Mark 10:18/Luke 18:19
Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”
We are fascinated and taken with “great” people, even as Christians. We look for inspiration, which is not all bad, but I think what we really need to look for are catalysts to the One who is good.
“Listen to the person who listens to God,” Tozer advises. I agree. As Christ followers, shouldn’t we all be pointing each other to Him and not to ourselves? To become, as we coined a year ago or so, “EPPTTP”s–Empowered Powerless Pointers To The Power.
It goes along with the Tozer quote from yesterday–“A hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically in tune with each other.” Now here I go quoting Tozer again. Am I worshipping him? Why I love Tozer’s writings is because they always point me to Jesus and away from Aiden Wilson himself. Same with Andrew Murray.
But they are human like you and me and therefore not to be followed or held in any sort of awe. That’s not fair to the person we put on the pedestal and it will always disappoint us once we “see behind the curtain.”
This was revealed to me another layer deeper last week when I read some stuff I never knew about Martin Luther. Now he obviously did some incredible stuff for the Christian faith for which I’m sure we are all thankful.
But he was human. Flawed.
With blind spots.
Did you know he was quite anti-semitic? Toward the end of his life, he wrote some pretty intense stuff. These are his words from a work entitled On the Jews and Their Lies:
“God has struck [the Jews] with ‘madness and blindness and confusion of mind.’ So we are even at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children they have shed since then (which still shines forth from their eyes and their skin). We are at fault in not slaying them. Rather we allow them to live freely in our midst despite all their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying, and defaming…”*
Luther continues by suggesting that Christians set fire to synagogues or schools (and bury whatever will not burn), raze their houses, take their prayer books and Talmudic writings, threaten the lives of their rabbis who continue to teach, ban them from the highways, and confiscate their money.*
Wow. “We are at fault in not slaying them.”
Nobody’s perfect, huh.
As you can probably figure, the Nazis republished these writings to support their cause. This is not a Martin Luther bashing. It should simply remind us of the imperfection of even our greatest theological heroes.
The book of Hebrews is all about the superiority of Jesus Christ. It is to Him we look. It is to Him we point each other. Who on earth is like Him? Who can heal and bring peace to our hearts?
No one but God alone.
Hopefully this takes pressure off everybody to be saviour. As we say in Ripple Effect, “I can’t heal you, but I can point you to the One who can.”
No one is good but God alone.
Though we do love each other with the love of Christ, I hope. God does love us through one another. Yet as Ana just said, it’s easy to confuse the vessel with the Source. Are you worshipping the vessel or the Source?
The purpose of these daily emails is to point you to the One who is perfect and good. To be an EPPTTP. If you have pursued God even a small fraction more than before, then glory to God for being a catalyst for Him alone.
Soli Deo Gloria–Glory to God alone.
*Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, in Luther’s Works, vol.47, ed. Franklin Sherman (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 267-270