"Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of your mouth: for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed."
1 Samuel 2:3
This is a good warning about pride and arrogance, which are some of our biggest problems as humans. We often think that we are cooler than we are, or better, or more competent, or whatever it is... and that gets in our way when we are considering others. If we are comparing ourselves to them and trying to "win," we are distracting ourselves from truly loving or appreciating them.
Luke 6:30 says something interesting that I read recently: "of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again." ... I think that commandment / requirement is just mind-blowing. It goes against, seemingly, the whole structure of our society, our sense of ownership and want our big pile of stuff to be protected from people who have a little pile.
It kind of goes back to the parable of the workers in the field as well. Some of them worked all day and some of them only worked an hour, and everyone got the same. That is a really hard parable for us to understand. The people who worked all day ask why they got the same as the people who hardly worked, and Lord asks "Is thine eye evil, because I am good?" (Matthew 20:15). We often have a gut reaction against that idea because it doesn't fit into the way that we want the world to work, or continue working.
Another thing it says in this chapter is "by strength shall no man prevail" (verse 9), which is also a little mind-blowing. Isn't that what war is? Isn't that what the police do? Isn't that most sports, and, depending on how symbolic you want to get, even most job interviews? There is so much competition underlying the whole structure of our world, it is difficult for us to imagine the world that God is trying to build... the Zion society where there are no poor, and where people have things in common, and where we honestly work to help the others around us to be as wealthy and successful as we are ourselves.
I'm not preaching communism or saying that stealing is okay (there's a clear commandment about that), but I am saying maybe God wants us to build a world where it is really impossible to steal, because we *want* to share what we have. Maybe God's way, where he allows us all into heaven whether we started repenting and working towards that at age 15 or at age 55, is better than the one that would give celestial corner offices to the prophets and make the rest of us work in cubicles for eternity. Maybe working together with the community around us instead of being in charge really is the best idea, like Christ kind of suggested in Mark 10:44: "whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all."
Today, let's think about what God asks us to do, and how it differs from what the world asks. And from there, let's work on letting go of our pride and our desire to be better than other people, and choose God's way instead of our own way.
1 Samuel 2:3
This is a good warning about pride and arrogance, which are some of our biggest problems as humans. We often think that we are cooler than we are, or better, or more competent, or whatever it is... and that gets in our way when we are considering others. If we are comparing ourselves to them and trying to "win," we are distracting ourselves from truly loving or appreciating them.
Luke 6:30 says something interesting that I read recently: "of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again." ... I think that commandment / requirement is just mind-blowing. It goes against, seemingly, the whole structure of our society, our sense of ownership and want our big pile of stuff to be protected from people who have a little pile.
It kind of goes back to the parable of the workers in the field as well. Some of them worked all day and some of them only worked an hour, and everyone got the same. That is a really hard parable for us to understand. The people who worked all day ask why they got the same as the people who hardly worked, and Lord asks "Is thine eye evil, because I am good?" (Matthew 20:15). We often have a gut reaction against that idea because it doesn't fit into the way that we want the world to work, or continue working.
Another thing it says in this chapter is "by strength shall no man prevail" (verse 9), which is also a little mind-blowing. Isn't that what war is? Isn't that what the police do? Isn't that most sports, and, depending on how symbolic you want to get, even most job interviews? There is so much competition underlying the whole structure of our world, it is difficult for us to imagine the world that God is trying to build... the Zion society where there are no poor, and where people have things in common, and where we honestly work to help the others around us to be as wealthy and successful as we are ourselves.
I'm not preaching communism or saying that stealing is okay (there's a clear commandment about that), but I am saying maybe God wants us to build a world where it is really impossible to steal, because we *want* to share what we have. Maybe God's way, where he allows us all into heaven whether we started repenting and working towards that at age 15 or at age 55, is better than the one that would give celestial corner offices to the prophets and make the rest of us work in cubicles for eternity. Maybe working together with the community around us instead of being in charge really is the best idea, like Christ kind of suggested in Mark 10:44: "whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all."
Today, let's think about what God asks us to do, and how it differs from what the world asks. And from there, let's work on letting go of our pride and our desire to be better than other people, and choose God's way instead of our own way.
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