Nobody says having a goal in mind is somehow evil. What’s evil is the underlying mental frame of reference that makes accomplishment the measure of your worth.
When you boil down Scripture to the essence, you discover God says holiness is measured by desire. God Himself, Creator of the Universe and all things, says He’s not interested in what people can measure through their various talents. What gets His attention is when you surrender to the fire of passion for Him. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” translates into our culture as a desire for whatever God says is good. That’s more than mere religion; that’s the ultimate measure of what humans can have. There’s nothing in that about what you can be or do, but what you can have.
Our Western world is obsessed with accomplishment. We want the value of all things placed inside the categories that we can control. We have an inborn desire to be our own gods. We want to decide what counts as virtue, to declare what is good and bad. It goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden and the forbidden fruit; “The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” is not a good translation. It should be more like “The Tree of Deciding What Is Good or Evil.” It implies arrogating God’s position and rejecting His revelation in favor of whatever our human capabilities can discern without revelation. The Fall was fundamentally man’s choice to assert his reason and feelings over what God said.
The point is not that you can’t build a structure against which you measure the events of life, but that you dare not build one without God’s input. The basic human tendency is to mark things like thrift as a virtue instead of trusting revelation in the moment to help you decide when you can’t afford not to throw it all away. Revelation starts with the record compiled by God’s people, but God Himself says it doesn’t end there. Revelation goes on and on through the moments of every day you are here in this world.
The problem is that I can get folks to pay lip service to all of that, and then watch them invest every bit of life into something God bluntly says is pointless. We build monuments to human achievement, not to remember and reflect on our mortality, but as a fist raised in the face of God. Where and when did God say we needed to own real estate and vast comfortable facilities in His name? Who said it was necessary to focus so much attention on just a tiny handful of virtuoso religious experts? Where is it written that a carefully structured budget is a valid reflection of Christ on the Cross? I will tell of most assuredly all of those things are sin in that they replace what God said and what His people first began to do after watching Jesus rise into the clouds.
That business of “renewing your mind” doesn’t mean getting a degree at some certified institution. It means learning to think so differently that the world cannot grapple with it at all. Nothing is ever settled in terms of what we can understand in our minds. If you can call it “efficient” and/or “effective,” it’s already taking the wrong path.
We have a convention in our literature called “Utopia” — literally “No Place.” We understand it as both a dreamy hope for what can be, while at the same time something that cannot be. Is it possible to take the revelation of God, even when we read it with good Hebrew intellectual assumptions, and implement a society what pleases Him? No. That’s a critical point of the Old Testament: Under the most ideal conditions, with God Himself writing the script and everything just about as perfect as it ever could be in this world, a human society could not keep it working for more than a few years at a time. Even with God’s constant miraculous intervention, it couldn’t work. It had nothing to do with God’s capability and wisdom; it had everything to do with our fallen state.
Every time I see or hear something that oozes with “if only we could” I get sick. As long as something like that passes through your mind, you cannot pretend to follow God’s agenda. His agenda has nothing to do with anything any human might consider an agenda. His agenda is a vivid, moment-by-moment clinging to Him without the pretense that you could write up a set of principles. God did had them written and people still ignore major elements of what He said, so stop pretending you can do it better. To the degree it can be stated in human language, it begins with recognizing that, starting at that Resurrection Morning 2000 years ago, we resign all efforts to build a human society that we can pretend is good.
It’s just barely possible to create a tiny enclave out of society that comes close, but that requires such a radical shift in thinking, down to the most basic assumptions about reality itself, that you would rightly despair of seeing it in your lifetime. It’s not bad enough that we live by the wrong epistemology, but the whole world does. The moment you start to build a genuine church, it will be crushed as illegal in a dozen different ways on the first day. Not that you shouldn’t learn about it, but that you should learn about it only so you understand that it can’t happen. Even while the Apostles were still around to make sure things were aimed in the right direction, it was a constant battle that eventually failed.
It cannot be done. God doesn’t want it done. We serve a false god if we think He does want things a certain way. What He wants is people who depend on Him in full assurance it won’t go right and that it won’t matter.
Go ahead and try, but don’t invest yourself in results. Read that again. You are supposed to try, to spend your whole life pressing ahead as if it could be, even while you realize in your mind that it won’t happen. From time to time, God will bless things and you’ll experience moments of His power manifesting before your eyes, but don’t try to capture it and camp on it. That’s not why He grants those moments. Once you’ve seen it and internalized it, you will be held accountable for the lesson, not keeping that moment alive. God does that to change us, not to change the world in which we live. It’s a taste of Heaven, not a recipe for a steady diet here below.
There have been in my life thus far great moments when the power of the Spirit poured out among various groups of people to which I belonged. Were I to seek remaking those moments, I would be fighting God. Were I to study them with all the tools of human education at my disposal and attempt to extract the essence of what made it good, it’s possible I’ll find something useful, in that I can learn to guard against folly. But there cannot be a pattern for provoking bliss in a future opportunity. Bliss comes as a gift from God, not as a result of some repeatable structure. There is no magic formula that can be made to work again down the road. The best you can do is teach yourself not to make the same mistakes you did when things did not bless you.
Stop taking it seriously if something you do takes off. Just because people and resources are attracted to something in which you are involved, even if you are the center of attention, that is not a sign of God’s favor on the activity. Don’t let it own you. That bullshit about negativity and self-fulfilling failure does not apply here. The point is not about some magical negative or positive energy, but about where you invest your loyalty. God works in and through all sorts of human activities, but none of them are God. Don’t treat any lesser thing as your god.
All that noise about living your dreams is a Satanic misdirection. Don’t let it own you. Take what God brings your way and let Him give you the fire to push it as far as you can, but don’t ever think it is about accomplishment. It’s about the joy of experiencing Him in the moment. It’s a false dichotomy presented by our secular world that you either have to save for a rainy day or live like an animal. In modern Western secular philosophy there is nothing above the intellect, so whatever isn’t rational must be emotional and animal. Faith in a higher power can’t be anything more than mere sentiment. The establishment does not recognize that intuition or a move of the Spirit is superior to reason. Even when society recognizes aspirations beyond the pedestrian level, they try to enslave it to mere inspiration to achieve more.
Stop trying to achieve. Pretend if you must for the sake of those who seem to be spiritually dead, but never give your heart to that folly. Rather, cultivate a sense of moral imperative and mission, and live in the moment that can also point you to thrift, but the same moment might well demand you sacrifice it all for no measurable result. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but God.
We do things because they are righteous and just in that moment, not based on expected results. Embracing God’s Justice is its own reward.
