Which Ruts Will You Choose?

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are a reflection on Sunday’s message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/hear-a-message]

This winter, my street has not gotten plowed nearly as often as I would have liked. As the snow got packed down by cars driving over it, ruts began to form--often just one down the middle of the street, making two-way traffic difficult. While veering from the well-worn ruts could be hazardous as the unpacked snow threatened to ensnare vehicles in its snowy grip, at least the ruts carved a path to drive on.

In Judges 10 and 11, the Israelites had gotten pulled into the practices of the culture around them by serving other gods. Yet when they cried out to God, he sent Jephthah, a mighty warrior chosen by God to deliver the Israelites from the oppression of the nations around them. Before going into battle, Jephthah made a vow to the Lord: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

This wasn’t something God commanded. Just a verse before, we read that “the Spirit of the Lord came on Jephthah.” He already had everything he needed to defeat the Ammonites. So why this last-minute vow? Because this is what Jephthah learned from the culture around him. The people groups around the Israelites offered sacrifices to their false gods, and Jephthah had seen that. When things got tough, Jephthah returned to the ruts of the culture around him. Instead of believing in a God who offers free grace, he believed in a God who demanded something in return.

I wonder what the ruts are that we fall into when we don’t know what to do. Our culture doesn’t have practices as drastic as human sacrifice, but it tells us other things--that our value comes from what we do, that we always have to have the latest and greatest stuff, that we have to have a certain GPA or title on our business card to amount to anything. These ways of thinking can become ruts that affect our actions--perhaps especially the split-section reactions that seem to happen before we even fully think them through.

Jephthah likely didn’t think he was giving in to cultural pressure when he made that vow to God. He probably didn’t think about the ruts of thinking and acting that had slowly crept in.

So what are the cultural patterns we’re entrenching ourselves in? What are the ruts we’re creating, possibly without even knowing it? We can easily turn to what the world tells us is important, or we can turn to God and what he says is important. It’s the ruts we create in the everyday moments that turn into the ones we go back to when the going gets rough.

Which ruts will you choose?

[Brianna DeWitt attends Encounter Church and lives, works, and writes in Grand Rapids, MI. You can see more of her musings on her personal blog at http://awritespot.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @bwitt722.]

Contemporary Idolatry

Midweek Encounter 2.9.14

Contemporary Idolatry

Imagine that you recently made a new friend, and he or she invites you over on Friday night. You show up at 7:00 and pull into the driveway and notice that your friend has two enormous graven images parked in the garage. A bit weird, but perhaps this friend is an artist. You enter the house, and everywhere you look you see polished and stacked stones, golden figures, and ornate woodcarvings. Your 21^st century brain requires a few minutes to reconcile what you see with what you know, but as you look about, there can be no mistake: your friend’s house is full of idols.

Now imagine that you and I are friends and I invite you over for dinner. And by “dinner”, I mean that I invite you over for Hot-n-Readys. Not such a stretch, probably. Imagine that you pull into my driveway and you see two newish cars parked in the garage. Maybe two “prudent” choices that announce to the world that we’re not rich but we’re not sacrificing too much, either. I greet you at the door and you notice a sizable shoe collection in the wicker bins to your right. These are my kids’ shoes. Mine are stashed in several closets of several rooms and I have to change them out seasonally because my foyer can’t store them all. You step into the living room. Nothing really seems out of the ordinary—photos of the kids adorn nearly every vertical space in the house, thirty or fifty toys might be strewn about, the kids’ bookshelf is literally overflowing. Nothing in my house is particularly fetching, but nothing is in as state of disrepair, either. Well, the railing along the stairs was broken for a bit, but my step-brother-in-law, Ben, screwed it back into the studs one day when he was babysitting my kids. Not bad for $10/hour.

Modern day idolatry is a bit slippery. Because although I would doubt that you have a golden calf or an Asherah pole on your mantel, you might have some lovely photos of your family, or perhaps 60” of HD entertainment. And don’t worry, that might be 100% ok. Your heart knows the answer.

There’s this story about the Israelites in the book of Gideon. The Israelites “did evil in the eyes of the Lord”, which they loved to do, apparently, and for seven years they suffered at the hands of the Midianites. The Israelites had nothing, and whatever they tried to have was utterly destroyed by the Midianites. Eventually, after their homes and farms and wealth were oppressed year after year after year, Israel finally cried out to the Lord. The story records these events very carefully: “The Israelites cried out to the Lord because of Midian.” Not because they were repentant over making their homes, their wealth, or their farms their idols, and not because they were repentant for worshipping Baal, but because someone else kept taking their stuff. They cried out, “Lord, the Midianites keep taking all of my things. Do something!” And God responded, of course, that he was doing something. He’s always doing something. He was teaching them to rely on Him, to make him their only priority, and they were having none of it. So year after year, their oppression continued. 

Eventually, an angel of the Lord comes to Gideon and tells him that it’s time for deliverance, but first, God demands obedience. Gideon was told to cut down his father’s alter to Baal and to build an alter to Yaweh on top of it. He does so, at pretty great peril to himself.

Sometimes, when I look around my house, I wonder if God is going to send a messenger to tell me to tear down the photos of my family from my walls and to burn them on an alter of the Lord. How many times do we young families skip out on church obligations or service in God’s kingdom and use the excuse of our families? For me, the family is the easiest idol to create and maintain. A close contender for many modern day Christians is probably work or possessions or reputation or popularity. It wouldn’t be pretty, but imagine if God demanded us to sacrifice our idols to him—our promotions or reputations or vacations. Of course he does demand that we maintain no idols, but he extends to us a whole lot of grace, which is to say time, to figure out how to put the first things first. And most importantly, of course, he sacrificed himself as atonement for all of our unfaithfulness and idolatry.