DOING WHAT WE VALUE

I've been reading Jonathan Edwards.  No easy task. It's like brain exercises. Y'all know who he was? A significant voice for the First Great Awakening revival in America. I heard a wonderful story about his little daughter, though really it is about his wife. A letter his little girl wrote to one of her friends said (my paraphrase), "My father is a circuit rider and he rides his horse through the land to preach to the people in different places and sometimes I go with him.  My mother stays home and prays for him and sometimes when she comes out of her room, her face glows so much from being with God that she puts a cover over her head."  Wow!  That I know of, only Moses had that kind of God-glow about him, after spending 40, no make that 80 days, on the mountain with God.  No food, no water - just the glory of God.  And it wasn't a glow that wore off in a few hours.  It was there upon him for quite some time. Wish I knew how to pray or get into God's presence like that, don't you? I imagine she had to learn and grow into that level of such intimacy with God. No one starts out that way, right?

I'm thinking that at least one great reason that Edwards was so successful in his preaching, even though supposedly he just read his sermons while thousands got saved when he did, was due to her prayers.  You know what they say, "Behind every great man is a great woman." But there was a also a whole lot of wisdom on his part.  One of the valuable things I've learned from reading Edwards was how he makes the point of addressing some very practical things which he then applies to God. Take for instance, that we can know much about what God values by what He does. A simple example is that He blesses generosity and kindness, and withholds blessings where there is stinginess, bitterness or resentment. We can tell from where the peace is what is pleasing to God.

I recently had a big decision to make about something critical to me. What seemed more or less logical to me did not line up with the fact that my stomach felt like someone was plowing it up with a backhoe. No peace! When I finally decided to forgo my logic and put it all in neutral, willing to go in a direction my natural inclination didn't agree with necessarily, my tummy settled down and happily my peace returned.  Edwards helped bail me out of the situation so I figured God put that book in my hands since it had been on my bookshelf for years but I never before felt equal to the task of trying to interpret what he was saying. Now it just seemed like the time. I love when God does something like that - gives you just what you need when you need it out of the blue.

Part of what I learned from my reading has served to be a kind of reconstruction for me in how I'm thinking through my everyday life. We all have intentions, call them goals. There are major goals and there are sub-goals that help us arrive at the major goal. On top of that there is a chief goal or perhaps two in your life. The choices we make in our sub-goals determine whether or not we actually attain to the major goals, and the major goals will determine if the chief goal is actually ever reached.  The goal of a happy marriage, for instance, is greatly dependent upon choices of time spent together, of what you choose to share with one another, and of whether you honor each other or take each other for grated. The same applies to friendships you value. 

All this may sound obvious, but it made me aware of how many times I make choices that derail or never feed into my sub-goals, so that I live with a relative sense of having missed the mark somewhere and not getting to what I really intend.  It's also possible that I've not really articulated to myself what I really want, what a goal of mine really is. Many of us just go through our days dealing with things as they come, but without defining what our personal druthers would be.

It's all about choices. As I thought about it, I realize how much our distraction level must far exceed what someone in Edwards' day may have. We live lives of a lot of distraction, do we not? If he was a circuit rider, traveling to one church one week and then another on a different Sunday of the month, it's likely that those good folks were blessed with a sermon once a month, with all that time to ponder the message in between his visits. So that, assuming they thought about it, it was a well-thought out sermon message for them. In which case, it likely became a part of them, in their innermost being. We on the other hand are surfeited with so much Christian input that it all sits like veneer on the top layer of our minds, and we're off to the next one before we ever absorb into our spirits what we last heard or read in our own time with the Lord. 

The statement above about knowing what God values by what He does, brought me into awareness that I 'does' a heap of stuff that I don't really value. There's a whole lot of time wasting in our lives today. I mean in terms of reaching our major goals. Certainly part of my chief goal is to stand one day before The Chief (aka Lord) and not wish I'd heeded the Bible's warning to use my time wisely. I now have a new goal, to heed Paul's words, "See that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.  Therefore do not be unwise but understand what the will of the Lord is" (Eph. 5:15-17). Another translation says "Make the most of every  opportunity in these evil days and don't act thoughtlessly...." The major here goal is godly wisdom; the sub-goal is to make choices as to how I use my time.  That doesn't mean I'm compulsively doing something spiritual every minute, but it does mean I portion my time out and not fritter it away so that at the end of the day I have little to account toward my chief goal which has to do with my relationship with God.     

I'm not trying to put some kind of legalistic "you better or else" yoke upon us. I wouldn't want that any more than you would. I've found my rest in God and I see this as more and deeper rest, not more 'trying'.  But I have been made aware that if my goal is to live for God so that He is my greatest and 'chief' delight, and to know Him so that I am strong in times of trouble and prepared for whatever might come, and so that I have become so attuned to His voice so that I'm not in doubt as to what He may be saying to me, both in times of quietness as well as in times when I need to know NOW what He's telling me.  It's been said that we are all as close to God as we want to be. I find that a challenging statement. I find I am newly aware of how I'm using my time which may or may not allow me to attain to my sub-goals.

If at the end of my day, or if at the time I set for having something accomplished I'm not even close, it could be that I've allowed what has no value to me whatsoever, except to keep me distracted and occupied with what has no real value. On the other hand, there is the practical side of things. When I got started writing this, I had intended to put in a load of laundry so it would wash while I was writing. But I chose to ignore the laundry and keep writing. Now I wish I'd put the laundry in because it still needs to get done and I could have done both at once.  You may think it foolish that I even mentioned this, but I wanted to be sure my words weren't taken to have some unrealistic super-spiritual sense when really, all this, including how we live with God, is part of the way we manage our every day lives. Jonathan Edwards' wife Sarah, had eleven children, ten of whom lived, to care for, plus being a preacher's wife added a lot to her responsibilities. Surely she was a lady who made wise choices as to how to utilize her time if she had that kind of access to the presence of the Lord.

As I said, it's about choices. What is your chief goal?  May I suggest that you don't just answer it in a perfunctory manner, telling yourself what you think you should be saying.  Give some quality time to thinking through what you really value and want to grow in with regard to your relationship with the Lord. Maybe some of what you have been doing, even for years, still hasn't gotten you to what you wanted with Him.  Should you keep doing it, or is there another way to reach the goal of knowing Him more deeply? If, for instance, memorizing a verse a week isn't really bringing you closer to Him, maybe letting one verse at a time sink into the deepest part of you will prove to be a way of reaching a new level of relationship with Him. Make a few sub-goals to reach a major goal, so that your major goal becomes a part of the chief goal o your life. I'm doing the same re-evaluating (call is a spiritual reconstruction) at this time and finding two things: The grace to make wiser choices more often with my time, and a deeper sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and what is pleasing to Him. That's for sure a whole lot more rewarding, profitable and enjoyable than wasting time on meaningless distractions, wouldn't you say?