Bob Newhart Video from way back. I mentioned some time ago that I’d write more about leaving “rebound” behind, and I’m just about ready to do so. This video is just the teaser: it captures the gist of the new teaching in… well… two words! Plus it’s funny. [If the video doesn’t appear, please click on the title of this post to go to its own page. The video should show up there.]
Pride is just another form of self-centeredness.
Thus, concentrating on our weaknesses and failures can be every bit as self-centered(prideful) as concentrating on our strengths and successes (which is the usual definition of pride).
As believers in Christ, we’re to fix our eyes on Him, not on the good or bad parts of ourselves, not on working harder at doing a better job.
And not on the weaknesses and failures of others, either.
No, we’re to fix our eyes on Him. To remember who He is, what He’s done. To seek constantly to know Him through His word, and to believe what it says. To rely on it; rest in it.
Only God can conform us to the image of His Son, (how arrogant to think we could ever in a million years do such a thing!) and He has promised to do ALL the work.
He doesn’t need our help, merely our attention and our acquiescence.
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“Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence…the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable. This of course is what the cross signifies, and it is the cross more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.” ~Malcolm Muggeridge
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Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990[1]) was an English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he was a soldier and a spy. He is credited with popularising Mother Teresa and in his later years became a Catholic and morals campaigner. (From Wikipedia)
Photo by by MunstiSue
Pastor Farley has been using the metaphor of an acorn becoming an oak as an illustration of our spiritual growth in many of our recent lessons… particularly to show that it’s painful and confusing. The acorn has to be buried in the ground, and then it swells until its hard shell cracks and splits, and pretty soon roots are coming out. And the acorn’s going, “Roots? What are these? I’ve never done roots before.”
And after a while maybe it says “Okay, I get it, I’m gonna be here underground with my roots and this dirt and I’m okay with that, I’m getting the hang of it, here.” And then suddenly there’s a stalk and its pushing upward and there’s pressure and leaves flying about and just one thing after another, and pressure here, and no pressure there and wind and light and rain… If all you are is a little acorn, it’s pretty dramatic. All of it is something it never had or was before.
And so it is with us as we grow into the new life Christ has given us. It’s really not at all like the old life and the old ways of thinking… particularly this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil thing — The more I think about it, the more profound this teaching seems to be become. The Tree of Life, which is the thinking that goes with New Life in Christ is really absolutely foreign to anything we ever thought before, anything the world thinks, and even to the parts that feel so good and right… but aren’t.
Anyway, I love the acorn metaphor , so when Pastor Farley mentioned that CBS has a photographer that did a video of time-lapse photographs showing this very process I had to go and find it.
Pretty cool! Here it is:
