Posers

Jesus tells an interesting story in Matthew 13. As a read it today, once again I was struck by the severity of His words.  He starts it by saying “the kingdom of God is like…” He tells the story of a farmer who plants seed in his field and of the farmer’s enemy who sowed tares (literally “false grain”) into the field while the farmer slept. The tares grew along with the wheat and in the process raising questions about how to deal with the situation.


Jesus goes on to explain the meaning of the story later in Matthew 13. The field is the world. The wheat plants are the sons of the kingdom. The tares are the sons of the wicked one or the sons of wickedness. There will come a time of reckoning, a time of separation. In the meantime however, the two types of plants grow simultaneously.

We must understand that the two plants, while sown almost simultaneously and grown simultaneously, are fundamentally different. They have two completely different sources and two completely different destinations. At the core, at the root of their DNA, a basic dissimilarity exists.

I have noticed recently how fashionable it has become in Christian circles to use the following phrase – “he is still a brother in Christ” or “she is still a sister in Christ”. Really now?? Jesus clearly and repeatedly states that not everyone who names His name abides in His kingdom. The wheat and the tares have nothing in common except being in close proximity to each other. Wheat is wheat. Tares are tares. The kingdom of God has no fellowship with the kingdom of darkness.

Interestingly Jesus, in His explanation of the story, told the disciples that the tares are those who “practice lawlessness”. The implication is that the tares are those people who do things outside of ways of God. This is not talking about people who become ensnared in sin and need and desire restoration in their place of brokenness. Based on other scriptures where the word is used, it indicates that this lawlessness is most likely a conscious choice to live and act outside of God’s ways, usually while still attempting to put forth a façade of goodness. For instance, Jesus told the Pharisees that they were full of lawlessness.

If it quacks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, it is a duck. Posers are still posers, regardless of their efforts to present themselves as something else. Tares are not wheat. In the same way, those whose self-centered attitude keeps people from entering the kingdom of God are neither brothers nor sisters to the children of the Kingdom.

discipline

The older I become, the more I recognize the truth of Jesus' words as they apply to life in general. This morning I read the following in Matthew 7:

 “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

The word "narrow" implies focus and discipline. Interestingly, in Proverbs, we discover the following wisdom:

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

The phrase "train up" in the original Hebrew means "to narrow". Parents have the responsibility to bring raise their children in a disciplined (a narrow, focused place) manner. Now before you react to word discipline, let me explain the concept of discipline. Discipline is not arbitrary punishment although at times punishment may be part of discipline. Discipline is usually painful in some manner but the purpose of discipline is not to inflict pain.

My daughter coaches high school girls soccer. During preseason, the coaching staff worked on conditioning. The forced the girls to do sprints beyond what they thought possible. Was the coaching staff cruel in their requirements? It would have been cruelty had there not been a goal in mind - to prepare the players to outlast the competition in a soccer match.

In the second and third games of the season, the painful conditioning drills paid off. They had a game on a Friday evening against a team that they had never beaten. The game ended in a draw after two periods of overtime. At the end of the game, the girls still had the stamina to play well. The very next day they had one of the most important matches of the season against the team picked to win the league. Once again they went into overtime, this time to come away with a win.

In August, the coaching staff provided a narrow, disciplined place for the players. Of course there were complaints, without a doubt there was pain. The coaching staff could have been considered mean-spirited, forcing the girls to abandon what they wanted to embrace the rigors and pain of disciplined conditioning. Yet the discipline was for a purpose.

The realities of high school girls soccer parallel the realities of the kingdom of God. Far too frequently, people miss the supernatural realm of God and his overwhelming goodness because His way of discipline feels too narrow. If we are to discover life, we must submit to the disciplinary hand of God. To the god of self, the hand of God feels far too restrictive. The broad way feels much more comfortable. Unfortunately, it never leads to life.