1 Timothy 6:16 – Preserved Anticipation
13 I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate, 14 that you keep this commandment without spot, blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ’s appearing, 15 which He will manifest in His own time, He who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see…
I woke up to the unkillable anthem of Petra this morning. "We are content… To pitch our tent… Where the glory's evident… Seldom do we know… The Glory came and went."
Perhaps the Lord was preparing my heart via those ancient songsters for what Paul sowed into Timothy's so long ago in 1 Timothy 6:16. And what a blessed Truth it is! Christ's unapproachable light, His holiness ever on His terms, perpetually humbles us, yes, and it should. But that Other, that Light so bright that it continues to reveal all of our remaining sin, it also irradiates our sense of stale sameness.
Yes, to some extent we are in the commercial with the middle-aged guy who said upon waking up without enthusiasm that it was another day to make the donuts. Yes, we agree with Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun, or the clouds. Much of what happens today has happened before. Many of the responses we will find in our families, in our coworkers, and in ourselves have come up before. Yet, Job 19:26 still stands. We can grow accustomed to and bored with a lot, but what the Christian looks forward to, we can have experienced already to the point of repetitiveness. In our flesh, we will see God.
Because of this, because there is a next chapter our eyes aren't ready for yet, that 1 Corinthians 2:9 says our imaginations have managed to wrap themselves around yet, even our Ephesus can't completely entangle us. Remember, Paul is emphatically coaching Timothy NOT to be satisfied with what that city offers his eyes, his pride, his pocketbook. What a blessing, then, that with all Christ has shown Him, and us, more of His glory is a coming attraction that nothing this world offers can satiate. We can reserve then, a little of the child at their best who anticipates eagerly every experience because it is new. We have newness coming.
This can also put our current relationships in perspective. Paul is a champion, especially here, especially with Timothy, of the ways in which God can use a human mentor in relationship. But this relationship, Paul says, has a built-in obsolescence at God's throne. NO MAN has seen, marvels Paul,
everything that Christ is. Even Timothy's mentor is teaching him the Divine handoff. Even he is loosening us from that tendency of which Christ spoke in Matthew 24 to go here and there seeking after the latest showing of Him.
Because we KNOW there is more to come that will be more satisfying as we are prepared to receive it, we can settle down in gratitude – even in Ephesus. Because we know we will see enough of Him that our current senses would be fried, we can be grateful to perceive Him, by His subtle grace, in the bird, and the lily, and the day's work.
This anticipation, this sense of Christ's gracious sovereignty to show us only what we are ready for can team some of our breathlessness in how we communicate with other people. We can, especially fresh from the Word, be a little like Jill Lepore wrote in "Herman Melville at Home" in the July 22, 2019 issue of the New Yorker. "Reading parts of Moby Dick, is like watching a fireworks in which Virgilian Roman candles, Old Testament sparklers, and Shakespearean bottle rockets pop off all at once, hissing and whistling; you get the feeling the stage manager is about to blow a finger off." When we are alive to Christ's glory at all, we can be a little like that, with a tendency to overwhelm.
Lepore modulates, though, "If there’s a showiness to Melville’s pyrotechnics, his erudition was hard-won." She refers to how the author came by his education, but I would earn our audience before men in the same way. If we would be hungry to catch glimpses of that glory there we would be better in a position to reveal it little by little. If we would be determined to reveal it and how we go about the most mundane habits, people might listen more readily to our experiences in the Word and in prayer. We can't show those around us, Lord, what no man has seen, but we can whet their appetite with the persevering, childlike enthusiasm You give us. May the Lord move it from the page to the prosaic.
I woke up to the unkillable anthem of Petra this morning. "We are content… To pitch our tent… Where the glory's evident… Seldom do we know… The Glory came and went."
Perhaps the Lord was preparing my heart via those ancient songsters for what Paul sowed into Timothy's so long ago in 1 Timothy 6:16. And what a blessed Truth it is! Christ's unapproachable light, His holiness ever on His terms, perpetually humbles us, yes, and it should. But that Other, that Light so bright that it continues to reveal all of our remaining sin, it also irradiates our sense of stale sameness.
Yes, to some extent we are in the commercial with the middle-aged guy who said upon waking up without enthusiasm that it was another day to make the donuts. Yes, we agree with Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun, or the clouds. Much of what happens today has happened before. Many of the responses we will find in our families, in our coworkers, and in ourselves have come up before. Yet, Job 19:26 still stands. We can grow accustomed to and bored with a lot, but what the Christian looks forward to, we can have experienced already to the point of repetitiveness. In our flesh, we will see God.
Because of this, because there is a next chapter our eyes aren't ready for yet, that 1 Corinthians 2:9 says our imaginations have managed to wrap themselves around yet, even our Ephesus can't completely entangle us. Remember, Paul is emphatically coaching Timothy NOT to be satisfied with what that city offers his eyes, his pride, his pocketbook. What a blessing, then, that with all Christ has shown Him, and us, more of His glory is a coming attraction that nothing this world offers can satiate. We can reserve then, a little of the child at their best who anticipates eagerly every experience because it is new. We have newness coming.
This can also put our current relationships in perspective. Paul is a champion, especially here, especially with Timothy, of the ways in which God can use a human mentor in relationship. But this relationship, Paul says, has a built-in obsolescence at God's throne. NO MAN has seen, marvels Paul,
everything that Christ is. Even Timothy's mentor is teaching him the Divine handoff. Even he is loosening us from that tendency of which Christ spoke in Matthew 24 to go here and there seeking after the latest showing of Him.
Because we KNOW there is more to come that will be more satisfying as we are prepared to receive it, we can settle down in gratitude – even in Ephesus. Because we know we will see enough of Him that our current senses would be fried, we can be grateful to perceive Him, by His subtle grace, in the bird, and the lily, and the day's work.
This anticipation, this sense of Christ's gracious sovereignty to show us only what we are ready for can team some of our breathlessness in how we communicate with other people. We can, especially fresh from the Word, be a little like Jill Lepore wrote in "Herman Melville at Home" in the July 22, 2019 issue of the New Yorker. "Reading parts of Moby Dick, is like watching a fireworks in which Virgilian Roman candles, Old Testament sparklers, and Shakespearean bottle rockets pop off all at once, hissing and whistling; you get the feeling the stage manager is about to blow a finger off." When we are alive to Christ's glory at all, we can be a little like that, with a tendency to overwhelm.
Lepore modulates, though, "If there’s a showiness to Melville’s pyrotechnics, his erudition was hard-won." She refers to how the author came by his education, but I would earn our audience before men in the same way. If we would be hungry to catch glimpses of that glory there we would be better in a position to reveal it little by little. If we would be determined to reveal it and how we go about the most mundane habits, people might listen more readily to our experiences in the Word and in prayer. We can't show those around us, Lord, what no man has seen, but we can whet their appetite with the persevering, childlike enthusiasm You give us. May the Lord move it from the page to the prosaic.
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