The end of it all...and the beginning of it all

On top of the ancient capital of Ammon

Sunset over Galilee

Nazareth Ridge

Thoughts from March 18

At Ancient Shechem

Thoughts and Reflections from this past week

It’s a great view here at JUC.  I can look out my window and see the towering hotels of the King Solomon or King David jutting above the horizon line.  Below is the Hinnom Valley (Gehenna in Greek….), which no longer seems like a place of fire and gnashing of teeth, but an open valley for concerts and dreadfully boring games of Ultimate Frisbee.  Just a hundred yards or so north of us, one comes upon an even better view: a massive stone wall.  This is the wall that surrounds the old city.  The wall is huge.  I look at it and wonder at it; how it is still standing, how would I go about trying to breach it, what does it represent?  The crazy thing is that wall has been up for centuries.  It defines the old city of Jerusalem.  Without it, despite the dimensions and architecture, the new city and old city would melt together.  In our classes we are learning about cities and the sorts.  Walls were a key to a cities survival in that it protected the city from outsiders.  Walls were very common and even small villages built houses in circles to form a similar idea.

            The reason I bring this up is because the Holy Spirit has been convicting me a lot about my own walls.  Why do people put up walls? Are walls a good thing?  I began thinking about it.  And for some reason “the Wall” by Pink Floyd kept popping into my head.  All right so I do like Pink Floyd and very much like music and it is only natural because that is the name of the album.  But is this really where the Holy Spirit was guiding me? To spacey, eccentric, concept rock?   In the album the main character (yeah it’s a story) goes through life building a wall to protect him, yet in the end he shuts everything out.  A line from a song near the end of the album sings: “And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.”  Is that what I do? 

            God has challenged me about certain ideas.  Theological ideas that are radical.  At first I stood firm in what was comfortable for me.  I built a wall of pre-conceived ideas.  A very strong wall that wouldn’t be budged.  A wall that shuts out biblical truth.  Yet the Holy Spirit worked in me to search for answers.  I was hearing of things that seemed so distant to me and so unnatural.  People were experiencing God in a way that was totally opposite than I thought it should be.  And yet I couldn’t get away from how Biblical it all seemed.  And so by the grace of God I began asking questions and looking for answers.  At first I looked inside my wall, inside my own notions for ways to explain these things.   But the more I searched, along with the Bible study in Ephesians Logan and I started doing this past week, the Holy Spirit started giving me answers.  And not only that he began giving me a deeper desire for the Word of Truth, for prayer, and for others.  As a result I feel closer to Him.  I’m slowly, by the power of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God, tearing down these old walls and putting up new ones.  I understand walls are for protection.  There is a lot of evil in this world and we need to be protected.  Walls also identify.  The wall that I want to put up is a wall of discernment based solely on the Bible, the Word of God.  To protect me from evil and to identify or define me as a son of God. 

            God has given me a wonderful opportunity to study His Word here in His city, but he has given me a better gift, the Holy Spirit, to encourage me and guide me towards God.  My prayer is that this desire to make Christ that the center of my life will not go away and to base my identity and my protection and my wall on the Word of truth, the gospel of my salvation.