To look at a tree as it stands in the woods, tall, majestic, alive, it isn’t very evident as to the beautiful music inside, or how would anyone know what to do with the wood or how it would be fashioned in order to make it sing? i figure God knows stuff we do not know and just because i don’t understand doesn’t make His word not so.
Somewhere along the line, God put it in the heart of man not only to need music, but to have the wisdom of how to fashion and form wood so as to draw the music and resonance out of it; how to pull strings across thin pieces of wood, or how to bend and carve parts of the tree, stretch a hide over it to make a drum, and then He gave us the wisdom and knowledge of how to make it better and better. i r-e-a-l-l-y doubt the universe came up with that….or maybe some think, “It just happened.” Right. But….well, nothing “just” happens does it?
I’m Social Porter and this is acoustic night here at Outposts. The cafe navigators, Rick and Jerry have declared every fourth Friday acoustic jazz night from dusk to closing. i think it’s a great idea….i think of it as the song in the woods, at the bend of the Ockluhwahhah River, in the edge of the forest by the trees which over shadow the rivers edge, home to a million fireflies in the summer. Acoustic night begins tonight and you’re just in time for brilliant music and contemplative conversation.
What is love to you? Who told you that? Is it love or lust? What are the stories of love you’ve heard or were told as a child which helped you form your ideas of love? Is there really someone called, “The One”, or is there just “One or two or more” or maybe just “whatever” for some who may be fed up with the search? Hang tight and i’ll be right back.
i read a really good article somewhere this week speaking of the difference between lust and love based on 1 John 2:16, “For all that is in the world–the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life–is not of the Father but is of the world.” i’m going to pick the lust of the eye for simplicity’s sake considering the big three there in that scripture, together, are a huge topic, and i’d like to narrow it down to one… for now.
What in the world does “lust of the eye” mean to you? Who rules your eye gate … anyone? Do you just let anything in your eyes to roam around in your head, crashing and smashing whatever it likes? From scripture, “The Eye” from God’s view, is in terms of aims & perspectives, and you should ask yourself what i meant by “aims and perspectives” and is there a difference? Don’t let that one get past you.. Continuing on…. by “the eye” we set our end before us, the “mark we shoot at”, or a goal. “The Eye” is also used in the sense of “the eyes of our understanding”, the eye as a perception of practical judgment and conscience, the seeing part of us which guides and directs our motions. The eye is also historically used as one of many building blocks in the foundation of our character, conduct, and conversation, the Three C’s. Our inner and outer eyes help define what is our end and aim…so i suppose it’s good to ask then, Is it ourselves or the Lord, what is the end you’re walking towards, and how can you tell?
That’s a good view of what “the eye” is about but, what is “lust” anyway? i mean, nobody hardly talks about it anymore, probably not very politically correct. Or maybe the idea of lust in our society is typically only used to get rid of opposing bureaucrats when one party, selectively, wants someone gone. In other words, no one cares unless it can be used as a weapon against an opponent. In the news lately, one guy got famous because of his unbridled lust, and another guy got kicked to the curb for even thinking about it. Pretty mean bunch of people if you ask me. From what i can see, Love is the opposite of lust. To me, lust is an activity of the will in a very questionable sense, a disorderly and unregulated affection, a literal craving….it’s an overwhelming longing for something or someone we’ve decided we just can’t live without. Gimme, gimme, gimme. The best example of lust is all the way back at Genesis 3 where Eve and the serpent are having a conversation, the serpent saying “Are you kidding me? God really said you can have everything except that one thing?” Eve repeating God’s words saying, “Yea, He said that, AND He told us if we ate the fruit, we would die!” The serpent says, “Oh yea, right! You will not. He just doesn’t want your eyes to be opened and be like He is! He’s holding out on you, can’t you see that?” Let’s keep in mind here, Adam is oddly absent. i find that pretty strange. Everyone wants to blame Eve, but you know, Adam was responsible and he doesn’t even get a dishonorable mention, he’s just absent. Then in verse 6 it says Eve saw the tree was pretty, she saw it was good for food (how she made that determination is a mystery seeing as how she’d never tasted it’s fruit), and she saw it was “desirable to make one wise”. Here we go now, the first two words of vs. 6 are “So when”, “when” meaning “at what time, or what period”. Uh oh! To begin the sentence like that means she had thought about it all, rolling the serpents words around in her head, re-visualizing how delicious it would be to eat that beautiful fruit and possessing the very thing God said would kill her. Here we can see wrongness of character which drove her rebellion, inordinate desire, and disobedience ruling Eve’s eye gate. “She saw” meaning she contemplated with intent. Did you get that? “Contemplated with intent.” More than just thinking about it, she was planning some action to get it for herself. Contemplated with intent. In light of that let me ask you, Who rules your eye gate … anyone?
By the Law of first mention, meaning the first time something is mentioned in the Bible, precedence was set in Gen 3 by disobedience and wrong desire … mankind decided to open their own eyes. God didn’t do it, man decided that, without God. It didn’t turn out well considering the entire universe came under a sentence of death, chaos and corruption entered in and we had a new master, sin.
i think this is a good time to give a good definition of sin, and it goes like this: Anything which weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God or takes away your relish for righteous spiritual things, anything which increases the authority and the power of the flesh over the Spirit…that to you becomes sin.
That day in the garden was the day disobedience and corrupt desire weakened mans reasoning; it impaired the tenderness of his conscience; it obscured his sense of God and took away his relish for righteous spiritual things; it increased the authority and power of the flesh over the Lord, and to Adam and Eve, to every human being and everything in the universe, that disobedience, rebellion, and corrupt desire became sin. It didn’t matter how good the fruit was in itself. In that moment man was left bowing & scraping to the power and authority of transgression and wrongness of character. And it all started at the fountain of someone’s person who’s heart became filled with the vision of “dubious want” and a “craving desire”, not to mention the lie that maybe God was holding out on them. And then to top it off, Adam was absent. Again, by the Law of First Mention, the first person spoken of whom God opened the eyes of is Hagar in Genesis21:19, and i want you to know, when God chose to open someone’s eyes, things went much better than when the first two, without God, decided to open their own eyes. Ok, here’s some good wisdom for us all: With God, good idea. Without God, bad idea. C’mon, say it with me, With God, good idea, without God, bad idea (say 2x). Lust opened the first eyes, Love opened Hagar’s eyes.
When God opened her eyes, the first thing Hagar saw was water, the first thing she did was give Ishmael a drink. Adam and Eve first helped themselves, the first thing Hagar did was help someone besides herself. Adam & Eve raised “implusive necessity” to an all-commanding, conscience condemning, good sense over-ruling motivation. Without God as the governor of their eyes, they were self-promoting and self-satisfying, they promoted their own passions, and their opinion became the rule. Sound familiar, like “Have it your way”?
Is Love the governor of your eye gate, or lust… we’ve got a bad case of “got the gimme’s”…i want it, i want it, gimme, gimme, gimme, can’t live without it!
Jesus died for us so we could recover and be restored from a state of death. Where lust offers us death, Love offers us life. Lust draws us into a world of hypnosis, lost in the dazzle. The world around us is filled with dazzle and we are so easily captured by what we see. Our eyes take in vision 10 + 9 zero’s faster than what we hear, no wonder there is a huge spiritual war going on over our eyes! Advertising is always sureal, dazzling, car colors in photo’s are brilliant, delicious colors… flowers are portrayed as more brilliant and dazzling than they are, everything is just big, and bigger. Advertising works hard to make everything we see “pop”, always wrestling for our attention. Cities are blindingly bright, architecture is truly phenomenal; people are more beautiful than ever, everyone is encouraged to just “have it your way”.
But let’s look at it all another way, we can have all the world has to offer, lost in the world of having what you’ve got and wanting what other’s have too, but did you know desire can have offspring? i believe James 1:14-15 speaks of the sin in the garden like this, James 1:13-15, “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lusts and enticed. Then, when desire (or lust) has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.”
“Lust”, the desire for what is forbidden. We can either accept God’s gift of Love and live, or go with our lusts and die. Pretty simple. With God, good idea. Without God, bad idea.
Who or what governs our appetites? Here’s a contrast: Love lifts us up, lust chokes the air out of us, and we don’t know we’re out of air until we’re nearly dead. Love is concerned with the whole person and all their appetites, lust reduces us to one appetite and one craving, and that one thing becomes the all encompassing focus of our lives. Love is considerate and kind, lust reduces people to tools or toys – something to exploit. Love has inherent durability, lust dies at dawn. Lust may rise like a blood sucking vampire during the end of the day, but every morning it dies. Love isn’t an itch, or a twitch, but lasting and enduring, whereas lust, ahh….lust degrades whatever it touches and keeps on degrading until something becomes disposable. Love, the Love of God is a true love story, lust is a lie masquerading as love from the beginning. Will your heart follow after your eyes?
2Corinthians5:14-15, “For the love of Christ constrains us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.” Constrain, as it’s used in vs. 14 means to “hold together or hold fast”, meaning for those who have set Christ as their “eye gate”, His love holds them together, His love holds them fast, and that’s a promise. His love and goodness are the bolts on our doors, the monitor over our mouth, and the compass for our heart.
Eugene Peterson wrote: “We live in a world awash with love stories. Most of them are lies. They are not love stories – they are lust stories, sex-fantasy stories, domination stories. From birth we are fed on lies about love.” “When our minds and imagination are crippled with lies about love, we have a hard time understanding this fundamental ingredient of daily living called “love”, either as a noun or a verb.”
Who governs your appetites? Love or lust? Does your eye crave the dazzling things, or is your eye governed by the King of Love so you see reality through His eyes?
We require true stories of love if we are to live truly. The true love story of eternity is that God gave His only son, Jesus, who said in John 10 “I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly.”
i suggest we set Jesus as the Governor of our Eye Gate, “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” If we don’t take our thoughts captive, they will take us captive, because one way or another one of us is going down in chains, and i’m determined through Christ, my thoughts will be my captives! Where do you stand, who governs your appetites? Love gate or Lust gate? You choose. Think about it.
It has been another beautiful evening here at Outposts, it’s a semi-live broadcast from the late night, cascading banks of the Ockluhwahhah River.
i’m Social Porter, and this production was brought to you by Living In His Name Ministries, and the brilliant minds and dancing fingers at Area 22 Guitars. i’d like to shout out a special thanks to Walt and Elisa, Seldon and Alma Stepp at the post office, Curtis at the A&W Drive In, Quality Tire’s very own Jimmy Payton, Kenny Maxwell at Farm Equipment Company on Chimney Rock Rd., the Mill End Store and Silk Shop out in Clear Creek, Mary Sexton for Kalmia Dairy, and Trinity Bakers, that’s right, Trinity Bakers, where there’s always something good in the oven.
Set anew Christ as the governor for your eyes, take care what you allow in your head, and let Jesus be the authority of your appetites. Take your time to lounge when you eat, learn to sip and enjoy what you consume instead of gobble everything in front of you. i hope to talk to you next time. Have a good evening, and amen.