April 13: Becoming Complete Human Beings
♫ Music:
Saturday, April 13
Becoming Complete Human Beings
Scripture: 2 Peter 1:5-11
"Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Poetry:
[My own heart let me more have pity on; let]
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
THE INTENTIONALITY OF BECOMING COMPLETE HUMAN BEINGS
What kind of life are you building, and by whose power are you building it? That question must be faced with some regular care, whether in the ‘sunrise’ or ‘sunset’ of life.
A life worth living is not meant to be run on or controlled by desire; "desire is infinite," says Dallas Willard. Its ‘wants’ never come to an end, even as quests for life-as-desire-fulfillment never fail to turn one into a hearty fool. Desire naturally forms obsessions. Obsessive desire (‘lust’) can dictate a world; it can also break-it-down, disintegrate it. The blind lead the blind, even in a self-satisfying way, in a world run on and deconstructed by desire.
Desire is not itself evil; but it does need discipline. Disciplined desire is desire that can be checked, put in its proper place. Unbridled desire turns a ‘remembering’ people into a forgetful, amnesiac people. We forget where we have come from and where we are going. We forget what we are supposed to be about. We forget our roots as much as our destiny. We are just ‘going.’
But a word of exhortation comes to us, crashing into the status quo of our desire-making Babylon. “Therefore, brothers and sisters,” urges Peter, “make every effort to be sure of your calling and election” (2 Peter 1:10)
A life worth living is a summoned life; a called-forth life. Jesus still calls forth many Lazarus’ from the grave. Our calling in Jesus and its ‘freedom for’ are in the mind and heart of God, so brilliant and generative with life giving life. It is not of our ‘making’, not rooted in our own sufficiency.
To “make every effort” is an exercise in whole-life, wholeheartedness; its intentionality evoked by a deep vision worth wanting because it is good. Visionless ‘intentionality’ is perhaps not much more than wishes for wanting a dream to be true. Intentionality is a good. It needs vision for what it is to be unto or about.
Do you hear the earnestness in ‘make every effort’? Don’t waste any time! For now is the day to step into “divine favor and shalom lavished on you as you grow in the rich knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Master Caller and Elector” (2 Peter 1:2). It is time to run on the grace and peace poured out on us for gaining Jesus, the Maestro of Life, as Dallas Willard would say.
Any why wouldn’t you? For His divine power is sufficient “for life and godliness,” which comes by an interactive relationship with “the one who called us by his own glory and excellence.” The Maestro is truly brilliant with Majesty!
Through a lavished grace and peace, divine power, and a rich knowledge (or interactive relationship) with Jesus, we receive bestowed “precious and most magnificent promises” of the one who has called us. Promises like God’s presence is with us now.
With faith or confidence, we step into the reality of those promises and the nature of the divine life-giving-life. In short, we realize our destiny as sons and daughters of a King in a Kingdom that is not of our making. It’s grace all the way down. And it is a grace that is not opposed to effort but opposed to earning as Willard would say. We don’t ‘add to’ our life for the sake of our own "self-justification," although the temptation to do so is definitely real.
We can begin to counter and subvert a life run on our desires (or the desires that others impose on us) by stepping into the destiny of who Jesus has made us to be as His people. We step into the promises that His superabundant sufficiency of life is all that we need for our life and godliness. In short, we walk through the wardrobe into Narnia and suddenly realize we are in a Psalm 23 world of immense life, meaning, and gravitas. Stunning. Wonderous. Marvelous.
“For this very reason” – as if you didn’t already have plenty of reasons! – “make every effort” to nurture and grow your faith, says Peter. Build from and with what has already been birthed out of interactively knowing Jesus in all of life’s experiences, including its great undulations.
Interactively knowing Jesus is the basis for a growing confidence in Him. We are learning to work with Him on what He wants to get done in our life and in the world around us (Philippians 2:12-13). There is no ‘off-topic’ for Him. There is no space where He says, “I can’t go there with you.” For “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not lack anything” is said by someone who knows, and who’s knowing results in a joyous confidence.
The Psalm 23 person is also one who’s intentionally forming a moral and spiritual character; that excellency, that virtue, those habits and patterns of mind and heart that help to steady us for the long-haul in a life aimed at becoming a more loving person. That’s always the telos: unselfish love, manifest in caring sacrificially for the good of another person.
Peter is brilliantly envisioning divine and human means for cultivating a life worth living. Take it seriously. Today, form an intention to cultivate habitual patterns of life-giving-life in and by the Spirit of God. Put differently, grow the very fruit of the Spirit of God in the garden of the Lord that is your life now! That ‘system’ for genuine life-growth and maturation involves as much intention to weed-out (“put to death”) as much as the intention to nurture, cultivate and grow.
What will you grow in your garden in order for the brilliant life and promises of God to spring forth and radiate for the world around you? What fruit will you bear in order to help ‘feed’ the nations?
Prayer:
Jesus, in your power, and with your leadership, I want to be a loving person this day. Help me to see what to put to death in order for your life of goodness to flow in and through me. Teach me self-control at the level of my most unbridled desires. May my life find steadfastness in your power and goodness. I entrust myself to you.
Amen
Joseph E. Gorra
Writer and Educator
Founder/Director of Veritas Life Center
About the Artwork:
The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Distemper on linen canvas
86 cm × 154 cm
Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy
The Blind Leading the Blind, considered a masterwork for its accurate detail and composition, depicts the Biblical parable of the blind leading the blind from the Gospel of Matthew 15:14. Each figure has a different eye affliction, including corneal leukoma, atrophy of globe, and removed eyes. The men hold their heads aloft to make better use of their other senses and the diagonal composition reinforces the off-kilter motion of the six figures falling in progression. Bruegel painted this the year before his death. It has a bitter, sorrowful tone, which may be related to the establishment of the Council of Troubles in 1567 by the government of the Spanish Netherlands. The council ordered mass arrests and executions to enforce Spanish rule and suppress Protestantism. The placement of Sint-Anna Church of the village Sint-Anna-Pede has led to both pro- and anti-Catholic interpretations, though it is not clear that the painting was meant as a political statement.
About the Artist:
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) was one of the most significant artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting. A painter and printmaker, he is primarily known for his landscapes, genre paintings, and religious works. His detailed genre paintings reflect the activities and lifestyles of the Northern European peasant class, and have aided historians in their understanding of what life was like in the sixteenth century. Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and the history of painting in general, because of his innovative choices of subject matter after religious imagery had ceased to be the primary subject matter of painting.
About the Music:
“Fast From, Feast On” from the album Lent to Maundy Thursday - Remastered
Lyrics:
Fast from the swelling darkness,
Feast on the power of his light
Fast from discontentment,
Feast on the joy that he brings
Sustainer, Protector, the Well of Life!
My Helper, My comfort, the bread of life
Is you-oo-ooo
Is you-oo-ooo!
Fast from the fear that haunts us,
Feast on the power of his might!
Fast from the trap of judgment,
Feast on all that's been redeemed
From the sorrow's shadow to perfect light
From the darkness of our doubt to a cleansing white
From the sorrow's shadow to perfect light
From the blindness of our sin to healing sight
About the Composers and Lyricists:
Latifah Phillips and David Wilton
Dave Wilton is a singer/songwriter, music producer, composer, recording, mixing and mastering engineer. He runs the recording studio Coalesce Audio in Lafayette, CO. Dave performs with the bands A Boy & His Kite and Loud Harp. Originating from the Midwest, Wilton’s sound parallels his journey from the flatlands of his birth to the mountains he calls home. Intrinsic in Dave’s passion for music is his desire to express the peace of God through song and to equip and encourage other artists in their unique sound and message.
Latifah Phillips is the lead vocalist and one of the songwriters of Page CXVI, a band whose mission is to make hymns accessible again to today's church. She also is involved in several other projects, including The Autumn Film, some solo work, and others. She provided the vocals for Sola-Mi, the film score project she did with Derek Webb.
About the Performers:
Reid Phillips, Latifah Phillips, and Dann Stockton were already in a band called The Autumn Film in 2010 when they decided to start Page CXVI, a band with the purpose of making traditional hymns accessible again by giving them a contemporary feel. The Page CXVI band name comes from a reference to page 116 in the book The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis. It is a poignant passage where Aslan begins to sing Narnia into creation out of a black void. It starts, “In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction is was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.”
About the Poet:
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is regarded as one the Victorian era’s greatest poets. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Classics. In 1867 he entered a Jesuit monastery near London. At that time, he vowed to “write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burned all of the poetry he had written and would not write poems again until 1875. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses throughout England. He was ordained in 1877, and for the next seven years carried out his duties of teaching and preaching in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst. In 1875, Hopkins, deeply moved by a newspaper account of a German ship, the Deutschland, wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames River, began to write again. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins’s works entitled Poems that first appeared in 1918.
About the Devotional Writer:
Joseph E. Gorra
Writer and Educator
Founder/Director of Veritas Life Center
Joe Gorra is founder and director of Veritas Life Center, a California-based 501c3 religious nonprofit aimed at advancing the Christian tradition as a knowledge and wisdom tradition for the flourishing of human life and society. His writings have appeared at ChristianityToday.com, Patheos.com, EPSOCIETY.org, and various publications, including the Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care, the Christian Research Journal, and the Journal of Markets and Morality.