“A teacher of the law came to him and said, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’ ”

-Matthew 8:19-20

Have you ever thought to yourself that Jesus wouldn’t have made a very good recruiter? Certainly, if he worked for the military, he would never have made his annual quotas. When we read some of the things that Jesus said to prospective disciples, steeped as we are in today’s culture of ‘attractional’ and ‘seeker sensitive’ churches, we might be forgiven for thinking that maybe he just didn’t understand what he needed to do in order to grow a large organization with ‘maximum impact’^[i]. In his recruitment drives, Jesus used phrases like ‘you must first count the cost’ (Luke 14:28), ‘let go of your friends, family and your own life’ (14:26), and ‘pick up your cross’ (14:27), all of which had immediate and graphic meaning to his listeners.

The short encounter between Jesus and the rabbi on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in Matthew 8 is classic Jesus. The teacher of the law has just told Jesus that as a rabbi himself, he recognizes Jesus’ authority, and desires to be his disciple. Jesus’ reply is not, ‘repent and be saved’—he replies that animals and birds have homes, but not the Son of Man.

What?!

Instead of being stoked that a rabbi with influence and ability has indicated a desire to follow him, Jesus chooses to use the occasion to make a profound point. It is one that our Father quietly calls us to in this 21^st century of unbelievable wealth, opportunity, and self-gratification, if we will have ears to hear. The point is this: fundamentally, when we become ‘Christians’, we change our citizenship. We move from having our home on earth to having no home on earth.

We become homeless.

Before we made the decision to follow Jesus, we were un-homeless, and everything we did was designed to give us a ‘return on our investment’ during our lives on this earth. For someone not committed to following Jesus, there is no shame in living this way—living according to the standards of the world means you are judged by them while you live in it.

For followers of Christ, however, our home is no longer on this earth—and everything we do in this temporary and short-term world is done to invest in our real home. In the fullest sense of the phrase, we become ‘citizens of heaven’. When you have citizenship or residence in more than one country, you understand immediately what it means to live in one place, but feel like you belong to another.

In practice, however, as Christians we choose whether we are homeless or un-homeless. It is the simple truth that many followers of Jesus are quite happily ‘un-homeless’. It is easy (and sometimes encouraged) to let much of what they do assist them in making life on earth easier and more enjoyable. Theologies and beliefs arise that usually share one thing in common—if you follow Christ, you will experience health, [insert your favorite material comfort here], and prosperity during your short time on this planet.

At the beginning of this century of profound opportunity and change, our ever-present Teacher quietly repeats the same call he gave more than two thousand years ago—when you follow me, will you give up your rights to your life, your family, your home, and your comfort during your short sojourn on this earth? Will you choose to be homeless? Or will you continue to keep your citizenship firmly rooted in the world?

There’s a great David Crowder song called ‘We Win’. In it, David leads a crowd of a few thousand yelling at the top of their lungs, ‘Because we’ve already won…this is for glory! Heaven’s glory!’

This is what it means to be homeless.

Resource of the Week: The David Crowder Band. Buy anything by this band, and experience the power that music (especially sacred music) has to touch the soul. This band gets it—worship that is humble, authentic, and rough around the edges—a useful reflection of our walk with God.

“…in repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength…“

-Isa 30:15

Have you ever had a week (or longer) where your workaday life seems to run in parallel and separate from your ‘spiritual’ life? Like they are on separate railroad tracks that only intersect at infrequent intervals?

I’ve had one of those weeks. If I measure it from what got done and the tasks accomplished, I see it as both intentional and productive—certainly, by the end of the week my prioritized and categorized ‘To Do’ list was empty! Mardi and I were preparing to leave on the weekend for South Africa, and I had spent the week delegating my responsibilities to some of my co-workers and making sure the project could continue to function in my absence. All in all, I felt pretty good about my ability to manage my time and the quality of my work.

But I was just empty inside. I felt like you do when you fast and you have that ‘hollow’ feeling in the pit of your stomach; only this was in my heart. I just felt far from the Lord.

Every time I sat down in the morning to pray or study there was the newspaper to be read, www.foxnews.com to be looked at for the latest on the Israeli-Hezbollah war, important emails to be answered, or the snooze button to be pressed on the alarm—‘I’ve worked hard this week, and I deserve to sleep in’.

I woke early Friday morning; empty and hungry. I opened my Bible to Isaiah 30:15, and read

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.

You said, ‘No, we will flee on horses.’ Therefore you will flee! You said, ‘We will ride off on swift horses!’ Therefore your pursuers will be swift!

Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!”

The historical context of these verses tells a story that rivals the best storytelling in books and movies today. The nation of Israel has split into two separate kingdoms, Israel and Judah, around 924 B.C. The Assyrians, led by their king Sennacherib, have laid siege to Judah’s outlying towns. The prophet Isaiah has counseled Hezekiah, the king of Judah, to wait on God and rely on his hand alone to rescue them. Against his advice, Hezekiah makes an uneasy treaty with Egypt in order to protect them against the Assyrians. Sennacherib, one of the most brutal and ruthless leaders ever recorded in history, gives an ultimatum to Hezekiah that he’s coming to get him, and that he’s crazy if he thinks Judah’s God will protect them from his armies. He then lays siege to Jerusalem.

As I read Isaiah’s words above early Friday morning, I was gently reminded by the Lord that like Hezekiah, I had become caught in a cycle of trusting and resting in my own strength and the work of my hands. I was more willing to rest in my ‘ability to make treaties’ than to rest in the Lord.

Can you relate? This is one of our battles as 21^st century western Christians. Most of us won’t ever face any real persecution for our faith, or find ourselves in a position where we are forced to choose between Jesus and death or imprisonment, like the early Christians. Unlike the nation of Israel during the period of Isaiah 30, we are not likely to be faced with complete annihilation at the hand of a brutal leader like Sennacharib (2 Kings 18:17, Is 30). The fear of this led Israel to seek a treaty with a nation that had held them as slaves for 400 years (Egypt)!

Our battle is to realize that in God’s upside-down kingdom, our strength lies not in our hands or our intellect, but in our ability to repent, rest, and quietly trust that God will do what he says he will.

Take some time this week to release to the Lord the outcome of the work of your hands, and give him free reign to lead and guide you in all that you do. Allow him to change your plans if he leads, and trust him if he says go, do, or wait awhile. And then rest, rest in the freedom he has given you to wait for him.

“Saul defended himself. ‘What are you talking about? I did obey God. I did the job God set for me. I brought in King Agag and destroyed the Amalekites…so the soldiers saved back a few choice sheep and cattle…what’s wrong with that?’“

-1 Samuel 15:20-21

Since Mardi and I returned from our trip to Israel in October 2005, I’ve been reading through the Old Testament. It’s now August 2006 and I’m in 1 Samuel, the tenth of thirty-eight books—yes, I’m reading very slowly. When I returned from Israel I found that I now have a connection between my head and my heart when I read of God’s interaction with his people thousands of years ago. For instance, when I read in 1 Samuel the story of David taking shelter from Saul in caves near the springs of En Gedi, I recall the feel of the rock underneath my feet, the sounds of waterfalls and the dry heat of the Judean desert—because I have walked there.

This is a part of the power of Scripture—more than a dry, historical record of the actions of an impersonal God, the written words of the Bible are used by our ever-present Teacher to connect with us personally and dynamically. Even though we might not have visited the geographic location of the events of the Bible, Scripture is powerful because our unchanging, constant God (1 Sam15:29) speaks to us today, right now through his interactions with people 5000 years ago who were just like us.

In 1 Samuel 15 we find the newly-crowned king of Israel, Saul, given a direct and unambiguous order by God to destroy an ethnic group of people called the Amalekites. God remembers that they persecuted the Israelites on their way out of Egypt (1 Sam 15:2), and wants them out of the picture so they can’t interfere with His people any more. He does not tell Saul to destroy only their army, or carry out pre-emptive surgical strikes to disable their command and control ability. He doesn’t ask him to battle them to a cease-fire and then hold war-crimes tribunals for all of their leaders. God tells Saul, in what we would call ‘plain English’ to kill all of the Amalekites ‘without pity’ (1 Sam 15:3), and to destroy (burn) all of their possessions and animals.

All of them. And all that they own.

What Saul does next is very interesting—he doesn’t have a problem waging a battle the Lord has already determined the outcome of, and he carries it out with gusto—and interestingly, mercy and restraint (see 15:6). But after a long and brutal campaign, in a fit of benevolence, Saul spares their king, Agag. He also allows his men to collect the best of the Amalekites’ animals (remember, animals to a largely agrarian people are roughly the equal of today’s stocks and bonds), ‘in order to sacrifice them to the Lord’ (15:15).

After the military campaign is finished, Saul builds a monument to the Lord’s victory, and gathers the best of the animals in order to have them sacrificed. Samuel, the faithful priest who was chief judge over Israel (before he anointed Saul and established the first-ever Hebrew monarchy) then appears and tells Saul that because he failed to obey the Lord’s clear and direct order to kill all of the Amalekites and destroy all of their possessions, the Lord is done with him, and has rejected him as king.

It would be a mistake to quickly write off Saul as being in clear violation of the Lord’s command, and think to ourselves something along the lines of, ‘if the Lord had spoken that clearly to me, I would never have disobeyed that flagrantly.’ It is equally a mistake to think that perhaps in Old Testament times God held his people to a higher standard of obedience, and boy are we glad God doesn’t expect us to strive to that level of obedience and devotion to His plan.

You can hear the injury in Saul’s voice when Samuel asks him why he didn’t listen to the Lord’s command and obey him (15:19): “But I did! I killed all of the Amalekites and only spared their king! And I made a battlefield decision to keep the best of the animals alive only long enough to sacrifice them to the Lord! Surely the Lord is pleased with my ability to innovate in my obedience?”

When I read Saul’s defensive reply, I am cut to the heart. When in humility and openness I turn my gaze inward, I remember times when I felt the urging of the Lord to do a certain thing. But after time passed by and I analyzed what I thought God had said and why He said it, I convinced myself that it might be better to do it another way, or to carry it out to a certain degree. What cuts me to the heart is that I sometimes choose to do something else for what I am convinced are the right reasons—and were you to ask me at the time, I would have a ready and ‘honest’ justification for why I thought it better to do it my way. Just like Saul.

As we examine God’s response to Saul’s actions, let us hear the Lord gently prompting us to remember the words He has spoken to us in the past, and examine whether or not we have obeyed him—or if, like Saul, we have innovatively and creatively come up with our own path of obedience. Perhaps the Lord has placed on you a call to do a certain thing, and on your own you have chosen to do something slightly different. Maybe, like Saul, you reinterpreted God’s words to you with what appeared to you to be the best of intentions, and have ended up not doing that thing for what you are convinced are the ‘right’ reasons. Your reasons may, at first glance, appear to be very pious or ‘spiritual’.

Perhaps you are comfortable where you are at, but when you examine your life in prayer and humility you remember that the Lord has spoken to you and given you guidance, and you have yet to act on it.

Allow the Lord to speak to you again with gentleness and grace and remind you that he is unchanging. You have not messed up His ‘Plan A’ for your life, and he does not have a ‘Plan B’ for you. He simply desires you to trust that He knows best, and that you really can trust Him with the things that matter most. God wants to remind us that we have nothing to fear from taking a risk and obeying him immediately and completely.

Let us be the kind of people who say to God, ‘thy will be done’, and let us never be the kind of people to whom God says in the end, ‘very well, THY will be done.’^[1]

For Further Action: Consider keeping a journal in which you write down reflections from your prayer and study times. Journals are a useful way to keep a written record of the promptings you feel from the Lord. They are also a good tool to use to go back and reflect on God’s words to you, and remember what he has spoken in the past. The French existentialist Albert Camus remarked that ‘Man’s first faculty is forgetting’, and a common thread in the Hebrew scriptures as well as our own lives is a tendency to forget what the Lord has already done, and demand that He do it again before we will trust Him.

Book of the Week: The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis. If you haven’t yet made it your life goal to read every word ever written by this great author, it’s not too late.