Daily Lesson for January 27, 2014

Today's Lesson from Hebrews 8:
10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, declares the Lord:
I will put my laws into their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
11 And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor
and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
for they shall all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.

The author of Hebrews is describing the difference between a former life of trying to do and be good to get to God, and a new life in Christ where our goodness comes out of our already-united oneness with God.

There is an old set of Grimm's Fairy tales about a little tailor who's sewed a jacket with many pockets. In one of the stories the tailor meets a giant who won't let him pass without first a test of strength.

The tailor scratches his beard, nods and then suggests a rock throwing contest. The giant then picks up a huge boulder and sails it into the air as far as the eye can see before finally coming down. The little tailor nods, kneels down and picks up a tiny pebble, and then reaches into one of his outer pockets a brings out a piece of string. Finally he reaches inside his coat, into an inner pocket, and pulls out a dove. The tailor then used the string to tie the tiny pebble to the foot of the dove and with a smile released the dove into the air. The dove never came back. Neither did the stone.

The point: what is set into flight by brute strength will always eventually come down; what flies of itself can fly forever.

The point of real transformation is when we recognize we can't fly of our own - when we see that we simply can't be good enough. We keep falling. That's when we realize the power has to come from somewhere else beside our willpower, and so finally we allow ourselves to be tied in a divine union with the God who invented flight.

How this happens I really don't know. All I can say is it involves the necessary step of admitting that we can't fly by ourselves; we need God's help. That's the first step toward soaring