day no. 12,866: we want to be where we never live for His glory‏

Ozzie punched me in the face this morning. I felt it only fair to punch you. Pass it on.

 

We see His glory on the mount,but we never live for His glory there. It is in the sphere of humiliation that we find our true worth to God; that is where our faithfulness is revealed.Most of us can do things if we are always at the heroic pitch because of the natural selfishness of our hearts, but God wants us at the drab commonplace pitch, where we live in the valley according to our personal relationship to Him. Peter thought it would be a fine thing for them to remain on the mount, but Jesus Christ took the disciples down from the mount into the valley, the place where the meaning of the vision is explained.

 

We often make a fetish of chasing moments of exhilaration where we feel like we would do anything for God. The rub is that we want the moments where we feel like we would do anything to come back, but never get around to doing much of anything for Him when the feeling wears off. That is to be expected in some regard. I get it. Adrenaline and emotion can spur on some great achievements. But I think Oswald’s point this morning isn’t just that the feeling wears off and we end up doing basically what we did prior to the reboot – that understandably in some respects – it’s that we never actually do much of anything in the moment either. When we look back on it, it is largely characterized by us taking in and digesting and feeling warm and fuzzy and motivated. We like that we feel that way. But careful reflection will often reveal that those moments had no more good works being done in them than the months of power-down that followed.

 

So while we feel unashamed about wanting to be back in the place where we felt like we would do anything, we ultimately have elevated our sense of wanting to a place seated higher than that of Jesus. We want to feel like we want to do things for Jesus. So we chase that. But nothing gets done in the meantime and if we’re honest, not much gets done if we are to be revisited by the mountaintop moments. We just feel better about the time in the valley in between although both flesh themselves out in mostly identical fashion.