Jesus Christ has opened up the pathway to freedom and this pathway is the pathway of extreme humility.
It is a trail blazed by the Word made flesh and a journey that leads to the Burning Bush where the limitlessness of God sets the limits of man aflame with love. Love alone knows how to find this trail and faith, unshod and thus vulnerable, progresses step by step into what would seem to be powerlessness. Such a journey is never an evading of responsibility but it is courageously engaging the task at hand with total reliance on God. It is a pilgrimage that one makes under the authority and power of heaven.
The earth is filled with chaos and its own power and authority are subject to futility and death. For this reason, no earthly power ever succeeds in stemming death. Yet, the temptation is to grasp for and covet control even to the point of coercing the behavior of others. Indeed, in a world that is passing away, self-preservation means either gaining control over circumstances as long as possible or else losing it altogether. The more one lives by the struggle for earthly power and authority in this way, the more one’s own freedom is diminished until one is completely subservient to the very power coveted.
On the royal pathway of true freedom, recourse is made to earthly power only as love for Christ deems necessary, and then it is quickly surrendered. Indeed, regarding the possession of earthly power and authority, the pathway of extreme humility requires total indifference to anything that is not God’s will. Rather than taking control for the sake of control, one patiently provides order only to the degree that others might be drawn to the truth by love.
This kind of indifference to earthly power is impossible except to those who by faith live under the power and authority of heaven. In the Kingdom of Heaven, confidence in the Father overcomes earthly fears and anxieties. Even if one dies, death is defeated and sin has no claim over the heart before the love of God. Instead, a love stronger than death reigns over the chaos of life and leads to the sacred until one crosses the threshold into God’s order and peace.
A true orientation point for one’s whole being is found when one takes off one’s shoes before this Burning Bush and listens with the ears of one’s own heart. Here, true authority and power are given not grasped in accord with one’s identity and mission before the Lord.
Here, God opens His Heart and one learns to rest in the glory of His Name.
Image courtesy of Unsplash.
This post was originally published on Beginning to Pray and is reprinted here with permission.
