
life. The church as an institution almost seems to trump the individual. Was
the saint made for the church or was the church intended for the believer? Are
not WE the CHURCH?
What are
some enemies of this rest? If the rest is ours, if it belongs to us, then we
must possess it and strike down the enemies that have cultivated attacks for
years until we believe them to be true. Is the purpose of the individual
utilitarian? “What can you do?” “What is your skill set?” What we seem to
really be asking is “What are useful for?” And the heart response from the
individual is to work harder to measure up so that they can be validated by
this new measuring stick we have produced while leaving God’s own standard
behind. We have failed to see. I want to look at a person in the church and not
care what team they serve on or how well they do it but love them and desire to
know them even as the Father desires to know me. I want to shed the scaly skin
of quantitatively summing someone up and seeing them as a number or “our
people” when they are really God’s treasures that we should gingerly and
lovingly handle. I want to see and stop being blind. And I want to be seen by
those around me -No planks, no specks, just God and His beautiful Rest.
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