Galatians 5 guides us to be reminded about law versus love. Law seeks human balance and human retribution. Law is a covenant conditionally made, sealed in the Old Testament with circumcision. The new ordinance in Christ requires the whole law summed in a single commandment "love your neighbour as yourself" (v 14); it does not excuse you from loving the neighbour who might have hurt or offended you; it does not excuse you from loving the neighbour whose offense you may have imagined.
"By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another." -from Galatians 5. We do not have self-control when we are controlled by our reactions to old hurts, old protective ways of thinking and being, when we have on old armour that pre-dates our birth in Christ.
Ephesians 4 offers some further insight into what it means to be born new in Christ ... and likens this new life to a process of growing up. It is not a binary thing: yesterday i was a scumbag but today I'm born again and I am no longer a scumbag. It takes time for the old scumminess to wash off ... leaving a clean and shiney heart. It takes time and effort. Jesus sets for us an example, and when we are called to Him, part of taking up our cross and following Him is having the daily bath, washing off the old scumminess with the daily new scumminess that wants to attach itself to us every single day. Each day, like we eat food and breathe to live, we must tidy house a little in Christ to draw closer and closer. It is a process, not a moment. God waits for us patiently in each moment.
We live in a world and time of legalistic balance. Jesus teaches us how to unbalance the scales, matching hate with love instead of matching hate with an equal portion of hate. Think about what would happen in the world if a nation that felt attacked by another nation offered AID instead of WAR? Suppose the USA had said "lets love up those people who bombed our twin towers instead of following their example of hatred" (read between the lines - I don't subscribe to anything US media puts out there but is a point I'm trying to make). Suppose last year, instead of sending in troops, the Jamaican government had sent in a peace keeping force of brothers and sisters in Christ into Tivoli Gardens? Or better yet, sent them in with food and money ... with AID to dis-arm the most effective control that any don might have had over the area? For future reference, if everybody got some education and opportunity up in the place, do you think they would barricade up again and cause another state of emergency again? If we are Christians, we are called upon to model this unbalancing method. It is kind of ayurvedic in it's nature.
Reminds me of how most women who wear bras learn how to remove their bras from under a t-shirt or blouse without taking the t-shirt or blouse off. I don't think our baptism in Christ means we put on an armour that displaces all other armour. It's more like we pull on an armour over whatever else we had on. But as we get more comfortable (or uncomfortable as the case may be) within the Christian armour we realize we can take some of the other stuff off ... and kindof pull it through a sleeve like a bra being taken off after a long day!
Getting back to Ephesians 4, I like this part: "We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love." - this part says to me, don't be afraid to take the bra off, for you have a bigger armour and a bigger more able support system in Christ!
More importantly though, this piece of Ephesians reminds us of the part we have in a bigger body, and brings me back to the reflection on the roles of the various parts of the body. Who, but Christ, can join and knit together all of us so that, in unison we can promote the body's growth in love? The analogy of the community of believers to the body of Christ repeats in the New Testament (and I think has some presence in the Old Testament too) anyway it is a *critical* analogy for us to embrace ... for different parts of the body have different roles.
When we go to scrub ourselves of old scumminess that followed along with us into our lives in Christ, we might encounter places where we think we are mucky because other Christians do not act, think, believe or feel in the same way we do ... I struggle with this a lot and the biggest challenge of the struggle sometimes is knowing when to stop scrubbing. Sometimes we have gotten down to our skin below the armour in Christ. And where skin meets armour, is the person God meant me to be as an individual. Resentments, hurts, angers can be scrubbed away. But muscle, sinew, skin, and armhairs can stay :) We must not try and scrub off our skin, our selfness entirely - for God has designed each of us individually to be exactly ourselves. The Bible is not telling us to be cookie cutter, but to take our place within a body in which each part plays a role for which it is uniquely designed.
So God gives us a heart, at birth we have it. In the course of life it might get hardened. Jesus is like heart tenderizer ... he is here to help undo some of that hardness of heart, to help re-balance the body that has gone out of whack (eg grown lumps in the neck etc). With Jesus, we can have the courage to love, whereas otherwise we might have tended to want instead to be safe and secure with hardened hearts impervious to the beauty of giving and loving. It's pretty cool.
Ephesians 4 also reminds us that different parts of the body have both positive and not so positive uses. The thing is not to chop off a hand that once stole, or a mind that once ruled the entire body ... but rather to bring the parts into harmony with each other - or balance (again something which ayurvedic practices, traditional chinese medicine, traditional Aboriginal spiritual practice and many aspects of Buddhist meditation focus on - balance and wholeness).
"Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear." (v 26-29). Jesus not only tenderizes the heart but gives us permission to use our hands, our mouths, our minds for honest labour, building each other up, helping, healing, caring, in short "loving our neighbours". I think I like this Ephesians 4 quite a bit.
I like the visual of the armour for two reasons: it speaks to protection and safety which we are assured of in faith ... the armour of Jesus is the refuge and fortress which Christians take in the Lord. (Psalm 91). It is also the suiting that allows us to go out into the world of human checks and balances and create a new imbalance by pouring out our own love, manifesting by our faith and action in and through our faith, the image of God within us ... we are guaranteed in Psalm 91, we are guaranteed protection:
"For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder,
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot."
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder,
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot."
We are assured that it is safe to get naked under the armour of Christ, and to go out into a world where hate balances or overbalances love, and pour out the love of Christ made manifest in us, in our armour - to pour it out into the world.
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