Just Passing Through

My father was a wandering Aramean....Deuteronomy 26:5a

Travel light.

In olden days when we would travel the 200 miles to the family in Arkansas, the rear springs of the Mercury would sag under the load of luggage my wife and daughter crammed into it.

I always wondered aloud, at these times, whether they were moving back south rather than going for a 2-day visit.

Proverbs 3:9-10 reminds me that God deserves the first and best of all He gives me.

It is a sure indicator of our fallenness, don't you agree, that God's commands seem so counterintuitive to us. Commands given for our good and our benefit, we resist obeying.

But we have been given the Spirit as a sign and seal of our salvation. And at times (much of the time?), He works in us, in spite of us, to perfect our faith.

John Calvin said that our hearts are manufacturies of idols and any serious meditation on this saying reveals the shameful depth of its truth.

How hard it is to hold loosely to the things for which we have an especial fondness. Yours are different from mine and mine from the next person's.

Maybe it is the unimaginable variety and commonplace nature of these idols that render them so hard to detect. And so hard to acknowledge. And so hard to forsake.

Even God's blessings, it seems, can become in and of themselves objects of our affections.

So we have the commandments, to remember that we have nothing that was not given to us, to understand the ephemeral nature of this life and its things, to desire to render unto God those things which are His.

Could this be one aspect of Jesus' offer to relieve us of our burdens?

John Bunyan was right. We are pilgrims. And as such, we are only passing through.