Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Will be won

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Luke 11:17
Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them: "Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall."

With my eyes closed, I try to visualize the collapse of a divided house, and I remember one of the final scenes of Scorsese's movie Casino. The Tangiers is loaded up with demolition explosives. Bright red flames flare out of the windows, one story at a time from the ground up. And then, down it goes. Raging selfishness and greed insure that same fate in the Mafia family. So new, so bright, so excited at first ... but built on sand.

Abraham Lincoln's most famous pre-presidential speech jumped off these words of Jesus:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

This speech may have lost him the U.S. Senate election in 1858. But what he said was true; and as president, Lincoln was guided by this first principle in all his decisions. He found a political avenue for emancipating the slaves. He also laid the foundation for building effective relationships with the Confederate states after the war.

Paul wrote of a dividedness we all share:

I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing.

Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Romans 7)

And James, too, knew what a toll a divided mind can take: "He who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does" (James 1).

The more I think, the more I second-guess myself. The more I know, the more I know I don't know. T. S. Eliot knew well this state of mind, posing as J. Alfred Prufrock:

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse ...
I am ... no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

But enough quotations. I'm just postponing the inevitable moment when I say something of my own instead of giving words to all the rest. What am I learning today from this fabulously full chapter 11 of Luke?

I think it is this. My motivations might be mixed, my personality might be split. But in whatever sorry state I find myself my undivided goal is to be united with Jesus. That first principle guides me always. When it does, there will be victory. When it does, there will be peace.

And death shall have no dominion.*

Bring up my mind to yours, Lord. Your eyes, your thoughts, your points of view.

*http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1486.html

Devotions Archive

Will be won

Thursday, February 28, 2008