Most of the time, I can figure them out. But then someone sends me something that
makes no sense at all. I don’t admit
that. I just google it. Then I act like
I knew what it meant all along. But it
still makes me feel old; like I’m past my sell-by date, if that makes any sense.
Has someone ever sent you a text with a mystery abbreviation, one that made no sense?
And to be honest, I wonder. Is it
really that hard just to write out the words?
Still, some abbreviations I really like, like this one. BAE.
Does anyone know what that one means?
Yep, Before anyone else. That’s
what you write to your beloved to let them know that no one comes before them
in your life. Or if you are a parent,
this one, PAW, might come in handy.
That means parents are watching.
And if you love Mr. Rogers (who was a Presbyterian
minister by the way), the text (143) could be right up your alley because
he inspired it. It means I love you,
based upon the number of letters in each of the words. And if you’re curious how Mister Rogers
inspired this, the Mr. Rogers link will clue you in.
And this one I had to bring up, because well, I found
the irony of it so compelling. (IYKWIM). This means, if you
know what I mean, which of course if I got this abbreviation, I wouldn’t know
what you meant at all, thus the irony.
And finally, I put up this one, SMH, which is what lots of folks do when
people like me, try to do hip texting.
It simply means shaking my head. And
of course, I don’t even want to go into emojis.
That’s a whole other story.
But why am I doing this little texting quiz? It’s because of what Lynn, our office
manager, put on the cover of my church's worship bulletin this week, LIJ. I don’t know if she was trying to create a
new texting abbreviation, but what she did struck me nonetheless. What if that little abbreviation, LIJ, could
describe your life, living in joy. Who
doesn’t want a life lived in joy? Yet in
the words linked below, God points to one practice that destroys any
chance of that life. And in those same
words, God points to the crucial insight that leads not only to a life of joy,
but a life of fulfillment, purpose and reward.
What is that insight? Here God
shows you the way. Let’s listen and hear
what God has to say.
What is the one practice that destroys joy every
time? In this public letter the
missionary Paul wrote to Christians in Philippi, God tells you. Complaining destroys joy. In fact, complaining or murmuring (the word
Paul uses here) messes up your life as few things can. Why? It’s
because complaining distorts reality. It
distorts reality around you. And it
distorts reality within you. And only
when you realize the truth that lies at the heart of reality will you discover
a life of joy, a life that truly fulfills you as nothing else can.
Now before we can get to this truth at the heart of
reality, you need to understand in how many ways complaining distorts reality. In fact, every type of complaining distorts
reality in a slightly different way. A preacher named, Dick Kauffman, helped me see
that, when he laid out the four basic ways people complain.
Lots of folks, complain by whining about stuff, people
at work or at home, things in the world, whatever. But when you whine, what you are really
saying is. “It’s not fair.” And that thought distorts reality in two
very significant ways. First of all, it
assumes that life is fair, when every day all sorts of things make it clear it’s
not at all. But more than that, it
assumes you know what fair looks like.
But fair can look radically different depending on where you sit. Even
trying to figure out what fair truly is, is sort of an impossible task.
Now you can complain too by acting the martyr, as in
no one appreciates me. And, do you see
how that distorts reality? When
non-appreciation offends you, it says something uncomfortably true about
you. It says. Whatever good thing you did wasn’t so much
about the other person. It was about the kudos you expected to
get. It wasn’t about them. It was about you. Yet that very truth, you can’t even see of
course. Why? Because, well, you are so focused on you and
the appreciate you didn’t get.
Now some complain in more subtle ways, by playing the
cynic. These are the folks that
complain that nothing ever changes, which of course is true, as long as they
live a life full of complaints about nothing ever changing.
And then comes maybe the most dangerous complaint of
all. That’s when you say something
like. “Is that the best you can
do?” For, far too often, that complaint
betrays not a striving for excellence as it does a twisted perfectionism. And that messes up your relationships with
others, and it destroys you. For you can
say that complaint to someone else, but often you can say it to yourself,
grinding yourself down in brutal ways.
And do you see how that distorts reality? Perfectionism leads you to
avoid risking mistakes or when you make them, to not admit them. But you can’t
learn and grow unless you make mistakes.
If you really want excellence, avoiding mistakes or refusing to face
them will never get you there. Perfectionistic complaining prevents the very excellence for which it strives.
Take a moment, to think about what sort of complainer
you tend to be, a whiner or a martry, a cynic or perfectionist? It doesn’t matter whatever one you are. They all mess you up equally.
It’s because behind all these complaints lies an even
deeper problem. When you complain, you
lose touch with the reality of who you are.
When Paul talks about murmuring here, he is alluding to a common set of
stories that the Philippians knew well.
In the Old Testament’s stories of the journeys of the Israelites out of
slavery in Egypt, one behavior trips them up, again and again, their
murmuring. It trips them up because it
betrays an uncomfortable truth. God
might have delivered them out of slavery.
But they had a long way to go for that slavery to be delivered out of
them. You see. Complaining doesn’t just
distort the reality of the world around you.
It distorts the reality within you.
It presumes that you are powerless to change things. It leads you to abdicate your responsibility
to do anything about problems in your life but complain. And that slavery mentality will not only take
away your joy, it will limit your life.
In 1964, two psychologists did a study with a group of dogs. In both groups, the dogs received
a mild shock that lasted for five seconds.
But in one group, there was a panel that if they pushed on it, would
stop the shock. But the other group had
no such panel to push. Now after the
researchers administered a good number of shocks, they put the dogs back in
their home cages. But the next day, they
placed each dog in a cage where the middle, they had put a low wall which every
dog could jump if they tried. Then they
played a high-pitched tone that signaled a shock was coming. Now the dogs who had had the panel to push,
quickly learned to leap over the wall and get away from the shock. But 2/3s of the dogs who didn’t have that panel
to push, do you know what they did. They
didn’t do anything. They just sat and
whimpered (or in other words complained) and waited for the shocks to
stop.
As the psychologist Angela Duckworth points out in her book Grit, this
experiment points to a powerful truth. It’s
not suffering that leads to hopelessness.
It’s suffering you think you can’t control.
And human beings get captured by this twisted perspective
again and again, living lives of complaints rather than lives of change. And
when they do, not only do they diminish their joy. They limit their life, and often their
relationships. That’s why Paul puts
murmuring or complaining with arguing.
He knows how often they go together.
In fact, Paul sees this slave mentality so present in
the world, that he tells the Philippians.
If you can live without murmuring and arguing, you will become so
different you will be like stars shining in this world.
But how do you become those stars? How do you become
free like that, free from complaining, free to change, to bring change into the
world? In Paul’s words, God tells
you. You hold fast to the word of
life. Now, what is that word?
When God saw the brokenness of the world, the lostness
of human beings, what did God do. God
did not whine about how unfair it all was.
God did not play the martyr and complain of our lack of appreciation. God
did not give up and play the cynic either.
And God did not expect perfection from those whom he loved. No, God did something about it. God reached
out in love again and again. And, in
Jesus, God reached out in love so radically that he offered up everything, even
his very life. And through that act of
love, God freed you from your slavery. God freed you to become everything God intended
for you to be.
And in doing that, God not only freed you. God showed you the path to joy, to true
fulfillment. That path Paul points to in the final words of
this passage. For, Paul is writing this
letter from death row in Rome. Any day,
the Romans could execute him. But he
tells his friends that if that happens, that means I will simply be a libation,a drink offering over the sacrifice of your faith. You see.
In the Hebrew system of sacrifice, after you sacrificed an animal, you
poured wine or oil over the sacrifice as a beautiful aroma to please God. And Paul is simply saying. If I die, that’s what I will be, someone who joyfully
offered up his life to give you the freedom, the joy Christ has given me. And that, Paul says will give me joy. For I will simply be following in the steps
of the God who did the same for me and for you, adding the aroma of my love, to
the One who is love. And as you
experience that path, that love, that God who extravagantly gave up everything
to save you, to bring you home, it will free you in the same way. It will free you to love and sacrifice not
because you are a slave, but because you know how profoundly God has set you
free.
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