Jacobs Thoughts and Doings

What is she creating?  It is certainly a labor or love. They are Christmas season pepper nuts, in Low German, pfeffer nuz.  She blesses us each Christmas season with her annual batch of these goodies.  Stop in and have a few, with tea or coffee.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

Matthew 7:7, 8

Ask, seek, knock.  Jesus uses these three active words to describe prayer.  Let me reflect, with you, on what Jesus is teaching.

Ask.  Jesus is probably talking about running out of resources completely. Now what? Ask out of desperation, not simply out of want.  For me, prayer is almost an add-on, a sort of, “by the way, if it is not too much bother, could you do this for me?  I would be happy if you do what I am asking.”

Sometimes is seems to me a well-ordered life leaves nothing to chance. If we manage well, cover all the bases, so to speak, then, why pray?

Seek.  This requires great diligence and persistence.  Now and again I lose something, unfortunately.  Then I turn all my attention to seeking for what I have lost.  Or maybe I am asking for something I never had.  Please, do not bother me when I am seeking.  Seeking means focusing all attention on that we seek.  Nothing can deter us.  That, I believe, is what Jesus is stressing.  The way of Christ requires all our senses, so to speak.

Knock.  A knocker is not a demander!  Knocking implies supplication. When we run out of something, we humbly ask a neighbor to help, knocking on the door resolutely and persistent, but never in pride, for we bring our want not our fullness.  That is prayer.

My soul, help me to see prayer as asking, seeking and knocking.  Amen

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Matthew 7:1 – 5

I figure that I spent 20 years in school, from First Grade at Kaufman School in Davidsville near Johnstown, to New York University where they put the finishing touches on me and pronounced me “Dr. Jacobs.”  A Ph D. That is a heap of school.

As I look back I can see that, in many ways, school taught me to be discerning and thoughtful, not to just swallow everything because others do. I was taught to be critical.  After all, I was in a high world-class society.  This supposed position of superiority came clear as crystal as I lived in African cultures.  I critiqued everything!  That is what I was trained to do and I was certainly not going to change.  After all, I was a “missionary!”  The word itself exalted me.

Then, what?  Because of the work of God in my heart I reached out to African friends and others who were also touched by the grace of Jesus Christ, and they reached out to me.  What, pray tell, am I to do with all the prejudices that had built up in my life?  Was I not, after all, superior?  Did not my training, etc., make me good at recognizing deficiencies in others?  Am I not the very best Christian?  Dear me!

I discovered that as I exposed the weakness of others, ever so harshly, I had to squint to see their bad sawdust specks because my own huge wooden timbers kept me from seeing the truth or from seeing others they were.  That was wrong and harmful.

These words of Jesus finally made sense. Stop critiquing others and examine yourself!  Ouch.  Strong medicine but the best for healing prejudice and blindness.  It is God’s prescribed medicine that produces love and humility.

Tammy has a way with hair.  She smoothed out David’s locks!

“Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?  So, do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ Your heavenly Father knows.  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”  

Matthew 6:25 – 34 (here and there.)

Jesus gets practical!   He acknowledges that life is a struggle because we cannot predict how things will be in the future.  Because of this fear of the future we do our best to make sure that we will survive – if not prosper.  We live in a constant state of “worry.”

I am writing here on Monday morning, the beginning of a new week.  I will need to make many decisions today and in the days ahead, that is for sure.  I hear a voice in my soul, is it Jesus?  He asks, “What dominates your thinking?”  Come to think of it, I feel driven to protect myself and my loved ones.  I would not say that I fear for them, but to be honest, I probably do, and I fear what might happen to them, and me.  Jesus gets my attention and says, “Don, do not worry.”  I say, under my breath, “If I do not worry for them, who will?”  So, I go on worrying.

At this point, Jesus catches my attention as he says, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.  Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Why do I worry?  Jesus says that it is a lack of faith.  Faith in Jesus dispels fear because we shift the responsibility from our shoulders to his.

My dear wife, Anna Ruth, one day years ago, challenged me by saying that the things she worries about do not happen, so why worry?  That struck me as the Jesus kind of spiritual common sense. It is for me.

Jesus knows how we are prone to worry.  His advice?  “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  Matthew 6:34

The secret is to seek the right things. If I seek first and foremost the things of the Kingdom, then all falls into place and there is no real reason for fear.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Matthew 6:19 – 21

We know, intuitively, that it is important to have enough money to get us through life’s demands.  So, we protect what we have and work at getting more. Hopefully we will have enough.  We do all this knowing that what we stack up here will not get to heaven at all.  All that activity happens here on the earth. It is so important to us that it is about all we get done, just making sure we have “enough.”

I try to imagine, for a moment, what difference it would make in my life if I was absolutely convinced that my most important task is to “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”  That language is so strange to me that, to tell the truth, I have almost no idea what Jesus is talking about.  I know something about the way money works, but I know that there will be no dollars in heaven.  No money will be there, nothing that we can depend on  is available.

The real “money” that Jesus is talking about is something much different.  At this point He does not elaborate on what he means, except that chasing money and this world’s goods is of limited purpose, because, He reminds us, earthly treasures stay with the earth.  They are meaningless in heaven.

What does this mean as I enter this day, having just celebrated Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday?  Could it be that when Anna Ruth and I held hands this morning and prayed together for those in need, naming them one by one, is laying up treasure in heaven? Or that the check we write today to further the advance of the Gospel in the world is that?  Or helping my son with a small task about his house is doing that?  I am not all that sure.  I am not very good at earmarking deeds or thoughts of mercy.  Maybe I should.

In any case I feel way down deep in my soul that I should not depend on any earthly currency to purchase God’s mercy.  Spiritual currency is of a different sort.  I believe Jesus is in my spirit, by the way of the Holy Spirit, and the work that he does is “heaven work.”

In a few weeks Anna Ruth and I will celebrate yet another anniversary.  It was Christmas Eve on 1949 when our journey as husband and wife began.  That bond is as tight as ever today.  I can not even imagine life without her. You will see love, wisdom, intelligence and compassion in those bright eyes.

Thanksgiving day 

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’ For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.  (My underlining.)

This is the day after our annual Thanksgiving Day.  For us, it was a family day, full of memories, good food and a central desire to be truly thankful.  This year our circle was a bit wider with some new faces among us, all around Jane and Glenn’s laden table, food for the occasion, in the best of our family’s tradition. After reading together Ps 100 (our favorite thanksgiving psalm)  and a hearty, very familiar “God is great,” we shared the most delicious meal, prepared by loving hands.  It included cranberry sauce, ham and turkey, goulash and much, much more, with fresh cider and cheery talk and laughing, things that make such times great, and pleasingly memorable.

In the Lord’s Prayer we plead, “Give us today our daily bread.”  For bread, we surely give thanks, as we did yesterday.  But the heart of Jesus’ prayer has to do with forgiveness. He asks us to forgive others, several times.  In fact, the Lord’s Prayer has much more to say about forgiving others than for “giving thanks.”  We do need daily physical bread – food, shall we say – but to do the will of the Father we must be first and foremost “forgivers,” not eaters.

I have wondered at times what Jesus means when he warns of “temptation” in this context. Could it be that a huge temptation is to withhold forgiveness?  Even physical bread does not do its work if we hold grudges.  Our stomachs work best when we forgive others.

Maybe we should call this day, “Forgiveness Day.”  Jesus would certainly approve of that because that is what he taught always.