Skip to main content

Ends of the Spectrums


Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people. (Proverbs 14:34)

          This morning’s prayer focus was our spiritual centers of influence. As I prayed for righteous for various roles within the Church, I found myself thinking about two spectrums: orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and personal and systemic.
          Orthodoxy is thinking righteously. Orthopraxy is doing righteousness. Some people think we should do one, or the other. Scripture makes it clear that we are to do both. Thinking right produces doing right and doing right produces thinking right. Some folks also preach the notion that everything is OK as long as no one gets hurt. But if we work with a number line spectrum, hurt is a negative number. Nobody getting hurt runs from zero upward. So, nobody getting hurt can mean that you’re actually not doing that person any good. Our goal should not be “nobody getting hurt” but something far more positive than that. Our goal should be for people to benefit, not just to not be hurt.
          Shifting from that soapbox to the other, I thought about the protests that have been taking place, and about someone who has said “Shame on you!” to a group of women gathering to pray. His problem isn’t the virus, it’s that, as he sees it, gathering to pray is a waste of time. We should be protesting, acting, doing! And in the sense of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, he’s right. It’s not enough for us to gather to pray. We must act as well. But the thing about the protesting and the acting that he advocated is that it tends to do more harm than good, especially if a systemic fix is the goal. 
          The purpose of protesting tends to be to force someone(s) seen as being in power to submit. It’s a quick fix, but chances are as good as not that the person(s) forced to submit are not going to change their beliefs. They will resent those who forced them to submit, or perhaps suffer from Stockholm syndrome, but they probably won’t actually convert. For those who are forced into “righteous” action, righteousness is vain, or empty. On the other hand, those who have been converted are often strongly committed to that change in their lives. The adage is that there is no one so eloquent on the topic of not smoking as the one who had been a chain smoker. 
          I’m not saying that protests never have positive results, or that there should be no protests but that that the same complaint made by the guy about prayer – that prayer is not enough – is true of protesting. Protests that does nothing but exercise power over another individual has failed miserably. It’s worthless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Way, The Truth, and The Life

              Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me . (John 14:6)           If “I am the gate of the sheep…I am the good shepherd” from chapter 10 is a double whammy, this verse is a triple whammy. And its first victim is the notion that any other so-called god was acceptable or the same as Jesus. He, and He alone is the way, the truth, and the life, and the only way to get to the Father. There is no other Savior, or Redeemer, according to Jesus. Now, to be fair, other religions will claim that their religion or god(s) are the only way. That is the nature of gods and of religions. If this and that are equally good and agree on what’s necessary, then this and that are the same thing, so there’s no need to from the other to one. If that’s the case, then why speak against the other or promote the one? There’s a song I’ve been listening to i...
Post a Comment
Read more