This morning going over Romans, slowly, but maybe not slowly enough, I remembered a discussion Laura and I were having yesterday. The new has arrived in doing church and the old sounds so old. Actually, we just have new ways of saying the same old stuff, but really, all of our theology and doctrine and even church ideas are a heritage we have from other generations. In fact, we are in debt to them, and really, we couldn’t produce today what they did years ago. It’s not in us. It is not our culture.
Think of the hours AH Strong put into his concordance. I have all of that at my finger’s touch, in a second. Yet that isn’t the point. In Strong and others like Warfield and Thomas and Machen and Chafer, and the list goes on, you had men who had to take time, and in time and in repetition comes meditation and remembrance and new discovery and depth. The heritage they left was more than the product on a shelf. They instilled depth in those they knew and who followed them. Depth is something we lack today simply on the level of time. It is all too easy. Too quick. Too instant. We have to multi-task or we die.
God plans stuff like this, and it happens, but only for those who wait. It was the same with the plants in front. We’re thinking we killed them with mulch, trying to uncover, find, them. Then one day they were there.
Speed and ease rob us of depth, and with God this means depth of relationship and love, real love. Spiritual love is the kind of love and trust and joy that just knows and is confident in quiet. It brings peace with it wherever it goes.
So how does God break us out of this? My experience: He uses the same plan He did with Moses, David, Elijah, and Paul. He sends us into the desert. Phones don’t work there (or no one calls us). Lost at first, we finally become comfortable with quiet and barren vistas. Finally the ringing in our ears dies away and we hear it: nothing. Then eventually we listen into the quiet and hear His voice. A word or phrase in His Word piques our interest and we slowly begin to give that thought room to roam through our minds and hearts where previously there was too much multi-tasking and distraction and self importance.
Even before I begin to mention to others what the Lord has been massaging my mind and heart with regarding discipleship, I know in most churches it wouldn’t be embraced. Why? The approach is too slow. Even to think of Jesus building into the lives of the disciples for 3 years, in the life of the church today, it seems to be too long a process. We are too busy multitasking. We need instant and auto pilot. If it took a master carpenter 3 years of focused chiseling and sanding and crafting to make His disciples, what makes us think it should only take a 12 week class and sporadic “checking in.” We lack the time and patience and focus, not the tools. It’s so important we need to go slow.
It took time, but we’ve got birds outside that are a joy to watch. We’ve got plants all over that are growing and even if we’re not here to enjoy them, someone will. We’ve got new thoughts growing in our hearts, new insights growing in us. Loving Christ has once again become a mysterious joy and mission . There are verses that I’ve read before, but finally discovered, and I wonder how I ever lived without them and all because of the quiet, slowness of life. Funny, that fruitfulness would come in the desert and that if He’d kept me in the main flow of life, I would have remained harried and barren. I know the Lord will lead us from here, but now I feel a little like Naaman the Syrian asking Elisha, “Can I take a couple donkey loads of this ground with me.” Wherever He leads us, I need to make sure, from this point on, to take a little of this desert with me.
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