Tag Wisdom

Only God Has Tamed the Tongue

Todd R 2 Comments

In many Psalms, the authors complain about the evils in the world and compare them with God and His perfect attributes.  Psalm 12 is one of these, and begins with David lamenting the ungodliness he sees in the world in the first verse:

“Save, O LORD, for the godly one is gone;
            for the faithful have vanished from among the children of man.”

What is David so upset about?  James 3:7-8 tells us: “For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”  David is upset by people’s inability to “tame the tongue,” which he describes in verses 2 through 4:

“Everyone utters lies to his neighbor;
            with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.
May the LORD cut off all flattering lips,
            the tongue that makes great boasts,
those who say, ‘With our tongue we will prevail,
            our lips are with us; who is master over us?’”

David says the words of the unfaithful are lies, flattering, duplicitous, boasting, proud, and rebellious.  These adjectives also describe much of what we see and hear today, and if we’re honest, much of what we say.  How often do we say things just because they came to mind?  And if they are bad things, but we get away with it or get something we want from it, are we emboldened to continue?  After all, “no human being can tame the tongue.”

There is One, however, who has tamed the tongue.  David contrasts His words with ours in verses 6 and 7:

“The words of the LORD are pure words,
            like silver refined in a furnace on the ground,
            purified seven times.
You, O LORD, will keep them;
            you will guard us from this generation forever.”

These words are pure, refined, purified, kept, and preserved.  The number seven in the Bible is often used to indicate perfection, so if His words are “purified seven times”, they are perfectly considered and constructed before they are delivered to us.  God keeps all His promises, and His word never expires.

Even when the world is full of people who speak ungodly words, the Lord’s words are pure and can be trusted. Because of this we know He will “guard us from this generation forever.”  Someday our words will be like His words.

Amen

Faith is Not a Democracy

Todd R 3 Comments

In our lives, there are many “voices” that try to influence us, from the people we know, to the things we read, to all the messages in our culture, and beyond.  These may not be literal voices in our heads, but all of these influences affect our inner dialogue and compete to make us act in certain ways.  Often, we don’t know why we do what we do or feel the way we feel, but chances are we got the idea from somewhere.

For Christians, one of those voices in our minds is God, guiding us in the perfect way to go by His Spirit, but we often let the other voices overrule Him.  This can be especially easy to do when He’s telling us to do something that seems strange to us.  One example is from ancient Israel, when the sins of the nation resulted in God passing sentence on the people, in the form of conquest by, and exile to, Babylon.

Once God had made up His mind, the result was inevitable and God, through His prophets, told His people to submit to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon.  Israel was not to follow all the customs of Babylon, or commands from its king[1], but Israel was supposed to submit to Babylon as long as it didn’t make them disobey God.  In this message, His prophets were often lonely voices among many speaking to Israel.  Jeremiah was one of these, and he had to remind the people about whose voice mattered, in Jeremiah 27:8-9.

“if any nation or kingdom will not serve this Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, I will punish that nation with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, declares the LORD, until I have consumed it by his hand. 9 So do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your fortune-tellers, or your sorcerers, who are saying to you, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon.’”

I bolded all the different groups of people who were competing to influence Israel.  These were the many voices Jeremiah had to compete with for the people’s attention, and there were perhaps dozens or even hundreds of them.  If people took opinion polls in those days, God’s word would have barely registered in the results.[2]

Also note that these people were “your” (Israel’s) messengers, not God’s.  These people were telling Israel what they wanted to say and to hear, not what God wanted them to hear.  In modern times, this might be like news networks and celebrities saying only what is popular to say or to believe.  Sadly, this also includes many Christians, even preachers, acting as messengers of our own culture’s values rather than as messengers carrying God’s word.

However, the lesson from the Jeremiah passage above is that God does not care about polling data, and He doesn’t want us to care about it either.  Even if many, or even all other, voices contradict God, He is still right.  Christians need to discern between the many influences inside and outside of us and find the ones that are coming from our Lord.  Even if He is telling us to do something strange, like submit to His judgement under a foreign king.

Paul warned his protégé Timothy and he warns us as well: “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”[3]  These teachers are our modern “prophets, … diviners, … dreamers, … fortune-tellers, or … sorcerers” who seek influence over us.  They may be pastors and teachers, but they can also be the news channels we choose to watch, the politicians we support, the celebrities we emulate, subtle messages in our culture like advertising, things we learn in school or at work, or simply what’s popular at the time.  But only one voice matters and there is only one that deserves our absolute faith – God – no matter how many others vote against Him.

Our actions should not be ruled by a democracy, but by our King.  Be careful who you listen to.

[1] See the book of Daniel for some examples.
[2] Read the story of the prophet Micaiah in 1 Kings 22 for more about how outnumbered God’s true prophets were.
[3] 2 Timothy 4:3-4

The Benefit of Faith

Todd R 1 Comment

One of my favorite comedians (and the only one I’ve paid to see live) is Steven Wright.  His deadpan delivery and observational humor were a combination no other comedian could do like him.  One of his lines is: “You know when you’re sitting on a chair, and you lean back so you’re just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time…”  He has a bit of a bizarre personality, so you’re tempted to believe him.

In that moment, we feel a sense of danger.  We’re convinced that we’re going to fall.  That the chair isn’t going to what we expect it to do and what it’s designed to do – support us.  In other words, we lose faith in the chair and that feeling of doubt shocks us into catching ourselves.  However, it was our faith in the chair that gives us the confidence to sit on it in the first place, and our misuse of the chair that almost made us fall.

See, the purpose of a chair is not to make us believe it is strong enough for us to sit on, but to give us a place to sit when we need it, when we use it correctly.  A chair doesn’t exist to generate an abstract, unused faith, but it exists to provide a specific benefit when we exercise our faith in it.  It serves a specific need, but it won’t fill that need if we don’t trust it.  Mere faith in a chair gives us no benefit.

Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash

In some ways, our relationship with God is like this.  When we believe in Him, we can have a purpose and meaning to our lives because we understand our origin and destiny.  We can know we aren’t accidents that nobody cares about, but that we are created, loved, beings.  However, we may live like we’re constantly at that place where we feel like we’re going to fall backwards if we don’t trust God enough to do what we were designed to do – which is to love Him and to love our fellow man.

The purpose of our faith in God isn’t to make us only believe that He can give our lives direction and meaning, but our faith exists to enable us to trust Him when He tells us that the way He designed for us to live is actually the way we should live.  We can feel secure living our lives to glorify Him not because we have an abstract, unused faith, but because we decide to actually live our lives to glorify Him.

When we feel like we’re going to fall spiritually, we may actually be feeling that way because we’re not exercising our faith as we’re supposed to.  We may need to ask God where we aren’t living out our trust in Him, and He may show us the right path where we can feel (and actually be) secure.  But we need to decide to walk on that path, otherwise our faith has little benefit.

So, you know when you’re sitting on a chair (on all 4 legs), and you are fully trusting the chair to support you? You can feel like that all the time…but it takes some faith, maybe repentance, and maybe even effort.

Faithful Affliction

Todd R 1 Comment

Sometimes the Bible surprises us by explaining things differently than how our natural instincts would like.  In the case of Psalm 119:75, there are two words that we might not think of together:

“I know, O LORD, that your rules are righteous,
            and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.”

How often do we associate God’s faithfulness with affliction?  Don’t we usually associate it with our blessings?  Yet there it is: “in faithfulness you have afflicted me.”

Earlier, in verse 71, David wrote:

“It is good for me that I was afflicted,
                        that I might learn your statutes.”

Then he says the benefit he gets from learning this is more than “thousands of gold and silver pieces”. Since we benefit from discipline, would God be unfaithful if He did not discipline us?  Or do we only consider Him faithful when things seem to go well?

“My son, do not despise the LORD’S discipline
            or be weary of his reproof,
for the LORD reproves him whom he loves,
            as a father the son in whom he delights.” – Proverbs 3:11-12

He is faithful, always.  Even in affliction.  Perhaps especially.

How to Avoid Being the “Greater Fool”

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My day job involves helping people save and invest for retirement, and every now and then it involves helping people avoid speculation.  What’s the difference between investment and speculation?  A short explanation is that speculation often means you’re trusting the “Greater fool theory” to make money.  According to Investopedia[1], “The greater fool theory states that you can make money from buying overvalued securities [stocks, bonds, currency, etc.] because there will usually be someone (i.e., a greater fool) who is willing to pay an even higher price.”  Another way to put it is that speculators buy things because they think someone else will later find them more valuable, whether they actually are or not.  Speculators seek to sell before others figure out that what they’re selling might be worthless.  Instead of trusting this, investors do some work to find out what something is worth and why it would be worth more later to someone else.

In an earlier post about saving for retirement, I noted that “Solomon did encourage us to invest for the future” but also “not to stress too much about what may or may not happen.”  So, this post is not about how to best invest for goals like college or retirement, but about how do we avoid ultimately being the greater fool?  The longer you extend the time frame – even beyond death and into eternity – any investment or speculation in this world looks very different.  In the words of Jim Elliot, an American missionary martyred in Ecuador: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”  In eternity, much of what we now consider investment will look like foolish speculation.

Consider this excerpt from Ecclesiastes 2:18-21.  “I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool?…sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.”

Solomon is cautioning against counting on things we can’t control, such as what will be done with our worldly goods after we’re gone.  If we agonize over accumulating goods, not only are we not satisfied, but do we also teach the next generation to overvalue things, rather than their Creator, thus making our efforts futile and foolish?  Even if our goods outlive us, can we hope that they help those who receive them more than they helped us?  Or is this just speculation?

As an alternative, Solomon says in 2:24: “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?”

Solomon argued that we can’t trust in goods to help our descendants – but what about the question of whether our goods will do us any good in eternity?  Can we trust goods to help us after we’re gone?  Jesus had this in mind in Mark 8:36, when He said: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.  For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?  For what can a man give in return for his soul?”

Jesus’ question is rhetorical, because we cannot offer any goods to God which are not already His: “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”[2] Also, nobody else can pay the cost of our soul either, because they owe their own.

Jesus, the Greater Fool
If our souls are eternal, but we’ve spoiled them by speculating on the goods of this world, who is the greater fool who will pay for them?

Fortunately, the only One who can pay the cost of our souls is also the one who values them the most – even more than we do.  This One was willing to become a fool to the world to purchase the souls of His people.  This One has a soul that was not wasted on the things of this world; therefore, He can offer it for others if He chooses to.

Fortunately, this One is also the One who values every soul the most because as Creator, He loves His people.  An old proverb says, “a thing is worth only what someone else will pay for it.”  On the cross, this One paid His own life for you, because to Him you are worth it and His own life was the price He was willing to pay.

Jesus is this One and in eternity, the only way to avoid the “greater fool theory” is to give our lives to Him and follow His command to love Him and love our neighbor.  Then we will always have everything we need, and we will never lose it.  Even after death and into eternity.

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” – Jesus, in Matthew 6:19-21

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/greaterfooltheory.asp
[2] Psalm 24:1