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The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.
Matthew 13: 44-46
Much of our Christian life is like this: forsaking the many – the things of this world – for the One in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).
In leaving go of so many things on this earth for the sake of Jesus, there is bound to be fear and anxiety. We know the Gospel is a worthy goal, but that doesn’t make it any easier through the trials and tribulations this life has to offer. We only know that goal as in a dimly lit mirror, for now do we only know in part (1 Corinthians 13: 12).
And so while the day is coming when we will know in full, what sustains us while we travel? What gives us provision while we pursue the treasure or the pearl?
For we know that once we have grabbed hold of that prize, sanctifying grace has had its way in our hearts, and we stand before our Savior fully glorified, we will have neither want nor worry ever again. But what shall carry us on until that day?
Notice our man from Matthew 13:44: When he found the treasure in the field, he went away and in his joy sold all he had for the sake of obtaining the field. In the original Greek text we can see that the man did not manufacture joy in his being or go looking for joy, but that the treasure in the field caused him to have joy.
The prospect of selling all he had to own the treasure was the very cause of his joy. The treasure was so great that it had the power to sustain him in the pursuit of it as well as provide for him once he obtained it.
There was joy inherent within the task of forsaking all in the name of obtaining the One. This was not a task taken begrudgingly or with mere obligation, this was the a cause of joy beyond which the man had never known.
Kierkegaard had it right when he said purity of the heart is to will one thing:
Father in heaven! What is a man without Thee! What is all that he knows, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if he does not know Thee! What is all his striving, could it even encompass a world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee: Thee the One, who art one thing and who art all!
So go, go on your way and be willing to seek the One thing. The prize awaits you, and while it will indeed provide for you one day, there is joy to carry you through in the meantime as well. Seek Jesus Christ almighty today and find peace, purpose, and perseverance in His grace. Pursue Him with all your might, and He will provide.
Be encouraged and of good cheer, for the Lord knows you and knows what you need, and He does not disappoint.
I began my birthday with a reference to my beautiful wife.
I have decided to end it with one of my favorite passages from Soren Kierkegaard.
father in heaven!
what is a man without thee!
what is all that he knows, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if he does not know thee!
what is all his striving, could it even encompass a world, but a half-finished work if he does not know thee: thee the one, who art one thing and who art all.
so may thou give to the intellect, wisdom to comprehend that one thing; to the heart, sincerity to receive this understanding; to the will, purity that wills only one thing.
in prosperity may thou grant perseverance to will one thing; amid distractions, collectedness to will one thing; in suffering, patience to will one thing.
thou that giveth both the beginning and the completion, may thou early, at the dawn of day, give to the young man resolution to will one thing.
as the day wanes, may thou give to the old man a renewed remembrance of his first resolution, that the first may be like the last, the last like the first, in possession of a life that has willed only one thing.
The Internet is a fascinating beast: through it we are admitted entrance to and information on nearly everything imaginable.
And yet, inherent within this great resource come great risks. On the Internet by Hubert Dreyfus contains a helpful analysis of both the advantages and the perils of the Internet.
Dreyfus touches on a hallmark of the postmodern age: the plurality and relativity of information and authority.
He notes, “There are no hierarchies; everything is linked to everything else on a single level.” In this pluralistic setting, there is no authority, no foundational point of reference. And in return, individuals today are, “not interested in collecting what is significant but in connecting to as wide a web of information as possible.”
Dreyfus delineates between Data Retrieval and Information Retrieval, specific and general relevance axioms, and information retrieval based on recall versus precision; all this is to simply re-emphasize the postmodern nature of the Internet as it affords opportunity in information access while carrying an inherent risk of rendering all information relative
Such relativity is treated with disdain by Soren Kierkegaard, who reveals the dangers inherent within the Internet.
Using Kierkegaard’s criticism of “The Crowd” and, “The Public”, one can see the perils presented by abstract reasoning apart from any actual involvement or commitment. The Internet represents the same sort of aberration Kierkegaard argued against when he criticized the press and coffeehouses for becoming hotbeds of discussion that led to nothing little else than more discussion.
The Internet has the potential to act in the same way the coffeehouses did 300 years ago: it provides a space for people to offer unmediated (and sometimes uneducated) opinions without any involvement or sense of consequences. The Internet encourages a lack of commitment in the same space as a presence of opinion. As a result, there is a leveling due to endless reflection.
Individuals in this context seek ultimate truth by pursuing every possible avenue, but do so indefinitely to an infinite regress. There is never an answer, but always room for more speculation.
Such are hallmark characteristics of postmodernity: infinite speculation of every possible avenue without commitment to one single course of action.
Implicit herein, says Kierkegaard, is nihilism. The leveling means there is nowhere to go: relevance and significance have disappeared in favor of relativity and pluralism.
Is the task of becoming a self ever completed?
When in a written examination the youth are allotted four hours to develop a theme, then it is neither here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is up, or uses the entire time. Here, therefore, the task is one thing, the time another. But when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time has transpired. Suppose a man were assigned the task of entertaining himself for an entire day, and he finishes this task of self-entertainment as early as noon, then his celerity would not be meritorious. So also when life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.
His words ringing with ample amounts of both wit and wisdom, Kierkegaard warns that to be over-eager for “perfection” or “completion” is to result in perpetual immaturity.
Oswald Chambers says that the downfall of Christians comes when they place their desire for personal holiness and righteousness above their desire to know God.
We are instructed to, one day at a time, make it a goal to simply desire to know God; seek His face and stand under His glory and power.
Paul says in Philippians 1:6, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
This completion Paul speaks of will not come quickly, nor will it come easily, but it will come, for this is the promise of God.
What Kierkegaard is saying is that never, of our own accord, are we rendered capable of declaring, “I have arrived.”
We are, however, given the length of our life to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, to love and serve Him, to worship Him, and allow our lives to reflect His glory, and we embark on these tasks only through His empowering.
Such is the purpose of our lives: the glorification of God, as opposed to the betterment or perfection of the self.
The goal of life is holiness (as opposed to wholeness), and such heights are achieved solely through the process of sanctification – whereby God refines our faith, molding and shaping us for His glorious purposes.
Sanctification will be a theme running for duration of our life; in Kierkegaardian terms, it will not simply last the first part of the test or culminate during the early afternoon of the day. As long as there is breath in our lungs, sanctification will be an everyday reality for us.
I have firmly resolved within me to dedicate myself for ever to His service. May the dear Lord give me strength and power to carry out my intention and protect me on my life’s way. Like a child I trust in His grace: He will preserve us all, that no misfortune may befall us. But His holy will be done! All He gives I will joyfully accept.
- Freidrich Nietzsche, age 13.
Within five years of writing this in his journal, Nietzsche would renounce his faith and walk away from God.
I am not sure what I find more intriguing about this quote: the fact that a 13 year old could be so spiritually mature and awa,re or that this spiritually mature 13 year old would within his lifetime proclaim with the Madman, “God is dead!”
I – an outside observer with a clear bias – find it somewhat ironic that God answered Nietzsche’s prayer with certainty, though perhaps in ways Nietzsche never could have imagined.
What Nietzsche wrote during his life carries with it lasting implications for Christendom (note I we use the term Christendom as Kierkegaard did to refer to the cultural identity of being Christian as opposed to the soul’s identity in Christ).
While his views on Christ and Christianity are without argument incorrect, his able critiscims of Christendom and the idolatry it spawns are certainly beneficial for those obedient followers of Christ with ears to hear.
The Danish (the country, not the pastry) philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was well-known for including parables in his work. Here is one of his most famous parables:
It is related of a peasant who came barefooted to the Capital, and had made so much money that he could buy himself a pair of shoes and stockings and still had enough left over to get drunk on – it is related that as he was trying in his drunken state to find his way home he lay down in the middle of the highway and fell asleep. Then along came a wagon, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would run over his legs. Then the drunken peasant awoke, looked at his legs, and since by reason of the shoes and stockings he didn’t recognize them, he said to the driver, “Drive on, they are not my legs.”
This parable was written early in the 1850′s in Copenhagen, yet I find it very pertinent today – an accurate depiction of the ills we face today in America.
We set out on the well-intentioned pursuit of success and victory in life, only to attain it and be consumed by it thereafter.
And when we have indulged to our heart’s content on the spoils our success has granted us, we lay down unaware of the danger that is fast approaching.
When warning signs present themselves, we do not recognize the whence or the wither of our trials and have no other recourse save for, “Drive on! They are not my legs!”
We set off to buy ourselves that new pair of shoes, and after we do credit ourselves with the success, and consider it innocent enough to satiate our longings for more…. only to be consumed by them and find ourselves in the most dire of situations.
Much has been made of the secularized state of America, and I would not pretend to be an expert and espouse this opinion or that perspective – I am uneducated on the subject and would do more harm than good.
But I find significant wisdom as to the precarious existence of our country in John Calvin’s two-fold knowledge of man – that we do not know we come from God gives us cause to not know ourselves because knowledge of self is tied intricately, inherently, and inseparably to knowledge of God.
As a culture I believe we have forgotten who and where we come from – who gives us breath and who orders our life.
We are tricked into believing the end of existence is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – selfish, man-centered goals with no thought to He who holds the universe in the palm of His hand.
We forget life is for His glory; we are consumed with including all and making existence acceptable for the creature, we give no thought to the Creator.
We have forgotten where we came from, and therefore have not the slightest clue as to who we are, where we are going, what we are doing, or what ills befall us. We are a purposeless culture with our heads in the sand and our hearts content to long for the most temporal of satisfaction.
in college (i attended a liberal college and majored in religious studies with a concentration in philosophy) my junior seminar was entitled, “evil and existence;” it was an exposition of evil and the different ways philosophy tries explain it and cope with it.
one of the tantamount questions we dealt with was threefold: how is it that a) God exists, b) God is all powerful and all loving, and c) evil exists. to philosophers of an earthly perspective, such a statement did not make sense to them.
an issue we worked through extensively was that of theodicy – the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil (Oxford American Dictionary).
we read hannah arendt and her thoughts on the holocaust, paul ricoeur and his ways to summarize evil, the horrific death by a thousand cuts, and other explanations of and traumatizing expeditions into the existence of evil.
and yet, none seemed to do justice for me; none seemed to explain the situation completely.
obviously, as a follower of Jesus Christ i see things from a different perspective and my worldview is built on a completely different set of presuppositions.
and so, as i realized the emptiness an earthly and fallen philosophy offered regarding evil, i began to see just how big my God truly is. recognizing the inadequacy of fickle, fallen, foolish, finite human reasoning, i began to worship God.
God’s plan is ultimate and perfect, His glory is transcendent above all else, and His purposes are without flaw. He orchestrates and allows all that happens despite the fact that over 6 billion people won’t understand it.
now i will admit that in recent days it has been increasingly difficult for me to rest easily and trust my God; it seems that every day another school shooting, mass murder, tragedy, or unthinkable horror occurs. Walt Mueller deals with some of these situations in a very poignant and redemptive fashion: http://learningmylines.blogspot.com
my father-in-law is a retired crime scene investigator (the show CSI is a sham, by the way), and he was actually one of the first people in the school with the SWAT team when Columbine happened to assist in crime scene reconstruction and blood spatter analysis; some of the stories he tells me about what he has experienced are beyond terrifying.
i think sometimes – admittedely very foolishly – begin to doubt God. i doubt His plan, His purpose….that He knows what He is doing….i think i doubt as a child doubts his father’s reasoning when he says, “don’t play in the street, it isnt safe.”
but then i stop and think, and i actually begin to praise my God all the more: it is so beyond my comprehension that He works all things for His good and His glory. and even though i cant understand it and dont see it, i know He is there, working and present. just because we aren’t aware of His Holy Spirit doesn’t mean He isnt there.
there is a reason soren kierkegaard said, “life is mean to be lived forward and understood backwards.”
there is a reason God is God and i am not.
there is a reason God works in us and through us and around us without our knowing.
it seems paradigmatic but i know it to be true – the more i see evil the more i am driven into the arms of my God because I know He is working for His glory. i have no other rest, no other foundation on which to stand, no other way to explain evil.
in attempting to understand evil, i am brought face to face with the reality of the very foundation for existence.
i desire to be the wise man who built his house on rock by listening to the words of the Lord and implementing them in my life (Matthew 7:24-29). and it is on that foundation that i presuppose my life and my purpose.
so it makes sense that as i turn to evil and attempt to comprehend it, i would see that my only recourse is to retreat to that very same foundation that trusts God and sees Him in and through everything.
i know my God in truth, though i will never know Him in fullness and entirety.
and in that same vein, i will understand the truth that God is always working for His own glory, and such a statement will explain every circumstance facing our world – even evil – though i will never comprehend the fullness or entirety of why or how.
8“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD.
9“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55: 8-9
29 The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.
Deuteronomy 29:29
to God be the glory, forever and ever amen.
