Our small group has been trudging through the book of Romans. I believe it was originally meant to be a focus on witnessing and evangelism, which I love by the way and use Romans quite a bit when engaging in both. However, I found as we began delving into and weeding through the chapters that a deeper more urgent theme seems to arise from our discussions. Who are we really in Christ? Not as a church, but as individuals.
The deeper I go in my faith, the more I experience a massive dichotomy between the world and the reality of God. God’s ways are in fact a complete reversal of everything that we image or place as valuable, powerful, or encouraging. Humanity places value in our individual accomplishments, achieving our own goals and prosperity. Humanity exhibits power through force and fear. Humanity finds encouragement in comparisons which make us “better” than someone else; i.e. the hierarchies of prejudice, racism, anti-culturalism, and hyper-exclusionism. I would even be so bold as to say patriotism can expose our need to devalue another in order to lift up ourselves.
But God sees things a little bit different. God glories in our diversity, but unites us in our faith. God holds the divine/human relationship as the most valuable thing in the whole world, even more so than His own earthly life. God sees power as the ability to serve another and laying down one’s life for a friend. God encourages us in that no matter the palace or the prison, rather a pit or a pedestal, where ever we find ourselves, he is there with us offering a relationship based on unconditional love.
In Isaiah 55: 8-9, “The Lord says, ‘My thoughts and my ways are not like yours. Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, my thoughts and my ways are high than yours.’” Clearly, a line of distinction has been drawn in the sand. The question is “where do we stand?” Perhaps for many of us, we find ourselves traveling back and forth across that line, longing for that intimacy of relationship that brings peace and joy, yet seduced by the pleasures and addictions of the world that burden us with heartache and loneliness. This is the trap of sin and the deceit to which humanity has fallen. We cannot achieve our own salvation as the world has taught us. We cannot obtain the thoughts of God as Satan would long for us to believe. (Look at the story of the fall in Genesis 3.) We, as individuals and as a species can do nothing more than struggle within our selves to reach a plateau that is beyond our comprehension, much less our reach.
Yet, God in his mercy has made a way for us. And Paul so vividly describes that way for us in Romans and urges us to see from a different perspective when he begins chapter 5. “For by faith, we have been made acceptable to God. And now because of our Lord Jesus Christ, we live at peace with God. Christ has also introduced us to God’s undeserved kindness (Grace) on which we take our stand.” All of us, rich or poor, free or slave, humble or proud, sinner or saint, have all been made capable of being welcomed by God into an eternal relationship with him. And because of the gracious acts of Christ, we can live in peace and harmony in the midst of the turbulent seas of life.
Ultimately, we are called to a higher existence, one not of intelligence or distinguished morality, but one of simplicity based on love. The dichotomy between this world and God’s world is simply about who is at the center. Am I or is God? Who we are in every thought, word and deed should express not ourselves, but the One in whom we find our peace. And the church cannot change the world when the individuals of the church are so staunchly against one another, Baptist vs. Catholic, Methodist vs. Pentecostal, Episcopal vs. Episcopal. What we need to find out about ourselves as individuals is that we are one with every other Christian around the world and that we stand together for the common good of all humanity, that all might come to know how great, how wide, and how deep God’s love is for them.
