Wisdom 10 We're Here to Make History

[HKHaugan]

Wisdom 10 We’re Here to Make History

Yesterday is gone, the past has passed, and history is a passing record of things past, passing and going to pass into the past. But is that all history is? Think again. There are actually three kinds of history---secular, personal and spiritual. Secular is what has happened in human society. Personal history is what is happening in our individual experience from birth to death. Spiritual history is what God has done and is continuing to do since Creation. History is His Story. It puts secular and personal history in a spiritual perspective where they belong. We know that because…? Because the Bible is our ultimate historical reference book.

Spiritual history defines reality (Gen.1:1). What Jesus shows us is that reality is ultimately spiritual, personal and relational because that’s what God is, spiritual, personal and relational, and we are His images (Gen.1:26).  Spiritual history covers our personal and relational history as well as our secular history and is happening right now. Each of us is a history in the making as were all those who preceded us and will follow us. The one constant in personal history is this: we are always coming out of a past into the present moving into the future. Reality is our personal consciousness in a spiritually comatose world atmosphere. Spiritual history is knowing the Lord Jesus who makes personal history come alive and productive because He is always looking forward and pushing us forward. Secular history without a spiritual perspective looks only through the rear-view mirror and has only one purpose, to keep us relatively honest as we look forward. But personal history without spiritual history presents neither honesty nor a future, only a depressing present.

We don’t study secular history so that we can make our society and the world better. We study spiritual history to open ourselves to what secular history means to each of us, so we as individuals can become better. That’s when society and the world become better. When history becomes His Story, the Lord’s story, then personal and relational history are transformed, and secular history becomes a tool to make sure we don’t repeat it. Jesus sets the example of the three histories in order; His Father, Himself and His relationships.

Spiritual history redeems secular and personal history to put all history in the hands, not of magnetic leaders and professionals, but in the will of God and the freedom it gives every person to make an historical impact regardless of their secular training, expertise or personality. The spiritual redeems the attitude and motivation of the individual to become creative history makers as they exercise their uniqueness. Lose spiritual momentum and you lose the world.

All we have to do is consider what God did to make real history come alive. He sent a spiritual individual, His Son Jesus, into the world in a physical body to be spiritually creative as a person in relationship with Him and with others. We only need look at the effect He had on secular history and personal history. He lifted up the value of the individual as opposed to the power-seeking dictators and their institutional structures. They rule by intimidation, pride and fear and seek to destroy creativity, relational love and faith in God.

Secular history is a record of humanity in flux. While it is supposed to be objective in its presentation, we have to face the fact it is very subjective. We have very limited knowledge of past people and their events because there is no way we can experience what they experienced in the atmosphere the way it was in their time. Secular history only records the hero and the anti-hero, idea movements that are progressive and regressive depending on who defines them. It centers on people who arrive with ideas, their influence and the modifying figures that follow them. However, it excludes those that make the ideas work and the local cross references that accept or reject them. It is written based on the bias of the historian. It records events much later than they happen. Then they come with the shadow of later social conditioning looking back on documents without the reality of the people who lived them. Without God they both use the same tactics to achieve their goals. It is a depressing story better called ‘depresstory’ than history.

Personal history is more helpful in that it centers on how a society progresses through the activity of individuals. But Jesus changes all that by putting history into the hands of people who believe and trust Him as they commit their daily lives to following Him in everything they do. Personal history becomes real history; the effect of Jesus on any believing individual and how that changes the environment in which that individual lives. That’s how God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to Himself. But secular and personal history are not friendly toward spiritual history. Secular historians and people in general like being in charge of ‘their’ history and usually try to eliminate spirituality as a factor in a society’s development. Let’s look at why we lean into spiritual history. It points to Jesus.

Let’s look at Jesus, Savior and Lord. His uniqueness is a signal to see ourselves as images of Him (Gen.1:26) who says He is the ‘I Am’ (Jn.8:58). We are, each of us, a unique image of God who can say ‘I am,’ I exist as a unique person.

He is relational. He relates to His Father, the Holy Spirit, His disciples and those He meets along the way. So, we can have a relationship with the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, with our families and friends and those we don’t know (Jn.17).

Jesus knows His identity, His purpose, His function and His location. He has given us the same knowledge, inspiration, motivation and an appointed part of the world to do His work (Mt.12:50).

Jesus is spontaneous. Nothing prevents Him from being Himself wherever He is. He plays the drums for no one but His Father. He never ponders, hesitates, avoids or puts off responding, or backs off of an unpleasant situation or conflict (Jn.8:29).

He is always looking forward to every next personal encounter. He pushes His disciples to go when they don’t want to go and go where they are afraid to go (Mk.4:35).

He is always on the move. Time after time when He is on a mountain or on a shore or in a valley, He bids His disciples to go to the other side, the next town or the next person. It’s always, “Follow me.” (Mt.4:19)

He hangs out with the deplorables, the unacceptable, the lonely, the sick, the crippled, the leper, the religiously ‘unclean.’ He sees all people as alone if they don’t believe in God (Lk,4:18).

He is always thinking spiritually. He is spiritually motivated. His every thought, action, teaching and movement was consciously spiritual (Jn.4:23).

He is completely absorbed in His Father’s will. So, everything we read about Him and experience in Him is covered by His Father’s perfect will (Jn. 6:38).

He was willing to suffer and die if it was His Father’s will, which it was. And, it was His Father’s will for Him to die in order that we might be saved from eternal aloneness and the devil’s domination. Saved we are when we accept His invitation to receive Him as Savior and Lord (Jn.12:27).

He was and is perfection in the flesh. This means that perfection is not something He can separate from Himself as though He would give it to us so we could be perfect on our own. It is He in us and we in Him. That’s how the Holy Spirit works it. We have to accept Him, the whole Person, and let Him be perfect through us. It’s relational. Because He is going to be who He is at the point of the need we have at any given moment. If we need love He is going to love through us. If we need grace, faith, truth, compassion, peace, He is already the perfection that will work them in us through the Spirit (Jn.17:25). Jesus is the measure of all history and trusting Him is the way we become secular history’s nemesis. Spiritual history is real history and, as His disciples, we are His Story in the making.