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Bricks Without Straw

Bricks Without Straw – Part 4

BricksandStraw

The following is Part 4 of the article: “Bricks Without Straw“:

While the ideas for this article were being put together, my wife Julie mentioned that she thinks that people often avoid silence voluntarily because they are afraid of the sense of emptiness they will find during those times of silence. I agree. Noise and busyness are two things that can take our minds off God.

In contrast, Christian saints have cherished their times of silence and solitude. Thomas A Kempis taught his monks to find the joy of the Lord while alone and quiet in their cells. In his 15th Century work “Imitation of Christ“, he instructs us in his chapter on silence and solitude:

Remain with him in your cell for you will not find so great a peace anywhere else.

In Thomas’ time, the word “cell” did not have the meaning it does in our culture. In the 15th century , the word “cell” did not describe a place of confinement. Rather, it was a small room that served as a monk’s quarters. It took its name from the Latin word coelum, which means “heaven.” Those times of quiet and aloneness with God are not a time of confinement but rather a sampling of heaven and interacting with Our Lord Jesus who sits, at this moment, in Heaven at the right hand of His Father (Luke 22:69).

Discouragement is another way that we try to make “bricks without straw”. It will often cause us to channel our time and energies into self-pity. It can produce an inner numbness of the spirit. It deflects us away from focusing on doing the will of the Lord. The Bible offers an example of what can happen when discouragement sets in.

In the fourth chapter of the book of Ezra, we read about how the Israelites came back from exile in Babylon. They soon began to re-build the Temple. When political pressure mounted against them, the construction was forcibly stopped. The people became discouraged. The re-­building of the Temple was not resumed for twenty years. The Israelites had inverted what Christ would teach centuries later:

Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these other things shall be added onto you.(Matthew 6:33)

They sought first “all these other things.” As a result, the other things failed. Keep in mind that money, food and houses are not evil. But it is evil to pursue them as a first priority.

Haggai reminded the Israelites that they needed to place God’s priorities first in their lives (See Haggai 1). What happened to those Israelites after their return from exile is a danger that we face as well. In our discouragement, we tend to take our minds away from the priority of Christ. Those other things that usurp God’s first priority in our lives will ultimately fail to satisfy us.

End of Part 4

Links to the previous entries for this article

Part 1 ; Part 2; Part 3;

Bricks Without Straw

Bricks Without Straw – Part 3

brickThe following is Part 3 of the article Bricks Without Straw

SELECTIVITY

At the start of my walk with Christ, I was blessed to study Scripture with a wonderful Bible study leader named Celeste. She taught me that the choice for a Christian is not between good and evil, since that choice is already settled. Rather, the choice is between what is good and what is best. This requires being selective and living life prayerfully with a sense of discernment. The times in which we live continue to force Christians to make a choice between the good and the best. We live in a world with so many choices that we are tempted to not choose but to try to have and do it all.

While our choices of things in the Lord are increasing, such as Bible translations, books, audio and videos, the amount of hours per day allotted to us hasn’t increased. Consider how Christian literature from over twenty centuries of church history is becoming more available to the average believer. Protestants are becoming familiar with the writings of Teresa of Avila. Catholics are learning to appreciate the insights of Jonathan Edwards. Western Christians are being introduced to the works of Eastern Orthodox theologians such as Gregory of Nazianzus, Simeon the New Theologian and Bishop Kallistos Ware. Many classic Christian writings are now on the Internet or available on downloadable media.

Some simple math will show that our culture’s attitude of trying to have it all falls far short of reality, especially if Christians believe that and try to apply it to the area of devotional reading on these digital sources. The equivalent of a church library can now be stored as text on a single DVD as well as older media such as compact discs, or on more modern storage devices such as memory sticks or even large scale devices (relatively small and affordable) such as a terabyte drive (1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes [or characters] of information). To give you some sense of scale, a Bible with a fair amount of commentary and notes takes up about 5 megabytes (5 million characters) of information. If you put the equivalent of what a 1 terabyte drive holds into books the size of a pocket-sized version of the Bible and put those books, one next to each other, you would need one shelf just under 4 miles long to hold them.

Consider a scenario in which you purposely limited your Christian devotional reading to using a reader tied to a terabyte drive (a storage device unimaginable for everyday use only as far back as 2002 but commonly available today). This terabyte drive is filled to its maximum capacity with books, articles, etc. If your desire is to eventually read through every last piece of text on that drive, you will run into a problem, namely, with available time. If you devoted one hour to such a daily reading, it would take you a little over 39,452 years to get through everything on the terabyte drive. If you started at age 10 and read for one hour every day, for the next 80 years, you would get through only 0.2% of the readings available to you. Restricting yourself to a much smaller device such as an iPhone wouldn’t help. With the available space on an 8GB iPhone, your one hour daily readings would take 236 and a half years. Examples like these show us that with today’s choices, trying to have it all cannot happen. There is simply not enough time. You have to be selective and make a choice. Keeping this in mind allows us the freedom to know, ahead of time, that we must be selective and do so in the light of God’s priorities for our lives.

The same holds true for other aspects of our Christian walk. We can, in essence, be making bricks without straw, in areas that do not involve an oppressive schedule forced upon us by our jobs or through other life circumstances outside of our control. Strangely enough, we can engage in a self-imposed oppression. For example, we live in a culture that thrives on noise and activity. These conditions are not ideal for taking time to reflect on God and your life in Him. Yet, how often, when we are by ourselves, do we needlessly destroy the silence by turning on a television or an audio player?

End of Part 3

Links to the previous entries for this article

Part 1 ; Part 2

Bricks Without Straw

Bricks Without Straw – Part 2

adobeThe following is Part 2 of “Bricks Without Straw.”

We live in an era in which more and more time is demanded of us. According to a December 2013 Gallup Poll, 11% of Americans got less than 7 hours per night in 1942. That percentage increased to 40% in 2013. Concerning our amount of time at work, the Center for American Progress states:

The typical American middle-income family put in an average of 11 more hours a week in 2006 than it did in 1979.

With only a fixed 168 hours per week for all of us, this comes at a cost. It comes at the cost of less time for family, church, community service, friends and leisure activities. Even our children face time demands unknown a generation ago. In a 2002 article for Newsweek, entitled Doing Nothing Is Something, Anna Quindlen, wrote on the need of kids to have more “downtime”. She wrote:

Soccer leagues, acting classes, tutors – the calendar of the average middle-class kid is so over the top that soon Palm handhelds will be sold in Toys ‘R’ Us. Our children are as overscheduled as we are, and that is saying something.

That was written in 2002. How much more so today?

Whether part of a purposeful strategy by the Evil One or the result of life circumstances which legitimately require our increased time and attention, how do we keep our minds on Christ, when it seems that we are being forced to make “bricks without straw?”

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

I have found comfort in the fact that God does indeed control all things. His Spirit blows through the sails of the ship of human history while His hand is firmly on the rudder. His purposes will eventually be accomplished (Proverbs 19:21; Isaiah 46:10). Yet, God’s control is not just on the large-scale level of national and global events. He knows us individually and knows us well and at a level of detail which we cannot know ourselves. The Psalmist instructs us as he prays to God:

O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.  (Psalm 139:1-4 ESV)

Such a God is no stranger to our needs and circumstances. In Acts 17:25-26, Paul tells us that God created us and put us where and when we are for the very purpose of our finding God:

From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

In the stress-filled times in our lives, there is a tendency to look to another time or place as where we would find comfort and contentment. David, during his years of being chased through the land of Israel like a criminal, wrote:

Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest- I would flee far away and stay in the desert; I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and storm. (Psalm 55:6-8)

With King Saul and his army pursuing him, Israel’s future king wanted to be anywhere other than where he was. I think we’ve all had that feeling at some time. Being a history buff who has seen his share of 18th and 19th century American buildings, I used to think that life must have been much simpler (and thus better) in those times.

Yet, the Bible tells us that the best time and place for us to live for God’s glory is where He has put us and in the time He has placed us. (As in, right here, right now). God knows that for me, for the person that I am and He wants me to be, I need to be alive now in early 21st century America and not in the America of the 18th century or any other time and place. That holds true for all of us. Where and when we live in the scheme of human history is not an accident. The Lord knows us and the events that make up our lives. The hospitalizing of Julie and then my Mom did not take Him by surprise. Yet, according to Him, it is in the midst of life circumstances such as these that God tells us, amazingly, that we can best reach Him.

End of Part Two

Part 1 of this article can be found here.

Bricks Without Straw

Bricks Without Straw – Part 1

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Brick RowsFor this entry and the next several posts, I will be serializing an article that I wrote in 2002 about guarding our time with God in a time-pressured world. While I updated a few of the references (mainly due to the change of technology between 2002 and now), the essence remains the same.

Bricks Without Straw – Part 1

New Year’s Day of 2002 was going to mark a new beginning for me. In the last days of 2001, I assembled what I thought was a workable plan for taking my personal ministry in the direction of writing. Having graduated from seminary with a degree in Christian theology, I was looking for further avenues to use the information and insights of students and teachers gained during those years of study. I had planned to write and submit several articles as well as a book review for publication.

Life was already rather busy at the start of the year with work, family events and preparing for teaching both adult Sunday school and Wednesday night classes for the 4th & 5th graders at our church. With great zeal and an eye toward being practical, I scheduled specific times on Monday and Thursday nights to research and write the articles. For the first two months, the planned sessions of writing and study were working out well.

In March, however, my usually busy life would get even busier. My wife Julie was diagnosed with a large blood clot in her right leg. She was hospitalized for a week to reduce and stabilize this clot to prevent part of it from breaking off and causing a possibly fatal stroke or heart attack. By God’s grace, we caught it in time. For a week, I was visiting Julie in the hospital, going to work and being a temporary single parent to our two sons (with lots of help from family and friends). Through much of March, I continued to do a lot of “double-duty” as Julie was continuing her recovery. In April, my Mom was hospitalized for nine days with pneumonia and congestive heart failure. After a week at home, she spent five weeks at physical rehabilitation to rebuild her strength.

With my attention being split into several different areas and each requiring more time than usual, I was feeling spiritually stressed as there was less time (or so I thought) for prayer, Bible reading and study. My writing plans were shelved for several months. It was during this time that I read a passage in Exodus that really spoke to my situation. The passage is in the context of Moses’ return to Egypt. He was bringing a message from God to His people. It was a message of liberation and hope for the long-enslaved and oppressed Israelites. The knowledge that the God of their forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew of their plight and was acting on their behalf must have been a great encouragement.

However, the Egyptian Pharaoh wanted no part of this. The building projects that were being done through the slave labor of the sons of Israel were considered to be of paramount importance to the Pharaoh. Despite an existing daily quota for the production of bricks to be used in the building projects, the Pharaoh issued a strange and seemingly self-defeating edict:

“You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don’t reduce the quota. (Exodus 5:7-8)

Implementing this edict could seriously delay the projects. Yet, it was issued with a specific purpose:

[The Israelites] are lazy; that is why they are crying out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.” (Exodus 5:8-9)

Pharaoh wanted more than their slave labor. He demanded their time and attention. He wanted his work to dominate their time and thoughts. In his ungodly thinking, he thought that God and His words were nothing but a lie. The Pharaoh’s strategy was to keep the minds of the Israelites off God and His words by forcing the Israelites to devote more time each day to their work. Forcing people to use more of their fixed allotment of time and making their daily toil more mentally and physically burdensome was the strategy of an evil Pharaoh so many centuries ago and seems to be a strategy of Satan which 21st century followers of God must constantly guard against in daily life.

Reflections on life

Finishing Strong

Finish Line - 2014-03-08Recent events are reminding me that not only are we running the race which God laid out before us to run (Hebrews 12:1-2) but that we need to keep the finish line in mind and in sight. Those of us in Christ know from this passage that not only was Christ the one Who put us onto this race course but also caused us to start the race, raced along with us and awaits us at the finish line.

A few weeks ago, I participated in a 5K walk in nearby Utica, Michigan. It was my third 5K walk in the last three months. I really wanted to do well (that is, to set a new personal best time). To help me along the way, I used the stopwatch on my wristwatch to indicate the elapsed time at certain mile markers along the way. In working the numbers later on, I found that the pace on the first mile was remarkably fast for me. The second mile was a bit slower but still much faster than my average pace. It was, however, between mile markers 2.0 and 2.6 that I really slowed down. Without other landmarks to use, I didn’t realize at the time how much I had slowed down.

However, at mile marker 2.6, the large structure for the finish line was directly down the street in front of me, half a mile away. When I calculated my speed from that point to the finish line, I found that my pace significantly increased. I completed the race with a personal best time, 32 seconds faster than my last race.

I didn’t realize it at the time but seeing the finish line gave me a focus to complete the race and do it with strength. I think we can compare this to what we have in life’s journey. The finish line is Christ. At a time in my life when I know that I have fewer years on Earth in front of me than behind me, I want to encourage all of us in Christ to finish strongly.

Recently, I read a passage from Psalm 92 that goes along with these reflections on finishing strong. I pray this would be true of all of us:

They flourish in the courts of our God.
They still bear fruit in old age;
they are ever full of sap and green,
to declare that the Lord is upright;

Psalm 92:13-15 (English Standard Version)