aliens among us

subtitle: Standing your ground vs. falling on your face.

subsubtitle: What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

Witches, witches everywhere, and not a drop to drink. The Internet provides a unique opportunity to offend someone without realizing it. In “Real Life”, you can see and often recognize the effect your words are having on the person you are speaking to. Even as the words come out of your mind and over your tongue.

The Internet doesn’t provide this kind of “Real Time” response. You have to wait until someone has reacted to your words before you realize they were taken differently than you meant them.

Before I go any further, I want to make a subtle distinction between action and reaction. I don’t believe reaction is a sin. I’ll have to define this a little more to make the distinction; by reaction, I mean a mental, emotional or physiological response to some stimulus or action by someone or something around us.

There are all kinds of sermons, lessons, even entire religions based on controlling and/or modifying these reactions, but they pretty much boil down to learning to control the actions one takes based on these reactions. These actions can be sin. Or the resistance to sin.

This should be pretty obvious to you aliens, right? (grin) More after the more break.

Obvious maybe, but a lot more difficult than it sounds. In fact, I think this is the primary spiritual battle ground for all of humanity. The Police summed it up best in a song us old geezers are familiar with:

Ooh scary! This was supposed to be a very paranoid stalker like song. So much for what The Police wanted. The world reacted to it as if it was one of the all time best love songs ever written. I think it makes a great Christian song. If you focus on the longing in it, it’s a good fit for God’s reaction to His people’s day to day lives. “Oh can’t you see, you belong to me”.

It’s in the motivation, not the details. Action may be sin. Your actions may be mistaken for sin by the unsaved. Your good intentions may actually be sin, instead of what you intended. Your reaction to the reactions to your actions may lead you to actions that could either be mistaken for sin or actually be sin. So, what’s the frequency, Kenneth? (dang, I already played that video for you. Oh well, nothing says loving like something from the oven. grin)

It’s not about actions or reactions, IMHO. If “life is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, then our actions don’t mean anything and signify nothing. If there is a “frequency” outside of the observable state of reality created by our reactions and actions to others and our environment, what is it?

It’s not in the details, the minutiae of our words or actions or even observable reactions. It’s in our motivations. I gave two examples of how I experienced this online in yesterday’s post. The first one was a “debate” over what it means to be Christian vs. being a member of a cult that claims to be Christian going on over at Confessions of a Recovering Pharisee.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t agree with everything Kevin says. But I think I know Kevin’s motivation. It’s not to confront everyone he thinks is wrong about their beliefs. It’s to glorify Christ, and to confront any attempt at “de-glorifying Christ”. I don’t believe that Kevin started this confrontation with the desire to cause anyone to stumble in their faith. I kept wanting to point out to Kevin that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar when I had to stop and examine my motives for wanting to point this out. And decided to stay out of it. I may disagree with Kevin’s approach, some of his conclusions, statements or opinions, but I know his motivations. I know who his motivator is.

Another example I mentioned was actually two examples I struggled over. I really felt that my intentions were good. But upon closer examination of the people I was going to aim my reactions at, their motivation outweighed my reactions. Both Mama Meadows and her daughter Anna Meadows made statements regarding women submitting to men in such a fashion that I almost violently disagreed with. Not “violently” in that I was going to commit “violence”, but in that I was going to come down on these reactions like a ton of bricks.

Fortunately, something stopped me. I looked at their actions, thoughts and words as expressed online over time, instead of isolating these few incidents all out of their full context, and reached an inescapable conclusion about their motivations. I know who their motivator is.

The observable difference between sinners who are saved and those who are not is not the details of their doctrines, their beliefs, their actions, their reactions, their achievements or their failures. It’s in their motivation.

IMHO, the most important fact of salvation is not in your buildings, your visions, your deeds no matter how self-sacrificing or “Christ presenting” they may be. It’s in the moment of your response to what your God wants of you right now. This very moment. Of every moment of every day in every situation.

The plight of the sinner is that while he can be in rebellion to God’s will, he cannot be in rebellion to God’s reality. It is everything outside of his rebellion. The miracle of the sinner saved by grace is not in the observable reactions to their own imperfections. It’s in the terrifyingly obedient action of them putting themselves, and their imperfections, under the direct submission and response to the action of their God through them.

IMHO, as always, this is when you will see the difference in whether a Christian is standing their ground or falling on their face. Not in the details, not even in the actions or reactions. In the motivation. In that sudden and personal reaction to the motivator. In that moment, it won’t matter to you whether they are standing their ground or falling on their face.

So aliens, when’s the last time you put yourself aside and reacted to your God instead of yourself or your environment? (grin)