In Jesus’ Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, this line is repeated most often: O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever.
In so many ways have we been blessed by his steadfast love! The Creator has established the heavens and the earth, with all their creatures, and has launched humankind on the long, long, path towards a glorious destiny.
We know what it is to be loyal in return for God’s steadfast love. From our first personal and wholehearted moral decision, we have known what it is to obey his will.
The spirit of God within us stays with us loyally through thick and thin. We wander like lost sheep; we stomp off like headstrong prodigal children. We are material creatures just getting started. On the path of evolution, we are the descendants of fighting animals. For our own self-protection as individuals and as a species, the Creator provided us with the fight-or-flight instinct, fear, and the sex urge. These tendencies of the human race may be expressed in ways that are evil, but the tendencies themselves are not serious in the way that sin is.
How does sin take hold? Our mustard seed faith is gradually sprouting and strengthening; but sometimes we become disloyal. Personal and wholehearted loyalty to the Father’s will does not always dominate our choices. Our loyalty downgrades from wholehearted to partial, from partial to conflicted, from conflicted to dying, and from dying to dead. We know the divine will in a deep and intuitive way. But we allow ourselves to be indecisive, conflicted, indifferent. At our worst, we rebel. We assert what we regard as our right: to do whatever we damn well please. At this point it is obvious that sin has taken over. But the degrees of sin have been increasingly serious starting with loyalty that is only partial.
Sin weakens us. The mind is not as sharp, the soul’s perception of true values becomes more cloudy, the connection with spirit becomes less and less clear and strong.
The way of life is the way of wholehearted loyalty. The way of sin is the path to death.
World ping-pong champion Victor Barna said, “Points are won or lost in groups.” The practical implication: when you lose a point, try harder to win the next one. When we lose a spiritual point by wandering into partial loyalty, we take the time to come into the presence of God, taste and see that he is good, experience his steadfast love, and refresh our own wholeheartedness by a fresh personal and wholehearted decision for his will of love.
One last thought. Sports metaphors are unhelpful if they give the impression that we need to maintain energy exertion at a level that is unsustainable. It takes time to learn to mobilize all our powers of mind, soul, and body . . . in a way that upholds the mind of perfect poise. Please join with me as we learn to sustain wholeheartedness in loyalty to our Father.
Here’s the six-minute video . . . and the podcast episode.
Photo credit: Photograph by Peter Porai-Koshits [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ITTF_World_Tour_2017_German_Open_Gu_Yuting_03.jpg
