Balance: Avoiding the Extremes

IT’S BEEN FAR TOO LONG since I’ve posted on this blog—since before the year-end holidays last year. So I’m overdue to add a second item in my list of the personally “Most Helpful Spiritual Insights I’ve Found” through the decades of my life.

This time, I want to speak briefly to the vital importance of BALANCE.

It’s not just of critical importance to tight-rope walkers and accountants tallying assets against liabilities. It’s vital too in what we accept as true in our Christian lives.

Some areas where things can easily get out of balance:

• Faith versus works

• Liberty versus license

• Grace versus legalism

• Head versus heart

• Quality versus quantity

• Justice versus mercy

• Fanaticism versus indifference

• Behavior versus relationship

Each of us is doubtless somewhere on the continuum for each of these pairs. And the more we’re balanced in our thinking and behavior, the better for us in our spiritual walk.

The enemy loves to get people so far to one side that they drive straight into the ditch on one side of the road or the other. But unlike driving a car—where in the U.S. it’s safer to be on the right side, or in Europe where it’s safer on the left—the best place for any of us spiritually is in the center of the road. Extremes on either side can be fatal not only to our spirituality but ultimately, to our eternal destiny.

It’s all too easy in life to “discover” truth for oneself—or to accept what we are taught—then adamantly, dogmatically cling to it, refusing to consider other ways of seeing things, closing our minds to anything new or different.

It’s fine to assemble and personalize our beliefs as we travel through life, but remember too what we all do when driving. We constantly make little moves, right or left, on the steering wheel, even on long, straight roads. We constantly make small “corrections” in the direction of our travel. If we did not do this, we’d soon end up straying off the road into the ditch.

We must constantly be doing the same with our personal belief system—making small (or sometimes even very large) corrections, lest we drift into the ditch. I’ve personally had to alter many things through the years that I once believed as a youth or young adult.

Just as the six blind men, each touching a different part of the elephant, were certain they knew the elephant was like a leaf, or a snake, or a tree, or a wall—yet each was “partly in the right” but all were ultimately wrong—we too must not be so proud that we stubbornly cling to our understanding of truth and foreclose ever altering it.

Balance.

Staying away from the extremes on either side.

One of the best lessons I’ve ever learned.

The Two Adams

ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND and burden-relieving things I’ve ever personally learned in my spiritual walk is Paul’s discussion of “the two Adams.” It’s because of understanding this that I have complete assurance of salvation. It’s because of this that I know I was forgiven 2,000 years before I was even born.

Paul isn’t always easy to follow, but try to do that for a moment. The rewards are enormous when you understand what he’s really saying.

Paul called Jesus “the last Adam”:

“The first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”—1 Corinthians 15:45.

You see, when Adam, the head of the human race, sinned, death passed over all of us. Paul wrote:

“Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned… Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. 19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.”—Romans 5:12, 18, 19.

But—and this is so vital to understand—all of us were in the first Adam there in Eden. God considered the whole human race to be in him. Therefore whatever happened to Adam happened to us all. Just as the first mountain climber on a rope may fall and take all the others down the precipice with him, when Adam fell, he took us all down with him. So when Adam came under the power of death, we all did.

Biologically speaking, of course, we were all quite definitely “in Adam” in Eden. The life that was in Adam has been passed on through countless generations, in one unbroken stream, to you and to me. If you have any doubts that you were in Adam there in Eden, consider where you would be just now if he had died with no children!

But in a far broader sense than just biology, in God’s reckoning we have all been included in Adam. So when it comes to sin’s consequences, God deals with this problem not just individually, but corporately. He deals with the entire human race.

What Adam did when he sinned, you see, affected us all. We all—and each—were doomed to reap the natural consequences of Adam’s choice. Therefore whatever God did to solve the problem also had to affect us all.

On the cross, Jesus died as the NEW head of the human race. And God, in His reckoning, has included every one of us in Jesus. “But of him [God the Father] are ye in Christ Jesus.” 1 Corinthians 1:30. So you see, just as we were in Adam the First, we are now in Adam the Second. And being in Christ is the key that opens salvation’s doors wide to us.

So whatever happened to Jesus happened to us all. What He lived counts now to God as what WE lived! When Christ died, we died. When He rose, we rose with Him to “newness of life.”

I am saved not by trying, by working, by becoming good enough, by keeping the law, by effort. I’m saved by accepting the FACT that when Jesus died, I—being in Him—died too, and paid the natural death consequence of my sinfulness and sins.

So unless I now reject the life that Jesus offers me, I have the right to, and absolute assurance of, eternal life. I am forgiven. I am free. I am reconciled to the Father.

BUT….someone protests—what about obedience? What about keeping the law? Are you selling “cheap grace,” in which you teach that because of the Cross, we can live as we please, because we are irreversibly saved?

Short answer: No. Because the companion teaching of Paul to “You in Christ,” is “Christ in you”! I’ll explore that in the next post.

The Most Helpful Spiritual Insights I’ve Found

I HEARD A PREACHER, when I was still high-school age, tell the story of another preacher of a time long past, who said, “When I was a young preacher, I organized all the Bible truth I knew into 300 doctrines. By the time I was in my middle age, I had narrowed that list down to just 30. But now I’m an old man—and now I have only two doctrines left: “I am a great sinner—and Christ is a great Savior.”

Now, I’m not sure that this story is genuine—that it actually happened. But there’s much truth in it, nonetheless. And the final words—”I am a great sinner—and Christ is a great Savior,” are definitely genuine. They were spoken by John Newton to his friend William Wilburforce, near the end of Newton’s life. I described the circumstances surrounding this statement back in June, in a post on my other blog—Right End of the Telescope.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on what the most important spiritual lessons are that I’ve learned through the years I’ve been here on Planet Earth. What ideas or insights have helped me most?

So for a while now here on this blog, I want to begin putting down in writing those key “big” ideas that have most benefited me in my own walk with God.

The first will be the twin concepts of “You in Christ” and “Christ in you.” The former is my only hope of salvation. The latter is my only hope of becoming more like Jesus. The theologians might call the first, justification—and the second, sanctification…but I’m not overly fond of those big ten-dollar terms. I need something practical, not just theoretical—something personal, not academic.

The Apostle Paul has some amazing, absolutely stunning things to say about those twin themes. So in my next post here soon, I’ll take a look at what I’ve learned from Paul—and also from some preachers and writers who have helped me see Paul’s writing more clearly—and focus on the first theme: “You in Christ.”

This exercise is primarily for my own benefit—to put on paper (or in this case, on a monitor!) where my thinking is at this moment in time. But you are certainly free to read over my shoulder…and if you wish, to weigh in with your own thoughts.

An Aroma From the Oven

SO FAR IN MY LIFE, NO ONE has ever said to me, “I just can’t stand the smell of home-made bread baking.”

Of the many aromas we human beings encounter in life, this one rates right up there. Each of us has his or her personal list of most-pleasant aromas or scents, of course.

Mine would include lilac and lavender, jasmine and honeysuckle, fresh-cut sawdust and new-mown hay, cinnamon rolls, freesia and fresh mint, sandalwood incense, the salty ocean breeze, roses, maple syrup, the air after a quick rain on dusty ground, the smell of rubber in a tire store (probably a guy thing), a smoky campfire, an evergreen forest, and apple-spice—for starters.

But the aroma of home-made bread, for sure, is one that most everybody has on their list of favorites.

Home-made bread. The “staff of life.” Wholesome, natural, filled with good stuff. And when you’re hungry—nothing better.

Beggars—and bread. Let’s be clear from the outset what the bread is.

It’s not morality or theology or ecclesiology or psychology or any other “ology” (though all of these can be related to what bread really is.

Bread is what you find in John 6:

And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. . . . I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Verses 35, 51, NKJV.

I’d like to suggest that God put an inborn hunger for this Bread into each of us. We can ignore that hunger, of course. Or we can try to satisfy it with something else. But it’s there, that hunger.

When you eat store-bought bread—filled with all those nutritious additives and preservatives and dough conditioners and who knows what—it’s just not the same as the real thing: fresh home-made bread.

And nothing can take the place of the real Bread of life: Jesus. Nothing else can satisfy that inborn spiritual hunger as He does.

What you find of the Bread, please share. I’ll do the same.

One Beggar to Another

FIRST POST…NEW BLOG. To see my reasons for launching it, see the page above: “About Beggars and Bread.” More posts to come…

I also invite you to peruse the left-hand column for other blogs, websites, and resources I’ve found spiritually helpful.