ANACONDA CHRISTIANITY

Yesterday morning during my personal prayer time, I felt specifically led to pray for people who were weary, and faint-hearted. The picture that I got was of believers who were experiencing a spiritual (more accurately a soulish) fatigue that was cumulative. In other words, this was not a fatigue that came from just one bad day, or even a difficult week. This fatigue was deep-seated, and it developed over an extended period of exertion and depletion of resources.

As I continued to pray, I felt led to refresh myself in a few ideas from the Word. I am not going to go into all of that today, but if you want to do what I did, you can look up the verses (in this case I mostly looked up New Testament verses) that contain the words, weary, faint, fainthearted, rest, and refreshing.

In the New Testament, the word “weary” actually refers to a beating that brings physical exhaustion and disability. When we get tired, we sometimes say, “I’m beat.” This word is used to describe the aftermath of hard labor or toil that produces nothing. It is filled with anxiety and hopelessness that results in collapse. The end result is that instead of being joyful, strong, and full of vision, the believer can lose courage, lose heart, and give up.

Jesus of course addresses this very thing in Matthew 11:28-30. He invites us to come to Him when we are weary, heavy-laden, and overburdened, and He promises that as we take His yoke (enter into His work alongside Him instead of charting our own course) and learn of Him (let Him retrain us in thought, attitude, and action) He will give us rest.

Interestingly, the word “rest” does not mean to cease from work. A lot of Christians hold to a theology that says, “if something isn’t going well, I need to just lay it down, get out of the way, and let God do all the work.” Vine’s dictionary says “rest” does not mean to rest from labor, but to rest in labor. In other words, rest is found in a place of faith that co-labors with God and always gives Him the lead. We should not stop pressing forward, or wrestling in prayer, or resisting the devil, or working hard to repair a relationship, or working hard at the job that God has given us. But we should do all of that “yoked together” with Jesus. In other words, listen carefully to His instructions, walk close to Him, put more dependence on, and effort into, knowing Him than into doing.

There is a lot that we could say about this, but I want to wrap it up with just one more thought. Jesus says that we need to “learn of Him.” That does not mean to learn about Him, but to allow Him to train us in very personal and practical terms. We need to position ourselves DAILY at His side and press in to know Him more.

As I was praying through that, the Lord reminded me that we Christians are in what the Bible describes as an endurance race. One thing endurance racers have to do is eat well and eat regularly. It is essential that they maintain both their energy level and their hydration level. If they don’t, even the very top athletes will literally collapse on the racecourse. The Lord gave me a picture, and I will share it with you. He showed me a big snake, like an anaconda, that had just finished a huge meal. You have all seen the videos. A snake like that will eat something huge, like a goat, then not eat again for weeks.

Unfortunately, a lot of believers today do the same thing. Once a month or so, whenever it doesn’t interfere with the “important” things in their lives, they gorge themselves on God for a day or two. They come to church, dust off the Bible, maybe hang with some Christian friends. Then they don’t eat again for a month or six weeks. God has not called us to be anaconda Christians. We are to feed on Him daily, or several times a day, many times in small but very nutritious meals.

Any pastor can tell you that the anaconda Christians find themselves in continuous crisis, feeling weary, feeling left out, and disconnected. I have actually had someone come to me in state of depression because after being out of church for 10 weeks she felt “disconnected from the body.” I explained in my compassionate way that the reason she felt that way was because SHE WAS disconnected from the body! I love to help.

If we accept Jesus’ invitation; come to Him, be yoked to Him, learn of Him, feed consistently on Him, He WILL give us rest and new strength. No rest? Then in that area, we can be sure that we are not yoked to Him and feeding on Him. It is an easy remedy, and we can start today.

GOD'S PRINCIPLES ARE UNSINKABLE

We were standing knee deep in water. That wouldn’t really be so bad, but the water was in a boat that was lying on its side. That might not be that big a deal either, but the boat was lying on its side in the middle of a narrow, granite-lined canyon, the wind was howling like a teenager who just had her texting privileges taken away, and it was getting dark. At least the constant lightning was helping with the darkness problem.

Sailing in Colorado can be challenging. I have always been one for air-sports, and the current one is sailing. The only problem is that sailing in mountain lakes means dealing with mountain weather. Mountain weather means you might have perfect conditions for a while, then dead calm, then thunder, lightning, and gale force winds. You just never know. On the evening in question, we had all of the above.

My friend Rusty and I had enjoyed an hour and a half of perfect conditions and wonderful sailing. Then a huge storm cell began to approach the lake from the mountains to the south. We turned back toward the dock, which also happened to be toward the storm, at this point, but that is when we entered a half hour of dead calm. We knew it wouldn’t last and that we were in for a very strong headwind. Sure enough, when it arrived conditions went from calm to somewhere around 40 mph in a minute or so.

So there we were, my 21-year-old crewman and I, with the boat pinned down by the wind on its port side and rapidly drifting toward the rocks. I kept telling him, in the calmest voice I could manage, “She’ll come back up, just wait, she’ll come back up.” I knew in my mind, and was grasping to believe in my heart, that this was actually true. The reason that I could make this confident confession is that this boat is designed to right itself from ANY gust of wind. I knew that under our feet (well actually at that point out beside us, but it is supposed to be under our feet) a 500-pound keel hangs about 4 feet below the hull. So, even if the boat gets pushed over so far that the mast hits the water, once the sails spill the wind, or the wind drops just a little, it will come back up–at least, that’s what all the books say.

But in the gathering, lightning shattered gloom, with the screaming wind, and that gray granite so close, I wondered if the books were right. We only had two choices–wait for the boat’s design characteristics to put it back on its feet and try to sail away from the cliff, or give up, jump overboard, and swim for the other side of the lake. We waited. The wind subsided just a bit, and she came up. That experience gave us much more confidence to go through the same scenario five or six more times in the next fifteen minutes. Then the wind dropped just enough for us to make the run to safety.

Good story, but what’s the point? God’s principles work the same way. Our God did not just create life in the sense that He made living beings. He did make living beings, but He designed and created the actual idea and scope of life. He created the physical world and the laws that govern it. He created relationship and the rules that make it work. He created every thing, every emotion, every physical interaction between elements – He created it all. And, He created the Great Spiritual Principles that are always at work in and around the universe. He didn’t just make seeds, He made the principle of seedtime and harvest that make seeds work, He didn’t just create us with a capacity to believe, He released faith itself from the depths of His being–faith that accesses the divine flow of grace, favor, and every provision. He created purpose, and compassion, and love, and curiosity. He created life.

My point is that sometimes you just have to stand there with the wind howling and things looking bleak, knowing that you are standing on some unsinkable principles. We are all going to go through some storms in life, and as for me and my house, we want to be standing on the unsinkable principles of God when they hit. We decided long ago that we would do everything we could to, having given our lives to Christ, to follow Him, to learn His ways, and to allow His Spirit to transform the very way we think, so that our lives will be built on those unsinkable truths of His Word.

When Rusty and I got back to the dock that night I was shaken, and shaking. I won’t mind at all if I never get into conditions like that again. But we did get back for two reasons: because the designer of this old boat knew what he was doing, and because we stood our ground on what we knew to be true. We even learned some things along the way, and we are ready to go out again–weather permitting. When we go out, the same design elements that kept us afloat that night will be right along with us.

Now, if someone would just explain to me why my wife still refuses to go sailing with me, I would appreciate it.