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This week's Come, Follow Me turned into a fine Sunday School lesson. I made a comment near the end of which a person I respect asked me to email it to her. Recapturing something so of-the-moment is sketchy business, but I've made an attempt:
Do not say: O God, I thank thee that we are better than our brethren; but rather say: O Lord, forgive my unworthiness, and remember my brethren in mercy—yea, acknowledge your unworthiness before God at all times.
16 For behold, he said: Thou art angry, O Lord, with this people, because they will not understand thy mercies which thou hast bestowed upon them because of thy Son.
As we discussed the serpent, I was thinking one reason people might not look is because looking at a bronze serpent on a rod is stupid. I know how the world works and that's not going to work. I'm not an idiot. Which reminded me of Namaan who felt similarly about washing in the Jordan. Pride, in other words. Pride of a specific type.
When we got to v17, I was still thinking about pride. My example comes from education (of course) but I immediately realized it applies also to politics and, no doubt, all other pursuits.
Something that irritates me in education is people who get a teaching credential, teach the minimum number of years to qualify as an administrator, then jump around from admin job to admin job for a few years, then spend the rest of their career as a consultant, bringing their expertise from school to school, earning a lot of money to solve problems that they don't actually solve. Which isn't that surprising. It's hard to know how to fix classroom-level problems when you left before getting sufficient experience to even really understand those problems.
When I pray to God to forgive my unworthiness, I am praying for humility. To always believe that I can learn. Not that I'm the smartypants who knows everything. (Even when evidence suggests that might be the case.)
Now we're getting to the point where I made my comment and I hope I've built my thoughts back to a point that I can recapture it. I'm a little doubtful....
Maybe God being angry we don't accept his mercies coincides with our failure to ask him to forgive our unworthiness. After all, unless we get over ourselves—our certainty we know best, our certainty we know everything worth knowing—we can't become what he knows we can become. We can't do what he wants us to do.
Without enough humility to say yes to callings, to requests to do pointless things like look at bronze snakes or wash in a river, to both opportunities that seem below us and those that seem above us, how can we accept the mercies he's lined up for the person who said yes.
This isn't exactly what I said, but I think it's the gist. Our unworthiness is in one sense a lie we tell ourselves. We're children of God. Yes, we are fallen sinners as well, but repentance may just be genuinely accepting one identity over another. When we accept our relationship with deity, how dare we say we are unworthy? Forgive us our unworthiness and the mercies pour in, and we discover what we really are.
Then, you know, just stay humble afterwards. Good luck to us!
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