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As numerous as the clichés regarding the journey of life and the paths we take are, there is truth behind every one of them. From the second we wake up we have infinite choices in any number of different combinations as to where the day will take us. Sadly, this complication reaches far beyond our surface into the very depths of our existence. The things we ascribe to as our morals, ethics, and values are all part of the cacophony of choices facing us. It can be argued that the underlying foundation for all these choices that dictate how we comport ourselves to the world is our faith, whatever it may be in and however it may manifest itself.
Oswald Chambers was an evangelistic minister in England during the early 1900’s and is the well-known author of many books, including the daily devotional My Utmost for His Highest. One of the daily readings by Chambers speaks to the primacy of our personal relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. Chambers does not refer in this particular passage to one’s receiving Christ as Lord and Savior, but instead to the daily walk one must endure in order to live a life bringing honor and glory to God.
What is interesting about Chambers’ point is his emphasis on the personal aspect of this relationship, and how that influences all other areas of life. One’s personal and private daily relationship to the Ultimate above us can sometimes go neglected, misunderstood, and underestimated. Often, rather than the daily relationship, the support systems surrounding the individual are considered with too much prominence. While these are good things and a blessing from God – Bible studies, fellowships, churches – they are not the ultimate authority nor do they contain the ultimate answers; they are fallible, man-made, and part of the fallen creation. Unfortunately, society gets caught in the discourse arising from organized religious structures and is worn down before it acknowledges its need for God’s truth.
What is it about the gathered masses that make them harbingers of such untruth? Soren Kierkegaard has several views on the dynamics of individuality versus existing as part of the crowd, the implications of which reach the shallowest facets of our cultural comings and goings to the deepest and most convicting aspects of our personal faith in Jesus Christ. In The Point of View, Kierkegaard attacks the crowd as untruth and focused on time-present, the finite and the temporal; the Infinite has no place in the crowd. Through Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard delves into the intricacies of the relationship between God and Abraham and Abraham and Isaac; and thereby examines what it is for one to exist in solitary obedience to God; the knight of faith.
Kierkegaard begins by speaking to the dichotomous views on the crowd, saying that one may look to the crowd to find truth while another may avoid the crowd, for within it lays the untruth. “…even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd – a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed, a voting, noisy, audible crowd – untruth would at once be in evidence.”
Each individual in the crowd seeks after themselves and forgets about what truly matters. “Hence where there is a multitude, a crowd, or where decisive significance is attached to the fact that there is a multitude, there it is sure that no one is working, living, striving for the highest aim, but only for one or another earthly aim; since to work for the eternal decisive aim is possible only where there is one, and to be this one which all can be is to let God be the helper – the ‘crowd’ is the untruth.”
In the crowd, each individual is focused on the temporal, the here and the now as opposed to the infinite and the eternal. Material goods and earthly worries consume the individual as opposed to concern for serving and glorifying the Infinite. Man looks to his left and to his right in an attempt at finding relevance; he does not look upward. The highest aim Kierkegaard speaks to concerns a life centered around God, something only attainable through His strength flowing through His people; hence the phrase, “God be the helper.” From this miniscule statement, much is divulged pertaining to Kierkegaard’s intentions.
The individual seeks the crowd because He fears the truth God will reveal to him, he fears living a life as God has called him. In the stead of this living, breathing, dynamic relationship with his Father in heaven, the individual seeks out a man-made construct that serves him as he attempts think his way to God and relate to Him on his own terms. In this circumstance, God is nothing more than the thing placed on a pedestal to live in relation to, not have a relationship with. Conversely, God truly desires direct interaction with His children; a Helper to the needy and the Truth beyond which there is nothing else. God is the Ultimate and the Inescapable, there is a reason He cannot be comprehended by man.
Yet what is it that has frightened the individual so much that he would run from the truth – God – and instead seek a falsifiable and fallen structure that forces him into serving himself rather than allowing him to serve His Father? For this it is necessary to turn to Fear and Trembling, in which Kierkegaard examines the anxiety and tension defining the life of an individual who follows God above all other directives; even forsaking moral law for the sake of a higher one – the teological suspension of the ethical.
In the Biblical passage recounting God’s instructions to Abraham concerning the sacrifice of his long awaited only child, much is revealed about the dynamics of the trust one has when living obediently for God. Abraham is asked, contrary to all ethical, moral, and logical considerations, to take his son up to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. In this test of the devout the particular results of living the individual life for God are made visible; the silence a true follower of God might live in and the resulting implications are made frighteningly clear.
Abraham is devoted to both God, his Father in heaven, and his son, the lone child for whom he waited so long. In the tension that exists here, between obeying his Father and attempting to preserve the life of his son, faith appears. Faith exists insofar as it calls into question human logic and reason because they are fallible and based on man’s mind; faith defies the world system that wants to define man. “…Moreover, it must be fixed in one’s memory as the highest rule, that what has been revealed to us by God is to be believed the most certain of all things; and even though the light of reason should seem most clearly to suggest something else, we must nevertheless give credence to the divine authority only, rather than to our own judgment.” It is in this tension that the individual solely seeking after God, namely Abraham in this case, is resigned to live.
First, Abraham can speak with no one about what he has been told; what can he be but insane for attempting to explain a loving God has ordered him to sacrifice the son for whom he waited one hundred years. “Humanly speaking, he is crazy and cannot make himself intelligible to anyone.” Abraham must not disclose what has been revealed to him, so he continues existing as an individual quietly resolved to obey God no matter the implications; Abraham trusts God. Now the resulting implications of said silence come into play and the reasons the individual flees his solitude for the comfort of crowd, albeit the crowd of untruth, are elucidated.
Abraham has a faith in God that he will not betray, his foundation is on God and God alone; he places faith not in man-made structures of organized religion that have been fabricated by men seeking to use God, not be used by Him. As a result of this unbreakable faith, Abraham displays no visible struggle accepting what God has to say; once God says to wait, Abraham waits. When Isaac asks where the sacrifice is, Abraham explains God will provide the sacrifice. Through his unshakable faith in the living and breathing God with whom he has a relationship, Abraham is able to successfully live the solitary life of faith in God.
Conversely, the man who flees solitude with God for the untruth is the man who panics when he cannot comprehend the wisdom of God that transcends man’s thinking; the finite cannot grasp the infinite and this scares him. The reality is that God’s ways go beyond men and call the individual to existence as a being in the world but not of the world. The individual flees because he is attempting a self-sufficient life and has not the strength to see himself through. Apart from God’s strength in him, he has no ability to survive.
The individual with no understanding of God’s calling flees it in an attempt to comprehend it, yet he flees God’s call to understand it on his own terms, and in the wake he has left God behind. The man who flees forsakes the relationship by which God will show Himself as all knowing and all powerful when he too quickly abandons the place God has put him and runs for a place of supposed clarity and understanding.
In his concluding comments to the Individuality and Subjective Truth portion of The Point of View, Kierkegaard deals specifically with this issue of knowledge, or lack thereof, and the ability to believe despite this. “The truth is precisely the venture which chooses an objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite…But it is for this very reason that the inwardness becomes as intense as it is, for it embraces this objective uncertainty with the entire passion of the infinite.” Man cannot comprehend God, and that is His intension. Simply because humans do not see how and why God works does not mean God hasn’t got a firm grasp on His world.
The man who flees because he does not understand is missing the point; he is not supposed to understand. In the space where he is left open with no basis for belief is the space in which he flees; yet this is the very space where instead he needs to embrace that which he knows exists but cannot fathom because he knows It is larger than he. “…So the only thing that can save him is the absurd, and this he grasps by faith. So he recognizes the impossibility, and that very instant he believes the absurd; for, if without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and with all his heart, he should wish to imagine that he has faith, he deceives himself…” The moment he realizes he cannot grasp the Infinite, he is to fall to his knees in broken desperation and cry out for God. Only through brokenness will the individual understand he is depraved and separate from God, realizing he has nothing to offer up to God of any value save for his humility and desire for God’s truth.
Yet at what point does the individual leave go of this world, and what are his intensions in finally doing so? The knight of Infinite Resignation forsakes this world because he knows he will gain it back. Through the knight’s recollection of the finite – the princess – he does not lose this world, he simply keeps it alive for himself in his mind and in his heart. “So the knight remembers everything, but precisely this remembrance is pain, and yet by infinite resignation he is reconciled with existence…This impossible however, the knight makes possible by expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by waiving his claim to it.”
The knight of Faith looks strikingly similar to the knight of Infinite Resignation, indeed because externally they are one in the same. Both knights renounce this world and all it has to offer and look instead to things of greater importance. Where the knight of Infinite Resignation gives up this world for himself, the night of Faith gives up this world for the Infinite and Eternal, desiring not to serve himself as does the knight of Infinite Resignation, but instead to laud praises upon and glorify the Ultimate in everything he does. Only the Ultimate, as omnipotent and omniscient, truly can differ between the two; a startling reality, for is it not possible the knight of Infinite Resignation is deceived, believing he is seeking the Eternal yet still pursuing his own interests?
We return to Oswald Chambers and the personal, private, and daily relationship to the Ultimate; this relationship must be nurtured, energy dedicated to knowing the Ultimate and understanding what it is to live a life for Him and not one’s own self. Once focus is removed from the Ultimate, man embarks on a journey fulfilling only himself. Chambers often asks, “Who is on the throne, God or man?” The true romantic knows what his love desires because he cares enough to ask her what she desires; in the same way, the true knight of Faith knows enough that listening to the Ultimate is the only way to live a life in pursuit of Him.
Day by day it is a struggle to exist in relation to God who is beyond comprehension. Day by day it is impossible to exist for God when man attempts to dictate how God should relate to humans, and then attempts to live in relation to that concept on his own strength. However, there is a solution. Day by day, man has no task except to wake up and commit to weakness and humility, for only when man offers himself to God as empty will God fill him with Himself. The knight of faith lays down his claim to himself and this world, and in return he is awarded all he needs to survive; he is provided for through God. He lets go and is sustained not by self-fulfillment and turning inward, but by self-emptying and looking upward. “He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything by virtue of the absurd.”
“The knight of faith knows that to give up oneself for the universal inspires enthusiasm, and that it requires courage, but he also knows that security is to be found in this, precisely because it is for the universal.” Through man’s emptiness does God instill in him love, wisdom, and understanding; and then man has no task except to glorify God in all that he does.
“The reason most Christians workers who fail do so is because they place the desire for personal holiness above their desire to know God.”
– Oswald Chambers
We all know the wisdom of avoiding such desires as sex, drugs, money, power, and greed. We all know the evil inherent within the temptations of the world. We all play the game as good little church boys, making sure we never desire the deeds of the flesh (Galatians 5: 19-21) and making sure we always desire the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5: 22-23).
But is that all? Is that to be the extent of our desires in life?
I think not.
Many faithful believers I know desire their own personal holiness, and this desire is to be commended. But to what end? For their edification and gratification? For the good of…them? That can’t be right.
The church at Ephesus was considered to be morally upright but self-centered and loveless (Revelation 2: 1-7); well-intentioned but misdirected. Modern scholars refer to those believers – and others like them – as “navel gazers”, believers who were so wrapped up in their own spiritual growth that they forgot to lift their heads and their hearts to the world around them.
When we grow so focused on our own personal walk, we can become deaf – and ultimately irrelevant – to the world around us.
Instead of devoting all our strength and energy to our own personal walk, I agree with Oswald Chambers in thinking our ultimate desire must simply be to desire God, to seek His face and know His truth. The natural byproduct of this – there is no way around it – is to have a living, active, and vibrant faith grounded in a God-glorifying, morally upright walk.
Beware desiring moral uprightness and personal purity alone, for such desires can become idolatrous, turning a good and Godly thing into an evil and corrupt thing.
Instead, desire to know God above all else, to know His face clearly and His truth as alive in your life.
Woe is he who speculates until he is blue in the face about what exactly God would have him do, for he who speculates so much he never actually gets to the doing!
Many a liberal theologian has used the analogy of the blind men examining the elephant, each looking at a different part (ear, tail, foot, etc), and then arguing that their experience contained the essence of the elephant. While I have particular disdain for this analogy (for the reason that all paths DO NOT lead to God as the analogy implies; Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father apart from Him), I still find it somewhat helpful in this case.
To be so heavenly minded so as to be of no earthly good finds expression in this analogy: after the blind men examined the elephant, they began to debate whose experience contained the essence of the elephant. Now they were still debating the nature of the elephant some time later, but it had grown weary and wandered away from them!
And so it is for us Christians: I fear far too often we debate over the slightest of issues, only to find ourselves so wrapped up in that very debate we forget to put our faith in action.
Now I am not talking about the essentials of Christianity:
Jesus Christ is the son of God
Salvation is through Christ alone, by grace alone and through faith alone
The Bible is the Word of God, divinely inspired and authoritative for our life.
God is a triune God: 3-in-1 and 1-in-3, representing neither poly nor pantheism.
These things are surely worth debating over, for they are the strong tenets of our faith, the very foundations of it, and are necessary to fulfill the role of the Church as the custodian of the truth.
Conversely, other issues are not worthy of such heated debate, and yet we still find ourselves consumed in their mire, too afraid of offending or being offended. And so we pridefully, stubbornly, miserably stick to our guns at the expense of the body of Christ.
I am not arguing for ecumenalism at the expense of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and His Truth; I am instead begging for a focus on the essentials and expedient action for the sake of His kingdom on other issues.
I am arguing for a steadfast gaze on the face of our great and mighty king, and as a result our life will be radiant with the reflection of His glory.
Oswald Chambers said it best:
“Christian workers fail
because they place their desire for their own holiness
above their desire to know God”
Desire to know God, to see His face and pursue Him always, and our lives will reflect that. Follow His lead and fear not, for He will lead.
Focus not so much on what you do or who you do it to, but on Who you are doing it for.
The issue is not so much what you do as it is who you are.
My wife is a full-time high school science teacher, and I work as a substitute teacher in addition to being a seminary student and a youth pastor.
Needless to say, my wife and I have constant interaction with youth.
So let me say this: our youth and our school systems need as much prayer as you can muster.
The casual observer says there is no reason to worry; every generation of parents looks to their child’s social group with horror and disdain.
As far as parents were concerned, the roaring 20′s were wrought with rebellious teens dancing and drinking, the 60′s were full of hippies strung out on LSD, the 70′s were consumed by disco and bell-bottoms, the 80′s saw the birth of MTV, and the 90′s were defined by the grunge and post-grunge movement.
And each generation of parents simply looked at their kids and shook their heads.
Yet each time, the youth came out seemingly unscathed and well-equipped to lead the country into the future.
And so the casual observer would look at the apparent horrors of today’s youth and assume the same will happen: the qualified will mature, grow out of their adolescence, and become adept business professionals, capable of assimilating into the business world, starting a family, and providing the backbone of the country.
I, however, am not so optimistic.
There is one thing that separates today’s youth from generations in times past, and that is postmodernity.
Throughout the early and middle years of this century, modernity was still in full-swing, meaning that objective truth existed somewhere and was capable of being attained. Putting aside the notion of our Judeo-Christian worldview for a second, at the very least everybody agreed that truth existed.
There was a common underpinning of society to which everybody could agree and relate.
There was a single common denominator which leveled the playing field and everybody strove for.
However, the 80′s and 90′s began to feel the very first effects of postmodernity – relativism, plurality, extreme tolerance – and those youth grew into today’s leaders.
And so that segment of the population are now becoming parents, and while they may only mildly influence their children with the faintest hints of postmodernity, their children are seeped in it.
At school and through the media, pluralism and relativism are the war-cries of the culture today.
The baby boomers were influenced by their parents – the so-called Greatest Generation – and worked harder for the American Dream than any who had come before them. They were influenced by their parents and strove to enjoy the freedom their parents had earned. However, that influence has deteriorated over the years.
And today’s youth, rather than being influenced by the Greatest Generation, are influenced by the Tolerant Generation.
Our culture as a whole encourages and teaches the plurality of truth and the acceptance of all; not realizing that in accepting all it affirms none, cutting its own feet out from under it.
The education system, cultural trends, societal norms, moral systems…these are all institutions once desperate for truth that are now held hostage by the culturally dependent nature of truth and the fall of the mighty mettanarrative in favor of the context-driven micronarrative.
And so while there was always a failsafe to fall back on for generations preceding ours – the assumed existence of ultimate truth to guide and direct our efforts – today that does not exist.
So now what are we left with?
The words of the great Puritan Thomas Watson ring in my heart:
Truth is ancient; it’s gray hairs make it venerable; it comes form Him who is the ancient of days.
God is truth, and all truth is His.
Society is turning away from truth as further evidence of its turning its back on God.
As Oswald Chambers would say, society has itself on the throne of its heart and not God.
We need not be surprised and we need not be discouraged:
Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.
– Galatians 6:9
God is good and God is faithful, and God will provide through this season.
Affirm God and glorify His name, and truth will abound.
Seek truth honestly and humbly, and God will reveal Himself to you.
And now, O Lord God, you are God, and your words are true
– 2 Samuel 7:28
God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth
– John 4:24
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”
– John 14:6
You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.
– Jeremiah 29:13
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.
“the reason most Christian workers fail is that they place their desire for holiness above their desire to know God.”
-oswald chambers
we are a society that feeds off results. we need to see practical, pragmatic, concrete results coming from our endeavors, or we feel as though we have failed.
the Christian – unfortunately – has not escaped this trap.
we often find ourselves achieving just to say we have achieved, striving just to say we have striven for something greater than ourselves.
we desire holiness, that we may be counted among the holiest followers of our Lord; we desire to reach this plateau or serve in that way.
how often do we simply just desire to know God?
we look for quick answers and panaceas that will cure every shortcoming of man. we desire to serve God to say we serve Him. we seek to “do” for the Lord so that we will have accomplished something.
can we not simply desire to know Him, and know that we will be drawn nearer to Him, and in doing so we will be spurred onward to a life that worships and glorifies Him?
before my wife and i were married, i left her for 3 months to be a missionary in jamaica.
as i was leaving, i wanted to buy a book she could read and study through while i was gone; she had long sought to read, “having a mary heart in a martha world.”
i knew of it and knew it to be a good book, but i did not buy it, choosing instead “the holiness of God” by RC Sproul.
i desired – more than my wife’s growing in a certain aspect of her personality – that she grow in nearness to our Lord.
and that is my prayer today, that we as the church would simply grow near the Lord and know Him, and allow Him to transform us.
5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Philippians 2: 5-8
nothing is more terrifying to me, nothing as frightening as yielding my will to that of another. my strongest desire is to control my own life, to be authoritative over myself.
yet mine is to conform to Christ’s, and His conformed to the Father’s.
my thoughts turn to the garden, where Christ emptied Himself in supplication before the throne of God, and was resolved to continue on in obedience and faithfulness. pride was a foreign concept to Christ, He had none because He chose not to.
He left Glory for earth. He left Glory for us.
He was mocked and taunted, humiliated, yet He was eager to persevere.
He was eager to live in – and die – obediently and faithfully. He yielded His will to that of another.
and so for me? for us?
we are called to obedience and faithfulness. my greatest fear is yielding my will to that of another, and that is precisely the life we are called to walk as believers in the risen Son of God.
i praise God, for that which He calls us to, He does not do so without empowering us, and He does not do so without purpose. He is faithful.
