WINNING - What does that mean?
If you're a supporter of a failing football club, you'll know how I feel.
Tomorrow I'll be gracing the London Stadium with my (these days) rare presence as West Ham take on Charlton, still very early into the new football season. Having thrown away a two goal advantage in the last six minutes of the first game, it's an all too familiar scenario for fans of teams like mine.
Ezri Konsa has just completed his transfer from Premier League Aston Villa to Arsenal. The move of dreams. He wants "to win."
Hang on.
Aston Villa had a fantastic season last time around. Maybe not as successful as Arsenal, who won the Premier League; but a European trophy and very healthy league placing constituted a highly positive campaign for Villa. Konsa was part of that. He contributed. It must have taken a lot of work, sweat, sacrifice.
No doubt his wages will spiral upwards with his move to London; but will it really be a greater, personal success? He is joining the top dogs of the land, currently, and I wonder how much greater an achievement it is to usually win as part of the best team, or to often win as part of a lesser outfit.
So he'll probably win more cups, maybe the league, maybe achieve at a higher level in European competition. It'll be the team effort. The team success. Is it really a greater success for him, personally?
We know the Bible tells us not to conform to the spirit of this world; achieving is part of our created nature, no doubt about that. But for whose glory? At what price?
The world will celebrate its victors for a very short while before doing its best to knock them to the floor.
These are days in which we have little time to exalt and magnify the Name of Jesus Christ. He is going to return soon for His people, I believe, so while He is 'away' we need to be about the business of investing in and delighting in His Kingdom. What we accomplish through the Holy Spirit will last into eternity. I just don't think we have time for our own works anymore.
We are part of His family, Team Jesus; it's a flawed team with a perfect Captain. I want to focus entirely on partnering with what He is doing and not to be encumbered with other stuff. That means church 'stuff', too. There is only one reputation to be magnified and it's His, Jesus Christ's.
That's where the life is, the peace, the sense of rest and wholeness.
"As it is in Heaven, let it be now on earth, Lord." Wherever His leading takes us.
Is Our Focus Him? Or About Him?
Shun (keep clear away from, avoid by flight if need be) any sort of idolatry (of loving or venerating anything more than God). (1 Corinthians 10:14 AMP)
There are many things which are not only harmless but good in themselves, which have, nevertheless, been allowed to take the place of the Lord Himself, and good things can therefore embody the principle of idolatry in the one in whom the devotion is found. Touch some Christians, or Christian institutions, and let the touch be even in relation to something more of the Lord Himself, and you will find an uprising of jealous regard for the institution which utterly blinds to that possibility of an extra measure of the Lord Himself. You can be so devoted to a denomination, a missionary society, a piece of Christian work, that there is no room for any extra measure of the Lord. The thing itself has become the end, the object for which you live, and when the Lord wants to get you moved on into something more of Himself, the obstacle is that good Christian work, association, institution, tradition, connection. Yes, and that is idolatry in principle, and we see from history how the Lord again and again has had to smite with smashing blows things which in themselves were good, in order to save His people unto Himself personally....
What is He after? It is Himself which He is seeking to establish as the object of man's life, and not the things that have relation to Himself: and I say again, you meet something intensely fierce if you touch a thing, even though you are touching it maybe with a view to getting people to move on with the Lord Himself. To put that in the other way, if your appeal for moving on with the Lord seems to people to involve their having to move away from this or that or some other thing, then there is warfare; which shows that Satan in his eternal campaign of idolatry, has got a footing amongst Christians in relation to things which take the place of the Lord Himself, good things though they be in themselves; and you find, if you are spiritually sensitive, that you are not just encountering the established institutions, but you are encountering a terrific spiritual force. Is that true? It is true. Had I never come up against it, never would I have believed the terrific force there is lying behind Christian institutions if your ministry touches them. You meet something which turns upon you, and it is not just the thing or the people. It is something that threatens your very life, to slay, and this in principle and essence, beloved, is idolatry; because its ultimate effect is that even the Lord cannot have what His heart is set upon and get His people spiritually where He wants them, because they are so bound up with His things. They are not able to discriminate between His things and Himself.
By T. Austin-Sparks from: The Cross, the Church, and the Conflict - Chapter 4