Playing For Likes

“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”

I confess. I confess I often find myself playing for likes. Wow. Whoopee! What a big deal! A man confessing. And even confessing such a deep matter. (Ha ha ha) “He wants to be liked!”

And O! look! He even quotes the scripture to show he’s doing, or about to do, the right thing. But that man’s confession is not really that he wants to be liked. But more truly he is often finding himself motivated, and acting according to that desire. But what he may even confess to as “often in his finding” is already plain to God…always. What he may see, not see, know, not know…everything is already laid bare and uncovered before Him with whom have “to do”.

What with (and with whom) do we “have to do?”

Oh. Is it Christ? Is this man trying to “do” Christ? Is this what he has to do? Try to be as Christ? Try to be like Christ? That man would do much better under a system that only requires the blood of bulls and goats and firstlings and calves and sheep than to enter into “trying” to be like Christ! Do we doubt or wonder about the strong appeal of religiosity and the provoking to religion? Do we? Have you tried…to be “like Christ”?

What have you found? Seriously, tell me. Or just…tell.

Listen of you can. Hear if you can. Trying to be anything is already the frank admission that one is not that anything. What do you allow admitted to yourself? O! but this is too much folly! What is one to do then “Try to not be like Christ?” But that is not being said. And that’s just as much folly.

O! But God has a way! Man, does God have a way!

Again if you can, listen. With (all) reason we are instructed “Sanctify the Lord in your hearts”. He is, and is to be “set apart”. But this is almost just as strange. How can this be done “of heart”? The heart that no man can know? The heart that is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things? Oh. God gives a new heart you say? Takes out the heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh…a soft…version? And one has this…how? By my faith? My confession? My repentance? My “works”? My doing…of anything? Even, God help me, my “doing what the Bible says”?

I thought God said He would do it.

Are you convinced? Am I?

And what does it feel like, this new heart? No more haughty judgments found? No more “looking down the nose”? No more lofty nor seemingly laudable comments about itself and what it has attained, or attained to? No more striving to be nor appear as anything before men? Is that what it “feels like?” Why even then any need or instruction to set anything (or anyone) apart there…if it is already made…so good?

Have you ever tenderized a tough cut of meat with a mallet? Beat the fire out of it to make it edible, even palatable? Sought to overcome the natural workings of fibrous and fleshly cohesions there of sinew and collagens that would otherwise resist their “breaking down” if left to itself…and be tough and hard as nails? But if worked upon diligently with the mallet and the application of heat…becomes savory?

Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?

“Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.”

What does that feel like?

“Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus,…”

What does the dying of the Lord Jesus…feel like?

I would suppose an apostle knew at least enough about it to speak of it.

Look. Listen. (I really only write to myself, preach to myself, at best recognize a self desperately needing to be worked on) There is no need to “try” to make this inward working of the cross of Christ (the only thing that works upon “the self” and all its sinewy attachments) plain. You know, there’s no longer any convincing that the claim of any man to having “Christ in my (or his) heart” matters a whit. That too is too easily lent to a heart only speaking for “itself”. God knows what the confession of Christ “looks like”.

The matter being that if He is there He alone knows how to make plain where He abides. And He alone is able to recognize Himself of “likeness” in any vessels of clay. For He will not deny Himself.

There’ll be an aroma. A taste. And the steak or even heart, may learn to know it was not upon itself it worked such pulverizing and heat. But that a someone else, even set apart as sanctified has been diligently at His work there even as the work of His Father was within Him.

Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered;

What does…obedience look like? What does it…feel like?

God knows.

It is far more than enough to be given even a glimpse of Him. And the heart will know it is not beholding itself. Yes, a heart may be trained to look elsewhere. And that may be what a new heart is. Looks like. Feels like.

But (or and) this remains God’s work alone.

Henceforth know we no man after the flesh, yea though once we knew Christ after the flesh, know we Him thus no longer. (or something like that)

And yikes! What’s a man to do that knows his wanting likes…and to be liked so often motivates him, when he reads:

“And you shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake”

Does he “have to try” and do that too?

“Try” to be hated?

ha ha ha!

“Quick, pass me a bullock and a strong sharp knife!”(?)

Who is equal to such a task?