ZERO

12/29/2007

God chose things despised by the world,
things counted as nothing at all, and used
them to bring to nothing what the world
considers important, so that no one can
boast in the presence of God.
1 Corinthians 1:28-29 (NLT)

How many of us were “Seinfeld” fans? I know we were, as a family. When living overseas, we couldn’t wait to receive a tape from back home, filled with some of our favorite TV shows, one of which was “Seinfeld.” I still like to watch the old reruns, and one show that I remember laughing at in particular was when Jerry and George were pitching their idea for a TV show to some producers. They were going to explain to them, “It’s a show about nothing. Nothing happens.” The laughable thing was they were explaining the very show they were on—a show that was a huge success!

How can a show about nothing be so engaging? Anyone who has watched “Seinfeld” knows that if you are not tuned in from minute one, you will probably be lost throughout the entire show…the crazy nothingness about the lives of these ordinary people won’t make sense without that first minute. When that one important element is missing, the humor has no foundation to stand on. It is lost…it is no longer funny.

How many of us think life is funny?
How many of us think that God thinks life is funny?
How many of us realize that God can even laugh?
The Bible says God can laugh… It says in Psalm 2:4:
“But the one who rules in heaven laughs.”

Why would God be laughing? Let’s take a look at a greater portion of Psalm 2, as it is written in The Message Bible, verses 1-6:

Why the big noise, nations? Why the mean plots, peoples?
Earth-leaders push for position,
demagogues and delegates meet for summit talks,
the God-deniers, the Messiah-defiers:
"Let's get free of God!
Cast loose from Messiah!"
Heaven-throned God breaks out laughing.
At first he's amused at their presumption;
then he gets good and angry.
Furiously, he shuts them up:
"Don't you know there's a King in Zion? A coronation banquet
is spread for him on the holy summit."

It reminds me of a gift I was given just recently at church by friend. It is a small wooden plaque that says:

“How to make God laugh…tell Him your future plans.”

Is God laughing because life is so funny? I don’t believe so; I believe He is laughing because of the ridiculousness of our childish behavior, our presumptions…our thoughts that we are anything without Him. If we think we are, we might want to spend some time reading what God had to say through Isaiah in Isaiah 40, and on from there, for a few chapters. Isaiah talks about our “nothingness,” saying even the nations of the world are nothing in comparison with God. They are “but a drop in the bucket, dust on the scales.” (NLT) Even the great people of the world are nothing. (Isaiah 40:23) And again in 41:24, it is written, “You are less than nothing and can do nothing at all.” (NLT) There’s a whole lot of “nothingness” in these chapters…so no wonder the Lord’s laughter turns to anger at our foolishness. In thinking back, I realized it isn’t so far-fetched to start out laughing and then to have an experience turn into an anger that will flare up in an instant. (Psalm 2:12b NLT) I will share:

Years ago I was on a camping trip through Europe with our three young boys and Karen, my sister. It was a fantastic trip, seeing eight countries in twelve days, while pitching our tents each night to keep the cost as low as possible. One morning, my two oldest boys were in their tent getting dressed when a fight erupted between them. Knowing they would be in trouble if they were heard fighting, they kept it as quiet as possible, but tent walls are thin, and as my sister and I stood outside we could hear the thumps and groans of fists meeting bodies and pain being inflicted. It was laughable for a while, seeing the tent walls expand and contract as they tried to “solve” their disagreement without being noticed by mom!

In an instant, the laughter I shared with my sister that morning turned to anger. At first I was amused at their foolish behavior, but then I got good and angry, and furiously, I shut them up! As their mom, I had had enough of their fighting, and I was going to put a stop to it immediately!! I ZIPPED open their tent, and EXTRACTED both boys from their secret boxing ring!! One son was dressed and ready for the day, one was left standing there holding his clothes in his hands, still in his PJ’s, wondering where he was now going to get dressed since I was rapidly taking down their tent and loading it into the car! He had to go off to the bathroom and finish getting ready for the day!

Why is this one particular fight between two boys still so vivid in my memory? I can only guess…perhaps it’s because it started out as laughable and changed instantaneously to anger on my part, just as God’s did. I think it’s probably unusual when anger starts out with laughter…but I do get a kick out of these things that happened years ago now becoming a part of the many lessons God is teaching me today! And I do get a kick out of the fact that all these things learned in life are starting to add up to a perfect score…a perfect score of ZERO! “Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save all who believe.” (1 Cor. 1:21 NLT)

The more God teaches us as we travel through this life, and the more we begin to realize who we are in Christ, the more we begin to understand that God and His wisdom is everything, and we and our wisdom equal nothing…AND, that there is nothing wrong with “nothing.” In fact, it is perfectly right!! Zero is good, because God chooses “things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all…to bring to nothing what the world considers important.” Our zero-ness can be used greatly by God!

And so we begin the adventure into nothingness…an adventure that brings wholeness.

As I talked to my brother, Rick, this morning about this Zero idea, he said he kind of liked it, it seemed like he could then be relieved of responsibility by being a zero. I said, “Exactly!” I had to agree that in a world filled with so much that is difficult, it is good to know God wants to carry our earthly responsibilities for us, if we will only give them to Him!

Christ came to set us free, not to burden us with things to do, ways to be, and rules to follow! We are children of the King! We should start to act like it!! We don’t have to be strong and courageous and all-knowing in these “tents” we live in while we’re here on earth. We can simply say to the devil, “I bet my Dad can beat up your dad,” knowing that our Father in Heaven rules over all!

What makes you better than anyone else?
What do you have that God hasn’t given to you?
And if all you have is from God, why boast as though
you have accomplished something on your own?
1 Corinthians 4:7 (NLT)

What has Prince Charles done to be a prince? What have Prince William and Prince Harry of England done to be counted as royalty, and to be living in palaces? Nothing, except that they were born into a royal family. Have we not also been re-born into the most Royal Family of all? God’s family!! As believers in Jesus Christ, we have!! When we realize this, we realize that everything we have has been given to us by our Father, and that we have actually accomplished nothing on our own to earn it! It means we are no better than anyone else and also that we have nothing to boast about. Our pride needs to go right out the window so we can open up our hearts (our tent flaps) and let the wind of God blow in through His Holy Spirit in our lives…it’s then that we’ll see our numbers start to diminish and the numbers about Who God really is start to add up!

So don’t take pride in following a particular leader.
Everything belongs to you: Paul and Apollos and Peter;
the whole world and life and death; the present and the
future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to
Christ, and Christ belongs to God.
1 Corinthians 3:21-23 (NLT)

In just watching a movie at home today, I heard a line that really struck a chord with me. A lawyer in the movie, “Fracture” was being told that he needed to “stay where he belonged.” His answer to that remark was, “I didn’t work this hard to stay where I belong.” Interesting thought. On one side Satan would like us to believe that where we belong is in the pit with him, in darkness with his demons, in the trenches fighting battles that don’t even belong to us. This is repudiated by 1 John 1:7 where it is written, “…the blood of Jesus…cleanses us from every sin.” (NLT) But, if those thoughts don’t hold us captive, then another ploy of our enemy is to try and convince us to the other side, telling us that we deserve better in this life, that we’re not such a terrible person—after all…there are a lot worse sinners out there than we are! Once again, God’s Word disagrees with this thinking in 1 John 1:8, “If we say we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth…” (NLT) Either way we go here, the enemy is taking our thoughts in wrong directions. He’s focusing us on us, and not on Jesus! By doing this, we’ll be looking at our own scoreboard, seeing how we’re doing in the “game,” instead of the worth of our Savior and how He has already won the landslide Victory!!

Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today,
to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.
Deuteronomy 28:14 (NIV)

Jesus has done the dirty work, now all we have to do is to follow Him. If you’ve ever watched that show, “Dirty Jobs,” you’ll know it can be a pretty disgusting show. Sometimes, you just have to close your eyes because of the visual concept alone…and that’s without “smell-a-vision!” Can you imagine being the star of that show and signing a contract that says, “Your job will consist of doing all the grossest things done on this planet, to seek out and work through what most would never attempt to do.” That’s what Jesus did, He took on the worst job of all—He took the sins of the world on His shoulders and washed us clean from the Cross.

When we really begin to grasp what Jesus worked so hard to do for us, the greatest tragedy would be to not only miss going Home to Heaven when we leave here, but to allow the enemy to convince us to “stay where we belong” while we’re still here, after Jesus worked so hard to get us out of that mess! We have been called to live in the freedom that came when Jesus said of His dirty job, “It is finished.” Jesus stepped out of the glory of Heaven into the slime pit of this world for us, to bring those of us counted as nothing at all into the very presence of God. We don’t have to be anything but a “zero” to be allowed into God’s Holy dwelling place, because Jesus is a perfect Ten for us!! But why do we sometimes miss it? Could it be “Pride”?
Do we get caught up in:

P-Perfectly
R-Ridiculous
I-Insights
D-Deciding
E-Eternity

(This would fall under our thinking that we're not good enough, and we need to try real hard to be good enough to make our own way Home to Heaven.)

Another way of getting caught up in PRIDE that my brother, Steve, gave me is:

P-Placing
R-Righteousness
I-In
D-Disrespectful
E-Extremities

(As Isaiah 44:20 NLT says, “The poor, deluded fool feeds on ashes. He is trusting something that can give him no help at all. Yet he cannot bring himself to ask, ‘Is this thing, this idol that I’m holding in my hand, a lie?’”)

When we depend on our own way of thinking, our own way of working things out, we’re believing lies from the Devil and whatever way he takes our thinking, he’s only out to mess us up! It’s not about who we are, but Who Jesus is in us! Just look at the rock stars, the movie stars, the billionaires, the politicians…to the world it seems best to have a name or a reputation that everyone knows. That looks like success in this world, it looks like what we should strive for, what will make us happy. If God blesses us with fame and fortune, fine. That is His doing. If not, He has a plan in that also...it is not “failure” in His eyes. God’s ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts… Our striving should always be for God, not for the praises of this world. Then wherever God places us, we can be at peace with that. In reading a book the other day by Philip Yancy, it said:

In my career as a journalist, I have interviewed diverse people. Looking back, I can roughly divide them into two types: stars and servants…I was prepared to honor and admire these servants, to hold them up as inspiring examples. I was not, however, prepared to envy them. But as I now reflect on the two groups side by side, stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. They work for low pay, long hours, and no applause, “wasting” their talents and skills among the poor and uneducated. But somehow in the process of losing their lives they have found them. They have received the “Peace that is not of this world.”

God can turn our thinking around, He can change the way we look at success and at what He is calling us to be in this life. I had always been of the thinking that the best way to make it in this world was, “Don’t tell me I can’t…or I’ll show you that I can.” I even told our boys when they were growing up, “The words, I can’t, are not in our vocabulary.” These ways used to seem noble, they seemed right—-they seemed to have the fighting spirit needed to survive in this world—but now I am learning that Jesus is the best way to get through the things this life holds. Our own prideful ways lead us down the roads of perfectly ridiculous insights deciding eternity, when all of Eternity has already been decided and guaranteed by Jesus Christ’s death on the Cross for those who will believe! “God’s weakness is far stronger than the greatest of human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:25b NLT) Understanding that we can’t, but God can, allows us to rest in who Jesus is, not in who we are. We can be perfectly nothing, rich or poor—weak or strong, because He is perfectly everything!!

We no longer have to fight the battle when being called out by the playground bully, Satan. We don’t have to concern ourselves with trying to measure up to the world’s standards when the “bully” calls us names. We don’t have to push back, making sure he knows whether we’re weak or strong. Whether we measure up or don’t. Whether we’re failing or succeeding. No matter what we look like to the world, to the enemy, to those around us…in our Father’s eyes, we are perfect. Why? Because when our Father looks at us, He sees His perfect Son, and for that we can be truly grateful! Our zero, plus Jesus’ perfect Ten, makes us perfectly acceptable to God!

In knowing Who Jesus is in us, we begin to realize that whatever generosity, kindness, or love that flows out of us onto others comes from the Holy Spirit Who lives within us, and whatever score it adds up to belongs to Jesus. He gets all the praise and glory and credit for it… so we can relax. Our “zero-ness” allows us to be the vessel God can then use for His Living Water to quench the thirst of a parched world.

Jesus knows that He is more than enough to get what needs to be done, done in each day. Do we? When our bodies move to serve another, when our hands work to comfort another, when our feet travel to be with another, are we beginning to understand that it is Jesus doing it through us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and there is no better way to live this life…to let it be no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us? If we so much as give ourselves a “one” in credit, trying to be a somebody, we will start to crowd out the power of Jesus Christ in our lives. We need to give Him full reign to work in and through us each day!

Again Philip Yancy writes:

Jesus captured succinctly the paradoxical nature of life in his one statement most repeated in the Gospels: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Such a statement goes against the search for “self-fulfillment” in advanced psychology—which turns out to be not advanced enough. Christianity offers the further insight that true fulfillment comes, not through ego satisfaction, but through service to others.

Why do we live on planet earth?
Why were we ever born?
Our pride wants to say we were born to be strong and able and willing to plow through this life and become a huge success—but then when we fail to be all that we think we should be, or all that others think we should be, we start to feel miserable! Jesus says let go of those old ways of thinking, dump everything you ever thought was good and able and worthy about you, and come with Me…I will show you a new and better way of being in this world…one that will bring you contentment and peace like you’ve never known before! He will show us just how valuable it is in God’s Kingdom work to be nothing in this world!

In talking with my brother, Steve, about this message, God has been giving him some insights and he has been passing them along to me. (Thanks to the help of my sister-in-law, Marlene, also!) In some of Steve’s prayerful thoughts, he believes Jesus sees two “PC Conditions” when He looks at this world. They are, Pride and Contempt, or Peace and Contentment. God gave Steve quite an extensive list about all this. I’m going to share it with you here because if we even begin to think that we can escape this prideful and contemptible place called earth without Jesus, this daunting list may convince us otherwise. If we even have the slightest idea that our “numbers” may be “good enough” without the help of a Savior, we might want to keep in mind that in James 2:10, it says, “And the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as the person who has broken all of God’s laws.” (NLT)

“The List”

Antagonism, Irritability, Fear, Insecurity, Rebellion, Fantasy/Enchantment, Infatuation, Wishful thinking, Laziness, Gluttony, Anger, Criticism, Hypocrisy, Accusing spirit of unworthiness, Sadism-sadistic, Sickening, Deplorable, Disgusting , Disorganization,Un-cleanliness, Slander, Manipulation, Quarreling, Quick temper, Jealousy, Envy, Coveting, Disorder, Unrest, Un-peaceful, Malice, Unmerciful, Hatred, Vengeance, Bitterness, Scorn, Dislike, Unhappiness, Division, Discouragement, Defiance, Hostility, Complaining, Arrogance, Conceit, Haughtiness, Fretting, Worrying, Despair, Desperation, Judgmental, Inflicting Guilt & Condemnation, Uncomforting, Frustration, Cantankerous, Pugnacious, Belligerent, Emotional Fanaticism, Deriding, Imperfection, Un-holiness, Ridicule, Resentment, Criticism, Meanness, Selfishness, Rudeness, Self-Righteousness, Impatience, Unkindness, Lustfulness, Lying, Gossip-full, Refusing council, Un-teachable, Unfaithfulness, Inhospitable, Disruption, Denial, Lawlessness, Uncompassionate, Self-vindicating, Willful ignorance, Inconsiderate, Uncaring, Disregarding others, Discrimination, Uncompassionate, Unforgiving spirit, Ranting & Raving, Stealing, Self-pity, Impulsiveness, Unsettled, War-mongering, Hostility, Chaotic, Confusion, Vileness, Dishonor, Disgracefulness, Disobedience, Disrespect, Irreverence, Unloving, Hopelessness, Partiality, Feeling inferior, Lacking courage, Blasphemy, Disregarding truth, Cynicism, Grumpiness, Disgust, Repulsiveness, Self-confidence, Self-independence, Unbelief, Untrusting, Ungraciousness, Un-thankfulness…as Daffy Duck would say…this is Despicable!

This list reminds me of Elton John’s song, “Too Low For Zero.”

I'm too low for zero
I'm on a losing streak
I got myself in a bad patch lately
I can't seem to get much sleep
I'm too low for zero
I wind up counting sheep
Nothing seems to make much sense
It's all just Greek to me

You know I'm too low, too low, too low for zero
You know I'm too low, too low, too low for zero

This list gives us 100-plus ways and counting the “sheep in wolves clothing” that the enemy will use to make us “less than” without Jesus! Satan can take us so far down that “bottom looks like up.” I don’t know about Daffy Duck, or you, but I was all over in that list…I could be happy to just be back to zero now…which is exactly where we can find ourselves when we know Jesus. A big happy zero!! With Jesus, we can realize that the glass is not even half-empty, it’s completely empty, dry to the bone, but Jesus alone fills our cup to over-flowing! All the ugly remnants of this life that we see in this long list of failures can be forgiven when we lose this life and find Jesus.

Jesus has a word that outweighs this entire list of failings… It is, “Redeemed.” Redeemed means we’re saved from the bondage of sin! Halleluiah! When we see our need for Christ’s salvation, we can throw that LONG list of failures away and be Redeemed! Thank you Satan, for reminding us every day how much we need Jesus—you remind us that we are more than completely lost without Jesus and how very much we need His saving grace in our lives!

Oswald Chambers writes:

There is a certain pride in people that causes them to give and give, but to come and accept a gift is another thing. I will give my life to martyrdom; I will dedicate my life to service—I will do anything. But do not humiliate me to the level of the most hell-deserving sinner and tell me that all I have to do is to accept the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. We have to realize that we cannot earn or win anything from God. We must either receive it as a gift or do without it.

It’s not that we won’t try, oh we’ve all tried it other ways—tried to be more than a zero…but that’s just the point—trying doesn’t make it so. It doesn’t change who we are and what only Jesus can do! To paraphrase Yoda in Star Wars, “Do or don’t do. There is no try.” Let’s give up our “try” so that Jesus will be allowed to “do” in our lives. Through Jesus, a new life will begin here and now, and then everything will belong to us, because we belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God!

Happy are those who trust themselves with this conquering Lord,
and who fight side by side with Him, doing their little in His name
and by His strength!  Charles H. Spurgeon

As Michael Angelo answered the question when asked how he had carved the statue of David, he said he cut away anything that wasn’t “David.” God is doing the same work in us. He is chiseling away all those ugly words in the list we read above—all the things our pride wants to count as worth something—so that what will remain in this life and in the life to come is on the Redeemed list. It’s a process that can be very painful; it’s a process that can take us very low into some dark valleys when we’ll even feel “too low for zero” at times. But the end result, the heights we’ll be lifted to by Jesus Christ, will be beyond our wildest dreams!

If I could multiply myself a thousandfold and then
give Him all, what would that be in comparison with God?
Bernard of Clairvaux

Understanding the greatness of God as compared to our human zero-ness is the “first minute” of really living a successful life. Knowing the All-Mighty in this way helps everything else in life make more sense—and it may even help us to see the humorous side of life.
Let’s tune in! We don’t want to miss it!

Until we meet again,
Diane