The wifey and I are in the throes of becoming licensed as foster parents, and we have a safety inspection of our house in a couple of days. In an attempt to be proactive, we started making a list of the things that we needed to make the house kid-proof, or at least kid-retardant. So, today, I tackled some electrical work before the wifey got back from softball practice, and I had a healthy dose of buyer's remorse: our house has been very poorly wired (if you’re the house inspector and you’re reading this, I’m uhhh, just joking). While I'm pretty certain that the concept of grounding electricity existed the last time this house was inspected (like, two years ago when we bought it), I also know that the previous owners were trying to get cleared to hurry up and move out. Ergo, everything that was found lacking in the inspection was rushed and inadequately patched - today's blog brought to you by the word "gilded" and the letter "they did a crappy job."
Practically, I would never do any electrical work if I didn't know what I was doing, even on household 110V. I had an uncle who was routinely working on 110 at work, and when some things were mis-labeled and mis-wired, he was electrocuted and died. Therefore - there is NO work in your house and for your employer that is worth life or limb. Whenever in doubt, hire someone (insert plug for my buddy Jeremy and S&S Electric in Plainview). If you are equipped to do it yourself, always cut power at the source, and use a few different methods to ensure that the power is dead (there's no replacement for a voltometer).
Theologically, I've realized something about sanctification. One might as well get used to me mentioning C.S. Lewis' name - the dude was a master of allegory. This is yet another instance. In "Mere Christianity," Lewis says that we can imagine ourselves as a shack – when we come to Christ, we are relieved when we see Him cleaning stuff out, fixing broken things, straightening hinges, repairing the sink, and so on. But we soon come to find that, once He fixes our little shack, He grabs a hammer and starts tearing out walls, knocking holes in the roof, doing all sorts of Holmes on Homes shtuff (yeah…I watch a little HGTV with m’lady). We are shocked to find that He doesn’t leave us as a little shack. We were content with a nice cottage – He is building a palace. This is sanctification: one thing, by the hand of God, becoming another, the Spirit enabling and enacting transformation into the likeness of Christ, as Christ leads us to the Father.
In the same way that our house didn’t just show up fixed, but was deliberately labored in and upon to become a better home, no one just wakes up sanctified. There has never been a case in history where someone just realized one day that they were suddenly Christ-like. In Matthew 5:29, Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” Now, in a culture of such soft ears and sharp tongues, this passage is instantly branded as “extremist,” even within most of our churches. You hear an instant cacophony of “Well, what Jesus really meant was, you know, not to love your eyes, or whatever,” or “Jesus isn’t speaking literally, He just means, like, to not be bad.” What our reaction to this passage reveals is that we see things upside down: we crave the immediate created over the eternal Creator, and would rather have comfort in our short 20-80 years here than the fullness of life from here to eternity. This is like not running a ground wire because it's expensive and troublesome and being ok that you run the risk of becoming the ground and being electrocuted.
Speaking on Matthew 5:29, John Piper tweets, “How intentional do you have to be to pluck out your own eye? Completely.” The process of sanctification, the process of the Spirit making one thing into another thing, a dead rebel into a living son, costs us, in the same way it costs to make a broken shack into a palace. There is grinding (the Hebrew word for “contrite,” i.e. Psalm 51:17, shares the same root as “grinding”), there is sanding, chiseling, patching, cutting, scraping, blood, sweat, and tears. But hear me here, if the end is worthy, then at the point of completion, everything else pales in comparison. The shack, made into a mansion, is worth every nail, plank, sheet, and brick that comprised it. Nearness to Christ, even at the cost of all things, is worth anything, because He is everything. Sanctification is not a shellac-ing over the old man; it’s the death of the old man and the birth of the new man, and the subsequent Christian life is the process of learning to see with the new eyes, walk with the new legs, work with the new hands, and think with the new mind.
As all good things flow out from God, may they return to Him as worship and adoration,
Kasey
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