Thursday, August 2, 2007

Wholeness is First Priority: The Good is the Enemy of the Best

Many people are trying to do good things in the church. I have met many good Christian people, but I think we also have become soft intellectually and soft in prioritizing our time. As a result, our efforts produce meager results at best. We must admit that even our best known Christian leaders often have different priorities among them. So even they can't all be right. Maybe too, because we are soft intellectually, we also are a bit too afraid of facing honest criticism that good things are the enemies of the best things.

We must turn from our good ways and focus on our best ways to reshape a good biblical phrase. It was one of my professors in seminary that pointed out numerous examples of how the good can be the enemy of the best. Are we focused on our first priority or are other priorities pushing it out? Are we willing to move from the convenience of where we've focused our efforts before or from the comfort of just dropping out and not trying? Do we really find peace without pursuing first things first?

Have you ever tried to fill a jar with rocks, small stones, sand and water? You have likely seen that it is important to place the items in the order I have listed them. Without that order or if the rocks are placed in the jar last, they are likely to not even fit in the jar. Our lives are like that jar. Our jar of time is limited. If we want to fit the big things in our lives, they must go into our lives first.

So whether called biggest or best, let's put what counts most first. I recommend studying holiness first and foremost and not taking our eye off the greatest character trait that God's word places as best. We need to do the intellectual work of realizing that holiness is wholeness, so that we know wholeness comes first. Whether you look at Isaiah 6:3 or Revelation 4:8, holy, holy, holy or wholly or wholly, wholly remains his most awesome character trait.

In Christ,

Pastor Jon Westlund

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Wholeness is First Priority: According to Holiness

Back in the middle 1980's, I had the good fortune of learning priorities from a great man named Claude Bowen. He was formerly with the Dale Carnegie Foundation. He was then giving his time to train youth ministers like myself. He got my passions going and this led me to spend a lot of time learning all I could on how to determine priorities. Added to this later was language training that taught me how to determine what comes first in things that are written, especially when the author does not directly tell us what their primary theme is. Dr. Daniel Shaw , who taught me so much about languages, called this prominence.

I've since used those skills and added them to traditional biblical reading skills to arrive at the conclusion that wholeness is the first priority in the Bible when it comes to God's or our character traits. What you need to know is that when I use the word wholeness, I am using it as a substitute for holiness, for the simple reason of clarity. If you want to read why I am comfortable using one word for the other read: http://holinessiswholeness.blogspot.com/.

The biblical support for wholeness or holiness being the first priority among character traits is the repetition of "holy, holy holy" in two very important passages in Scripture. One is found in Isaiah and the other is found in Revelation. In the Revelation text, the majority text view actually supports it being repeated nine times! I learned when I was a seminary student and real estate agent (to pay for the education) that "location, location, location" was a popular way of expressing what was the first priority in real estate. Likewise, though I cannot claim that my expensive education taught me this, John Calvin, a theologian of some prominence, once said that all the Bible could be summarized in three words: "humility, humility humility." I think it is fair to say that some theologians have interpreted this since to refer to John Calvin's first priority in theology.

There is more support though than theological tradition or a good business illustration from daily life. There is the history of writers using repetition to express their most important themes. So this argument is rooted in reading and writing itself. Keep in mind, that all the other good candidates for the first priority for character never are repeated three times or even two times successively. You might think righteousness, truth (a close cousin of humility), love or goodness would be priority one. Remember how the Beatles used to say: "love, love love" to express their number one priority? But wholeness or holiness in the Bible stands alone in this way.

So I take wholeness to be the first priority in Scripture when it comes to reading that writing for what it says. If we follow the sound rules the first priority gets to be first: wholeness. I think it is good to know God's first priority regardless of time in history. Yet, next time, I will be talking about how is also the first thing needed in this particular time in history.

In Christ,

Pastor Jon Westlund