For This Reason 43

[HKHaugan]

The most unnerving sight for me when I watch the Olympics is the female gymnasts who tackle the balance beam. When I see it I find myself wincing at every move fearing that one of these tiny figures may miss by a sliver of an inch, fall and be severely injured. The months and even years of training that go into doing acrobatics on this narrow hard wooden structure raised several feet above the floor requires devotion, persistence and discipline, the road to athletic maturity. And this for what may be less than a few minutes performance that very well could define a lifetime of achievement or failure for the athlete.

Take those moments and transfer them into our theme of spiritual maturity, to Jesus who spent His first thirty years in training for a three year walk (a speck in earthly time) on the most precarious of all challenges, the invisible balance beam of faith with uncertainty facing Him in every next moment. Coming from eternity He walked it perfectly through this world right back into eternity. The entire universe seen and unseen rested on His every next step of faith which He offered in the moment of His death. He knew everyday and every moment it meant the Cross, the pattern for faith He calls us to adopt for our every next moment. His Resurrection, His emergence from the catacomb of death, proved His faith, His perfection and the source of His being would be the way we find ourselves. It is from that point of the Resurrection we received His balance beam in a gift wrapped book called Holy Scripture that identifies where our every next step has it as a “lamp for our feet and a light for our path (Ps.119:105).” Through Scripture He plants Himself in our mind which is informed with His wisdom, our heart given His trust and our spirit given His motivation. Through its inspiration by the Holy Spirit Jesus made eternity available in the present.

What was expected of Him only He could do---perfect and complete obedience to His Father and our Father. What He did He now calls us to do in Him. He is the balance beam whose faith to live in the seen and the unseen, the way, the truth and the life (Jn.14:6), is our salvation, the process of personally walking with Him step by step, moment by moment and day by day.

Why would He do this? Why would He go to all of this trouble? Why would He leave His established place in Heaven and put Himself in a human body to be faced with the massive indifference, hostility, that lonely walk in a desert wilderness, where the devil with his sin always probing for a way to “bruise His heel (Gen.3:15)?”

First, everything Jesus said and did was to please His Father. If this was His Father's will and it pleased Him then Jesus was pleased to obey. And with the Holy Spirit it's just the way they fit. Different from us, isn't it? “For I have come down from Heaven not to do my will but the will of Him who sent me (Jn.6:38).”

Second, the primary maxim, God loves us, personally, each one. The invisible balance beam called faith is the only way any of us can be reconciled to what we were intended to be in God's grand design. What we actually live in is much larger, broader and more experiential than the physical universe with its unfathomable size. In fact when you really survey what takes all of our attention, it's not the physical environment but our relational experience. That is the spiritual reality out of which everything comes and to which in the end it will all be sorted out. This is the province of God. We can't comprehend its vastness. We can only perceive it from within where we are spiritually walking with God and one another.

Third, where we are in Christ is bigger, greater and more intriguing than anything material and physical in and about the universe. That spiritual dimension is unmeasurable and limitless because it's God's dimension. God's declaration to Job in Chs.38-41 is a series of questions that puts Job's self-centered wonder in an eternal context beyond human comprehension. Job can only humbly yield in his ignorance as to the length and breadth of the sense of God's dimensional context. It is this context for which we have been saved, appointed and anointed to share when we come into His presence

Faith is the means by which we begin to recognize, realize and restore the spiritual consciousness for which we were created. If maturity is to grow then it is spiritual maturity that brings us into the broad expanse of thinking, knowing, sensing and feeling the presence of God and His environs. We worship, study, sing, share, love and move into the ultimate reality which Jesus opens to us. This is why He tells us He is the gate for the sheep, the doorway into the unseen where faith balances us which is where reality begins and continues eternally. We walk with Him in spiritual space, the greater space where our self conscious aloneness finds Him as our true companion and guide. The truly interesting thing about this is that God has chosen to bring the physical and secular world back to Him through the faith of His Son through

There is really only one spiritually mature person, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One. He is the full, complete and perfectly in-balance mind, heart and spirit. We are not. Therefore He is the One we look to correct the imbalance in us. It's not until we let Him into our heart as Savior that we can begin to let Him be Lord of our thoughts, our emotions and our behavior. That is, we can't proceed to function as we were intended in Creation until He saves us from the sin that throws us out of balance and let Him help us sort out the complications of living in a confusing world. It's a balance that only comes as a work of the Holy Spirit in our heart.

The Lord Jesus sets the bar high. He is the bar. He tells us that we must be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect. Now that is a high bar. The thing we need to understand is that that is impossible without Him. The beautiful part about this is that what He requires He provides the means, the details and the power to accomplish it. It's all right there in His Word.

Do you remember the 1972 movie “The Poseidon Adventure?” It was about an ocean liner hit unexpectedly by a huge wave that caused it to capsize. It retained enough buoyancy for the stern to stay afloat but it was upside down. The survivors inside had to reinterpret their environment by thinking about the ship in total reverse of it being right side up. That way they could reach the stern where the left over air was and bang on its hull to let rescuers know they were still alive. Apply this theme to the human situation. It was an unexpected huge spiritual wave of sin the devil sent toward Adam and Eve that turned our world upside down and separated Adam and Eve and therefore us from God. Sin's self-centeredness with its fear and pride engulfed us to the degree we are left to try and get to the stern but all the passages are reversed and there's no way out and even if we got to the stern where the rest of the air is, we'd still need someone from the outside to rescue us.

We are living the “Poseidon Adventure” everyday. We may reach the top of a sinking ship we call the world. We may be the richest, the greatest, the most accomplished in every field of human activity which is the stern, the flip side where the devil still rules only to find that our air will run out anyway. We may develop pour intellect, our feelings and give our spirit the motivation to reach those goals but …?

Is there anyone out there to hear the banging we do when what stands between us and real life is a steel hull called death and finality? This is where the human mind, heart and spirit have hit the hull. Here is where who we believe, who we trust and who we follow are defined not by who we see but by the Person who got in the ship when it was upside down. The One who came into the capsized world to show us the truth about our situation, showed us how to navigate the upside down waterlogged passages and the spiritual air pockets along the way to breathe life that takes us through the steel hull and into His Kingdom. Now we are talking spiritual maturity, spiritual reality and spiritual eternity. We are talking about Jesus.

Life is not measured by what we accomplish materially, socially or economically. It is measured by who and what we believe in the midst of those world oriented goals. These are spiritual issues bottom line. Spiritual maturity is the basic goal. Belief, trust and motivation are built into us. Who becomes the center of them not only determines our eternal destiny but our moment-to-moment trip along the way.

Spiritual maturity begins not with wanting to become spiritually mature but relating one on one with the spiritually mature person of Jesus. Maturity is not a concept you think yourself into. It is a living developing process. You are always following His lead. He brings you into the balance that is spiritually arriving, alive and moving from one moment to the next.

Since spiritual maturity brings us into Christ and Christ into us the practical means will occupy what is said next.