Lent: Facing the Stomach Gods

For, as I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. ~ Philippians 3:18-19

Often we give up something we enjoy; a vice of some sort that we know is a pleasing and distracting indulgence. These indulgences take our hearts and bind them to earthly things. It can become godlike as we turn to it for comfort rather than to God for restoration. For some it’s chocolate, others alcohol, still others pornography or costly apparel. There are a million ways to divert our heart away from what our heart truly needs… a right relationship with God.

The apostle James reminds us that friendship with the world is enmity with God (James 4:4) and Jesus taught that where your treasure is there your heart will be also (Mat. 6: 21). Treasure is not simply money, for what is money but the means to gain earthly things? No, treasure is what our hearts desire, what we love in this world. Our relationship to earthly things is related to the Greek concept of Eros. It is a desiring, alluring affection.

Don’t get me wrong. God’s creation is filled with good things and all these good things should be enjoyed and give us glad hearts. Psalm 104:15 celebrates God’s good work.

wine that gladdens the heart of man,

oil to make his face shine,

and bread that sustains his heart.

But when these good things become the main source of comfort, when we hit the malls for retail therapy, we are turning to stomach gods! We are bound to our desires. The sad thing about this common human weakness is that we are trying to fill a spiritual need with a material solution. We have a God-shaped hole in each of us that only the living God can fill. So when we turn to the stomach gods, the alluring affection for earthly things, we remain empty. There may be an immediate pleasure, but it does not sustain. And the next time the pleasure fix will require bigger and better experiences with our material solution to our spiritual needs. That’s why Paul pities those who are focused on earthly things. They are going nowhere on this spiritual journey.

But there are those who are wise enough to recognize that nothing in this mortal plain satisfies the hungry heart. Lent is the opportunity for us to join with others in following the apostle’s example of prayer, fasting, meditation and devotion as we prepare for a sharing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Read all of Philippians Chapter 3 and discuss with your spouse what you believe may be a stomach god in your life. How are you going to join with others in this Lenten journey toward resurrection?

Plans

Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails. ~ Proverbs 19:21

In the 2004 film Dodgeball, Vince Vaughn plays Peter La Fleur, the underachieving owner/manager of Average Joe’s Gymnasium. When asked by an auditor if he had a goal in life Le Fleur answers, “I found that if you have a goal, that you might not reach it. But if you don't have one, then you are never disappointed. And I gotta tell ya... it feels phenomenal.”

While the absurdity of this attitude is humorous, there are times when I want to join La Fleur. The emotional consequences of upset plans are just too painful.

For Valentine’s Day this year, we purchased tickets to see Pretenders in concert. It was a special night because Michele and I were celebrating our 25th year since we had first met. I had high hopes for a fun night of music and romance. It was a severely windy night with gusts up to 66 miles an hour. As Michele and I made our way to the theatre we were nearly knocked down. I feared our umbrella would be destroyed by the force of the wind. Finally we made it within eyeshot of the theatre marquee only to see the words “Tonight’s Show Postponed.” One of the musicians had fallen ill.

You can imagine our disappointment and frustration. We had decided on a short and inexpensive meal prior to the concert, so we weren’t going out to a restaurant as a back up plan. Movie times were way too late for Michele’s early morning work schedule, so reluctantly we drove home. What we had planned as a fun and meaningful evening had been detoured. It was “a bummer,” as they say.

Michele and I still were able to express our happiness at having been together for 25 years. We were able to exchange gifts and words of appreciation and love. But it was not the kind of evening we had hoped for. Instead it became an ordinary night like many others except of the glaring disappointment.

How well do you “let go” when plans go awry? It might be helpful to recognize that ultimately we are not in control of our lives. There are other agendas that sometimes collide with our course and upset our plans. But do we have to be defeated? Who is ultimately in control? The apostle James offers the humbling thought that the Lord is in control.

Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast and brag. – James 4:13-16

Even simple plans for the day are under the Lord’s will. If I accept James’ worldview, then I have to see that my plans for a fun and romantic night out were trumped by greater needs. The high winds helped to dry up standing water from melting snow and rain. Perhaps that was a greater need. The sickly musician perhaps needed rest and a night off. I suppose I could logically accept these as being of greater importance than our desire for a romantic evening, but the truth is I wanted to see the Pretenders with Michele at my side. That was my dream for the night and it did not go as planned. Had I been humble enough to admit that I am not in charge and let go of my frustration, we might still have had a fun and romantic evening. After all we still had each other!

When your plans go wrong, consider that God has other plans. How do you feel about acknowledging God's control? May you be given peace as you surrender your plans to the Lord’s will each day.

Finances

The ants are not a strong people, but they prepare their food in the summer;
~ Proverbs 30:24-25


Do you all remember the fable of the grasshopper and the ant? Disney made a cartoon version in which the carefree grasshopper sang, “Oh, the world owes me a living!” The grasshopper played his fiddle and lazed about all summer while the ants worked and stored up food for the winter. When winter came the ants were warm in their anthill with plenty of food for the whole community, but the grasshopper was hungry and cold.

This is the cautionary tale that we Baby Boomers and beyond (1945 and forward) need to hear. Our theme song for this current generation was voiced by the rock group Queen: “I want it all and I want it now!” Planning and saving runs counter to amassing goodies, toys and nice things. “I want my big screen HDTV,” has been my mantra for years now as I watch a 27” traditional set. But there are other demands on our finances that put that coveting desire lower in the queue. College payments, auto insurance, mortgage, medical bills, school clothes and supplies, home and auto maintenance and repairs; there is always something that gets in the way of me getting what I want. I don’t like having to wait.

In a marriage chances are you mate’s wants will differ from yours. For instance Michele can live without the HDTV big screen and enjoy what we already have. She’d rather travel and visit places she has never seen or experienced. That takes big money! We differ on how to spend. It can cause friction. Family finances are the number one troublemaker for marriages. We can bicker, worry and blame each other into crisis.

Jesus taught that his disciples cannot serve both God and the goodies (money). You can’t have two masters. You will end up serving only one and hating the other. “Where your treasure is your heart will be also (Mat 6:21).” He said this in the context of preaching about laying up treasures in heaven. Chapter 6 of Matthew deals with practicing piety in order to impress and other worries. Our eyes and minds are often on earthy things and not on heaven. Jesus calls us to look beyond the glitter of all the goodies money can buy and invest ourselves in working toward a secure future in eternity. This world is passing away. All the nice things in this world, we cannot take with us. But heaven is forever, your home for eternity.

We challenge you to pray together with your spouse and seek God’s guidance on how and where you spend. Become tithers, giving 10% of your income as first fruits to the Lord. God will bless your life when you set Him as your priority in all expenditures. Proverbs 11:25 says “the generous man will be prosperous and he who waters will himself be watered.”

Where is your treasure? To what does you heart really belong? Does your spending reflect that you love God or goodies? How do you feel about giving God 10% of your income?

My father-in-law always says, “You can’t out-give God.” May you be blessed with faith to trust in Him, learn to appreciate what you have and be patient for what you desire. God has a way of fulfilling the desires of your heart when you truly delight in Him.

The Way Out

But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' ~ Luke 18:13

In our last devotion, The Blame Game, we talked about how we tend to hide in the bushes like Adam and Eve, ashamed and afraid of our failures. We don’t want to face the truth. We find it difficult to be honest. The pain of admitting our guilt and taking ownership of our shortcoming seems too difficult. It’s much easier to hide or divert attention away from it by blaming others.

One tactic I often use to divert attention away from my failure is to get angry. If I huff and puff like a child in a tantrum perhaps no one will press the issue. Also the anger feels powerful, when confession of failure feels to me like defeat. My clean exterior is shattered. My “Grade A” performance is marred. Admission of guilt is humiliation to the ego.

Michele shocked me on this subject. I had asked her to think of a time she was hiding. Instead of hearing about her trying to protect her ego, she shared this:

“For most of our marriage I did our finances, but recently Scott took over that job. Now I realize I had been hiding. If I bought something Scott might think was too expensive, I didn’t worry about it. I said to myself, ‘He’ll never know.’ Now I think twice because he will see the checking and credit card statements. It is a good thing to be accountable to Scott and my spending, but it’s based on fear…fear of Scott’s anger.”

I was saddened to hear that she feared being honest with me. When I asked what she was afraid would happen if I got angry, she responded that she’d just rather avoid the hassle. What a trap! And the truth is I am the careless spender! I was confronted by my hypocracy.

In our marriage relationships, anger as a means to keep a sense of power and control in the face of our sinful action and failures is not healthy. It is an abuse against your spouse and family. It is simply another way to hide. There is a way out.

What a freeing reality to know forgiveness and mercy in Jesus Christ! In Luke 18 Jesus told a parable to free those “who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else.” He told of a religious leader who prayed “about himself.” He expressed how glad he was that he wasn’t like all the other sinners and how good he was by his disciplines of fasting and tithing. He was hiding, trapped in the bushes of fear.

There was a tax collector near who, ashamed of his own sin, wouldn’t lift his face to heaven, but beat his chest in shame saying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said that this humiliated man went home justified before God and not the puffed up religious leader.

There’s an invitation here. The invitation is like God’s calling out to Adam hiding in the bushes, "Where are you?" (Gen 3:9) Where are you in relationship to God’s offer of mercy for your failures and shortcoming, your weakness and sin? Are you still hiding trying to maintain some sense of dignity? There is no dignity in hiding. God wants to free us from our fear of judgment. His perfect love will cast out of our hearts all fear of judgment (1 Jn 4:18) and give us the freedom to walk out from behind our hiding place, whether is be angry outbursts or false piety, and stand before him both humbled and at the same time exalted. God lifts up the humbled, but those who exalt themselves, well they stay stuck in their fear of begin found out.

Mr. Romance...NOT!

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. ~Ephesians 5:21

February is often the month where we think of sweethearts on St. Valentine’s Day and all things romantic. When it comes to romance, I am the world’s biggest idiot. I feel completely inept in the area of creating what a woman might find romantic and for me there is no romantic vision. I like candles. I like fireplaces. I like soft music, sometimes. But by and large, I lose in this category.

I dare say I am not alone in this. Most men find romancing a tiresome and awkward agenda. One author on the topic of male/female relationships once said men are like microwaves and women are like crock pots. The romantic agenda is more often for her than for him. She needs to warm up. But more importantly she needs to feel loved and appreciated. Men, while not too open about this, also need to know they are loved and appreciated and needed by their spouse.

So erring on the point that I know little or nothing on this subject, I will turn to the apostle Paul who knew nothing about marriage either, since he was celibate!!! But he does have some good thoughts for married and unmarried folks that he believes are the sort of things we disciples of Jesus ought to think about.

Ephesians 5:21 states that we are to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” For Paul, in this problematic passage that follows, his chief concern is that the right witness is given to those who watch the Christian. In Paul’s day, a woman was sort of property to the husband and her obedience was expected as sign of what godly women do out of love for their husbands and in obedience to God. But because men have used this arrangement as a means of oppressing their wives, an explanation is needed. Paul wishes both partners in a traditional marriage relationship to consider first their relationship with Christ as guiding and empowering how they relate to their spouse. A man must learn to humble himself before God and become a servant to his wife.

Paul tells husbands to love their wives like Jesus loved the church, giving himself up to death on a cross as a means of cleansing his bride and lifting her up spotless and clean and prized. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives by sacrificing himself for the sake of their unity. It’s in little things I find, like doing something that puts me out of my normal routine, that extra effort lets Michele know that I love her. When I give up doing something I want to do in order to do something she wants or likes, I show her in a small way the sacrificial love of Jesus. Chick Flicks, anyone?

Wives submit to their husbands in the same way by showing Christ’s love in humility before God. For this Valentine’s Day, think about a way you can put yourself out for your loved ones. You don’t need to spill blood, but you do need to eat humble pie and love it, for Christ and your loved one! Have a great romance.

I recognize this article leaves out widows and the unmarried. Paul spoke to such persons in 1 Corinthians 7. The long and short of it is that you are blessed to be free from relationship issues in your home and are fee to serve the Lord and love Him with a complete unfettered agenda. You need not worry about pleasing your spouse. The Lord is your pleasure if He has so gifted you with the delight in Him.

I hope these biblical teachings stir up in you a desire to love Christ and others with the love you see in Jesus.

Blame Game

The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.” (NLT) ~ Genesis 3:12


Blame Game

We all know this story. Adam and Eve ate the apple and we lost paradise. According to the rock singer Meatloaf, we regained paradise by the dashboard lights! Original Sin, no less paradise, has often been misrepresented as sexual in nature. To lust and fornicate is original sin in some people’s estimation. The band Aerosmith wrote in their song Adam’s Apple, “She ate it. Lordy, it was love at first bite. Well she ate it never knowing wrong from right.” Not an accurate retelling of the biblical story. The song minimizes the sin of eating forbidden fruit by sympathizing that all she wanted was “a little taste.”

The truth is that Adam and Eve listened to the serpent’s lie rather than God’s command. The serpent told them they would not die, but rather become like God with their eyes wide open. She wanted more than a little taste. She wanted it all. She and Adam wanted to be like God, unlimited in knowledge. The serpent made it sound like God didn’t want the man and woman to know what He knew. Perhaps Adam and Eve didn’t want to be out done by God.
Original Sin in this context is simply refusing to take God at His word. It is a lack of faith. All manner of sin springs from this filthy well. Fear drives the sinful mind. Where faith fails, fear’s near. Adam and Eve feared that God had something they didn’t, knowledge of evil. There seemed in their minds an injustice or an imbalance of power. To right this perceived wrong, they disobeyed God’s warning and ate of the tree and they became aware of their shame. So they hid.

Hiding from God is a ridiculous notion. The truth cannot be hidden indefinitely. And God knows our inmost thoughts. Hiding from God only shows our foolishness. Hiding our sin from our spouse is likewise foolish. “The truth will out,” as they say.

Adam answered God when he was called out. Instead of admitting his guilt, he passed the blame on to Eve. Eve, when confronted, passed the blame to the serpent. Evidently the serpent had no one to whom the blame could be passed. Instead they all bore the consequence of their sin.

Michele notes that in our marriage we’ve played the blame game lots of times, but she can’t remember a specific incident. In general when she senses I am mad at her, she gets defensive and wants to shift the blame. Is the reason that we can’t think of a specific incident of the blame game an indication that we’ve learned to forgive and forget? Or is it because we are hiding and ashamed? We can become experts at hiding our guilt from our own eyes so that we don’t have to take responsibility for our actions.

What about you? Are you able to be honest about your sin? At what times do you behave like you are God and not his obedient child? When have you felt the need to push the blame off on your spouse, or a child, or another person in your family, church or work? Talk with your spouse about how you each tend to hide in the bushes to keep from owning up to your failures and weaknesses.

Sin has character in the bible. God told Cain “sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it (Gen. 4:7).” The serpent crawls in the dust from which we came. In a sense sin crawls on us. God breathed his breath of life into the dust to bring us to life. But we are always in between our longing to be completely filled with the breath of life and united with God and the dust of the ground where the serpent feeds on our fear.

Companionship

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

                                                                                                                           ~ Genesis 2:18

God created man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life and he became a living being.  Man is nothing but dirt, apart from the life-giving God.  Without God, we have no real life.  Humans are made in God’s image and meant to be filled with the knowledge of He who blesses and calls us to tend His earth.

            Yet companionship with God alone, apparently was not all that man needed.  God saw that is wasn’t good for man to be alone.  He made for him a helpmate from his own body.  My father used to joke that when God took a rib from Adam’s side, women have been a pain ever since!  He used to say, “woman = woe unto man!”  This of course would cause my mother to roll her eyes and have a few rebuttals of her own, which was the whole point anyway, to get a rise out of his wife!  Fun times at the expense of the biblical story!

            In truth, God created woman from Adam’s side, near his vital organs, so as to communicate the delicate and intimate connection between him and her.  One rabbinical teaching says that God took the bone to create Eve, not from the head so as to imply that she would rule over the man, or from the foot to imply that Adam would keep her under his domination, but from the rib as equals.  It made Adam vulnerable to her and Eve to him.  

            The intimacy and vulnerability are communicated in verses like Gen. 2:23 “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”  Also in verse 24, “a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”  One translation states that the man shall cleave or hold fast to his wife, much like a vulnerable child clings to his or her mother.   

            Before we get too mushy romantic or too embarrassed from some threatened sense of masculinity, let’s read the last verse, Gen. 2:25.  “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”  From the beginning the woman does not exist apart from man. She must be near his side for that is home to her.  Neither can man deny the need he has for the comfort she brings him as his faithful and loving partner.   We should never feel shame to be vulnerable in this way to each other. Nakedness is less about sexuality and more about an innocence that husband and wife share when God has brought them together.

            Michele remembers when we were dating that we both agreed that God brought us together; that He made us for each other.  She admits that “even though we’ve had our share of trials through the years, it is with Scott that I most want to spend my time.  Before I make plans to do something without him I check first with him.  When we are apart, I tell him not to have too much fun without me.  I don’t want to miss out on anything.”  While other friendships are important, this is the one relationship that feels God picked.

That one flesh connection that God brings about in marriage is kind of like that Rod Stewart song, You’re In My Heart. “You’re in my heart. You’re in my soul, You'll be my breath should I grow old. You are my lover, you're my best friend. You're in my soul.”
            In what ways do you and your spouse exhibit this one flesh connection?  Are you unashamed of the need you have for one another in this intimate partnership?  What would happen if you both recognized your utter need for each other? 

What if men recognized that they need their wives affections like a boy needs his mother’s love?  What if women recognized that the place they feel most at home is at her man’s side, the man God has given to her?  Perhaps we might find healthier marriages, happier homes and a better society for the next generation.