What's in your jar?

Being an adult can suck. A lot. If I had known 20 years ago what I know now, I would have changed a whole lot. For one, I would have stopped myself from buying such unnecessary things, in order to pay for the necessary with greater ease. Managing expenses is hard. Weighing up between wants and needs is hard. Keeping yourself out of debt, is even harder still. Let me just say it, being an adult is expensive. I wish there was an alternative. But, alas, there isn’t. Everything we need costs us – a lot of the time, way more than what we like.

What makes our absolute need of God any different?

Last Sunday, during our time of worship at Church, I felt the Holy Spirit speak to me through two accounts in Scripture. Firstly, the account in 2 Samuel 24 where a plague had fallen upon Israel due to David’s sin. Gad, the prophet, instructed David to present an offering to the Lord at Araunah’s threshing floor. Araunah offered to give David the threshing floor and everything he needed at no cost, but David replied, ”I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God with that which cost me nothing”. David bought the entire property and everything he needed for 600 shekels of gold (1 Chronicles 21:25), which in today’s value is $290 000 (R3.9mil). That is ridiculously expensive. The second account, was the account of the sinful woman in Luke 7 who washed Jesus’ feet with the contents of an alabaster jar and her tears, and finally dried His feet with her hair. Scholars are unsure if this fragrant oil was identical to the one Mary Magdalene used in John 12, but in this case let’s assume that it is. (It’s easy to assume this, as spikenard, the expensive oil Mary used, was transported from India in alabaster jars, the same kind of jar that this lady brought her oil in.) If that’s the case, a jar of spikenard cost 300 denarii – or 300 days worth of work. That’s 10 months of your full salary, before tax. This cost is relative to your own salary but, according to the US Federal Reserve, the average salary in the USA is $54462 (or R736 326) per year, which equates to $45385 (or R613605) for 10 months of that annual salary. That, too, is insanely expensive. When considering the cost of David and the woman’s worship, the Lord asked me this:

"What’s in your jar?"

It hit me, as I mulled over that question, that I don’t love God as He deserves with the things I treasure most in this life. How I lead and love Jess, as my wife, is an act of worship and if I don’t do that in such a way that it costs me my pride, my wants, my everything, then I don’t honour God through it.

My talents – I definitely don’t love God as He deserves with my talents. I can give Him so much more, but my self-confidence says I can’t.

My time – the one thing I defend whole-heartedly. I’m going to be real, I love spending time with Jess, my family and my friends. My primary love language is “Quality Time”. So, you’d think I use my time well. ***insert game shower sound for incorrect answer here*** I am terrible at it. I am lazy and have spent more time on social media than in the Word and in prayer. I said to Jess this morning at breakfast that we have got to manage the time we spend on social media and be cut-throat with it, because not only is it infringing on our own time as a family, it’s infringing on the time we should be spending in the presence of God.

At the moment, there is not much of tremendous value in my jar. My worship and my affections toward God is not as costly as it should be. Sure, I serve on Friday nights at youth and in various other capacities in the life of the Church, which costs Jess and I the ability to hang out with our friends and family on those nights. It also costs us weekends away and being able to go camping. However, I have other very valuable things in my life that I still need to be put in that jar.

It’s going to cost me.

It’s going to be expensive.

Am I ready to do it?

Probably not.

But, man, Jesus is so worth it.

He deserves every ounce of affection I can give Him and more. He requires that I love Him with all my heart, all my soul and all my mind.

No matter what the cost.

I bet if you had to ask David and the sinful woman if they regretted spending the amount they did on the Lord, you would more than likely get a response like this:

“Nope. It was totally worth it. He is totally worth it.”

So, what’s in your jar?

Love, actually...

Love. We think we know what that is. That is, until we get married. Or until we have a child. In fact, our vague notion of love is utterly shattered into pieces when we read Jesus’ words in the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37) to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds. But let me not run ahead of myself.

Before I met Jess, I thought I had an idea of what love “felt like”. I was certain I had been in love before – but in all honesty, I hadn’t known that kind of love. The moment I fell in love with Jess, my notion of love was shattered and completely redefined. Then we got married. Marriage is the culmination of love between a man and a woman. It joins them as one unit, under a not-so-easily broken covenant. It’s in this covenant union that their affections are tested, stretched and substantially grown. It takes work to allow your notion of love to be redefined on a daily basis.

I love being married to Jess and I know she loves being married to me. It’s something we both acknowledge on a daily basis. Yes, we can and do irritate each other. I irritate Jess by being so chipper in the morning. She irritates me by not being so chipper in the morning. But our love supersedes our irritation and I’ve learned to serve Jess in the morning by doing all the morning chores, so that she gets a chance to wake up properly. I take what I have and, instead of using it to irritate Jess by trying to cheer her up, I use it to demonstrate my love for her in an act of service. When I finally got that down, pregnancy hormones kicked in and, suddenly, the lack of chipperness extended beyond 20mins in the morning. When I feel insecure, I have to remind myself that Jess is not mad with me and, in that place, press in harder to demonstrate my love for her by using my morning mood to get her breakfast ready. It can be hard but I love serving her in this way. I think that I have a high capacity to love.

Until I read a statement I made on Facebook exactly 2 years ago:

“In doing a study on The Great Commandment "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind", I've come to realise that loving God on this level is so hard. Loving God with our heart attitudes, our very personality and giftings, and our thought life means being utterly consumed by Him in every way. However, God knows this. That's why Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit, even after He died for us. He knew we would need help. Even in our worst and most difficult moments, we have access to Love, to be taught Love on a higher level by the Spirit of Love.”

My capacity to love on a natural/horizontal scale could be defined as pretty high. But in reading this statement, I am reminded of how short I fall from loving God on the scale that He deserves. I put so much effort into loving my wife the way that she deserves but I don’t come close to putting as much effort into loving Jesus the way that He deserves. My capacity to love on a vertical scale needs a lot of work. A lot. And I'm going to need a lot of help. A lot.

Yes, there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. However, just like letting my love for my wife be stretched and tested daily can be hard work, the same must be said for the love I have for Jesus, but on an exponential scale. I cannot allow the love I have for Jess to grow cold (which would happen if I listened to any insecurities that could arise through taking Jess’ morning “chipperlessness” personally), and I absolutely cannot allow my love for Jesus to grow cold either. And that, my dear friends, is going to take some work. Hard work. Truth be told, as my capacity to love Jesus grows, it will directly affect and influence the way I love Jess. In fact, in direct proportion, it will grow my capacity to love Jess in the way that Christ loves the Church.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I want to to rediscover exactly what it is to love God the way He deserves: with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my mind. I hope that I will get to take some of you on that same journey with me, (and hopefully get to share in your journey too) and I pray that together we can be stirred to love the One who loves enough to call us His own, to call us His children. And not just to love Him but to let our capacity to love Him grow to the point where we are, in fact, utterly consumed by Him, using what we have to reveal our deepest affections towards Him.

(Disclaimer: When I say Jess is not chipper in the morning, I DO NOT imply that she is moody. What I mean is that she doesn’t see the bright side of being woken up by an alarm and, although her eyes are open, she is still mostly asleep. Whereas, I am the total opposite. When I get out of bed, I am 95% awake, and happy to be awake, until the first sip of coffee touches my soul.)