Well good day to all you present and future Abrahams, all careening through your year with the sun glinting off your proverbial Ray Bans. You’re filling your lungs with the good desert air, hopeful about the days to come, and loving this sweet ride that’s gonna get you there. I wanna tell you what a marvel you are.
But first: Have you ever asked yourself, “What is it in the heart of a man that makes him seek adventure?” We’re fond of telling you, round these parts, that when you figure out the whole Abrahamic family leadership game, your outpost is not going to look like mine. There’s a messy, adventure-filled process of fits and starts that you must undertake if you want to unearth the modus operandi for your corner of the kingdom. That’s what makes this good, hard work: nobody can just hand you the ideal system and say ‘do this’. It’s also why we attract adventure-hungry men instead of church mice. (It’s also why you consistently throw away the instructions included with your new Ikea furniture and tackle it with hubristic machismo… but that’s less of our focus today.)
I’m out to answer a couple of questions for you today:
- Why will your exploits not look like anyone else’s exploits? And
- Why do you even feel drawn to adventure and exploits in the first place?
Let me begin to answer by going way way WAY back, like we so often do around here…
In Genesis 1, God is making all sorts of amazing, as-yet-unknown things, and making them to reproduce. In His outrageous, unfettered entrepreneurial creativity, he makes flowers and trees “after their kind”; makes fish with scales that will reproduce ad infinitum “after their kind”; made gibbons and cockatiels and platypuses and dragonflies to reproduce after their kind, etc. etc.
Then He did something breathtaking:
He made something after… HIS kind.
“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them rule…” -Genesis 1:26
When God made man, He unveiled something never seen before in the cosmos. Even the beautiful and powerful angels had to be dumbfounded at the revelation that God could bake His own character into a creature of His making. What are the implications, even, of God’s image existing in a created being? We since learned some of what that would entail:
- Man (and woman, eventually) would carry eternity inside him (and all those implications: he is unsatisfied with a material existence, asks spiritual questions, craves eternal significance, etc.)
- Man would house, and express, all of the many gifts of God’s Spirit: He wouldn’t just care for his young out of instinct; he would love, in totally selfless altruism; he would not just seek pain avoidance, but could truly experience joy, even in horrible suffering, as his spirit rejoiced with the Good and True; etc. etc.
- Man would, as the verse above states, rule the planet (though filled with angels and demons and all the myriad created animals, including many that were stronger than him)
- Man would be a creator on earth unlike any other creature. He would express his own imagination by taking raw goods and re-forming them into new, never-before-seen objects. He would find new ways to master his environment. He would seek out expressions of his ideas and the aforementioned gifts of God through art and commerce and construction
- Man would have the power of life and death in his words, with the ability to bless and curse. His words would matter. Unlike the elephant that trumpets into the wind and then it’s gone, the utterings of Man would build and destroy in the mind, will, emotions… and in the unseen spiritual realm. His prayers, for instance, would actually impact eternity by finding, and affecting, the heart of the Creator Himself
- Man would carry the identity of FAMILY as men and women are called sons and daughters of GOD. The Almighty Father would consider Mankind as members of a family which had heretofore only been populated by the Trinity Himself. And being part of that family would so shape his internal worldview that Man would then seek to reproduce his Creator, making a family that held the imprint of his image…
That list alone, if properly received and internalized (and that might take some time), would change a heart from aimless to overcoming. There is so much dignity and resplendence bestowed upon mankind by the only One capable of doing so that we’ve scarce comprehended it. Out of the million million planets in the universe, He chose this one… and of the million million creatures on this planet, he assigned THIS ONE the unique place on His org chart that represents His Own Heart and Character to the rest of creation. It’s… amazing.
Another of God’s great kindnesses is that, when He finds a man who is living out His designed glory, He comes alongside that man and empowers him even further by adding His Own glory to the proceedings. Everybody man I know, or have read about or heard from, who feels he’s walking in his God-ordained purpose finds that God blesses it to a supernatural degree. It’s like in Super Mario Kart, when you’re driving as fast as you possibly can, and you run over those rainbow stripes… you go supersuperDUPER fast! To a supernatural degree! And you’re all like, “Oh man, praise God for this almighty speed! I just hope Lakitu doesn’t throw a banana peel my way. For Thy, ahem… glory…” Anyway, our glory combined with God’s can look like:
- Forgiving an offense (Proverbs 19 says outright that this is man expressing his glory)
- Ruling over created beings according to God’s dictates, including caring for other men, all the animal kingdom, the planet as a whole, and…
- Keeping demons in check, removing them at every appropriate and helpful opportunity
- Leading families in grace and truth, not as a pandering sycophant who wants popularity votes, but as a Spirit-led father, using his authority for the Kingdom’s sake
- Rescuing others from darkness,
In addition to all the above (and other) honors, man has been uniquely chosen by God to be what my friend Mary Senff calls a “glory bearer”. This means he is a singularly amazing creature (“a little lower than the angels” according to Psalm 8) who carries outrageous power and potential, whether he walks in relationship with his Heavenly Father or not. This is a key point: God has imbued humans with amazing capacities of intellect, creativity, endurance, spiritual power, etc.- and has given them “without repentance” (Romans 11:29). If man seeks to walk with God’s Spirit, these gifts will explode with incomparable beauty. And if man seeks to live without God… he will yet retain those gifts.
- People anointed by God to love others and watch over them… will still be empowered to do that, even if it’s for self- or man-glorifying motives.
- People anointed by God for healing… will still be empowered to heal, even if they do it for profit or to serve demons.
- People anointed by God to prophesy… will still be empowered to discern, provoke, and have spiritual insight, even if those gifts are distorted waaaay away from God’s intentions.
- People anointed by God for leadership… will still be empowered to use those gifts, even if they use them to glorify themselves or to serve money.
The point is, God gives away powerful, earth-changing gifts to regular folks, and He isn’t controlling or manipulative. He’ll let us serve His Kingdom with them… but gives us the freedom to oppose His Kingdom with them, as well. The gifts will stay, and will operate, but without the glory of God–which is the only fitting destination for anything glorious–as their end.
How magnanimous of God. And what a gift to mankind! Glory with no strings attached! (Except those strings that attach us to Him… you know… Glory Strings.)
And this, gents, is why you feel that tingling in your nose when the opportunity for an adventure pops up. You were equipped with a unique set of God-expressing tools, and then handed a commission from the King to go use them in His service. That’s exciting, and it also means that, because you’re carrying a different set of supplies than I am, we’re just not going to build the same things as each other. We’ve been sent in different directions with different tools – if we look just like each other then we’re probably missing something.
Is Glory Dangerous?
Now, we here at Abraham’s Wallet want men to understand the awesome destiny and authority described above. We believe that one of the things stolen from men is the confidence that we’re endorsed by God to do great things, and that He gleefully hands the Kingdom to His sons and tells us, “go get em!” We want men equipped, confident, and full of godly ambition to explore and impact the world around them with truth, love, courage, and honor swinging from their tool belts. Then to go do exploits!
The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits.
Daniel 11:32
However.
There’s always a “however”, it seems.
With this much glory at our fingertips,
With this authority imparted to us,
And with our flaky, unstable, often-self-centered hearts,
Things… CAN… do wrong. …And usually do.
We’ll get to that… next time.
