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Thursday, November 26

Prayer 4: Cross the line


In a management game, I asked two delegates to stand on either side of a line and to coerce the other to cross that line to their side. The audience also took sides.

I forbade them from touching each other. They could only use guile, manipulation or coercion. “But”, I added, “the game will only be won when one of you crosses the line”.

They tried bribes, threats, taunts, innuendos and more, but every now and then in the intensity of it all, I reminded them, “the game is won when one of you crosses the line”.

Then one would get it and step across the line, not to lose, but to make both winners – for in crossing the line, they both won.

We are so wired to rivalry that we see it before understanding what it is we are supposed to be doing. We would rather vie with each other. Competitiveness is instinctual.

We also compete with God.

Indeed most of our Christian walk is a struggle to get Him to move our way and to cross the line into our reality. We try everything. Crying, moaning, groaning, shouting, pleading, bargaining, rebelling, manipulating …. whatever we have in our box of tricks.

God’s position is pretty clear. He has already done all that we are asking Him to do. However, I need to step back a bit and explain why.

I have flown in the cockpits of commercial aircraft, which many would regard as the sexiest office in the world. What a dream job we all think. Not so.

From ground, to take off, through the climb, to cruise, through descent, to landing and docking, the pilots use checklists that one calls and the other checks. It is mundane, but for the sake of black-box recordings, routine and safety, they do it anyway.

I could do that kind of mindless checking in a post office.

It is just an analogy to describe how God the Father reviewed the death-throws of His son. He looked away, turned to His “check list” and worked it with stoic detachment.

That it was His son down there was incidental. The sacrifice had to pass muster. Every prescription of the law had to be fully met, without a single compromise.

The Father dared not heed the cries down or say, “that’ll do, get Him down, stop it.” Far, far too much was at stake. It had to be done.

Had Jesus failed in just one single aspect, be it in His youth, His Wilderness Trial, His ministry years or in the events surrounding the cross, Satan would have argued that His death was deserved and for His own sins. He would have been disqualified.

That would have set back 4,000 years of history and the creative millennia that preceded it. Instead, when the work was done, God said, “I have seen it all and (I judge that) I am satisfied”, to which the son replied, “It is finished”.

That same detachment still defines the role of the Father. He is the standard to which Jesus is reconciling us. It is not a fluid standard. It is absolute. God is righteous.

Thus, for God to abandon that role, leave His throne and compromise His righteousness in response to our cries, is as impossible. We would all fail.  

It would require Him to replace the objective standards that defined the cross, with sentiments like favor, compromise, expedience and so on.

In doing that, Satan would argue, “what you do for them, you do for me”. Worse, God would have negated the cross, for if He can favor me at whim, why bother with a cross.

And so, back to our game. We go through life trying to pull God over the line and, as most have found, He remains as unmoving as the rock of Gibraltar.

He will never move. He cannot. Salvation depends on it being so. The task falls to Jesus to close the gap between The Father and us, which He does by moving us to Him. In another sense, through Jesus, God did come to us and then some.

Yet we will compete on that, urging God to look beyond the cross and do me a favor or make an exception. We derive every religious nuance to up our chances of being heard.

Some make big personal sacrifices, others donate money, some have reverted to ancient ways, others have developed elaborate festivals and fancy buildings. It is all in the nature of bargaining with God – but He will not be moved and no formula can change that.

However, inside the land of promise lies every benefit of the cross, reserved as our inheritance.

It has its own laws and precepts, its own court of justice and it offers a righteous way for us to be exonerated. It is a land of healing, fullness of life, hope, redemption and life.

All that and more was enabled by the cross and God, the great steward of that glorious sacrifice, knows how much is reserved for you. As such He calls you from afar off and wills you to keep going through your deserts and storms, to get there.

Jesus also walks with us, in a shared journey of mutual adjustment in which He learns about your uniqueness and what about you should never change or could possibly be perfected, whilst whittling away at what hinders you from reaching fulfilment.

Of course, we also adjust to Him. Like two young men from either side of the tracks sharing a foxhole, mutual adjustment turns them into friends. That is as true of our long walk with Jesus.

Yet even He will eventually echo the Father’s heart by saying, “You will never win, until you cross the line”. So keep going until you do.    

(c) Peter Missing: bethelstone@gmail.com

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