Priority One

It has been said that you can look at a person’s checkbook to see where their priorities are. For many of us this means our top priorities are Citibank, Capital One, Starbucks and Target. Your list might be a little different based on your interests. If you’re into tools then Sears or Home Depot might be on the list. If you’re into shopping online then it might be Amazon. If music is your thing, then it might be iTunes.

Where and how you spend your money does say something about your priorities. Some people value driving newer cars. Others value living in a large home. Some are into lavish globe-trekking vacations. If a friend where to open up your checkbook (or online bank statement), what would it say about what’s important to you?

Money is not the only way to gain insight into what someone loves, time is probably just as important. Time is the great equalizer. Some have more money than others, but everyone has the same amount of time in a day. The way that you chose to spend your 24 hours gives an important insight into your life.

You can tell what someone is into by how much time they spend at it. The people who are into sports spend their time on the couch on game day, watching the game. They probably also spend a significant amount of time reading about the sport and of course managing their fantasy football league. They might spend time shopping for and buying the right jersey and of course the appropriate team flags to fly out their car windows.

If you’re not into sports, you might scoff at this ridiculous display of mis-managed time. But that’s just because sports is just not your thing. Maybe your thing is computers, sewing, gaming, cars, WCW or working out. There’s a million things that people are into and they spend a lot of time doing the thing, thinking about the thing and planning to do the thing. What’s your “thing”? How do you spend your time?

Money and time are two huge indicators of what is truly important to you. People can say that their marriage and their family are their top priorities, but money (and time) talks. Often people say that they are willing to lay their life on the line for their kids, but they aren’t willing to lay their time or money on the line. It’s funny how easy it is to promise that you’re willing to “lay your life down”, but you won’t lay the TV remote down and go out and play ball with the kids outside.

What’s important to you? It is said that you can become an expert on any subject if you were to spend 30 minutes a day for six months studying it. Some of us have become experts on things that are entertaining but that don’t really mean much in the long run. Maybe it’s time to become an expert on the subject of your spouse?

The pastors of Kings County would love to help you focus your priorities in the areas that matter. Jesus told a story about a man who found a pearl worth so much that he went out and sold everything to buy it. Far too often we are spending the resources of our lives buying things that are worthless and the pearls are right in front of us all along.

Andrew Cromwell is the executive pastor at Koinonia Church in Hanford. E-mail him at andrew@kchanford.com or call 582-1528.

Desire

I want. I want. I want.

When we think of the word “desire”, often the first thing that comes to our mind is our list. All of us have lots of desires. The whole world’s economies are fueled by desire. Everyone wants a bigger, better, newer, shinier, bike or car or house or plane. And if we don’t desire it now, you can rest assured, advertising departments everywhere are investing their resources in figuring out a way to create that desire inside of you.

Of course, we have more than just material desires. We have emotional desires as well. At our best, we want to be accepted. We want to lead meaningful lives. We want to love and be loved. At our worst, we want to hurt those who have hurt us. We want to make others feel bad so we can feel good. And we want to impress everyone.

That’s the funny thing about our desires, they can be good or they can be bad. Like the cartoon depicting the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, our desires whisper inspiration or destruction in our ear. In the blink of an eye we go from saint to sinner.

This internal struggle of competing desires is familiar territory for all of us. We have all had the experience of pursuing a good desire and having it result in a good outcome. You go out of your way to show kindness to a stranger because you desire to be a kind person. In doing so, you are rewarded internally by a sense of positive accomplishment. Often, you are also rewarded externally by a kind response from the person you help.

Similarly, we have all chased after desires that were not so good. Perhaps you gave in to jealousy or greed because of a negative desire for possession of a person or of material things. In doing so, you wounded someone and most certainly yourself as well.

Many solutions have been offered to this struggle. The Buddhist solution is to seek to eliminate desire altogether. The hedonist argues the best way is to simply jump headfirst into the fray and give oneself to the fulfillment of every possible desire. In doing so, the pleasure will be such that it will drown out every other concern.

The Greek gnostic solution is to separate desires into two camps. One camp, connected to the spirit, was all good. The other, connected to the body, was all bad. Everything to do with the spirit--kindness, love, compassion, generosity, selflessness--should be pursued. And everything to do with the body--sex, appetites--should be denied.

Interestingly enough, there is even an economic solution for this quandry. The capitalist argues that selfish desires can be harnessed and redirected by making material gain dependent upon the service of the other. In doing so, our modern concept of “customer service” is created. The customer is always right because the way to the customer’s money is by filling their desire. Those who do it best get rich. Those who don’t, go bankrupt.

Jesus’ solution to this challenge is to offer a paradox that sounds similar to the Buddhist solution, but goes a step further. He said, “Those who desire true life, must despise their self-focused life.” This strange statement holds the key for us.

Every living thing has desires. This is normal and natural. The problem is our desires are constantly at war with one another. But when you look at something that is dead, we immediately see there are no desires at war. There is, in fact, no desires whatsoever.  

So the very first thing that must happen to us, according to Jesus, is that we must die. Fortunately, this death is not a natural death (although that will happen to all of us at some point), it is instead a spiritual death. What must be put to death inside of us are all of our selfish, self-centered desires. All of the things that take away life anyway, these must be put to death.

But it doesn’t stop there. After the death, there is a resurrection. There is a new spiritual life and a new set of other centered desires that emerge. The great theologian, Apostle Paul, describes it in this way, “For when we died with Christ, we were set free from the power of sin….so use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right.”

These beautiful desires to love rightly, to serve willingly, and to give freely spring out of people that have died to themselves. And these desires, when followed consistently are thereby reinforced and become a benevolent cycle that changes not only the person who is acting beautifully but those around them as well.

In one sense, Jesus is suggesting a wholesale desire transplant for all those who are fed up with living life the same old way. Transplanted organs don’t work very well if the immune system is not suppressed systematically. The immune system will attack the new organ, no matter how needed the new organ is. All of the work done to harvest, transport and insert the new organ is useless if the body will not accept it.

In the same way, all of us need a desire transplant. But no matter how much we need it, if we do not deal with the state of our heart before the transplant, then the transplant will fail. When we come to the point that we are ready to truly die to the old selfish way, then and only then are we ready for the new.

So what do you want?

Pass the Chocolate

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. A quick check of the Sunday ads or a run through your local department store will remind you of the fact. Virtually any calendar pronounces that April 5, 2015 is Easter.

But what is Easter, exactly? If you were a visitor from another planet who was unfamiliar with our traditions and was charged with studying the major holidays of the people of planet Earth, what would you conclude?

A study of the ads and stores might lead you to believe that the people of this planet believe in a mythical creature called the Easter bunny. This gigantic rabbit apparently loves pastel colors and promotes the purchase of new sets of clothing in said colors. He is further honored by the curious practice of painting white eggs in shades of pink, green, blue and yellow. But it doesn’t stop there. People also buy massive amounts of chocolate and other sugary sweet objects and pack these candies into other hollow plastic eggs. They then take these little balls of sugar and spread them around their yards. Next, they dress their children up in their new clothes, shove a plastic basket in their hand and engage their children in a kind of contest where the children collect as many of these colorful orbs as possible. The adults then watch as the children gorge themselves with the candy until their eyes roll back in their heads and their brains go into a overload involving many tears and stomach aches.

Perhaps that description of Easter is not too far off from the way many people celebrate the holiday (excepting of course that the adults are sneaking at least as much candy as they actually load into the eggs). There is little doubt that insofar as retail is concerned, Easter is simply another holiday that presents an opportunity to market and sell something to a willing general public.

But this version of Easter misses the mark. While there is nothing wrong with new clothes and coloring eggs, and certainly nothing wrong with consuming mass amounts of chocolate covered peanut butter, we are remiss if we fail to look deeper at the reason for this holiday.

Easter is marked on our calendar because it is the holiday that celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As such it is a uniquely Christian holiday. As a matter of fact, if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, then not only would there not be a reason for Easter, there would not be a reason for Christianity altogether.

In all of human history, there is only one person who predicted their own death and resurrection and then actually followed through. This is the central claim of the Christian faith. Whatever other objections you might have to Christianity—Christians are jerks, church is boring, the Bible doesn’t make sense, etc.—you have to first and foremost wrestle with Jesus coming back to life after being dead for three days. The fact is there is a lot of evidence for this historical event.

Have you really wrestled with Easter? Have you investigated the claims that Christ made about Himself? Or is Easter to you still just a day of cute white bunnies and peeps?

Tomorrow churches through Kings County will celebrate the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Maybe its your time to find out if there’s something to it!