From The Manse Window
From the manse window
MY dog loves to curl up in a manky old dressing-gown. I leave him to sleep in the kitchen overnight and when I open the door in the morning he’s buried underneath the dressing-gown.
There are now so many holes in it that often he gets stuck because he’s put his head through one of them. Sometimes he gets his head stuck in the sleeve and all I see is his nose sticking out.
When I try to extricate him he growls a clear message.
“Get off! This is mine! Leave me alone!”
I do. So, instead of being free of what he’s trapped in, he has to drag it around hanging off his shoulders until he disentangles himself. I only want to help and make things easier for him, but there’s no way he’s going to let go of his old dressing-gown.
It makes me think about our attitude to God. It’s as if we’re carrying around an old dressing-gown because of our sin. It tangles us up, it weighs us down, it hinders us; yet we cling to it because it’s ours, it’s our comfort and we dread it being taken away from us.
The Bible says, “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles . . .”
God has given us this wonderful world. He knows the best way for us to live in it is to be in a relationship with him, yet he does not force that on us. Right at the beginning he gave us a choice. Humankind rebelled.
“We think we know better. Why should we listen to you?”
We’ve lived with the consequences ever since. We naturally want to do things our way. We shy away from obedience to a divine Being. That would cramp our style and limit our choices, surely? We don’t realise that this is the very thing that will give us freedom and joy.
So we tangle ourselves up in knots, thinking that we can sort it out for ourselves, and instead we get into an even worse mess than the one we’re already in.
How sad to see the denial and denigration of our Christian foundations in society today. I understand that people are acting out of the goodness of their hearts and often from the highest of motives, but the reality is that every decision naturally leads to a consequence which demands another decision, and ultimately we get so entangled that we experience the very opposite of the freedom God wants to give us. It’s obedience that brings joy and freedom.
There was a period back in the 80s when I was in a bleak place. Fed up of waiting for God to do something, I went off to do my own thing, fuelled by ambition and dreams. I didn’t go to church for over two years.
In the end all the dreams came to nothing and I ended up back where I’d started. But God was speaking to me and this time I said, “Lord, come and take this blanket away. I need rescuing.” And he did. Within a couple of years I was training for the ordained ministry.
The wonderful thing is that we can turn to God at any moment, no matter how tangled up we are, and he responds. Maybe it’s time to stop growling and clinging to our old blankets and allow God to set us free. Next week: Rev Andrew Watson reminds us that pride comes before a fall!