Tag: knowledge

It’s About Love (1 Corinthians 8:1-13)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment

Now concerning meat that has been sacrificed to a false god: We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes people arrogant, but love builds people up. If anyone thinks they know something, they don’t yet know as much as they should know. But if someone loves God, then they are known by God.

So concerning the actual food involved in these sacrifices to false gods, we know that a false god isn’t anything in this world, and that there is no God except for the one God. Granted, there are so-called “gods,” in heaven and on the earth, as there are many gods and many lords. However, for us believers,

There is one God the Father.
        All things come from him, and we belong to him.
And there is one Lord Jesus Christ.
        All things exist through him, and we live through him.

But not everybody knows this. Some are eating this food as though it really is food sacrificed to a real idol, because they were used to idol worship until now. Their conscience is weak because it has been damaged. Food won’t bring us close to God. We’re not missing out if we don’t eat, and we don’t have any advantage if we do eat.But watch out or else this freedom of yours might be a problem for those who are weak. 

Suppose someone sees you (the person who has knowledge) eating in an idol’s temple. Won’t the person with a weak conscience be encouraged to eat the meat sacrificed to false gods? The weak brother or sister for whom Christ died is destroyed by your knowledge. You sin against Christ if you sin against your brothers and sisters and hurt their weak consciences this way. This is why, if food causes the downfall of my brother or sister, I won’t eat meat ever again, or else I may cause my brother or sister to fall. (Common English Bible)

Consider an issue you care about… 

Likely, one of the big reasons you care is that you either see some abuse, neglect, inattention, or lack of love applied toward someone or a group of people. So, you want to see it be different. 

Now, here comes the interesting part: We are motivated by love, but we often end up addressing the problem or issue in the realm of thought and/or belief. We may rely on the political, theoretical, and intellectual to solve the problem.

Our hearts might be open and attuned, and yet we may turn to knowledge and rules to achieve the change we deeply desire.

The Apostle Paul knew that we are primarily lovers – not thinkers or believers. Thinkers and believers traffic in knowledge and belief systems. Although these are important, they are not the primary or ultimate ends for the Apostle. 

Instead of leading with the head, Paul led with the heart. He tackled the divisive issue in the Corinthian Church about whether one can eat food sourced from a pagan temple and originally sacrificed to idols by saying:

“Knowledge makes us proud of ourselves, while love makes us helpful to others.”

Paul began with love and ended with love. The issue of particular kinds of food was neither an intellectual nor a faith issue – it was a love issue. 

Paul’s answer to the problem dividing the Christian believers on food was that food is a secondary issue. Rather, to look at the food issue through the lenses of love, makes it clear what you ought to, or ought not to do. In coming at the issue from this angle, it doesn’t make our thinking and our believing somehow irrelevant; it just places it in its proper place, and supports love.

Whenever our opinions and thoughts, and our faith and beliefs are handled without love, then special interest groups begin to form. A division occurs based upon what we think and believe about certain things. But when love is supreme, knowledge is no longer the tail wagging the dog.

Love is meant to enlighten us. Love illumines not only to the problems among us, but love is also the answer to those issues we care about most. And if we will keep this in both our minds and in our hearts, then we have both added to our knowledge so that we can encourage and build-up others, without discouraging others and tearing them down. 

It really is all about love.

Love rejoices in the truth,
    but not in evil.
Love is always supportive,
loyal, hopeful,
    and trusting.
Love never fails! (1 Corinthians 13:6-8a, CEV)

Loving God, you demonstrated your own love for us through sending us your Son, the Lord Jesus, who is the perfect embodiment of love. May Christ be so manifested within me that love becomes not only the motivator to change, but also the answer to change; through the power and help of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Don’t Be a Fool (Proverbs 1:20-33)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment

Wisdom shouts in the street;
    in the public square she raises her voice.
Above the noisy crowd, she calls out.
    At the entrances of the city gates, she has her say:
“How long will you clueless people love your naïveté,
    mockers hold their mocking dear,
    and fools hate knowledge?
You should respond when I correct you.
    Look, I’ll pour out my spirit on you.
    I’ll reveal my words to you.
I invited you, but you rejected me;
    I stretched out my hand to you,
    but you paid no attention.
You ignored all my advice,
    and you didn’t want me to correct you.
So I’ll laugh at your disaster;
    I’ll make fun of you when dread comes over you,
        when terror hits you like a hurricane,
        and your disaster comes in like a tornado,
        when distress and oppression overcome you.
Then they will call me, but I won’t answer;
    they will seek me, but won’t find me
        because they hated knowledge
        and didn’t choose the fear of the Lord.
They didn’t want my advice;
    they rejected all my corrections.
They will eat from the fruit of their way,
    and they’ll be full of their own schemes.
The immature will die because they turn away;
    smugness will destroy fools.
Those who obey me will dwell securely,
    untroubled by the dread of harm.” (Common English Bible)

I don’t know about you, but I find that the older I get, the more I realize I don’t know.

What I’m trying to say is that, as I move along in this life, I am discovering more and more how much I need wisdom.

Wisdom is more than being smart, intelligent, or even having some common sense; it is to gain a basic foundation of sound knowledge and instruction, and then having the ability to put that knowledge into practice, applying it to the specific concrete situations we face daily.

In other words, to be wise is to make decisions, engage in actions, and speak words that are appropriate to a given circumstance.

Conversely, stupidity has less to do with one’s intelligence quotient (IQ), lack of education (degrees), or ability to speak well (erudition). To be stupid means that a person is too stubborn to accept help, take advice, or learn from their mistakes.

The Foolish Person

Instead, a stupid fool relies on their own short-sighted opinions, looks for easy ways out of trouble, and generally expects others to think and act the way they do. And that approach to life can literally get you killed. I can testify to that as a hospital chaplain who has been around a lot of death.

The telltale signs of a foolish person are:

  • Refusing to change, even if it means having a better life, or even to keep living
  • Ignoring the advice, correction, or rebuke of another person
  • Being cynical and sarcastic most of the time
  • Mocking and talking down to others
  • Disliking books and reading; or just generally not wanting to learn or consider new ideas
  • Freaking-out when any little thing doesn’t go their way

A person characterized by those things will face disaster, likely sooner than later. That will happen, not so much because they tend to get into trouble, but because they do not have a solid spiritual, emotional, and mental foundation of internal support to draw from. So, when disaster hits them, they fall over and crumble, like a house with its foundation built on sand.

Fools won’t find God in the mix of their hardship since they did not look to the Lord to begin with. And even in the midst of their adversity, the fool would rather blame God than seek God’s help. Indeed, stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

The Wise Person

The wise person, however, is careful to set aside time so that they can learn about God and God’s Word. They seek to know God’s commands in order to live honestly, ethically, responsibly, and justly.

Wisdom has taught them humility, obedience, and acceptance. When the storms of life hit the wise, they are safe and secure in a house built on the rock; the wind and waves shall not blow them over.

People who have sought wisdom can remain calm in the midst of trouble; rely on their acquired experiential knowledge in hard situations; and have faith that doing what is right and just is its own reward.

Wisdom is still calling out, just as she did all those centuries ago to the ancients. Amidst all the noise, bustle, and confusion of our contemporary society, you can hear the clarion voice of Lady Wisdom above the fray – that is, if you are bending your ear to listen…

Almighty God, the Creator and Author of my life, help me learn to read what you have written on my heart. Give me discerning eyes, a steadfast spirit, and courage of heart to look within me in order to understand how to reach outside of me. And once I have begun to read you aright, give me the generosity to help others to read you, to sound you out one letter, and one word of radical giving at a time. Amen.

Known by God (Psalm 139:13-18)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year ALeave a comment

You are the one
who put me together
    inside my mother’s body,
and I praise you because of
the wonderful way
    you created me.
Everything you do is marvelous!
    Of this I have no doubt.

Nothing about me
    is hidden from you!
I was secretly woven together
    out of human sight,
but with your own eyes you saw
    my body being formed.
Even before I was born,
you had written in your book
    everything about me.

Your thoughts are far beyond
    my understanding,
much more than I
    could ever imagine.
I try to count your thoughts,
but they outnumber the grains
    of sand on the beach.
And when I awake,
    I will find you nearby. (Contemporary English Version)

We don’t really know God, as much as we are known by God.

And God knows us intimately, down to each individual chromosome in our DNA strand.

For me, the incredible thing about this very detailed knowledge about each one of us is that God still wants to discover even more about us, as well as to be known by us.

Yes, the cosmic Ruler of the universe wants to share in a relationship with you and me – to be known and to know – and delights in the whole process of perceiving us.

Perhaps this is why my highest aspiration in life is to know Christ better. This has been true of me throughout the entirety of my Christian life across the decades. Which is why one of my favorite places in the Bible (which, by the way, is God’s self-revealing knowledge of the divine nature) is from a fellow believer who aims for the same thing:

“Nothing is as wonderful as knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have given up everything else and count it all as garbage. All I want is Christ and to know that I belong to him…. All I want is to know Christ and the power that raised him to life. I want to suffer and die as he did, so that somehow I also may be raised to life.” (Philippians 3:8-11, CEV)

This sort of knowing is much more than intellectual understanding or cerebral information; it’s an experiential knowledge that requires the dialogue and interaction of a lived relationship with another. Love is the glue which bonds this kind of reciprocal knowing of two persons. Sheer learning, without love – which fuels relational discovery – is counterproductive.

“All of us know something…. But knowledge makes us proud of ourselves, while love makes us helpful to others. In fact, people who think they know so much don’t know anything at all. But God has no doubts about who loves him.” (1 Corinthians 8:1-3, CEV)

What we know about ourselves is weird and conflicting. Many of us know we are good persons doing good work in the world. And yet, we also know many of the dark places in our hearts, and this knowledge is a source of shame to us.

This was also true of the psalmist. He knew that he was a bundle of contradictions within a single person. However, he was willing to be vulnerable before God, knowing that the Lord sees him completely for who he is – including all of those shadowy places within.

Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Pucallpa, Peru

In fact, God does some of the best divine work in the dark. A masterful weaving of your body and soul was done in the deepest part of your mother’s physical self. Life truly is a hand crafted one-of-a-kind gift, given to us by God.

There are, of course, parts of us we really like – and parts of us we don’t like and maybe even despise – which may cause us to question the goodness and/or care of God by the way we were formed. It’s easy to fixate on what’s wrong, as if we have the right to a particular body. Yet, none of us are owed anything from the Creator.

But, my friend, I ask, “Who do you think you are to question God? Does the clay have the right to ask the potter why he shaped it the way he did? Doesn’t a potter have the right to make a fancy bowl and a plain bowl out of the same lump of clay?” (Romans 9:20-21, CEV)

Today’s psalm suggests to us that each individual human person, you and me, are God’s best work of art. There is no beauty quite like that designed and made by God. Beauty takes our breath away and elicits awe and wonder from us. We are made in the image and likeness of a beautiful God – so beautiful that if we were to actually see God, the sheer beauty would undo us.

God even treasures us at our worst. Although spiritual growth and development is a lifetime project, we don’t engage in it in order for God to take notice and accept us. It isn’t a self-improvement plan. Rather, our spiritual growth is to help us be in a position to know Christ better – just as flower opens to the sun for energy. God delights in spiritually forming us, as well as the creative process in physically making us.

The Lord’s thoughts of us are continual. God is immanently near and close to us. And this is the bedrock foundation of our faith – that we are known by a good God who cares about every hair on our head, or in my case, every molecule of my being.

The psalmist’s God is a God worth getting to know. This is a God who is with us when we fall asleep at night, and who is there when we awake, having kept watch over us throughout the dark after-hours. “I am awake. I’m still with you!” says the Lord as we are greeted for each new day.

So, may you truly know this God who knows you deeply and intimately.

May you come to know and love yourself, just as you are known and loved by God.

And may the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the abiding encouragement of the Holy Spirit be with you, now and forever. Amen.

Do You Really Know? Probably Not (Job 38:22-38)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year ALeave a comment
God Answers Job Out of the Whirlwind, by William Blake, 1826

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
    or seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I reserve for times of trouble,
    for days of war and battle?
What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
    or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
    and a path for the thunderstorm,
to water a land where no one lives,
    an uninhabited desert,
to satisfy a desolate wasteland
    and make it sprout with grass?
Does the rain have a father?
    Who fathers the drops of dew?
From whose womb comes the ice?
    Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
    when the surface of the deep is frozen?

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?
    Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons
    or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
Do you know the laws of the heavens?
    Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?

“Can you raise your voice to the clouds
    and cover yourself with a flood of water?
Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
    Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
Who gives the ibis wisdom
    or gives the rooster understanding?
Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
    Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
when the dust becomes hard
    and the clods of earth stick together? (New International Version)

The older I get, and the more understanding I gain, the more I realize how little knowledge I truly possess.

When I was eighteen years old, I thought I had the world pretty much figured out. Since then, it’s all been downhill. With each passing year, my ignorance seems to grow. I suppose this all really makes some sense when talking about God’s upside-down kingdom.

There’s so much of life that is a mystery; and as we accumulate our life experiences, it seems all, not just some, of life is a mystical encounter. In other words, the more discernment I gain, I discover I know a lot less than I thought I did.

God Answers Job from the Whirlwind, by William Blake, c.1804

It seems as if the biblical character of Job found this out the hard way. If there is any person in Holy Scripture that would be wise and understanding, its him. God speaks highly of Job in the Bible.

Regarding the upcoming destruction of Jerusalem, God said, “even if these three men—Noah, Daniel and Job—were in it, they could save only themselves by their righteousness, declares the Sovereign Lord.” (Ezekiel 14:14)

Job is held up as the model of patience under suffering: “As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.” (James 5:11)

Yet, with all of Job’s integrity, patience, and righteousness, his understanding barely moves the Richter Scale of God’s expansive knowledge.

We might be somewhat familiar with the story of Job. Being a conscientious follower of God, Job is careful to live uprightly. He acknowledges God in all things and worships him alone. Yet, suffering befell him – for no other reason than that God allowed it. Job knew fully well that there was no personal sin behind his awful ordeal of grief and grinding pain.

So, Job contended with God. For an agonizing thirty-five chapters (Job 3:1-37:24) Job questions God and respectfully takes him to task – as Job’s supposed friends questioned him and assume his guilt. Through it all God is there… silent… saying nothing.

The Desperation of Job, by William Blake, 1821

Then, just when we think God is paying no attention whatsoever, the Lord suddenly speaks.

And what is so remarkable about God’s speech is that for four chapters (Job 38:1-41:34) the Lord gives no answers. It’s all rhetorical questions. God said, “Brace yourself like a man; I will question you and you shall answer me.” (Job 38:3)

It becomes abundantly clear after just a few questions that it would be impossible for any human being to even come close to having the understanding God has. And that was the whole point.

God is God, and we are not. Our questions, however legitimate, real, and raw they are, come from a very puny perspective. Turns out, we just don’t know as much as we think we do.

To Job’s credit, he keeps his mouth shut and listens. At the end of the questioning, Job responds in the only wise way one could, after such an encounter: “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” (Job 42:3)

None of this means that, for us, we need to face our hardships and our sufferings with a stoic keep-a-stiff-upper-lip approach. Trapped grief will inevitably come out sideways and only cause more hurt. I believe God allowed Job to express his terrible physical, emotional, and spiritual pain for chapter after chapter because he needed to.

Only when God sensed it was the proper timing did he jump in and bring the perspective Job then needed. And even after being challenged by God about his vantage point, Job still did not receive answers as to why he had to endure the awfulness of loss beyond what most of us could comprehend.

Maybe we lack being able to understand, even if God directly answered all our questions. Most likely, God protects us from knowing things that might bring irreparable damage to our human psyches. Again, this is all pure conjecture. Which leaves us with perhaps one of our greatest challenges as human beings:

We must eventually come to the place of being comfortable with mystery – and even embracing it. We simply will not have all things revealed to us that we want to know. And that’s okay.

There is yet one more comment to observe about God’s questioning of Job: God is sarcastic. Sarcasm often gets a bad rap, much like anger does, because it is so often associated with unacknowledged emotions and/or expressing our feelings in an unhelpful way.

Yet, there the sarcasm is, with the God of the universe. I take some odd comfort in knowing that God can be snarky at times – in a good way.

Anytime we try to pin God down to some tidy understandable categories, the Lord typically colors outside our human contrived lines and demonstrates to us that the divine cannot be contained in our ramshackle box.

I like it that God is playful, wild, and free to be God – even if there are times it may bug me.

God is unbound by any human knowledge, understanding, ideas, or plans. God will do what God will do. God will be who God will be. “I AM who I AM.” Now that’s a God I can put my trust in.

O Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon me.

O Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon me.

O Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, grant me your peace. Amen.