12/02/2017
Are you approaching your faith through study and hard work to further perfect yourself each day? Every evening during your evening prayers do you kneel before God and tell Him of your progress? If this is so, and it is all you do, He will speak words similar to these back to you...”Yes, but when I walked in the garden where were you?” or, “As I love you, do you love me?” God wants our journey towards perfection to be a manifestation of our relationship with Him; our perfection is not His ultimate goal.
“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”
Philippians 3:12 ESV
I have taught my children many things about life and what it means to be good, and a person of faith, but my greatest joy is when they walk with me in it, not in the lessons. Don’t get me wrong; the instruction time I spend with them is precious, but the goal is not for me to be their teacher, but to enjoy their company as we walk through life together. Oswald Chambers describes this in a wonderful way:
“Christian perfection is not, and never can be, human perfection. Christian perfection is the perfection of a relationship to God which shows itself amid the irrelevancies of human life.”
As my children were growing up I would occasionally take them fishing. I would teach them to tie a hook on their line, how to bait it, how to cast their line out, how to fight a fish to shore, and if large enough, how to place it on a stringer, but I didn’t do these things because I thought they would become professional fishermen. I did it because it allowed me to reveal snippets of myself to them in the process. The most enjoyable part of the experience for me was when we sat together on the bank and waited patiently for the bobber to go down. This was a time of conversation and relationship... this was my time with them, just as much, if not more, than their time with me. Fishing trips were never really about the fish, after all it would have been cheaper to have bought the fish, but it was about the time together and our relationship.
An interesting result of these trips is that they all developed a love for fishing. They liked the challenge of it, and the time in nature, but most of all they loved it because they thought I loved it. We do this with God too... we spend time with Him in the classroom of life and confuse our learning with His true purpose, which is to be with us in relationship.
My children have grown to adulthood now, and yet occasionally one of my sons will show me a picture of a nice fish he has caught. Although I admire the fish, what gives me the greatest enjoyment in that moment is in remembering a little boy’s excitement in reeling in a tiny bass, and the sparkle in his eye as he hugged me when we put it back in the water. You see, it was never about the fish... that was just the tool that opened up the tackle box of relationship.
God teaches us about commandments, obedience, prayer, faith, and all the nuances of His Word, but He doesn’t do that to make us perfect, He does it so that we can walk with Him in relationship. It is His fishing trip, and gives us something to share together. It isn’t now, and never was, all about perfection... that was just a manifestation of our relationship; it was the loving child wanting to be like his Father and his Father loving His child.
With some of us it is a fishing trip, but it could be a sewing class, working on cars, a sporting event, playing a musical instrument, how to cook; whatever we use as our tackle box don’t get so wrapped up in the lesson that you forget the reason you are there in the first place... the relationship with the child. If we don’t learn another thing, let that be the lesson we learn from God. Let that be the lesson our Heavenly Father teaches us.
“I am called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life produces a longing after God” - Oswald Chambers
Prayer:
Father, I thank you for the lessons you teach me through your Holy Word, but most of all I thank you for the relationship this fosters between us. I thank you for the perseverance you teach me through hardship, but what I value most is feeling your arm around me as I struggle to succeed. I thank you for the love you teach me to show my neighbor, but in the end I value your Words “this is my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.” Because they tell me that in loving others I am pleasing to you. Teach me Father, not to be a fisherman, but to be a fisher of men, so that I can walk with you in this endeavor and find snippets of you all along the way. Let our relationship bloom as you pull lesson after lesson from your tackle box. Never let me confuse the righteousness of these holy fishing trips with the love they are intended to elicit, and at the end of the day when we walk together, let me surprised by each tiny fish of perfection that you have taught me to reel in and gently release back into your waters.
Rich Forbes