City Life Starter

Written by Paul Lane

The Word

¹³ For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, ¹⁴ saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” ¹⁵ And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. ¹⁶ For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation. ¹⁷ So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, ¹⁸ so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. ¹⁹ We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, ²⁰ where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. 

Hebrews 6:13-20 (ESV)

Reflection

Of the four forces in the universe, the gravitational force has been the most difficult to understand.  The electrical, the weak interactive, and the strong interactive forces have all been shown to link with each other.  But for some reason, gravity has been extremely hard to, dare I say, get our arms around.  Interesting word picture there.

However, gravity is the foremost force we grapple with daily, and thus the one with which we are most acquainted. We easily accept the notion that “it never fails us.” When we lift one foot to take a step, we never spend a moment worrying that gravity won’t be there in the next instance to assist our foots return to Earth.  When we run, jump, and play our games, we do so with such reckless abandon that we hardly even notice gravity’s existence, or we think of it as just how the universe works. Only a real nerd would think, “I’m going to apply a momentary acceleration for 523 milliseconds, while raising my hands with the basketball. Then I’ll begin the release of the ball 137 milliseconds prior to apogee, for maximum energy transfer.” Most people just say, “I’ll take a jump shot.”

But when we do notice gravity, and are able to pull off some amazing feat by running, jumping or playing some other game, we say that we have mastered gravity. This is not true, we have only mastered ourselves in some way. Gravity is unchanged by our amazing feat. In fact, we are able to so master ourselves in this way because of gravity’s certainty.

In this passage of Hebrews, the author is calling us to not only look at how sure gravity is, but to think on the one who made gravity and how sure he is.  “…since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself….” (Hebrews 6:13)  If God promises a blessing, we should come to understand the certainty of that blessing, just as we have come to understand the certainty of gravitational action upon us.

Application

The formula above is the equation we use to describe how gravity works.  The two “m” terms are the objects that are causing the force and the “r” is the distance between them.  If you think of God and yourself as the two m’s, and r as the distance between you, this is a good model of how effective God’s promises can be in your life.  As Abraham patiently waited for God’s promises, the distance between him and God got smaller and smaller, until he could actually attain the promises.

Let the Lord attend your waiting and you will find that your distance to God and his promises will get smaller and smaller. 

Prayer

Dear Lord, create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me.  Just as I learned in church as a child, teach me Your sayings, Your thoughts, and Your promises, that I might train my mind to attend to them, and so attain them by Your grace. In Jesus name, amen.