From the “Sometimes I Hate to be Right” Department
Let’s face it: Everyone loves to be right. It’s a grand feeling, especially for an egomaniac like myself, to know that something is going to happen despite the optimist’s best efforts to prevent it. As the smug grin grows ever-wider upon my face, while watching the optimist failing at every turn to stop that which I knew was inevitable, I anticipate the climatic moment when the optimist knows that he cannot prevent my pessimistic prediction from coming to pass and I get to say “I told you so.”
Sometimes, I epitomize the famous movie line, “Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.” Now having lived on this earth for 30 years, I have a wealth of life experience to draw upon and I can foresee more things based upon that experience. This means that I’m right more times than I used to be. And, as an egomaniac, that is an exhilarating feeling. In fact, roller coasters and sex may be the only things better!
But, there are many times when I dread being right, and this is one of those times. In an earlier post, I explained why I was distancing my ministry from the Buddy Christ icon. The most compelling reason was the fact that God is not meant to be my buddy or my pal. Our relationship to God is meant to be a patron/client relationship. God, the patron, has granted us, His clients, the gifts of this planet, life, time, people, etc. We are stewards of all of these gifts. We do not own our lives, our time, our planet, our money, nor are the people in our lives accidents of existentialism. These components are all carefully designed for us by God, and He intends an outcome for each dollar He allows us to touch, each person we meet, and each second we are alive. At the end of our lives, we will have to give an account to Him for how we spent this time, our money, and how we impacted the people that we came in contact with.
This implies that He is our Lord, and that we serve Him.
I was right in that post when I said that the latest trend is downplaying any aspect of the gospel where it teaches we are meant to serve God. The new way churches are teaching their congregates is that God is right next to us, like an invisible friend, cheering us on and helping us behave. As if He doesn’t sit in judgment over His creation. One pastor had this to say:
“If God is understood and viewed as within creation, acting inside of it, loving, compassionate, hopeful, creative — all of those produce a very different way of imagining the Christian life and living it out,” he said. “If you are always calling God ‘Lord,’ you are sticking him into that outside place. It seems to me, in order to avoid doing that, one of the first things you do is call God something different.”
God is more involved in our lives than we realize. However, He is not a part of His creation. He is outside it, above it, and greater than it. We, as His creation, owe our existence to Him and should be held accountable by Him for how we spent the resources He gave us. He created this universe from nothing, and molded us in His image from the very dust of the ground. He granted us a free will and gave us stewardship over His planet. This makes Him worthy of my worship, and certainly more than worthy of the title of Lord.
If you think in hierarchical terms, then yes, God would be far over and above us. We owe Him everything, and He owes us nothing. Yet, by His grace, we are able to come to Him through His Son. When we do that, He grants us the Holy Spirit, and recreates us in the Spirit, changing our lives forever for the better, and helps us improve the quality of life of those around us by granting us spiritual gifts that we can use to further His kingdom and for His glory.
Despite being worthy of our worship, worthy of being called King of kings and Lord of lords, some people say otherwise:
“We usually change ‘Lord’ to ‘love’ or ’soul’ or ‘light,’ ” [David] Wilkinson [senior pastor of St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church] said. “It’s pretty much a hierarchical, patriarchal image we’re getting rid of.”
The article I linked to is very disturbing. The truth is that we owe God everything from our very existence to the annual salaries we earn, to the clothes on our backs and the nice blanket I’m about to crawl under after I hit the “Publish” button. The wife I cuddle with and the child she carries are all His, and He entrusts them to me for a time.
All of us have things that God has entrusted to us, and all of us must use these resources as He would have us use them. How could anyone not think that God is above us, that He is unworthy of a title of respect such as Lord?
Praise God, for He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. How could anyone possibly think otherwise?
