Doug Van Pelt

"I'm Going to YOUR House Today..."

Habakkuk 3 is a prayer. As is appropriate with ANY prayer, it starts off with praise:

"Lord, I have heard of Your fame;
I stand in awe of Your deeds, O Lord."

In verse 12 he proclaims what God has done:

"In wrath You strode through the earth
and in anger You threshed the nations.
You came out to deliver Your people,
to save Your anointed one."

Now, sometimes in the Old Testament, a reference to "Your anointed one" is a messianic reference to Christ, the Son of God that would come later. In this context, that hardly seems the case. Perhaps he is talking about himself. Perhaps he is talking about another one of God's people. It got me to thinking.

'Aren't we all anointed? Haven't we all been given a 'special touch,' position, or gifting?' (By "we" I'm refering to those that believe in, cling to, trust in, rely on Jesus the Messiah...) If that's the case, I wonder how many of us look at ourselves as anointed, as special.

It is true that we need to be humbled. Sometimes we just get on a prideful bent and think too highly of ourselves. Sometimes, though, I think I can actually perpetuate this "humility" thing in such a way that it gets twisted upside-down and becomes pride. I become "proud of my humility." How stupid is that?

But then other times I hold on to the "woe is me" part of humility and kind of wallow in my fallen-ness. I think this is missing the mark as well. Our personalities often inject themselves into our theology, and that's understandable, but it should make us motivated to seek the truth and understand theology as correctly as we can.

Being picked last for the softball team in P.E. can make us feel like we are second class athletes and second class people. Just as self-important people can easily think that they are God's favorite children, rejected people can falsely think that they are God's red-headed step-children (no offense to the red-haired readers). As always, I think there's a balance. I believe that each of us needs to experience being "put in our place" by God, where He reinforces the attitude that we need to put others before ourselves; and I also think we need to experience having the special, focused attention of the Creator of the universe. We need to have a "Zacheous experience."

Remember the story? Jesus was passing through and people lined the path to see him. Short little Zacheous wanted to see, so he climbed up a sycamore tree. (Luke 19:4 actually specifies the type of tree he climbed, isn't that interesting?) When Jesus saw him, he said, "Zacheous, come on down, for I'm going to your house today." This was a great honor for Zacheous. It was a self-esteem booster, to be sure. The balance of the esteem issue was that Zacheous repented publically at the gathering. I think it'd be wonderful if we all felt -- at least once, but preferably many times in our lives -- that God was choosing us. That He was favoring us. That He was saying, "This person is special. I love him/her..." That sense of love is very reassuring and can motivate us to do great things.

There's 10 days, 4 hours, 26 minutes and 14 seconds left of deadline. The owner of the property we rent to house our manufactured home that we call the HM office (We don't live here, but instead use the spacious 5 bedroom home to be our office) has been foreclosed upon. The bank has sold the land to a developer who is going to use the land to build brick homes on. In other words, we are being kicked off the land and given 120 days to vacate. It will be interesting to see where we end up. We have to trust God that we'll be taken care of.

Posted by Doug Van Pelt at September 13, 2005 08:39 AM