"Rise Up, O Church of God!"

Isaiah 13:2  "Raise a signal flag on a bare hilltop.  Call up an army...Wave your hand to encourage them as they march..."

Psalm 60:4  "You have raised a banner for those who fear You..."

Used with Permission by MJane Photography

     As I've meditated on all that has happened in America in the last couple of weeks, I've come to some conclusions that I'd like to share with you all.  By way of disclaimer, these are simply my conclusions, not the "word a God" as my Daddy used to say. You are free to comment and agree or disagree or dismiss it as the ravings of a frustrated old woman, but at any rate I hope you'll consider it.

     My contemplations went back to Charleston, not to the horrible mass murder in the AME church, but to the unceremoniously taking down of the Stars and Bars, the so called Confederate Flag.  I knew that was an important occurrence, probably even more symbolic than the flag itself.  So that's what got my wheels turning.  As a student of history, I knew that there was more to that banner than a symbol of slavery. It was a symbol of why the Civil War was initially fought.  One writer put it this way, "A major point of contention between the North and the South was the issue of the size and power of the federal government as defined by the Constitution.  Most Northern politicians supported a loose reading of the Constitution and wanted to expand the size and scope of the federal government, even if that meant giving the government powers that were not authorized by the Constitution.  Most Southern statesmen supported a strict reading of the Constitution and believed the federal government should perform only those functions that were expressly delegated to it by the Constitution. From the earliest days of the Republic, Southern and Northern leaders battled over this issue. Our textbooks rarely do justice to this important fact." (Michael T. Griffith, 2004, A Condensed Look At The Southern Side Of The Civil War)

     So the lowering of that flag was another victory for the "loose Constitutionalists", in the ongoing battle between governmental ideologies in our country.  However, it has come to mean something else.  As the South surrendered the meaning of the war as simply a fight for or against slavery, it devolved into segregation symbolized by the hated Jim Crow laws. The South became like a husband who sees his authority slipping away, trying futilely to hang onto it by becoming an unreasonable tyrant.  As the "good old boys" began flying the Confederate flag from the backs of their pick-up trucks in desperate efforts to assert their questionable manhood and their "flagging" superiority, the whole thing became uglier and uglier. The once noble symbol became a banner of hate.  The people who had once waved it from a hill top, to call up an army, waving their hands to encourage them as they marched (Is. 13:2) had given up their banner.  It had been lowered generations before.  They had lost the history of it... surrendered it to the enemy and covered it with hatred and shame.  Then to top it off, they surrendered their children to federal public schools, who would reinforce the philosophies of their opponent. So, they lost their flag because they lost it's history.  Now they watched in horror as a Southern Governor stood with pride and great ceremony and brought it down.

     As I thought about this I realized that we as Christians do the same thing when we fail to guard our banners, our symbols, our flags, which stand for our most cherished values.  I suddenly thought of a personal illustration of how this happened in my life.  I remembered a battle that waged in my home, when I was a little girl. My mother insisted that I wear a hat to church every Sunday.  I hated the stupid looking things.  I'd protest every Sunday and ask "Why?" She'd say something like "Because we're supposed to wear a hat to church!" and I'd come back with "...but why?"  Then she'd end the conversation by saying "Just put the hat on and stop arguing with me!" Well that worked until I got into my teens. No one else wore a hat so I would either take it off when we were separated at church, or I cry and throw a fit until she acquiesced and gave in to me.  It wasn't long before I was going to church hat less and the fight was over.  

     My mother was raised as a strict Methodist, who in her day believed that women should have their heads covered when "praying or prophesying" (1Cor. 11:5) The problem was, by the time the tradition got to me, it had lost it's meaning.  Her church had dictated that my mother wear a head covering to church, but they had failed to pass on the teaching, thus the symbol became meaningless.  She couldn't tell me "Why?" when I asked because she didn't know why.  She just kept the tradition without knowing the Biblical reason for it.  The symbol became meaningless to her and odious to me. In my mind I had some great reasons for my rebellion.  It messed up my hair, none of my peers had to do it, and it made me look different.  So in my mind, it became a hated, mocked, meaningless thing which I despised.  Years later when my oldest daughter came home from college advocating head coverings, because she had learned from her Greek studies that it was taught by Paul in 1 Cor. 11 (in plain Greek, even if the English is obscure). I simply said "Huh!" and began to cover my head in church.  The Biblical reasons became clear to me and the symbol precious.  "Why?" you ask?  Well briefly, because it is a symbol to the world and to angels (perhaps demons) that a women who covers her head in church, is under the protection of her spiritual authority, first her father, then her husband and if she is a widow or orphan, her church leadership.  Now the symbol is still, mocked, embarrassing, messes up my hair and makes me look different from my peers, but now it means something to me and will be honored by me until I die. Having said that, it has been almost completely surrendered by the church.

     Finally, at the end of this week we received the ruling by the Supreme Court on same sex marriage.  It was the last dot I connected as I cried and prayed and wondered in trepidation what it would mean in the life of the church and religious freedom, in the life of people who are given the freedom to pursue this destructive lifestyle, and in my life as I sought to stand against the tide of secularism in our country.  I first experienced anger at SCOTUS, then grief, then solemn contemplation, as I realized that once again we, the Christian world, had surrendered a flag.  When the church lowered the banner on sexuality within marriage and marriage alone, when it began to celebrate out of wedlock births, when it failed to stand against divorce, it surrendered the flag of the sanctity of marriage.  The reasons God gave for marriage between a man and a women are spelled out in the first writings of holy writ in Gen. 1:27 & 28. There He gave us the banner, the flag, the reason and definition of marriage. As I studied it I realized that He never even mentioned "Love" as the reason for marriage, in these verses.  Love and respect is implied and certainly nice to have if you're going to be in this thing together for the rest of your life but God didn't hold it up as paramount. So once again, sadly, the Church layed down a flag.  Through generations of neglect, it failed to lift high the absolute necessity to honor God's institution of marriage and gave up the banner.  The Supreme Court this week, like Nikki Haley in South Carolina, simply lowered the flag that long ago had been surrendered by the church.  

     1 Peter 4:17 says, "For the time has come for judgment, and it must begin with God's household.  And if judgment begins with us, what terrible fate awaits those who have never obeyed God's Good News?"  So as we begin to judge ourselves as His church, may God help us to do it with repentance, love and respect for all.

The Open Door, The Narrow Way and The Road Less Traveled

     *The following is a speech that I will be giving at the graduation of my Granddaughter on June 4th.  She is a home schooler and will be graduating with two of her friends.   I'm very honored to have been asked to speak and hope that this will bless them and something here will stick with them.

      Graduation... even the word has an exciting ring to it! It's a word denoting a passage to the future, an open door of opportunity, a new beginning and achievement...makes you smile just thinking about it.  On the other hand, it also brings us to an ending, a finishing line, a passing from childhood to adulthood, the leaving of old friends, and that may make you choke back tears.  But today you'll receive your diplomas that will officially make you High School Graduates!
     It's a time of rejoicing, a time of reflection and a time of serious consideration.  That's why graduation speeches are full of advice because when the glow is off the diploma, when the last well wisher has left the open house, when you wake up on some Monday morning staring at the ceiling of your bedroom and asking yourself, "what now?" that's when you'll need, advice.... lots of it, from wherever you can get it, parents, pastors, counsellors, friends... anybody that you think might have a thimble full of wisdom and experience.
     So this speech won't be any different from others you might have heard this year.  It will be full of advice, most of which you probably won't remember past this afternoon, but if you remember just one bit of it, my job here will be done.
     Now, I am really an expert in this area of advice, because... I've had lots of it... some good, some bad... and probably the most important thing I've learned about advice is how to discern the good from the bad.  I don't know this because I'm smart. I know it because I'm OLD!  Because I've given and received lots of advice in my 76 years, I've  trained myself to look at it in a certain way.  This is a valuable skill to have,  so I'm going to pass it on to you.
     So lets start here with,  "How to tell the good advice from the bad advice.  The answer to this for a Christian is really pretty simple. You start by asking yourself this question... How does this advice line up with principles of scripture?  The bible for Christians is the seat of all wisdom. (It is for the non-Christians too. They just don't know it.)  Now this might seem difficult to you at first but like I said before, it's really very simple.
     If you're on face book you receive, almost daily, pithy little sayings that offer you advice.  Some are really good and some are really bad. For example, last week I re-posted one that said, "Remember to be nice to the people you love because someday God's going to want them back!"  Then another time I read one that said, "Be nice to your kids, because one day they'll pick out your nursing home!"  Now both of these are true and possibly good advice,  but only one is biblical.  In the first one you'd be motivated by love of others (which is biblical) in the second, though it's very funny, we shouldn't take it too seriously, because it's not always true and if you followed it for the reason given, you will have been motivated by self-centerdness (something that is un-biblical).  Then there was this little gem also posted last week... "The problem with putting others first is you are training them to put you second!"  That sounds right, but is it?  Jesus said, "The first shall be last and the last shall be first!" We are called to love sacrificially.  The Christian way is the way of the cross, Jesus teaches us that the way up is down, and when we practice this, our example will be seen by others.  So if the bible is our guide, than that can't be a statement by which we should order our lives.
      The bottom line is this... start training yourself to think biblicaly.  How you do this is simple.  Read your bible!  Even if it's just a verse a day... read it daily.  Now, even for Christians, daily bible reading is a discipline that must be developed through practice. If you don't have much of an appetite for it right now, don't worry about it.  If a person stays on a fast for a long period of time, he will eventually lose his appetite.  I don't know when that happens but eventually it does happen.  I say this because I remember being an 18 year old girl.  The Bible was the last book on my mind.  If I read it, it was because my parents made me.  So if you don't have the habit of daily Bible reading, you probably won't have an appetite for it and even a verse a day will wake up your appetite and you'll find yourself wanting more and making it a priority to set aside time to read more.  If you read it consistently, the bible will train your mind to think along with it.  You will develop a biblical mindset and it will become a shield to all the un-biblical philosophies that will bombard you on a daily basis for the rest of your life.
      The next piece of advice I have for you is this... choose your close friends wisely. Psalm 1 gives us this instruction, "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful."  When I taught 4th grade I taught them this Psalm and I asked, "What does it mean when it says "standeth in the way of sinners"?  One little boy raised his hand and said, "It means to go find a bunch of sinners and stand around in their way."  Imagine that... wisdom from the mouth of a child. :) Basically this verse is telling us that we shouldn't become such close friends with ungodly, scornful people, people who habitually live in sin, that we'd be willing to go to them for advice.  Even the so called experts are to be "taken with a grain of salt" if they fall into that category.  Why? Because sin and unbelief hardens a person's heart and clouds their thinking.  People you go to for advice should be first of all, people who care what happens to you,  and secondly, people who's wisdom comes from the Book.
       Since Christian young women are the ones I'm talking to here, it's important for you to hear what perhaps is the best piece of advice the Bible gives to women.  It comes from 1 Peter 3:3&4. There it says, "Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit which is in the sight of God of great price." Put in plainer English it reads like this, "Don't be concerned about the outward beauty of fancy hair styles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful clothes.  You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God."

Elizabeth Taylor

     I once read an interview with one of Elizabeth Taylor's ex husbands.  It was very interesting and it really validated the truth of 1 Peter 3:3&4. Liz Taylor was for years known as "the world's most beautiful woman" and that claim was almost indisputable.   She was very beautiful.  If you don't believe me, google her and look at her pictures from childhood to when she became an old woman.  So, I wondered, how could she go through 7 or 8 husbands?  Why would any man leave "the most beautiful woman in the world"?  This interview answered my question.  Her ex husband began by saying, "Liz is a mess! Everywhere she goes there is chaos. She can't keep domestic help because she yells and screams at everybody all the time and there's no one in the world who needs help more than Liz.  She constantly has to be in control of everything and if she's not she's miserable and makes everyone around her miserable.  A person can only live with that for so long without going crazy."
      She was outwardly perhaps "the world's most beautiful woman" but inwardly she was... well, ugly!  At the same time her outward beauty was fading and she couldn't control the one thing in life, that she felt, made her valuable.  She was pitiful because she'd never learned the secret of true beauty, "the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit".

Brooke Schneider, Teyha Smith,
Margaret Jane Ginster

     Now, right now in your life you probably aren't too concerned about this because right now you are beautiful. You are budding roses, but just as a rose buds then blossoms, it also fades and falls, so what the Bible is telling you here is that unlike the rose, your beauty can be unfading.  That becomes  true when you apply that anti wrinkle cream of faith and unwavering trust in God, to that "hidden person of the heart".  You see, God wants you to be attractive so that others will be drawn to you, from your youth to your old age.  You are His workmanship, His witnesses, His ambassadors.
      When I was a little girl I would ask my mother, "Am I pretty?" and she would say to me, "Pretty is as pretty does."  Then when I would misbehave she wouldn't say, "Don't be bad!" she said instead, "Don't be ugly!"  In her mind the two were inseparable.

     So all I've said today can be summed up in these two sentences... "Only one life, twill soon be past. Only what's done for Christ will last!"  This is the one thing I hope you take away, the one thing I hope will be pinned on your heart and in your mind.  Whether this open door before you, leads you into marriage and motherhood, or a degree and a career, or to a life of full time Christian service, this is the most valuable thing you will hear here today.  Your life is a gift from your Creator, meant to be given back to Him, in the service of Jesus Christ, through serving others, so that when your time is finished on this earth, something you have done will last forever. I once heard a Gideon say, "There are only two things that you can take with you to Heaven ... the Word of God and the souls of men!" That pretty much says it all.  

     Finally you're not only facing an open door today, but you are at a cross roads, facing a choice, the choice is to live for yourself or for Christ.  And less you think that you can make that choice once, and you won't ever have to make it again, let me dispel that notion for you.  You will come to this fork in the road over and over again.  The poet Robert Frost talked about these things in a much more beautiful way than I am able to do, in his poem "The Road Not Taken".  I won't take the time to quote the whole poem here, but I encourage you to look it up and read it, however  I want to emphasize what I've said here by quoting the last stanza of his poem,  It says...

"I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence,

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference." 

     

     Now, I'm not sure what road Frost was referring to but I'm talking about the Jesus road, the way of the cross.  Jesus Himself described it in Matthew 7:14 when He said, "...strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it!"  Jesus wasn't just talking about the afterlife in the "sweet by and by".  He was talking about our present life in the "nasty now and now"!

     Thus my final advice to you is this, keep choosing the narrow way, the one "less traveled" and when you come to the end of your journey you will find that it has made "all the difference"!