Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it;
for he founded it on the seas
    and established it on the waters.
Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord?
    Who may stand in his holy place?
The one who has clean hands and a pure heart,
    who does not trust in an idol
    or swear by a false god.

• Psalm 24:1-4

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.
Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.

• James 1:19-25

“Today we are in danger of being caught up in the lure of wrong roads to the Kingdom-‘Things must be worked out at once, we cannot wait, there must be results immediately.’ If to benefit mankind is the whole purpose of God, quicker results could be produced apart from the Redemption, because the Redemption works appallingly slowly, according to our human standards. If all that is necessary is this hand-to-mouth business there is no need for all the teaching of Jesus, no need for patience until God’s purposes are fully worked out. To look on the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount as referring to a future dispensation is to rob the Cross of its meaning. If Jesus Christ cannot alter me now, so that the alteration shows externally in my home life, in my business life, when is He going to alter me? What is going to transform me so that I can love my enemies, can pray for those that persecute me, if I cannot do it now? No suffering or discipline on my part will make me any different; the only thing that will make me different is being born again into the Kingdom of God. To look for death to make me holy is to make out that death, which is ‘the last enemy’, is going to do what the Atonement cannot do. The Cross of Christ alone makes me holy, and it does so the second I am willing to let it.
The Kingdom of God is latent in the Cross, but don’t spiritualize the Kingdom into vagueness, and don’t materialize it into non-spirituality … To say that the Kingdom is going to be brought in by the earth being swept clean through wars and cataclysms is not true; you cannot introduce the Kingdom in that way, it is impossible. Nothing can bring in the Kingdom saving the Redemption, which works in personal lives through the Cross and in no other way.”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (October 4, from God’s Workmanship)

Have you heard, or have you ever said, “I do not want it as soon as possible (ASAP), I want it yesterday.”  We had a word that we used in the military that was impossible, non-sensical, but effective.  The word was “soonest.”  To define “soonest” you have to understand “as soon as possible.”  With ASAP, you realize to keep your sanity, you will have to close your eyes and breathe a little.  When it gets to be mealtime, you might stop to quickly eat a sandwich.

Note: My wife and I had both been military, she while I was in college, and me after we were married.  But we both learned to eat in a hurry.  We rarely savored our food.  My wife occasionally asked me if I had taken the time to enjoy the taste of something she felt she had spiced perfectly.  I would swallow hard, and then promise for a few bites, at least, I would slow down to enjoy the work she had put into the meal.  Yes, you can eat so fast that you miss subtleties in the spice pallet.

But ASAP is usually considered to mean “as soon as reasonably possible.”  “Soonest” obliterates that notion.  Soonest means quicker than ASAP.  The dictionary equates soonest with ASAP but adds “urgently” to the definition.  In the military, you learned that if the commander said “soonest” you found a way to trim hours, minutes, or seconds off what you might think of when you think of As Soon As Possible.

Have you noticed how the church is getting to be as impatient as the world?  I wrote recently about how the church wants to make the worship service more entertaining, which means that our church leadership has no clue who the people “worshipping” are.  But they cannot see why church attendance is crashing?

The church that I presently attend does not have Sunday school in the summer.  They want to give their teachers “a rest.”  They move the second service up to make it impossible to sandwich Sunday school between the services.  So, are we training people, who enjoy daylight savings time anyway, to become sun worshippers by giving them more afternoon time in the sun by moving the worship service up earlier?  Could they simply go to the first service if they needed more time in the sun?  Oh, no, they are also sleep worshippers.  They cannot do without their sleep or their sun worship.

But I bring it up in that I teach a Sunday school class.  It took months of getting to know a young Japanese family who attended the early service.  They attended the class where I teach for the last class before the summer break.  I have never seen them in church since that Sunday.  They laughed at some of my stories.  Maybe they were “entertained.”  I do not think anyone said anything offensive.  But in noticing that their primary goal was to have Sunday school for their children, did they find a church that has Sunday school every week all year?

Having church leaders who never attend Sunday school creates church leaders who do not see the importance in Sunday school.  Thus, Christian education as a whole suffers.

But Rev. Chambers goes beyond such things.  The entire sanctification process, which he calls the Redemptive works, is a slow process.  I have often mentioned that R. C. Sproul, in a conference question and answer session, said that sanctification happens little bits at a time.  For those who really want to be more like Jesus, God chisels away little bits of “non-Jesus-like” qualities, but the biggest part that is chiseled away is upon our death.  In other words, we will not be perfect, but to add what Rev. Chambers says, if we wait until death, we have missed the point.  We need to desire God to do a little chiseling every day so that our lives reflect God’s light to those around us.

And that is horribly slow at times.  Some people who knew us before we accepted Jesus may not trust the change within us until they see that our life has indeed changed remarkably.

But we live in a world that wants instant gratification.  The internet keeps creating new social media platforms to not just play toward our shortened attention span, but they program us into becoming bored after a few seconds.  I wonder if anyone under the age of thirty years old has ever read a book of at least 300 pages with no pictures in the book.  I might have to add a provision – reading such a book for a book report in school does not count – but my son tells me that his high school student, middle school student, and elementary school student have never ever written a book report.  When I was in middle school, we had to write a book report every six weeks, and the book had to be listed on the “classical” literature list.  And I now have a junior in high school that has no clue what I am talking about when I say “book report.”  I am sure they could write a review of a 5 second Tik Tok video, and part of their review will be that it was too long.  They lost interest after three seconds.

But I guess I am writing this to people who can keep their attention span into the fourth page of writing.

What is the answer?  The Holy Spirit is willing, if only we were willing.  You do not need entertainment if the Holy Spirit is active within you and the others around you.  And the Holy Spirit grabs your attention.  After an hour or two hours, someone who is not affected by the Holy Spirit’s work asks you for the time.  Otherwise, you would never have noticed the past two hours had gone by so quickly.

The answer is not what we do, unless it is prayer.  The answer is that we must be willing participants in what the Holy Spirit can do within us and within the church body.  And then the problem will again become empty pews.  The problem will not be all the empty pews in the church.  The problem will be finding an empty pew for all the people who are flocking in to be part of something special, something unworldly in a fallen world.  Something that is – might I say, Holy.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.