Our God is Jealous
You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God…
-Exodus 20:5
One of the ways that God has consistently revealed Himself, especially throughout the Old Covenant is as a God who is jealous.
We don’t talk about God being jealous very often. I think if we were honest, most of us have tried to put jealousy behind us, seeing the damage it’s done to ourselves and others. In our experience jealousy is selfish. We’ve rarely met someone who is jealous and has our best interest at heart. God’s jealousy is different than ours. The jealousy of God is not unstable or unhinged. It’s a burning fire within God that causes Him to pursue the ultimate desires of His heart and the best for mankind.
When God created us, He designed us to have hearts that were totally in love with Him. We were designed to be in love God and only function properly when our hearts are focused on Him and everything else comes second. This is why when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was He easily replied that it was to “love the Lord Your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” (Matthew 22:37). But when sin entered mankind’s experience, we began to give our hearts on other loves.
Think about this for a moment: One of the places where jealousy is appropriate is when holy love is denied. As a husband, if my wife were ever to start to see another man, I would be filled with jealousy, and it would be right. The rightful love that was once mine was given to another. This is the kind of holy jealousy that fills God when He looks at His people. It’s an all consuming love that desires love to be fully shared between Him and His people.
Why is this important? In order to understand how God responds and why He does the things that He does, we need to understand God is a jealous God. He’s promised that He will yet again shake the Heavens and Earth so that everything that can be shaken, will be (Hebrews 12:26-27). The reality is, He’s constantly doing this throughout our lives and He will do this in a final way before the end of the age. If we don’t understand that these things come out of jealous love, we’ll be tempted to believe they come from anger.
Friends, we serve a God so committed to winning us back that He gave us His very Son. He’s loved us, laid down His life for us, and given us His Spirit. He’ll stop at nothing to bring forth the most love possible out of the human heart. His jealousy drives Him there. We don’t serve a God with weak love that doesn’t really care whether you walk away or not. His love burns deeply for you. We serve a jealous God.
Photo Credit: Amor Dei by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
Learning from Imperfect People
Most of us want to learn from perfect people.
Now, I don’t mean technically perfect people. Outside of Christ there is no one who is truly perfect. What I mean is many of us want to learn from those who have their lives together in a greater degree than we do: a pastor, an evangelist, a great teacher. Someone higher than us.
I understand where this attitude comes from. It’s a growth mentality that continually wants to improve and push the boundaries of development. The problem is I don’t know that this is the attitude Jesus wants us to have.
When Jesus comes into the life of a person, we assume that person starts at ground zero. They know nothing about Christ and they have nothing to contribute. The truth is they have no facts, but they have the fullness of God dwelling in them by the Holy Spirit. This is a significant reality that most of us minimize. The Holy Spirit living in us is real, not just a nice thing we say about people. What this means is we have to be willing to learn from those who don’t have their lives completely together, because Jesus still might be speaking to us through them.
Jesus was like this, too, right? He didn’t learn from others, He was the Teacher, but he often pointed to people outside of religious circles to teach others about following God. He used a Roman Centurion as an example of faith in Matthew 8:5-13. Surely the Jews of Christ’s day would have been horribly offended by this. But Jesus didn’t mind that the Centurion in many other ways wasn’t perfect. He zeroed in on his act of faith and put it on display for the whole world to see.
My point is, in your world there are people who, to your critical mind, are imperfect examples of following Jesus. It’s tempting to write those people off and never learn from them. But I have a secret for you: There are no perfect examples of following Jesus. In fact, if you waiting for a perfect example to come into your life to learn from, you’ll be waiting for a long time. Instead, don’t think of yourself more highly than you are. Associate with the lowly. Don’t be to proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people.
Imperfect examples have much to teach us. I’ve learned much about what not to do from listening to imperfect people reflect on where they’ve made mistakes. I’ve seen real life apostles sit in humility as the Holy Spirit moved on the most common people within a church speaking life-changing truth. I’ve sat in Bible studies with new and not-yet believers and been struck with truth about Jesus as we’ve looked at the Bible through their eyes.
All it takes is enough humility to learn from someone you might think doesn’t have it all together. Imperfect people are all around you. You have plenty of opportunities to learn if you want. You just need to be open to it.
The Antidote for Pride
Yesterday I spent some time talking about the issues of pride within house churches. In that post I suggested that receiving the love of God and letting that free you from comparison drives out pride. Today I’d like to focus on a practical method of dealing with pride: confession.
If, when I talk about confession, you start to see pictures of confessional booths and men with collars, you’re probably thinking of the wrong thing. When the Protestant Reformation happened, Luther and his allies announced that all believers were priests and therefore you didn’t have to to a priest to get forgiveness of your sins. But the unfortunate side effect of the Reformation is the practice of confession was all but lost to Bible-believing church.
The apostle James, who as the brother of Jesus obviously believed in direct access to God and the priesthood of all believers, encourages believers to confess their sins to one another because it results in both spiritual and physical healing (James 5:16). At least one aspect of spiritual healing that confession offers is the ability to be healed of our pride. If we are honest with ourselves about our sin, it’s hard to be judgmental towards others.When we expose the darkness in our own hearts to another human being, it becomes much harder to create masks of greatness that feed our pride. If we do, we have brothers or sisters that aren’t deceived by the masks we wear.
Now this is a bit of a chicken and egg sort of problem: Does confession create humility or does humility cause someone to confess their sins to another person? I would tell you the answer is “Yes!” Obviously humble people confess their sins to others, but there are times when confession becomes an act of the will and true humility is birthed in the heart of a believer afterwards. It’s both/and. I can tell you, though, that those who are transparent and honest about the weakness are generally some of the more humble people that I know.
I’ve talked about confession at length here on the blog, both about how confession creates brotherhood and how true transparency births transformation. There are tons of benefits in addition to keeping us humble. The first step is to find someone: another man if you’re a man, another woman if you’re a woman, and begin a regular practice of confession with him or her. If you need a model for this, you can use one we’ve found helpful here.
The point isn’t that you do it perfectly, it’s more important that you start. You may notice a difference immediately, but if you don’t you’ll definitely notice a difference in a year or two. It’s a long game to protect your soul and keep you safe from pride that so easily corrupts spiritual things.
It’s also the place where transformation happens.
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 