2023-06-14 A Meditation on Persistent Yet Flawed

“4 Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved.” (Php 4:1 ESV)

Revolving around the soul persistent yet flawed by original sin, is a call to longsuffering, and a call no longer to fear coming judgment. For in the case of the latter, a temporary judgment can bring us to panic or plead for a revisal, a second chance. We forever chase the judgment that has outpaced us. Yet all things work together for good: today, consigned to the frightful degradation; tomorrow humbled in mind, ready to rise from bed to meet the day’s work. Who knows but that it is simply a time of testing: will we be grateful in the small things, that we may be entrusted with the greater things.

Likewise longsuffering. It is a familiar trope yet one bearing repetition: that when God reveals His plans for each one of us, we will marvel that we weren’t more diligent and patient. We will laugh at our own miserliness in seasons past. We will only plead a second chance: to go back and operate with a better smile on our faces.

So the soldier’s plight is a spiritual warfare consisting of matters such as the quest to revise a signed and sealed judgment, and the need for longsuffering. The soldier is in the high winds of Jesus Encounter: some aspects easily seen to be Holy, and others tempting us to degrade, to flail and object, to revile and curl up. Such is our newfound love for parent or for friend: that the channels of doubt instead merge with an inner confidence, a boast in this one, a sticking-up for our peer. For it is Jesus stuff that brings the fog of war. It is Jesus stuff that brings the immediate need for forgiveness, for a second chance. “This time, and not the next, I shall make good on my claim to be a lover of souls”; “This time, and not tomorrow, I shall make good on my claim to receive all good things from the hand of the Lord”; “This time, and not in some by-and-by, I shall make good on my claim to worship at that estranged altar called Holy”.

For we have an altar that those around us have no business attending to (Heb 13:10). We dwell in the gratitude for those fellow travelers who have charted a head-held-high course for us. We make much of our personal foibles and odd sin-injured postures, that we may know not to make further apologies than this: that against God, and God alone have we sinned (Ps 51:4). Against God, and therefore from the hand of God, we receive mercy upon mercy.

Heightened alert, radical pursuit, we pursue the soul absolved, yet can fear having gone one step too far. We can fear to have lost that longsuffering or fasted posture, that ax held to the root of our tree of sin, that guilt we might feel for walking today a confident and forgiven walk. Yet to fight is to put skin in the game, and to stay limber, alert, watchful, for all those ways our own peculiar mode of analysis and discourse might overlook the innate genius of another soul. In that winnowing hour. In that accusatory tone. In that group-think and corporate revulsion. For it is souls we hold up as Created, as Good though utterly sinful, and it is sin we revile. That sin that gets ill pleasure in the wrong things. That sin that longs for accolades, to be seen finally as “right”, to win and self-exalt. So we know, too, that the penitent heart immediately is healed of such frightening innards, and turns over an unexpected new leaf. That leaf is innocent of greater designs or stratagems. It simply believes with a soldier’s young innocence. Innocent of greater evils and party to a greater Good: designed in His image, made from scratch to dwell in a Garden, on the front lines before even feeling quite “Ready”, yet today Ready and Able, inducted via an odd exchange with a devil called sin, formerly living within.