A Greater Place Than First Place

 

It was back somewhere around the eighties or the nineties that there was a popular expression among believers.  It wasn’t at all rare to hear it being proclaimed; not so much the case today.  Put God First was accentuated at prayer meetings, bible studies, in cell groups, and most of all from the pulpit.  What troubled me about it, was that for some reason it never struck a chord in me.  I wondered if maybe something wasn’t wrong in my spirit.  But there came a morning when I sat myself down to enter into a time of communion with the Lord.  Before I ever got started, five words rushed through my head.  Do not put Me first, was what I heard.  I was stunned by this, now becoming quite concerned about myself.  There came more, but not audibly as did the five words.  The Lord began to show me that first was not the best place for Him to be in the heart of the believer.  But the place where He instead desires to be, is in the Center.  He then began to show me of the problem that will always arise when we simply Put Him First.  For starters, this will indicate to us that we are about to place something second.  Since there are more things of importance to us than just two things, we will then line something else up third.  In fact, if I recall it right, the sequence used to go something like this.  God 1st, Family 2nd, Church life 3rd, Job 4th.  So what’s the problem, you may ask?  The problem is that the God who the universe cannot contain should be separated from all else.  I believe this is what Peter meant when he wrote to us, “separate God in your hearts.”  Separate Him from what?  Separate Him from all that there is. 

Somewhere in the heart of the believer, there should most definitely be family, friends, fellow believers, our dreams, desires, meditations, memories and so on.  But then there should be at the heart’s core - God alone.  Does He not deserve a place in us that we have sanctified for Him and no other - a place untouched by anything and everything that can be imagined?  Surely He does.  The God of all creation must be separated from all that is within us; a place set apart for Him only; a place greater than first place - namely in the center of our being.  It is there that He must ever dwell.  As far as all of the people and the things that we hold dear are concerned, these we must place all around Him, with He himself as the Hub.  But with God ever being our focal point, will we not begin to neglect the things that we have set just outside of Him?  On the contrary, these will become even greater in our eyes, while relationships with loved ones only abound.  In fact, we will discover that the love of people in general has risen to new heights in us. 

I believe we have all seen horse races at one time or another.  If not, I’m sure that we have heard of the sport.  At the start of each race the thoroughbreds are led into their gates, one at a time.  When all are in, it is only a matter of a few short seconds and the gates are opened.  The horses are off and running.  The turf soon will be flying from their hooves while each jockey begins to vie for position.  Often there is a front-runner who sets the pace for the running.  Though this horse may be out in front for a good part of the contest, he usually does not win.  In fact, he may even be passed up by quite a few of  the other contestants before the race is over.  We are now going to stop here and I am going to ask something of you.  I am going to ask you to imagine everything that is dear to you - persons, places or things - as being like horses in a race.  Next, I’d like for you to see the Triune God as the front-runner.  After all, this is where we would normally have Him, upon being saved by His glorious grace.  Suddenly we have come to feel so new; it seems that from out of nowhere a bright new world has opened up to us.  Our mind seems to ever be on God and the things of God.  What is this miracle that has happened?  The miracle is this.  We have asked our Lord and Creator to be before all things in the new life He has given us - to be at the head of the pack; to take His position before all that we hold dear.  We have finally discovered what life is really about and how it is to be lived.  Nothing will ever be the same again.  Not true.  Nothing will ever be the same again if He remains the front-runner.  But what happens to us as believers - and more than not - is that we begin to allow other things to pass the Lord up on our racetrack.  Then one day our eyes become opened to the fact that family has ran right by Him; our job has done the same, and even long ago; dreams and interests are running neck and neck with the One who once was first; soon they too will pass Him by.  No wonder we’ve been feeling down in the dumps for quite a while now. It also explains why we don’t seem to sense the nearness of the Spirit like we used to; no desire to read His Word or pray.  What is the answer?  What do we do in order to know and experience the joy of the Lord again?  The answer I am going to give, is the answer you have already heard.  You need to take the Lord off of that track altogether.  He never did belong there in the first place.  The dangers of having Him be on the same track as all of the other things we hold dear is what you have just finished reading about. 

What we can and most likely will do at times in our life, will be to allow what we had once put behind our Saviour, to now start passing Him by - the One who in His hand holds everything; and that is everything minus nothing.  And so I ask this question.  Should such a One be placed by us in the same arena with things that He is so far above?  How far above?  Infinitely above.  Isaiah saw this and wrote it down for us.  Peter instructed us on what to do about the matter.  “Sanctify God in your hearts,” he said.  To sanctify is to separate.  This tells us that the Lord our God does not belong on the same ground with other things - our work, our dreams, not friends or family.  His greatness is such that He should never have to contend with anything.  Neither will He do so.  If we would have it so that our dreams and desires pass Him by, He will always grant us our choice in the matter.  Grieved will He be, but He will not stay our hand.

There is a fundamental truth that all believers must learn.  The sooner we learn and apply this truth, the quicker we will arrive at perfect peace and in perfect agreement with the Majesty on high.  That truth is this.  He is our All in all.  King David had certainly grasped this concept.  This is why he was able to say, “Who have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none that I desire upon the earth but Thee.”  The eyes of Israel’s greatest king were ever on the Lord.  No wonder his God described him as a man after His own heart.  This would not have been true if David didn’t first separate the Lord from all that was within him.  He granted Him that special place in the very core of his being. 

What are the implications of it all?  If we lose our job, He is greater than our job.  If we lose our house, He is greater than our house.  If we lose even family, He is greater than our family.  It is why Martin Luther once wrote, Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.  Difficult it is indeed to not have a single idol stand before Him.  But until that is so, can we truly say that He is our All in all, the Head of the body, even the Head of all that has been created?  He is God our Maker - loving us more than we can ever begin to grasp.  First is not the place for Him, but He is at home only at the Center of who we are.  It is the place to which no number will ever become attached, a secret place, created for none other but you and the Lover of your soul. 

Praises eternal, to the High and the Holy, to our only God and King, for all that He has done for those who have been made in His image. 


-J. Pecoraro

From Out Of The Old The New

What are these things that are happening today?  The Lord our God is flipping every switch, and the lights are going off all over the world; all of the stars being cast to the earth.  Man has lived out his time on its surface.  Beginning in rebellion, it has now escalated.  All of the foundations are crumbling; the darkness is falling; yet creation shall be redeemed, with the souls of the living ones going before it.

Praises be to Him, the God of many mercies.  Of His kingdom there will be no end - a new earth shall be our home; our inheritance, the cosmos made alive forever. 

Even as the unknown author once wrote:  “You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands; they will perish, but You remain; and they will all grow old like a garment; like a cloak You will fold them up, and they will be changed…”

J. Pecoraro

Why Thou Shalt Not?

As I sat one morning to have a time of communion with the Lord, something crossed my mind that I never before thought of.  Why did the commandments that were given to Moses contain the words thou shalt not?  They could have just as easily read thou shalt.  In other words, did it really need to read, “I am the Lord your God… thou shalt not have any other gods before me”?  Why couldn’t it have been put to Moses this way?  “I am the Lord your God.  Thou shalt worship me alone.”  Again, “Thou shalt be content with your own wife, and not another’s.”  “Thou shalt ever be truthful in your words.”  “Thou shalt be satisfied with your goods only.”  But always He speaks thou shalt not.  It wasn’t very long when I believe the answer came.  It was the Lord’s intention to communicate to His people in more of a prohibiting manner, as opposed to a way that would spur us on or inspire us.  Why so?  Because the Law would not be given to us as a friend, but as one laying upon others difficult burdens to bear, yet not lifting a finger to assist in any way.  In actuality, the law was telling us to conform to an ideal set of rules, thereby satisfying the righteousness of God, and if we failed there would be consequences.  Knowing that we’d fail time and again, still it was what the law was sent to speak.

Now I thought, “Hold it!”  These were not the first of the thou shalt nots.  Genesis 1:17  “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.”  This is where all of the thou shalt nots began.  However, when we go back to the beginning we see that our God was a bit more gracious than in the day of Moses.  For we read only in the verse before - Genesis 1:16  - that alongside the thou shalt not track there ran a thou may track, stating all of what we could have eaten.  We were allowed to eat of every other tree of the garden; and who knows how many trees that might have been.  Stated as it was, I highly doubt that the Lord was speaking only of a small number of them.  Still, the thou shalt not tree won over all of the thou may trees.  There sure is something about those thou shalt nots that man has always been attracted to.  I suppose we just love the challenge, whereas we’d be likely to see the thou mays as too easy.  Speaking for myself, I’m glad that after so many years I’m finally beginning to see the thou mays as being more alluring than what prohibits.  For God knows how I’ve been kicked in the pants far too many times by all of those thou shalt nots.

Be as it may, I believe that when the law was given to Moses, it was given primarily to set us up, seeking to show us of a deep evil that indwelt us through the fall of Adam, so that by this we would learn that, though the desire to do good would be there, we could not despite the shalt nots.  What then?  What hope did we have?  The answer to these questions is that as far as the law had say over us, we had no hope.  But the God of the living had never intended for His people to put their hope in the commandment or in the satisfying of it.  Instead He would have the living to put their hope in the Living - not in the Letter.  For was it the law that was sent to redeem us?  Never.  But in its place a child would be given - the only Son of the Most High God, the  law incarnate.  He would fulfill it, meeting every demand, since He was bound together with it.  And His work would be applied as a seal upon all who believed in Him.  In other words, if the object of their faith was pure and without transgression in the eyes of the Almighty, then so would be those who belong to Him, seeing that all would be of one body together. 

Once again, when the law came, it came not as a friend.  Instead it came to us as would a hard taskmaster, being void of all compassion, like one who was appointed merely to deliver words - nothing less and nothing more.  From there, everything would be on the hearers.  Such was the nature of the law.  Mainly its job in the end was to show us how lost we were.  With all this being said, it’s important to remember that the law is good, the law is just, and the law is altogether holy; it is Adam’s seed that is carnal, but the law is spiritual.  Also it was the commandment that paved the way for the Son of God.  Upon it exiting our world it pointed us to Him, that we would know and understand that this was our true Redeemer and not the letter; for by the letter, eternal life could have never come to those made in the Image.  And with this the tutoring of the Law had come to an end. 

Now there comes another - One different from the Law, though in perfect union with it.  He indeed would be to us a friend, and more than a friend.  In this way He spoke to us: Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.  This One, unlike the law, would sympathize with us in our weaknesses, at times becoming heavily affected by them.  Moreover He would miraculously rid many of their diseases while astonishing onlookers.  Then encouraging them, He would speak of the love that His Father in heaven had for the children of the earth.  Lastly He understood the depths in which the sin of Adam had come to reside in the people.  And so He knew that we could not, despite all of heaven’s shalt nots.  His mission therefore would be to take upon Himself all of the consequences of every could not, and beneath their heavy load become nailed to a tree.  The plan then was to eliminate all of the dark deeds of Adam’s seed through one earsplitting cry of I Can, while shattering the rocks, rending the veil, and causing the graves to open.  The One who had beforetime said to the Father, “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me”, would now become heaven’s opened gates for all who would trust in His Name.  Yet like all of the faithful who would walk after Him, He too would be “sown in weakness - RAISED IN POWER!!!”

Now for the sad part.  Since today we know that the Son of God, by His death and resurrection, has lifted from His church the heavy weight of the law, then why do we live as if it all never occurred?  Why is it that when we fail to satisfy the commandment, that we tell ourselves that we need to try harder?  And if we try harder and still do not succeed, why is it that we tell ourselves that we need to try harder still?  Or why is it that when we fall flat on our face, that we tell ourselves we need a new strategy?  Then, why is it, that when we fall on our face again, we tell ourselves that we simply need a change of strategies?  But it is as Solomon once wrote, “a chasing after the wind”.  I regret to say, that as the church of Jesus Christ, it appears that we haven’t fully emerged from out of the woods, even though He has prepared for us a city of great splendor.  True, that this city isn’t within reach of us presently, nevertheless we need to start making our way out of the forest to under open skies.  And so the focus must become FAITH - in a Person.  Never should it be the commandment - on stone.  Our walk is to be the same walk as our father Abraham’s.  It’s said of him that he believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.  But to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt.  While Abraham sojourned on the earth, his walk was not based on a law of works, but on faith in the God of all creation.  And the apostle Paul tells us that Abraham’s walk is also to be the walk of the New Testament believer.  The father of our faith lived prior to the law - a law that came with Moses and ended with Christ.  It was meant to stay only for a time.  Its purpose would be to tutor us.  And I think that the greatest thing ever to be learned from it, was that we were without hope in satisfying its demands.  Therefore, One divine would step forward to accomplish this feat in our place, thus becoming our salvation.  Now we live through faith in Him.  And so, the children of God have come full circle around from the time of our father Abraham, with a vision no longer on the commandment, but on the God who has taught us by it.  We therefore are in search of a city - a city made without hands.  It is no other city than that which the apostle John saw descending out of heaven.  Abraham knew of it; it was revealed even unto him, though his days were far removed from the church age.  It is why we read in the book of Hebrews that he sojourned in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, while waiting for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 

The life of the sojourner, in search of that city, speaks all about faith and not the commandment.  But what is the secret of maintaining this faith and seeing it grow?  The secret is not difficult to uncover.  So simple is it that a child could know it.  It is to meet with Him; and to meet with Him.  It is to meet with Him daily.  By such communion do we become connected, and remain so.  And by such communion comes the intimacy that we all yearn to have with the Triune God.  Because we draw near, He will satisfy our thirst and our hunger.  He will disclose to us much from vast storehouses, things becoming food for the soul and strength for the spirit.  And so relationship abounds.  Now we have entered the abundant life, in a union born of faith, with One who none exceed.  Can the law be greater than this?  How can it be?   And this is what the promise of the Spirit for the New Testament Age has brought to us.  It is greater even than the law, and has in fact taken the place of it.

 And now the mystery of all this is that in truth we have not set aside the law at all.  Instead, those who have entered into such a relationship with their Creator, surely will love and walk in the light of His statutes.  But this because they have now been etched on hearts of flesh and not of stone.  When they were on hearts of stone, our attempts to satisfy His demands were altogether backward, and certainly were they futile.  What I am saying is that it was never meant for us to face the law head-on, as two wrestlers with one another, while thinking we could pin it to the canvas.  Our nature never was (Old Testament) and still isn’t (New Testament) fit enough for such a task.  There is however a roundabout way of overcoming the law.  And it’s been the plan of the Father for his children from the foundation of the world.  It is to have your life hidden in Christ.  When your life is hidden in Him, then all of what applies to the Son applies to you who are in Him.  And since He has satisfied the law at every point, then you also have been made clean through His works in the eyes of the Father.  King David, a man of great insight and ahead of his time, saw this while living in an Old Testament world.  And so he penned these words.  “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.” 

But the fact of the matter is that we can be in Him, and we can be IN HIM.  The latter are those who meet with Him often; who have drawn near; who have become filled while receiving from His storehouses; who have tasted the abundant life.  These are the children who love His statutes and walk in their light.  Though they may stumble for reason of the flesh not rendered fully dead, they yet move on, in search of that city, looking ahead to the GREAT DAY when all are made whole in the God of our salvation.

“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!”  Great is His Holiness!!!


- J. Pecoraro