Hope as the unfathomable promise of the Mat 6:33 Imperative

The social, political, and religious milieu of Christ’s time cried out for hope, and yet when hope landed in its midst, it could not be recognized, ^{Jn 1:11} “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”   Israel’s history in biblical times was a history of hope; hope was the very fibre of their ancestral foundations.  How could the hopeful go back on hope when they needed it most?

People have written about hope in many directions, Ernst Bloch in Marxism, Paul Tillich and Jürgen Moltmann in theology, and Viktor Frankl in psychiatry.  A common thesis in most writings on the notion of hope is that hope is perhaps the strongest driving force in human existence.  A person without hope is as good as dead, says Paul Tillich in his sermon, The Right to Hope.  Frankl (1984) is fond of citing Nietzsche’s famous maxim on hope, “He who has a why to live for, can live with almost any how.”

Why then are we so hopeless if we can be so hopeful?  In the words of Tillich, “nobody can live without hope, even if it were only for the smallest things which give some satisfaction even under the worst of conditions, even in poverty, sickness, and social failure. Without hope, the tension of our life toward the future would vanish, and with it, life itself.”  Hope is what the abyss of the human soul cries out for.

METANOIA: YOU ARE A CHILD OF THE UNIVERSE

The Metanoia experience: Encountering the Spirit of the Divine.

The prodigal son sat in a pigsty and received a rare moment of enlightenment, and right there and then he “came to his senses.”  King Nebuchadnezzar intoxicated by power was banished to live like an animal; there, he met his revolutionary spiritual decisive moment, and he acknowledged and worshipped the one and only true God.

A Metanoia moment is a moment where your spirit is simply invaded by the Spirit of the Divine, a moment when the question, “What must I do?” is unavoidable.  That question rightly answered is the point of a Metanoia breakthrough, the beginning of a journey with ever opening possibilities.  You are anxious beyond and not anxious below, you are anxious about tomorrow, yet you are not anxious because you know who holds tomorrow.  Your sanity or insanity is determined by how you maintain a suitable balance between those resulting tensions.

On a higher level, repentance is like walking into a dark room and switching the lights on, the darkness is suddenly swallowed, and it can’t return for as long as there is light.  Repentance is allowing the light of the Divine and universal mind to enter the darkness of the essence of our being and to break up the imprisoning psychological shackles of one’s past. 

Essentially, “Metanoia” is allowing the Spirit of God to rain fresh waters on the parched ground of our own spirit and to allow new spiritual seed to sprout even on the hard rock of a spent volcano. In repentance, one opens up to the reality of one’s own spiritual-ness as opposed to one’s physical-ness; the two are not mutually exclusive one over the other, yet there is a transformation of the inside out.  A spiritual awareness is created in the interconnectedness of being as a whole.  In that awareness, the human spirit is returned to the beginning, and the disrupted relationship between one’s spirit and the Spirit of the Divine is restored.  Right there, ^{Ro 8:16} “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” 

Religion tends to separate the interdependence and connectedness of our whole being with an overemphasis of one over the other.  In asceticism the emphasis is on self–denial and/or abstinence from physical indulgence, in mysticism there is a “spiritual flight” of sorts into a “Nirvana.”  In the former, you “beat” the body because it denies you spiritual access, and in the latter, you “leave” the body to gain spiritual access. 

In repentance one’s spirit opens up to the reality that life is one, and it is spiritual, the physical exist within the spiritual.  We are as successful in separating the two, as we would be in removing light from a flame.  

"WHERE THERE IS NO VISION THE PEOPLE PERISH!"

What do you see?

The Mat 6:33 Imperative is an exploration in which the prophetic question, “What do you see” is continually asked.  Nothing much happens in the life of a person who sees nothing.  A person with no vision is like the archer who shoots an arrow with no target—his target is wherever the arrow lands.  A vision is an obsession you see in your mind, and feel in your spirit, until it hits the ground.

When we revise old mental models, we must replace them with empowering new images of the future.  What do you see happening in the future, visualise it, dream it, sketch it, pray about it, develop an attitude, just find a way of keeping it alive!  The emotions that ensue from the tensions and contradictions of that process provide the crucial momentum towards your passion.

Biblical scripture is abundantly rich with powerful imagery that can help us in the process of rebuilding new mental models.  The prophets and psalmists portrayed God in various positive and empowering images; it invoked in them a sense of understanding the attributes of God on a level they could relate with. 

Any vision built on flawed and negative mental models will not survive the test of time.  There are many tensions along the way, and every one of them is intended to derail the vision.  Nehemiah had a vision to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and that vision had tensions from its very inception, but the people around him had an ATTITUDE to work.

Think pictures!

God has given us an amazing mind to work with, to be sure, ^{1Co 2:16} “We have the mind of Christ.”  If we hold out the picture of a suffering Christ before us, then we will also uphold his unconquerable spirit, and victory over adversity and death.  Jesus did not give up on his mission for life; he saw it through till the end.

Peter Senge says, “An effective way to focus the subconscious is through imagery and visualization.”  The mind thinks in pictures!  The Bible is full of vivid images that create a clear picture of our relationship to God.  The prophets conveyed and received their messages in imagery, and Christ taught in parables.

Visualization is common practice in the various disciplines of psychology; meditation is its closest counterpart in the various religions that practice it.  Meditation as a form of visualization was an integral part of David’s prayer life, and he wrote, ^{Ps 119:148} “My eyes stay open through the watches of the night that I may meditate on your promises.”

Meditation is turning an image of a desired state over in your mind repeatedly, until it sinks into your spirit.  You don’t only churn an image of a desired state in the mind, but you practically become it.  The practice of meditation does not yield results overnight, but if one stays with the process as a matter of habit, the outcome is nothing short of awe-inspiring and phenomenal.

In biblical scripture, God is the object of our meditation; otherwise the whole thing is mental rehearsal in a vacuum.  Meditation without an object of faith is not sustainable.  A sustainable and meaningful vision is born within purpose.  Purpose defines our reason for being, and vision is what we want to achieve within the perimeters of that purpose.  If we do not define purpose, we run the risk of hopping all over the place achieving what we may not even be passionate about.

The Mat 6:33 Imperative is the vibrant atmosphere and environment in which our capacity to achieve vision is stretched; in it, we are invited to begin to dream with God God’s inexhaustible dream for our future.  The prophet’s words bear this out, ^{Jer 29:11} “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

To be sure, seeking the kingdom of God is setting out on a life long journey of understanding, and trying to understand again what God’s plan is for our lives.  The Kingdom is given to us one acre at a time in an unfolding process, Israel was promised, ^{Dt 7:22} “The LORD your God will drive out those nations before you, little by little.  You will not be allowed to eliminate them all at once, or the wild animals will multiply around you.” 

The challenge is not in reaching the destination, but in staying with the process.  More often than not, that journey is crowded by what Christ called, ^{Mat 13:22 (NLT)}“…the worries of this life, and the lure of wealth.”   The Mat 6:33 Imperative is to pursue what we have not been given (spiritual), and the rest will be given to us as well (physical).  For many, that distinction is written with invisible ink.

Meaningful purpose must be located squarely in God’s overall purpose for the creation of the universe; otherwise, it runs the risk of being exhausted or misdirected.  When we are the focus of our own purpose, our environment limits our dreams, and yet in God we are released to explore the constant beckon of never-ending possibilities at the peripheries of an ever-shifting horison.

 

There is no maximum to what we can accomplish in God through Christ, because beyond every level of triumph there is a higher possibility.  Paul wrote, ^{Phil 4:13} “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”

IT'S NOT ABOUT MONEY!

^{Mt 5:3} “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.”

Let’s face it, who wants to be poor?  For the most part, we all want to accumulate wealth; our reasons may differ, but we still want it.  In most societies, it is a symbol of power or social status.  You may be the dumbest person on earth, but if you have money, nobody really cares how stupid you are.  Even in agrarian societies, a person is as important as the number of animals he owns.  It is an environmental thing.

Poverty is a sign of being desperate; one would rather be dead than poor.  A wise king once wrote, ^{Pr 19:4} “Wealth brings many friends, but a poor man’s friend deserts him.”  In times of desperate economic turmoil many billionaires around the world take their own lives because for them life is measured in terms of a bank balance.  Some cheat their way to the top of millions money worth because the thought of not having money can be terrifying.  For them the maxim is true, “Better a rich devil than a poor saint.”  Spouses are known to underwrite their partners for large sums of insurance money and then plot to murder them.  People can do unimaginable things for money.

Long before Adam Smith people have been on the rush to the “gold fields” just in case king mammon is smiling; perhaps they too could receive financial healing by pushing through the crowds and touching the edge of his garment.

Jesus and his non-sense.

The disciples were often tempted to resort to their five senses, Christ told them many times that he will be crucified, and that he will rise on the third day.  When the women came to report that he had risen, ^{Lk 24:11} “they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”  That confrontation of the spiritual and the sensual is presented many times over in our lives—we struggle and juggle between natural sense and spiritual non-sense.

So what did Jesus mean?  In a world turning on wheels of wealth, what does poverty have to do with anything?  As in everything else, the Master had a different perspective on the subject of poverty or wealth for that matter. In his usual paradoxical way of teaching he said a person is blessed not in his/her wealth but in spiritual poverty.  That is why he refused Satan’s kingdoms of the earth.  He was tempted where many of us would have loved falling on our knees at first call.  After all, it happened in the mountains where nobody would know about it.  The bigger question is, “What did Jesus know about poverty and wealth that has eluded us?”

 In the parable of the rich fool, we see a competent farmer who is preoccupied with his own small picture and gets ready to recline and enjoy the fruits of his ingenuity and hard work.  Life is measured in the abundance of his wealth.  In the meantime he ignored that his real life was what he could not control.  Then a question was asked, ^{Lk 12:20} ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.  Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’  He prepared for the future and forgot about eternity.  In the irony of paradox; if he prepared for eternity, his future would have been taken care of.

 

There is a principle buried deep in what Christ said to the rich fool, “The core of material abundance is squarely situated in one’s spiritual abundance.”  All things must proceed from the richness of one’s knowledge of God.  When we embrace eternity, we embrace life in all its abundance, including the smaller picture of life on earth.

Jesus was not talking about money as in hard cents and dollars; he was talking about the person.  If you are poor in God, you are poor even with your coffers full.  Money is a blessing from God, but many curse themselves with it when it defines who they are outside of God.  ^{1Ti 6:10} “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.  Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” 

  

His whole ministry focused on changing and turning natural perspectives right side up, trying to get people to see that reality is not sensual but spiritual, that if you focus on what you see you miss out on what you don’t see, and that what you don’t see is more powerful than what you see.

 

That was not a rejection of the need for money, but a correction of a perspective.  We all need money for one reason or another, and anyone can be rich if they put their mind to it—but we can’t deny that some have indeed pierced themselves with many griefs.  It is not money, but the love of it that sends people spinning in a whirlwind of greed.  The same fire we use to cook a meal can bring a house down.

Christ taught that the ultimate measure of a person is not in how much the person owns but in how rich the person is in his/her relationship with God.  Right here we are caught with our backs against the wall.  The twist is not so much in the contest of economic ideologies as it is in our hearts.  We are chasing sensual vanities in real terms and spiritual realities in vain terms.

 

Christ refused to be caught up in those silly earthly games; he was here to point humanity to something greater beyond the seen and the measurable, to a place where the seen is discovered in the unseen, and every time he succeeded he would say, “Your faith has healed you.”  Where people could not see his point, He said "Oh you of little faith.”

EVERY DREAM HAS ITS DETRACTORS!

Every dream has its detractors.

An enemy sleeps when you work and works against you when you sleep, his/her compass bearings are always pointing in the wrong direction.  Our anxiety is caused by our expectation of good from evil.  We expect sweetness from bitter sources, and in the end we are disappointed not by the enemy but by our own expectations.

Enemies disrupt your good work because you threaten to expose their laziness by succeeding where they fail.  They never operate from a foundation of strength but always from a position of weakness.  Saul was afraid of David"s successes that is why he became his enemy, ^{1Sa 18:29} “Saul became still more afraid of him, and he remained his enemy the rest of his days.”

If you lose sleep over your enemy your focus is misdirected, your energy wasted and your success delayed.  You ignore the essentials and concentrate on non-essentials.  You spend more time building high fences for your security instead of exploring opportunities for expansion and growth. 

One of the best ways to deal with enemies’ is not to lavish them with the attention they expect but to ignore them and pursue your dream as competently and as completely as you can: that in fact is more piercing than a confrontation.  Just go about with your business as if they don’t exist, if they disrupt it, pick up the pieces and try again.  Many years ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote in a poem called “IF,”

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build’em up with worn out tools

Yours is the earth and everything in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a man my son

The enemy’s best weapon is to instil panic and panic always leads to discouragement, discouragement to abandonment.  His/her highest objective is to see you throw out your dream.  Enemies enjoy sowing weed where others sow seed.  The challenge is how you respond.  When enemies’ disrupt your good work you need to be sober enough to make a good decision for the next step, you need to be calm because sometimes it is a matter of life and death.  Remember the Farmer's advice in the parable of Christ, when the farm workers wanted to rush into the fields and uproot the weeds, the farmer decided against it, “While you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest.”  If your decision is based on your emotions, you must prepare for commotion not promotion.

Enemies’ are usually faceless; if you remove the weed they may return to root out the seed, letting the seed and the weed grow together increases your chances of a good harvest.  It may look chaotic at first but when the blades shoot up and the ears begin to grow, a trained eye can separate the wheat from the weeds.  If you rush in, you may play right into the hands of the enemy.

Sometimes we destroy our good work because we want to rush in and fight the fires, but some things are best defended by the test of time.  For a while, everything may appear green and we can’t tell the seed from the weed, but in the end the seed is not the weed, and the difference in the blades will be obvious and crystal clear for all to see.

Good and evil may exist side by side but eventually truth triumphs.  Pharaoh called his magicians to turn their sticks into snakes like Moses did, but eventually the snake with God swallowed the rest.  Truth does not need to be defended because it can defend itself.  It may take a while for the aura of a lie to die down, but eventually it must give way to the sterner character of a truth that never gives in to the popular demands of time, because truth is vindicated in the unfolding processes of time.

WHAT IS TRUTH?

Unravelling the crisis of the belly.

Biblical scripture summarises the problem of human existence in one word—SIN.  Our first temptation was a temptation of the belly, and the first judgement, was a judgement on the belly.  We are driven by the demands of our bellies, long before Maslow, Paul wrote about the crisis of the belly, ^{Phil 3:19} “Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.  Their mind is on earthly things.”  Our sin may be expressed in many other forms, but every idol we carve is fundamentally related to our hunger spasms.

The challenge of the Mat 6:33 Imperative is to discover God in the old way.  In the Garden of Eden, our priority was not food, but a relationship with God—we were created, not for providence, but for relationship.  The question of providence had been taken care of long before the serpent disrupted our relationship with God.  The charge in the Garden did not forbid eating, but not to eat from a particular tree, ^{Ge 2:17} “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”   The tree promised more than what God had given, at least according to the serpent.  God provided for need, and the serpent created the path for greed; and we’ve been hell bent ever since.  The prophecy has turned out to be true, because many who turn the belly into a god pay exorbitantly, and often with their own lives.

Greed is undermining what you have because you envy what you don’t have.  It is never content, because when you have what you didn’t have, your eyes stretch out for more.  This is the point where idolatry is introduced; when we become obsessed with the environment to the degree that our relationship with God is disrupted, and eventually detached.

Is there more to life than what it already offers?  That question is a corollary to a more important question, “What is life?”  How meaningful life becomes for each person, depends on how each one responds to that question; and every answer calls forth another question. 

According to Christ, ^{Lk 12:23} “Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.”  Christ is not saying that food and clothes are not important; he is saying there is more; and that more is beyond tangibles such as food and clothing.  What could be more important than food and clothes?  Christ sums up the answer in one word; “Life.”  There’s more to life than fine food, human achievement, breathing in and out, or being preoccupied with fashion and design.

It is clear that Christ understood Life on a different level than we do.  For us, it is this confusing and anxious thing we do between birth and death; and to him it is who we are becoming between birth and beyond physical death.  Life on our terms and in our understanding is often squashed by existential pressures, and limited by the grave.  In Christ, Life is unlimited; it marches triumphantly through the constraints of human existence, into a purpose with ever stretching possibilities.

Our natural tendency is to let it go if it doesn’t make sense, and that is where we are caught with our backs against the wall.  Like a dog given a long rope, we end up coiled in the intricate web of our own creation.  The question we ought to ask is, “What did the Christ know about life that we are missing?”

The word “Life” appears in the Gospel of John more often than it does in the Synoptic Gospels.  For Jesus, life was more than this temporal, lifelong thing interrupted by the death.  It was something permanent, eternal, and enabled in us by the Spirit of God.  He didn’t only speak about life, he was Life.  One level is physical and limited in time; the other is spiritual and liberated in time without end, and he called it eternal life.

The pomp of physical life on earth is an aberration of truth, but eventually we are ushered into a rude awakening, ^{Isa 14:11} “All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps, maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you.”  When death stares you in the face, that’s when you want nothing but the naked truth; you push and probe for lasting and permanent things.  John 3:16 is all about eternal life, read it and LIVE!

YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN! INSIDE OUT UPSIDE DOWN.

You must be “Born Again.”

Effective personal transformation is not a product of the mind, but of the human spirit.  When the human spirit opens up to the Spirit of God, a new life is born.  The Mat 6:33 Imperative is the atmosphere in which this new life takes a lungful of oxygen, and develops towards its God given destiny.

The human spirit, and the human mind are not same; the spirit is the being in us created in the image of God, and the mind is the rational seat of that being.  Christ taught that, ^{Jn 4:24} “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”  We are created in the image of God, as scripture says, ^{Ge 1:27(TNIV)} “So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”   Our connection with God is Spirit to spirit.  When we reduce God to the limitations of our environment, we end up with religion, as Paul wrote, ^{2Ti 3:5} “having a form of godliness but denying its power.”  Only spirit can understand Spirit.

It is common knowledge that every living species will give birth to its own kind, and even more that the physical body we focus on so much, Christ came to restore the original “Being” in which we were created.  Paul said, ^{Ac 17:28} ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’  As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’  To be born of the Spirit is to be born of God.

That recognition is essentially a restoration of the human being’s authority over nature and environment.  We were created to reign—to act upon, and not to be acted upon.  Scripture says, ^{Ge 1:26(TNIV)} Then God said, “Let us make the human being in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

In the Genesis creation narrative, Adam and Eve had a spiritual relationship with God, and the serpent reduced that to an environmental relationship.  This is the precise point where our anxiety was introduced, ^{Ge 3:19} “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”  Since then, success is measured in terms of pleasure, power, possession, and achievement. 

When we are “born again,” our spiritual relationship with God is restored, and our relationship with the environment changes.  We are defined—not by the environment and its success indicators—but by a rich and dynamic relationship with Christ in God.

That truth is what Nicodemus could not walk away from; to be “born again” meant giving up known idols for the Truth.  His idols were not so conspicuous because they were disguised in religion.  As a veteran Pharisee, he was used to a sense of power covered and flowered with god-talk. 

Pharisees adhered more to their interpretations, than to the God they were interpreting.  To be sure, whatever they did was more about them than it was about God.  Nicodemus’ idol was exposed because his constituency had discovered a sterner truth.  It is better to discover the truth about you, before your lie is exposed.  The worn-out cliché is true, “You can lie to some people some of the time, but you can’t lie to all the people all of the time.”  Your sin will find you out.

Traditionally, Nicodemus worked his way backwards to his ancestors, which was more rational than spiritual, but this new challenge was about working forward and spiritual.  The challenge of the Mat 6:33 Imperative is about the future, not the past—and the future needs a new attitude.  Paul reminded the Ephesians that they needed, ^{Eph 4:23}”… to be made new in the attitude of your minds…” in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus Christ (V.21).

The Mat 6:33 Imperative is an invitation to return to the depth of our innermost, and to search and constantly probe our reason for being.  To search for one’s life-long aspiration; one’s deepest and best hope of what one’s life might be.  Nelson Mandela and his comrades were kept alive in prison by nothing less than the “Ideal” of a just and democratic South Africa.  Martin Luther King was motivated by his “Dream” of human equality in the United States of America.  WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE?

SOW THE SEED, IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO EXPECT A HARVEST

in many and various ways taught that patience is a spiritual virtue, it involves sitting on the banks of a river with your fishing rod and hook in the waters and waiting for your fish to swim by.  Sometimes the wait is short and sometimes it is long but that is entirely outside the angler’s scope of control, he can only go as far as setting up the rod, the fish and the waters are outside his influence.

The farmer knows he/she can’t harvest without first sowing the seed even though he/she is not responsible for its growth.  First, he/she prepares the soil in the best way he/she knows how, throws the seed into the ground, and leaves the rest to natural forces buried deep in the soil.  The farmer recognizes that he/she is only part of a whole intricate scheme of things that must happen before harvest; in the meantime, he/she must sit and wait because the processes of time are not emotional, just realistic.

When soil lies bare, not many people see the opportunities in it because they don’t scream out, but if you have an eye, you can identify opportunity where others see waste.  When the seed is buried beneath the soil, the surface looks as bare as it is unfarmed, but the reality is there is a lot of activity underneath that the naked eye can’t pick up.  Many people have seen advantage where others have seen nothing.

Opportunity is rare and often surfaces at the most unexpected of places, if we can’t read beyond the obvious we miss it.  No breakthrough is ever possible without learning how to wait and patiently watching the place where the seed was buried, Solomon wrote about wisdom, ^{Pr 8:34(NLT)} “Joyful are those who listen to me, watching for me daily at my gates, waiting for me outside my home.” 

Waiting is futile if we don’t know what we are waiting for or if we are waiting at the wrong place.  If we wait for a door to open, it has to be the right door at the right place, if you want bread you go to the bakery not the butchery.  If we don’t know what we are waiting for we can’t identify it when it comes along, and if we are waiting at the wrong place, what we are waiting for may never come along.  Waiting for what you don’t know or at the wrong place is foolish even if by some accident you end up with what you need.  Waiting for what you know and at the right place is virtuous even if you may never find it; the spiritual processes at work are different.

On the natural, it is better to be foolish with something than be virtuous with nothing.  That is to completely miss the crux of the “Kingdom Imperative” because the focus of the imperative is not on the finding but on the seeking.  The finding is only an effect of the seeking, if you keep looking in the right places you will find what you are looking for.  No seeking is complete until we find, just as no finding is complete unless the processes of waiting purify character.  Shortcuts may deliver an end but they don’t produce the emotional robustness of the process.  Victory, as Samson’s honey is sweeter if found in the carcass of a lion you killed.  If you worm your way through any sort of achievement, you will lack the moral stronghold to sustain it.

IGNORANCE EXPOSED IS IGNORANCE DEPOSED

In both parable and paradox, the objective in the pedagogy of Christ was to expose the gap between awareness and ignorance.  Ignorance exposed, is ignorance deposed.  God’s Word exposes our ignorance, and facilitates new levels of awareness—a paradigm shift from what is known to what is unknown.

The Mat 6:33 Imperative is a call to shift paradigms from self and environment to Christ—an absolute surrender to the authority of God in Christ.  As the journey unfolds, we begin to see us in the context of the Light of God.  It enables the individual to begin a process of breaking down models deeply rooted in environmental limitations, and replacing them with new ones loaded with charged possibilities in the context of the eternal and divine.

Every butterfly must go through certain transformational stages before it flies its own unique fly.  Personal transformation in the Christ-Logos is a metamorphosis of the tensions and contradictions of the dynamic interaction between the Spirit of the divine and the churning of the human spirit.  We are transformed as we experience God in our relationship with the person of Christ as being—very God, and very human.  Christ went through it all, ^{Heb 4:15} “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.”

In all biblical teaching, the Word of God is central and crucial to the transformation of one’s mind, ^{Dt 30:14”} [T]he word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.”  Paul quotes the same scripture in Rom 10:8, and links it with Faith and confession—confess with your mouth, and believe in your heart.  True transformation begins in one’s heart, and ultimately affects one’s language.  The power of confession is not in what you say, but in what you believe; and Christ as Logos is both the substance and object of our faith and confession.

In much of self-help literature, scripture is used as rote recitation and incantation and personal gratification.  To be sure, it idolizes the human mind, and uses biblical scripture as a religious invocation to dispel or invoke a desired result.  If it works, you can safely walk away from it, and perhaps try it the next time you are in trouble.  The problem is relational in that God is used as we would a voodoo charm, but there is often no personal relationship with the Christ of God.

Many of these mental rehearsal incantations are based on “tried and tested” theories of the human mind; and thrive on psychological manipulation.  The challenge of the Mat 6:33 Imperative is to let God transform our minds through God’s word—not us transform God through human theories.  Paul warned, ^{Col 2:8 (NLT)} “Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.”  Scientific theories change with time, but the word of God endures forever.

Human nature being what it is, will always question its own competence to stand above itself, it is always in search of a higher Divine.  Whenever we run into a glitch, we want a more powerful intervention.  St. Augustine confessed (Pusey, 1996:11),  “Oh God!  You created us to praise you; you made us for your own pleasure, and our hearts are ill-at-ease until they find rest in you.”

REVISITING OUR FROZEN MENTAL MODELS...

When Jesus announced the Mat 6:33 Imperative, he was in every sense calling the processes of history to look beyond themselves for answers to the questions that emerge in the tensions and contradictions of its activities.  He was calling for a moment of silence and reflection.  Something was missing, and he called it the kingdom of God.

Blaise Pascal said, “The sole cause of our unhappiness is that we don’t know how to sit quietly in a room.”  But why would one sit quietly in a room when the rat race is so hot among individuals and nations?  We live in a culture of “Se mphete ke go fete,”[1] and often racing past each other to where nobody wants to go.

 

The Christ had the answer, ^{Lk 12:30} “For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them.”  Existential questions revolve around “things.”  To be sure, they revolve around life’s meaninglessness, and we try to create meaning around “things.”  There are things which are indispensable to the survival of the human species; and Maslow called them “needs.”  But in the rat race of human existence there are those who chase, and those who are being chased.  Therefore, the problem is relational; it is not the “thing,” but how I choose to relate to the “thing.”

Martin Buber sheds more light on this predicament, the problem is not “It,” but how “I” relates to “It.”  If “It” replaces “Thou,” then “I” become “It.”  Paul Tillich was right, in manipulating things, we are transformed into the things we manipulate.

But do we know any different?  Is life not about power in some sense or another?  The Mat 6:33 Imperative seems to ignore all of these environmental demands.  The Pharisees must have felt like they are being surrendered to the very forces they sought to be liberated from.  They had become the very structures they erected.

Nietzsche (1967, pp. 122-123) was upset with Christ for all the wrong reasons; he did not question his existence in history, but was nauseated by his seemingly dis-empowering message.  Why would anyone reject the answer to the questions that one wrestles with every day?  The question is rhetoric, and yet it sheds some light into the deep and dark corridors of our own existence.  We penetrate the skies, and yet we fail to explore the depth of our own being.  And with deep insight, Tillich observed, “No one can experience depth without stopping and becoming aware of himself.”

This is true, not only for religion, but depth about anything is impossible unless we recognise the need for self-awareness.  This is important because none of us is a bastion of all knowledge.  Where something is known, there is always something else to be known on a higher level.  This seems to have been the problem with the Pharisees and their legal counterparts.  They were tenured in traditional religion, and could not conceive of anything else coming outside of the established perimeters.  This is typical horizontal or linear thinking, if it doesn’t come the way it is known, it can’t be accepted.

How do you search for what you thought you had all along?  But that’s what the Mat 6:33 Imperative implies.  The proposition is simple yet deeply complex.  We have a problem.  We are missing something, and unless we stop and think deeply about it, it will elude us for ever.  That calls for a thoroughgoing re-visitation of the models, symbols, and myths we hold about God.  Symbols may be helpful in facilitating our expressions of God in time, but with time, they are rendered obsolete.  Like people, symbols are born, and they die.  Jewish religion was high on symbolism, and the Christ called for a re-visioning of the situation.

TAKE SOME TIME OFF!  SCRUTINISE WHAT YOU BELIEVE!  HOW RELEVANT IS IT?  

---

[1] A phrase in Setswana (African language mostly spoken in western parts of South Africa) depicting how in the human rat race one person seems to call out to another, “Don’t pass me, let me pass you!”  Martin Luther King called it, “The Drum Major Instinct” (Clayborne Cassel, 1998).

THE MAT 6:33 IMPERATIVE: "SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD!"

In a journey of faith, you respond to a voice within that only you can hear.  You see things in your spirit that cannot be measured on the scoreboard, and somehow you know you are right even when everything else around you says you are wrong.  That is not conventional thinking, there is no logic in it, and sceptics will quickly point that out, and yet that is the core of its genius and ingenuity.  The Imperative is an invitation to rise above conventional thinking, and to see the universe from a God-in-charge and God-created perspective.

Kingdom thinking begins with the conviction that God is in charge, reigning high over all, and enthroned in glory.  That notion immediately calls for the absolute surrender of every fibre of our total being to the rule of God—that in part, is the kingdom of God.  Our challenge from the very beginning is to let God be God over God’s creation.  The Imperative is a call back to the “Garden” beginning, and a challenge to work on what we have been given.  The greed to extend our borders is more often than not an indication of our spiritual, not our social condition.

The panaceas prescribed by social theories provide some relief, but they run short of curing the illness; what we need is deep spiritual insight into the predicament of human existence.  Biblical scripture is clear; our deliverance is found at the precise point where we sinned.  Greed will always seek to extend its borders; eventually it searches for opportunity to overthrow God.  It may hide under acceptable norms of pleasure, power, and possession; but eventually it turns out to be a dragon with many heads, and it marches forth, stark naked and spitting fire on everything in its way to occupy its coveted territory.  Greed is idolatry, Paul warned, ^{Col 3:5} “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.” 

When greed hides in religion, it becomes an enemy of God in the name of God, because it promotes itself in the name of God to replace God.  When Adam and Eve stretched forth to eat of the forbidden tree, the promise was nothing less than to be God.  Alfred Adler was right; every pursuit in society is an overt or covert attempt to gain power, not so much over others, as it is over self.  We are our own enemy.  Our own feelings of inferiority drive us to pursue achievements that will instil in us a feeling of superiority.  We worship the idols we carve, because we associate them with the power we crave.

Adam and Eve were made to feel inferior, and prompted to seek definition and superiority from the immediate environment.  The serpent in the Garden of Eden drove them to undermine who they were in relation to God. 

Our biggest problem with God is relational.  Idols undermine our relationship with God, in Martin Buber’s trend of thinking, the “THOU” becomes an “It.”  We relate to things as though they were God, and to God as though God were a thing.  Jesus introduced a kingdom principle, ^{Lk 12:15 (TNIV)} “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”  The problem is not the possessions, but greed—Christ spoke to the condition of the heart.

Every culture has established ways of dealing with God, why would the Mat 6:33 Imperative introduce anything different?  The Imperative is the defining moment of what Christ called the message of the Kingdom of God.  In religion, society defines how we relate to God, but in the message of the Kingdom, God defines the relationship with humankind.  We are in it for who God is, not for what we leech out of it.

The Mat 6:33 Imperative introduced a different dimension, ^{Ex 20:4} “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”  The contest between God and idols stretches back to the beginning of human history; Adam and Eve chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil over God.  There was more to the garden than they could exhaust, but they chose the tree because it promised more than what God had given.

Jesus challenged his crowds to revisit their loyalties; did they lie with God, or with the royalties received from idols of the environment.  It is common practice to worship an idol for royalty; you bow because there’s something in it for you.  It was Sigmund Freud who first popularised “The will to pleasure,” he attached all kinds of sexual overtones to it; but in the end we do what we do for our own pleasure.  Adam and Eve reached out to eat of the forbidden tree for their own pleasure; and our relationship with God was disrupted.

God did not deny the couple the pleasures of the Garden (not even in Freudian terms)—they denied God the pleasure of being God in relation to God’s own creation.  In prophetic terms, they prostituted their allegiance.  Israel was warned of spiritual prostitution, ^{Nu 15:39} “You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the LORD, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by going after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes.”

Allegiance defines relationship.  Jesus taught, ^{Lk 16:13} “No servant can serve two masters.  Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve both God and Money.”  Allegiance defines fidelity, ^{Lk 12:34} “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The problem with environmental idols is that their glory is short-lived; they are a journey with a defined destination, and once you arrive, you don’t know where else to go, or what more to do.  What do you do beyond becoming the wealthiest person on earth?  Could there be more beyond a person’s highest aspirations?  Not many people get there, but if you do, Jesus asked, ^{Mk 8:36 (TNIV)} “What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?”

"GOD IS DEAD!"

It is Nietzsche who told a parable of a man who pronounced "God is dead, and we killed him!"

Good Friday is a good reminder of how we killed God.  One is reminded of Mel Gibson's "Passion Of The Christ," a gruesome motion picture of how cruel we can become, especially if we wear the cloak of religion.  Religion crucified God in the name of God.

Christ was at his most ferocious when confronted by religious leaders.  The scribes and Pharisees of his time anointed themselves with the exclusive right to represent God on earth, and he overthrew that.  They had been waiting all their lives for the Messiah and when he showed up, they killed him.  That is very typical of religion, and that is why it thrives on dogma.  People who hold a thing to be the truth of all times are capable of the worst kinds of cruelty.  Religious people can be very dangerous, especially if they do what they do in the name of God

But who can kill God?  A God who dies does not deserve to be God at all.  And that is the difference between the Christ of God and every other known religious leader.  He died and he rose again!  Everyone else is still in their graves.  If he didn't rise again the religious leaders of his day would have been more than ready and willing to prove otherwise.  Mary Magdalene--the first woman apostle--carried the good news of his resurrection.  And of course the men thought it was all nonsense.  God's foolishness will always confound the wisdom of the day.

Jesus died and he rose gain!  All it takes is a leap of faith, believing that he was who he claimed to be, "Christ the saviour of the world, and the Son of the living God."  It's like banjo jumping, the only difference is that you land in the hands of God.  God never dies!

UPSIDE DOWN AND RIGHT SIDE UP

It's amazing how Jesus turned everything upside down, only to turn it right side up!  In a world of "Business as usual" that's bound to be a shocker, and you may even get crucified for it!

The world was a tense place when the Master walked in.  People were coming and going as in the usual give and takes of human existence.  And--as if ignorant of what was happening--he said in Mat 6:33, "Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need."  For the Romans, there was nothing as "all else" as power, Greeks were preoccupied with human intelligence, and the Jews were obsessed with religion.  All of that seemed meaningless unless priority was given to the Mat 6:33 Imperative.


Our greatest tragedy is that we are separated from God!  We are unable to function to optimum because we see ourselves as independent from God and the rest of the universe.  Our politics, philosophy and religion have pushed us even deeper into this quagmire.  The only success we've made of ourselves is a mess.  How do we turn it all around?

There is only one answer, and it is caught in the words of the late African Apostle Nicholas Bhengu, "Back To God."  We've missed it so bad, we must go back to the God-beginning, and Jesus called it "Born again."We need a new mindset for everything.  We must "Repent!"

Religion has stripped the word "Repent" of its original and more powerful meaning.  It is now limited to a list of do's and dont's that are palatable to human taste.  You either measure up to a rigid religious-list or you get thrown out.  Repentance is not a religious list of what to do and not to do, it is a spiritual journey "Back To God."  And that journey begins with the Christ of God, believing that he was whom he claimed to be, the Son of the living God and the saviour of the world.

God is a spiritual journey; a very long spiritual journey.  There is no religious list on human morality that can capture the processes of that unfolding journey, and that is why Paul wrote Romans12:2b, "But let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.  Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect."

The spiritual journey in Christ is a journey of learning (discipleship), and in the learning we are transformed.  We all have a personal pilgrimage, that journey we undertake between birth and death.  We either live it within the determinations of the human environment, or the unfolding processes of the Spirit of God.  Transformation is not a once-off instalment, it comes over time in a journey where we arrive yet never arrive.  Our intention is not destiny but eternity.  We live the not-yet as though it already was, and pray "Thy Kingdom come...and thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."