Bits and Pieces 27

Posted on October 24, 2017 by ehurst

I contacted Del City about that mystery tree, and was referred to someone at a local agricultural college extension service. The farther I have to go afield like that, the less likely anyone will take an interest in my query. That’s the way it works in this part of the world.

Has anyone else noticed? The people who work at the elite spying agencies are not actually more talented or competent than the rest of us. Even the most highly trained field operatives tend to screw things up. What has protected them so far is that the targets of their spying have been even less competent. Their aura of supremacy is fake. What makes them seem different is that they have been able to hide how mundane they really are under that veil of official secrecy. Lately, with computer crackers breaking in and leakers breaking out, even the secrecy is failing.

Most people I’ve encountered in the past had no trouble working out that I was a Christian. Quite often someone gets around to asking me about it, and the inevitable question is what brand I claim. Most of the time I am unabashed at saying I am a Christian Mystic. That doesn’t answer their question, but it serves to warn them that it’s the wrong question. Naturally, most people have some wrong ideas about that, but it gives me a chance to offer a better understanding. Evangelism is mostly portrayal of the the truth, and only a very small amount is directly talking about it.

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Glory Behind Walls

Posted on October 23, 2017 by ehurst

I hope you take the time to read Christine’s post Managing the “Ick” Factor. For me it was a good reminder and good timing.

As we descend farther into this time of tribulation, there will be a whole raft of new challenges to our faith. Your witness of God’s truth and glory will demand more from you. It’s not so radically different from the situation for the First Century churches, in the sense that God’s power and presence always comes with greater turmoil. Your relationship with Him determines whether you will be on the wrath edge of the sword or the blessing edge, but that sword will most assuredly cut (Hebrews 4:12). It’s a time of clarifying and purifying, making us more like His Son.

A critical element in that clarification is that you learn how to set and maintain boundaries. There’s an awful lot of hidden ick that’s going to come out into the open, and it tends to splash around. The whole point of digging into revelation is to shed your own ick; you surely don’t need someone else’s ick. The problem, then, is to differentiate between genuine moral ick and all the things it rides on into our lives. Ick tends to cling to people, so it’s not really the people who are the problem (Ephesians 6:12). They are the victims just like us.

Keeping sane moral boundaries is compassion and mercy for those who bear a lot of ick. It calls their attention to the ugly truth if you refuse to accept something in your life that is icky. On the one hand, we will see a lot of fresh exposure of ick that people we already know have been hiding from themselves; it’ll expose our own ick. But the turmoil of tribulation will also bring us into contact with a lot more people than usual, people that we would otherwise never encounter. That means a lot of new ick we haven’t encountered before.

For me, it’s a fresh call to remember all those lessons about professional military bearing. What for many is a false veneer they endure as part of wearing the uniform, is for me a truth about the ugly fallen world. Some measure of what the military demanded of me during my service was actually in my best interest. It belongs to me, and I belong to it. Though it seems at times like hiding my true self, it’s a simple matter of civility that not everyone has earned the privilege of getting that close me. It’s not that I can’t use the full range of God’s gifts, but that I don’t have to drop all the barriers to exercise them. Put on the full armor of God.

Some of you may recall a term I used before: cathexis. In the realm of human behavioral science, it refers to the sudden rush of emotional attachment that most people experience when falling in love. But the word does not refer to romantic attachment alone. Rather, it refers to the natural human tendency to look for any safe place to drop all of our boundaries and experience full communion. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s often poorly done. We tend to attach ourselves to a presence that is untrustworthy, and eventually get burned. You can let yourself go (cathect) with the unfallen natural world; it won’t betray your trust. Nature reflects God’s character and you can surely trust Him. But fallen humans are another matter entirely.

We are born with a longing to commune with others; that’s our divine design peeking through. Our fallen nature spoils the whole thing. But as redemption draws us farther and farther into the heart-led way, we find ourselves farther and farther from the common human society around us. It’s not that we have forgotten how they do things, but that we know we can’t go back to that. Don’t be cold; be reserved. Don’t give your pearls to swine; don’t give what is holy to dogs. Until your heart finds evidence that the people around you have begun to operate on a level above pigs and dogs, you’ll have to keep a portion of your true self out of their reach.

All of this, of course, assumes that you are doing your best to explore the true self God made in His image. As you discover more of the beauty and wonders God has planted in your own soul, recognize that they are the pearls and holy things that demand a proper guardianship. Share them in a manner and context that helps expose the glory of God to others. It will polarize the people you encounter, but all of that is just the appearance of things. Be consistent, but let that consistency be rooted in your heart. It doesn’t have to make sense to others. The people you are supposed to help will, sooner or later, be drawn to seek the truth you bear.

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A Little More about “Law”

Posted on October 22, 2017 by ehurst

In the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mind, “law” was nothing like our Western concept. It was always envisioned as a covenant. It was personal and feudal in nature. The closest term we can use is a “suzerain-vassal treaty,” and even that tends to echo in our minds as Western feudalism. In the West, it’s all about the land and privileges; the people are part of the land. In the ANE, it was always about the people, and land was somewhat fungible. A covenant betokens some form of recognition as family. When an eastern shepherd sheikh offered a covenant to bring people under his authority, it was also under his protection as kinfolk. It was a form of legal adoption.

Judaism was a departure from this; it was never Old Testament religion. It is not Moses at all, since Moses was an ANE mystic who could not have imagined the semantic wrangling of the Jews. Claims that Moses had an oral teaching separate from the written Pentateuch is a flat out lie used to justify the very obvious divergence between the Old Testament and the Talmud. And you’ll notice that Jesus didn’t waste much time with the Sadducees because they were secularists and doomed to disappear from the pages of history. Judaism is simply Talmudic Pharisaism, a huge lie that Jesus exposed.

So when you read “law” as a term in the New Testament, you have to be sensitive to the context. Sometimes it refers to the Covenant; at other times it refers to the Talmudic traditions not yet recorded in writing during the New Testament. But this week’s lesson in the Sermon on the Mount points out how the Covenant of Moses reflected reality and revelation. It was a specific instance and application of all Biblical Law in one sense, aimed at that people, that time, that place. However, it’s nature as a parable of unspeakable moral truth meant that it was applicable for the duration of the Curse of the Fall.

To be honest, if you were to embrace the Covenant of Moses, particularly as Jesus taught it, you can be sure all the promises still apply. You can still harvest the shalom of the Covenant by obeying it. However, you will also face the very harsh challenge of taking something that belongs to another world and trying to make it fit your context today. It requires a huge effort to learn the full range of ancient Hebrew culture and intellectual assumptions to extrapolate what the Law of Moses demands. Judaism is a signal failure of that, because it is documented in rabbinical traditions how the rabbis gradually departed from their own Hebrew roots and bought into Hellenism.

That business of “not under law, but under grace” comes from Romans 6:15, and it has to be kept in its own context. Paul is agonizing over the popular Talmudic notions of the Jews in his audience in Rome. In their minds the oral traditions were “the law” that no longer applied. They were free from that legalistic nonsense. Notice in that whole chapter how Paul warns that “free from the law” does not mean free to do as your lusts demand. This isn’t Gnosticism, a common place for Jews who drifted away from the Talmud.

Notice how his argument is couched in terms of feudalism. If you bow the knee to your lusts, then you will serve them. Don’t let fallen flesh, with its arrogant rational intellect, rule your existence. You can always justify any sin that tempts you. If you bow the knee to righteousness, obeying from the heart (v.17), then you will be in the family of righteousness. The whole idea is that you find yourself still agreeing with the moral definitions of Moses, even if you might have a different idea about how to implement that moral discernment.

This sounds to Western ears like fuzzy logic, but it’s actually more like organic logic. That is, it is the native moral reasoning of the heart, something that is naturally difficult to put into words, particularly English words. But this is the logic of Life itself, and is rooted in assumptions wholly different than what the Pharisees had bought into with Hellenism. Most of the Jewish Christians in Rome, a significant part of Paul’s audience in the Roman epistle, would be struggling with this ancient Hebrew mysticism stuff. All the more so, given they were in Rome, with it’s radically different cosmology and anthropology, particularly in terms of law and government.

Paul had spent three years in Arabian hermitage, a latter disciple of the risen Christ, washing away the Hellenized crap of the Pharisees. It took time to rekindle that ancient Hebrew mystical fire in his soul. We have to account for all this when we read the New Testament.

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Sermon on the Mount 3

Posted on October 21, 2017 by ehurst

The Last Measure — Matthew 5:17-20

Everything about this passage hangs on how you understand Matthew’s choice of the Greek word for “fulfill” (pleroo play-rah’-oh) in verse 17.

Once again, let’s remind ourselves that there are two primary issues behind this sermon: (1) renewing the Covenant (2) for the coming of the Messiah. Jesus flatly says that He didn’t come to “destroy” the Covenant. The Greek word here is kataluo (kat-ah-loo’-oh), meaning to allow something to disintegrate. In other words, Jesus confirms the Covenant. That’s the whole meaning of the Messiah; He fulfills all of the promises as a living fulfillment.

But what was the whole point of the Covenant? It was revelation; Israel the nation was chosen to convey Israel the message. By living according to the Covenant with their Maker and Master, Israel would convey to the world who the Creator was in terms of His provision for life in a fallen world. The codes of law gave shape to His moral character, an outline humanity could recognize. God would back their declaration by showing that Creation itself was on board with this. The Covenant granted all kinds of promises, summed up in the word shalom. But the emphasis was peace with God. Anyone with half a brain in the Ancient Near East would have recognized that it was all a parable, acting out the protocols of making Jehovah a feudal Sheikh. And He in turn would offer a covenant of adoption as family; those who entered this covenant were His own kinfolk.

There was a little of that imagery still swirling around in the minds of common Jewish people, despite at least a couple of centuries of increasing legalism among the rabbis and leaders. The Covenant was progressively rendered lifeless and dead by that legalism. So along comes Jesus claiming that He was the whole point of the Covenant. Whatever that legalism had done to vacate the Covenant, Jesus was coming onto the scene to put it all back into place. That “fulfill” meant to pack something full, to fill up what was missing to make it complete. Jesus was the final revelation of God’s Person in a human form; you couldn’t get any closer to the Creator than to get to know Jesus, His Son. Jesus was the Covenant, because He was One with the Father who gave that covenant.

Thus, in verse 18 He says that the Covenant would remain intact and applicable as it ever was, so long as our current existence remains. Not the Talmudic perversion of the Covenant, but the same eternal promise of God to make family out of anyone who bows the knee before the Creator and claims Him as feudal Lord. Jesus became that Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden. Whatever it is that God intends to do on the earth with mankind is still rooted in this covenant, but it was the Covenant as it would be with Jesus making it complete. That is, the Covenant was whatever Jesus said it was. In His own mind, Jesus knew that this meant His death on the Cross, and His resurrection. As the Letter of Hebrews explains, Jesus planned to update the terms of the Covenant with the full authority of the Maker of that Covenant.

There was one major reason for updating the Covenant: It was badly broken on the Jews’ end. In verse 19 Jesus warns that those who try to shortcut the Covenant would be cut out of the provisions and privileges of adoption into the Sheikh’s household. The “whole law” was not a matter of cataloging each nitpicking legalistic requirement, but it was the very personal commitment that any ANE sheikh would have required for adoption as his children. God’s favor was reserved for those who truly favored Him.

And lest there be any mistake, in verse 20 Jesus points out that the Scribes and Pharisees don’t get it. They were the ones teaching legalistic shortcuts. Their brand of righteousness was badly broken, a complete failure of the Covenant. It was the kind of rightness that was pure legalism, as if God never knew their hearts, but admired their smart-ass intellectual maneuvering and semantic wrangling. In their mythology, God had to admit He was bound by their acumen in twisting His words. Jesus was restoring the image of God as the ANE shepherd sheikh. This was the God of ancient mystical wisdom, who sees through the lip service and empty protocols, the God who knows hearts and measures genuine loyalty.

Jesus came to restore the Covenant to what it meant in Heaven. That His nation would reject Him and murder Him was proof they were unworthy of the Covenant. They had abrogated the terms of adoption and were about to be disowned and disinherited. He was about to offer it to the rest of humanity on a much clearer explanation of the terms.

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The Tool Shed Outside Eden

Posted on October 21, 2017 by ehurst

When we mention Biblical Law, more than just an expanded Covenant of Noah, it includes all the assumptions of the heart-led way, all of the mysticism and communion with Creation — it’s all part of the same package. You cannot obey Biblical Law without embracing the mystical heart-led approach to thinking and acting.

Thus, you cannot have any part of the various dreams of a better world and a better life in this world without that whole package. Granted, our basic understanding does include an assessment based on increments of embracing the full package: Fundamental to mysticism is that there is no rote perfection in human activity. Holiness is a desire and commitment, not a performance. We are not holding forth a harsh law of rules; God is a Person and the fundamental nature of Creation is personal commitment exemplified in ANE feudalism. This is God’s revelation of His personal character; it’s the very nature of reality itself. It’s flexible and contextual for the individual, but without that essence of truth, we should never be surprised that things are not going well in this world.

Don’t subscribe to any theories of a good life outside of that revelation. Nothing any person or group of people dream up is worth a damn if it doesn’t start from God’s revelation. All the glittering hopes of mankind are bullshit, utterly lacking in virtue of any kind. The hardest thing we do in pursuit of the heart-led way is shredding and shedding all the incubated values and moral assumptions with which we are born and raised. There may well be glimpses of glory here and there in hidden corners of various human traditions, but nobody has gotten it right for at least the past 2000 years. It’s all fundamentally wrong.

The proof is in the final result; if God allows any nation or culture to be conquered by another, it’s because those conquered were doing something fundamentally wrong. His Law has always consistently come with noteworthy miraculous protections for those who cling to Him in personal commitment. There will surely be some hassles and testing of faith, but no nation ever died, no culture was ever eclipsed or buried in the sands of history, unless the people failed some essential feudal obligation to Biblical Law. Indeed, the record of revelation indicates God is quite patient and tolerant of mistakes and misunderstandings far beyond any human measure.

So while you may well offer conditional loyalty to your nation and people and culture, without some essential commitment to the revelation of God in that thing, you know it’s doomed. You cannot allow yourself to cling to it. There are countless moral systems in this world, but none of them measure up to genuine moral truth. The definition of shalom includes far more than mere symptoms of prosperity, safety and stability. Those are just earthly manifestations; shalom is a sense of peace with God, of conforming to His divine moral character with a boundless personal desire and commitment. It always brings a sense of peace and order with Creation. To the degree that is missing from your human environment, to that degree your world is under the wrath of God.

That He still grants moments of great beauty and peace and joy that transport us beyond this world does not change this fundamental truth. The existence of such high mountains of bliss are proof in themselves that we have not yet returned to Eden, because Eden is like that at its worst. It would wear out your flesh with such overpowering sweetness that you would have to shed your mortal existence to bear it. All the best and brightest of this world, even in moral truth and holiness, are a taste of the Otherworld to come. Whatever bliss you find here is a reminder that it’s so much better without the Curse of the Fall.

Even under that curse, this world could be so much better, but it requires Biblical Law to make the most of it. It requires the whole package. It’s fine when you discern in your context that this one thing here, or that one there, reflects moral truth in your heart. Go ahead and put some energy into sponsoring those things, but do so as they reflect truth, not so as to get bogged down in the crap that comes with it. Seek from God some way to make that distinction so others can know. How you do that is inherent in your personal divine calling, but you simply cannot be silent when you see such things. Observe the measure of worldly protocols that are appropriate to your faith. Wait for those teachable moments, but never let it rest in silence that there is a long way to go.

Do not become so entangled in the context that you cannot bail out when it all starts coming apart. Nothing in this world is any more than a useful tool for His glory.

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Tree ID Study

Posted on October 20, 2017 by ehurst

Christine was intrigued by my mention of the mystery tree I found growing in Ray Trent Park. She asked a few questions, but I added a few of my own.

First it a close-up of the main trunk, to show the scaly bark pattern. It’s pretty thick for something this short, and there’s no evidence of cropping, so it’s naturally squat and grows in a random brambly pattern. The tips of new growth stems are sharp and bare, though not quite a thorn. You can reach into it without much risk, but you could get a mild scratch if you aren’t paying attention.

Here is the backside of a still green leaf, indicating the vein pattern. With the wind blowing, I had to wait a bit for a moment when it slacked enough to catch the leaf holding still. You have to keep in mind that I’m chatting with this tree the whole time. When I announced my intention, the response I got was rather like, “Oh, yipee. An adventure!” No sarcasm, but a bit impish.

I overstated the softness of the berries. Back in the spring, when they were red, I got the impression of a very hard little pebble. This orange fruit in the fall has just a tiny bit of give when squeezed. I cut open several of them. There are seeds in star-form around the center. One, maybe two, are always quite large like a pit, so the “star” is usually a little off-center. The rest are tiny dark flakes. I tasted the juice; it was mostly sweet, a little tart and no bitterness at all. My mouth offered no surprising reactions.

Aside from the taste, it reminds me just a bit of persimmons. I’ll have to check back after the first frost to see if the berries change. Meanwhile, I took one small branch off. The wood required moderate effort to cut with a sharp pocket knife. It stripped easily with just a minimum of effort using my thumbnail. The bark flakes instead of peeling off in larger sections. The wood was moderately sappy with a sweet, fruity smell. It reminded me broadly of melons; it persisted long after drying on my nails. After drying, the sap tasted faintly bitter. The picture shows the sample sitting on my bike saddle.

There is another such tree growing a few meters away, but that one is deeply entangled with some other quick-growing “weed” tree that could kill it in a few years. I can’t say which one tried to hijack the other, but I think the berry tree is likely to lose the battle. Just to be sure, I rode around a bit in the tall grass along both creeks and saw nothing like this particular tree anywhere. I know for sure I’ve not seen it elsewhere in this part of Oklahoma. That striking contrasting color scheme in the spring was quite memorable.

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Refresh: Symbols and Rituals

Posted on October 19, 2017 by ehurst

On the one hand, the symbols are just that — symbols. They are not the thing itself. The key to mysticism is that we believe our current “reality” is just one huge deception. There are glimpses of ultimate reality and truth here and there, but we use symbols from this world to point our focus on that otherworld.

Further, we have a vast corpus of ancient symbols in the Bible. They arose from a specific time, place and people. On the one hand, God built up those things from scratch as the proper setting to reveal Himself. The revelation itself comes with a context, and it’s our duty to God to learn something about that context so we can understand the revelation. There is a sense in which the packaging cannot be separated from the contents. If you don’t learn to think in Hebrew terms, you cannot understand the God who created all things, because He specifically chose that context to reveal Himself. It may not point out how God Himself thinks, but it’s how He demands we approach Him.

But we received that path of approach in order to transcend it all and commune with Him personally. The definition of Christian Mysticism is the firm conviction that we can and must commune with God directly on some level even before we leave this existence. The whole point of worship and ritual is to ascend to His throne in that fashion repeatedly until we go to be with Him eternally. The very concept of transcendence is that what we have here in this broken reality is not fully binding on us. We belong outside of this; we realize that we were not made for this. We come to a full grasp somewhere deep in our souls that what we have here and now was not what God intended.

That this drab existence is not reality means we cannot trust it much. Don’t get me wrong; Creation isn’t fallen — we are. We cannot interact with Creation honestly without some awakening. That is, we cannot take our cues from what our human existence here tells us without that awakening. Resting only in our senses and logic, we get a very badly skewed image of things. We have awakened in us a very different range of perception, a faculty far beyond sensory data and reason. That faculty sees and recognizes things our senses and reason cannot handle. So we have to unlearn the wrong perceptions and begin the process of healing our souls and learning the truth.

We discover instinctively that this ultimate reality and higher perception is also supremely personal and individual in nature. It’s alive; it’s a person in its own right. There’s a certain amount of uniformity inherent in existence itself, but it’s also intensely personal in experience. So there’s a mixture of things common and unique. There’s enough common that we can share it, but enough unique to make us realize that we are getting personal attention from our Creator.

No human has any business telling you how to mix that commonality and individuality in your life here below. And yet, we must honor the common revelation of God in His Son. We each strive to find our own individual path to the foot of the Cross, and lay our lives down at the feet of the true and living revelation made flesh. He wants a living sacrifice, so for at least a little while on this earth, we have to find ways to silence parts of us that don’t belong on the other side of eternity.

We use rituals as part of that process of silencing, and some rituals are repeated over and over because the fallen nature won’t stay dead as long as we bear this vessel of flesh. As long as we are still here, we have to renew certain elements of that connection. Inherent in our existence is a measure of moral entropy. We have to kill one part of us so the other parts can stay alive. That’s just how it is. So we engage in various physical acts that remind us to keep feeding the truth inside. Those physical acts don’t really change anything on their own, but a ritual engaged with a true heart of commitment serves to drag the fallen flesh nature along.

How much ritual do you need? Well, a certain minimum is prescribed in the Bible. We have this thing we call “communion” that involves some earthly symbols to represent the body and blood of Christ. You can look them up for yourself; start with 1 Corinthians 11:23-29. Notice that in Matthew 26, starting around verse 26, Jesus takes a portion of the ancient Seder meal and gives it a new meaning. The Seder arose from that Covenant of Moses, and a critical element in this scene is that Jesus shows the old covenant is about to end. His death on the Cross ended Moses; His resurrection gave birth to a whole New Covenant. He kept some of the old symbols to show that the old pointed to the new all along.

The old covenant was a context pointing to something universal. And we’ve already established that the universal is not also uniform; it’s that mixture of common and individual again. The question is not merely how much ritual do you need, but what kind of ritual? Obviously we have a biblical record of two rituals commanded in a rather straightforward fashion: baptism and communion. Others are hinted at, or recommended at various passages of life. With a very raucous and mixed tradition of 2000 years of Church History, you’d be rightly confused about rituals in following Christ. If you ask me, I think a whole bunch of stuff has been lost on the roadside, and all kinds of silly stuff picked up and added that don’t matter.

The origin is a shared meal with God. If you eat with someone, you have declared a peace treaty. The emphasis is on the higher authority inviting you to a peace meal to declare terms of covenant. In the case of our God, it’s also to declare terms of adoption into His family. But God has no physical form, so what we do is a ritual of all that.

Notice something here: If you live as a nomad and forager, none of our rituals fit. You can give thanks and eat “in His Presence” as it were, but the ancient rituals we have start with human existence after the birth of cultivation and domestication of food sources. In the Ancient Near East, the prime symbols of agriculture are bread and wine. By the way, the symbolism is pretty specific to yeast that’s removed, not chemical leavenings. Yet the drink is supposed to be fermented, not straight. Again, the symbolism is pretty specific on that. I suppose if you grew up in places like the American Heartland, maybe it’s more like apple cider and cornbread. Do you think it matters? Shape your rituals accordingly, but always seek a clear conscience. Don’t just try to be cute and make it a game. Take it seriously, yet don’t feel bound by someone else’s answer.

The worst thing you can do is neglect the rituals. Your heart knows what you need, but without some of that ritual repetition, you could forget who you are in serving Christ. That’s the whole point.

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Random Photos 03

Posted on October 18, 2017 by ehurst

Remember this? I shot a picture of an odd tree this last spring, intrigued by the color mix. So now I have a much more recent image; it seems to have lost it’s leaves very quickly when the overnight lows dipped below 50°F (10C). Same tree, different angle. Now the berries are dark orange and soft. There’s no discernible scent. This thing stands in Ray Trent Park, Del City, where the multi-use trail has a T intersection. I’ve not seen any other tree like it anywhere in my riding. Here’s a close-up of the remaining foliage and the berries.

For once, Cherry Creek had a little run-off water and it was trickling. The shot of the water falling over a few rocks didn’t turn out due to the way it was shaded. However, I was quite interested in how the cut-bank appeared from down near the water. It’s been quite a long time, but the creek has flooded in the past. The flow cut into the bank and left vegetation and roots hanging from above.

Today I rode out to Draper Lake, and took the longish drive down to the marina. On one side of the multi-lane boat ramp is a high concrete abutment with railings. I had the place to myself and I sat down on the deck, letting the wind sing to me through my bike beside me. This was the view from my seat. I honestly lost track of the time, but noticed there was not a trace of sweat on me anywhere by the time I felt like getting back on the bike.

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Just Because I Like It

Posted on October 17, 2017 by ehurst

There’s nothing wrong with trying it once or twice, but once you know you won’t do it, stop wasting time on something you’ve been sold as laudable.

Too many people are trapped in the mythology we stole from Greeks and Romans about having a perfect physique and long lives. You’ll notice the Bible never says much about it. On the one hand, a long life is commendable, but there’s no shame in a short life lived for the Lord’s glory. But the Bible says virtually nothing about physique. It notes in passing that some folks got it and some don’t, but only in terms of hints; it’s seldom all that important. It was considered shameful to dress so as to expose whether you had an attractive shape.

I’ve never had it. You can find photos of me on this blog with my shirt off, but my point in posing was to show it’s possible to lose some weight. It wasn’t about pursuing an ideal body. It had to do with being faithful to a calling from God to get as fit as possible. There was never any objective ideal; it was a matter of doing what was within reach. A bit of fat loss is just an indicator of obedience.

For example, I did spend a lot of time in the gym a few years ago. But eventually the arthritis caught up with me and made those three days per week impossible. You can only do what your body can tolerate. Things have happened since then. These days, it’s one hard workout per week at the park, like today. I got home with just a half-hour to get ready for yet another bike ride to see a tech support client. By the time I got home, my bad knee was complaining just a bit. It wasn’t just the riding, but riding after all the other stuff I did. And then I had to do some shopping, after which that knee simply hurt enough to make me lose interest in any kind of activity at all.

I’ll probably be ready to ride somewhere tomorrow, but I won’t ride hard or fast.

When I started taking those beta-blockers to control my heart rate, one of the side effects was doing something funny to my metabolism. On the one hand, my heavy workouts result in visible muscle growth. On the other hand, my weight went up, and it also meant adding some fat around the middle. While minor adjustments in my diet are feasible, major changes are simply unsustainable. I’ve tried revving up the metabolism by doing some exercises the moment I get out of bed, but that means I won’t be able to do quite as much later in the day. There’s only so much I can do before the joints start getting stiff. Maybe I could beat it if I tried hard enough, but it’s not worth the trouble. It cuts into some other things I consider more important.

It’s not a question of making excuses; it’s not a high priority to go beyond a certain point. I’ll do what I can to match my efforts to my convictions, but fitness is a relative thing. Go ahead and call me “fat” — I’m not sensitive about it, nor do I feel guilty. My conscience is clear enough for me to keep working on fitness at a realistic level. Physical activity is not a discipline; it’s play for me. I’m still tweaking and adjusting the wake-up workout routine to find something I can do daily without hindering anything the rest of the day. It’s reason enough that it makes me feel just a little more energetic through the day.

The goal has nothing to do with what most people around me think to be important. I’m going to make the most of what God puts within my reach. I’m still a kid at heart, delighted to experience life as it comes. I enjoyed the tedium of repetitive tasks on the client’s computer; I like working better than sitting at home. I enjoy knowing how to do the stuff I do with computers. I ride my bike because it’s fun and my body tolerates it. I like the feeling of fitness, however much of it I can get. It’s not important if anyone else admires what they see in my efforts.

This is the joy of living.

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Another Religious Word: Discipleship

Posted on October 16, 2017 by ehurst

“Make disciples of all the nations,” Jesus said (Matthew 28:19).

During my adult life, I recall when the word “discipleship” became a big thing during the late 1970s. It’s one of several competing themes in the mainstream religious market that probably came and went repeatedly. I don’t doubt the term was in use before the 1970s, but it seemed to blossom into prominence well after I felt called of God to pay attention to the business of His Kingdom. I recall the books that burst on the scene and suddenly older preachers who didn’t use the term before were now referring to it as a thing of importance.

In my experience, it took on a rather fixed and consistent meaning during that time I was at Oklahoma Baptist University. It didn’t feature in our professors’ lectures, but was a part of the background stuff we students pursued amongst ourselves. The impact of a college education is as much about those informal influences as it is about the ostensible academic program. Whatever shape the concept of discipleship took at the time has remained fairly constant since then. It has taken on the status of a sacred term, one of those religious holy words that seems to have a definition in practice that is not precisely the same as any official written definition.

The practical definition is therefore fuzzy because the official definition is seldom shared. It’s a word that comes with bulky baggage that is seldom opened. Those who use the term simply assume you already know, so a lot of people use the word in conversation without bothering to open the bags and see what’s included. Thus, the full meaning is actually reduced somewhat in practice by how people attempt to put it to work.

In essence it works out to a program of training that remaps the mental reflexes. It’s doctrinal conditioning. There is an implied caveat that the individual “disciple” will experience this program at the hands of one or a few designated leaders. When done well, it includes a conscious curriculum with milestones for progress and a lot of one-on-one attention.

Somehow, people imagine that this is what Jesus did with His disciples. It sounds good; there’s nothing sinister about it. Still, it’s not what Jesus did unless you completely fail to understand the Hebrew culture and Old Testament religion. Jesus didn’t follow a curriculum in the sense we have among evangelicals today. Rather, He operated from a heart-led sense of what those men needed most at any given time, against the background and context of what He was obliged to do whether they grasped it or not.

Jesus clearly understood that at some point after His resurrection, all those experiences would be reawakened by the Holy Spirit. Until that time came, it was necessary only that they receive the experiences in a way that left an imprint on their souls. In other words, the whole exercise presumed that heart-led way, sooner or later. The heart remembers things the mind cannot; the heart understands things for which the mind needs a lot of help. That’s the whole point behind teaching in parables in the first place (Matthew 13:10-17). Parables register on the heart independently of the intellect, for most people. But the heart is all about people; it’s intensely moral and personal, not informational. His disciples were granted access to the man behind the parables, so they had the equipment to process them, even if their conscious minds were still struggling.

The essence of revelation is a Person, not a bunch of ideas. By experiencing the Person, we all gain an insight that boils up from within. The one thing that must be communicated is the sense of conviction; only personal communion with Christ can awaken that. This explains the Day of Pentecost — the Spirit of Christ was granted so that discipleship was built into their souls. It’s not just three years or so, but everyone can have a lifetime with Christ. They can still miss the point, as 2000 years of Church History well attests, but the potential is there. That our modern day version of discipleship succeeds at all is because of the personal element, not the curriculum. People will witness the power of conviction; it’s an experience that touches the heart, never mind whether the intellect catches on.

Perhaps now you realize that there is no significant difference between evangelism and discipleship beyond the academic boundaries we describe. Once it starts to work, it’s better to recognize that the boundaries between the two are provisional, a way of getting from here to there. Evangelism is not about conversion, but leaving an imprint on the soul. Discipleship is that same process, but it presumes an acceptance in the disciple that is apparently missing in the one you evangelize. Since it’s all the work of God in the first place, we remain faithful and trust Him that our consistency in moral compassion and mercy is success in itself.

So we make disciples of everyone in our world by walking according to Biblical Law — “teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you,” Jesus said (Matthew 28:20).

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