The first covenant that God made with His creation is found in Genesis 2:16-17. It is known as the Adamic Covenant. I have heard some theologians refer to it as a ‘covenant of works’ since it was based on Adam and Eve not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I have also heard it said that faith was not necessary for Adam and Eve because they were in the presence of God every day in the Garden of Eden. After all, why do you need faith to believe in a God that is walking and talking with you every day? While all of this may be true on the surface, there was most certainly an element of faith in this first covenant.

• Here is the first test of faith in the bible. Eve is confronted with a very real dilemma – conflicting testimonies; the first lie from the father of lies. (John 8:44)
• Here is this crafty serpent telling her that God has some secret reason for making the rule against eating the fruit of the tree; He wants to keep her down.
• Here is the serpent telling Eve that she will not die – calling God a liar.
• Here is Eve tempted to want more that what God has given her.

Pride, covetousness and selfishness (the very things that caused Satan to fall) enter into her heart and she was faced with a crisis of faith. Not faith in regard to whether God exists or not, but rather, whether or not God is trustworthy. Whether or not His word is truth.

Eve desired the control that the knowledge of good and evil would give, though it was not hers to possess. Further, when Adam saw that Eve didn’t die immediately, he may have thought he had reason to doubt God’s word. He partook in the selfish desires of his heart and ate of the fruit.

Adam and Eve may not have needed faith to believe in God, but they needed faith to believe God. The element of faith that was a part of their covenant with God (trust) was thus broken; the element of works (obedience) was also broken, and all humankind was stained with the sin of our parents.

Each of us faces the same crisis of faith every single day. No matter how long we have been Christians, the temptation is always there to covet God’s power and usurp his authority through self-reliance. In this life, none of us will ever be truly righteous (Romans 3:10), none of us will ever be without sin (1 John 1:10). We will always fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), failing to love Him with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength (Luke 10:27). It is only by leaning completely on Him who died that we are granted the ability to become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). Don’t trust your own wisdom or understanding. (Proverbs 3:5) Trust (have faith) only in Him (Isaiah 26:4), and Obey (work) His commandments (John 14:15).

It was a diorama about twelve inches square and nine inches high. It depicted a simply appointed living room with a chair, a carpet, a door, and a woman vacuuming. It was an ordinary scene with absolutely nothing remarkable about it. What made this piece of art so memorable to me was what was going on outside the room.

Outside was a fanciful array of men and monsters of all different colors, sizes and shapes. Their tentacles, arms, legs and eyes were all interwoven and they surrounded the room and the woman doing her chores. Inside was a scene of mundane toil; outside was total chaos.

UPDATE: Here is the work of art described above. Click for a larger version.

That piece of artwork depicted my life at the time. To the casual observer, I was an average guy working an average job living in an average house and driving an average car. My main worries were losing my job, losing my wife, losing my house, losing my car and my dwindling bank account.

Since saving faith was granted to me by God through Jesus, I really don’t worry much about my job or whether I will have enough food or clothing (Luke 12:29-31), nor even about having enough money. Strangely enough, I still identify with this piece of artwork and am still concerned with many things.

The monsters lurking outside my window today are my sins that I don’t want to do, but keep doing (Romans 7:15); my unsaved family (both those who claim to know Christ but produce no fruit and those who overtly deny Him); my friends at church who seem biblically illiterate and apathetic about the Gospel;  people I work with who are trapped in a legalistic religion; and what, if anything, I can do to help bring these people to Christ.

For now I think I will pray about it (1 Peter 5:7), be still, and know that God reigns. (Psalm 46:10)

Two weeks ago at church, our council of Elders called a man up to the front of the church before the worship service began. They presented him an award for being the most humble Christian at our church. The award was a tiny lapel pin a little smaller than a dime. The man accepted the award with a tearful and red-faced “Thank you all, so much” and returned to his seat. Last Sunday, the man came to church wearing the pin in the lapel of his jacket and the head elder took it away from him because he showed pride by wearing it and didn’t deserve it anymore.

This actually didn’t happen. It is an old joke rephrased. Nevertheless, humility can be a difficult concept to understand. Last week I listened to a two-part sermon preached by John Piper entitled Battling the Unbelief of a Haughty Spirit. You can download it and listen to it yourself here:

Battling the Unbelief of a Haughty Spirit Part 1.mp3

Battling the Unbelief of a Haughty Spirit Part 2.mp3

When I listen to podcast sermons (usually about a dozen each week) I like to take notes on the parts that hit me hard, or speak to my heart. Sometimes I’ll stop the playback and just start writing about instances where I have personally experienced what the preacher is talking about.

Here are the notes that I took while I was listening to the sermons linked above. If you get anything out of this, I encourage you to download and listen to the entire sermon. Not all of what appears below is Piper’s and not all of it is mine.

If you are a Christian and you know anything at all about humility, I am confident that you have encountered this type of pride at least once. Here are two examples: The man who volunteers for the worst task at a church function and then for weeks afterward, brags about doing such a menial job. The woman who helps somebody anonymously and then “lets slip” what she did to one friend who she knows can’t keep her mouth shut. These are examples of a craving that people have for other people to think well of them.

Each of these forms of pride is an example of making much of yourself. As Christians, we should be delighting in Christ alone and in God’s mercy to us.

Isn’t it funny, considering our size and place in the universe, that we humans would struggle with genuine humility?

True humility means casting everything on the Lord. Casting your anxieties on the Lord is humility, because proud people don’t feel that they need help from the Lord. Pride makes people deny their anxieties and want to look like they’ve got it all together. Piper says, “…how easy it is to ‘be made much of’ even for my self-denial.” We have to be such cool customers. God is our LAST refuge instead of our first thought. We are afraid to be vulnerable. We are afraid to look human.

Piper says, “God loves people, but hates pride.” The condition of your heart is of utmost importance. It is almost impossible for anyone to tell the difference between genuine humility and false humility in another person, but it is easy for us to know it in ourselves. This is a skill that we work inwardly on ourselves, not an outward skill that we work on others.

Surprisingly, this one was not fictional and was written by a respected journalist named Michael Gartner. It is entitled, “A Life Without Left Turns.” If you would like to read the entire article, here is the link. If you would just like a synopsis, read on.

My father never drove a car.

Well, that’s not quite right.

I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:

“Oh, bull___!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car.

Another portion tells about his father and mother’s church habits:

My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church.

He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

Later in the account we find out why it is so named.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?” “I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”

The piece ends with his father’s death at 102 years of age.

“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”

A short time later, he died.

A man gets married, works hard all his life, has two sons, walks everywhere, doesn’t drive a car, avoids church, lives to be 102 years old, dies peacefully and goes straight to Hell.

If there is nothing more to this life than to live happily, comfortably, healthily and die peacefully, then religion is a complete waste of time and we should just skip church like this man did and go for a walk instead!  His story is an example of how not to live and we should pray that our lives are not wasted as this man’s was. How terribly, tragically sad this story is. Proof that Satan will give you anything you want in this life if he can have you in the next.

But if the Bible is the truth and there is more to our existence than this brief journey we call life, then our purpose must be to never live a life focused on selfish comfort and pleasure. Our true purpose must be to reach those who do not know about Jesus and share God’s gift of eternal life. (I’ll let you in on a secret: most of your friends at church are trying their best to live their lives like the man in this story. If they have retired already, time is running out for you to tell them that they’re wasting their life.)

Here is a truly heartwarming story that Christians should pass around more than the one by Gartner. This one is from John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life.

In April 2000, Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards were killed in Cameroon, West Africa. Ruby was over eighty. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old, and serving at Ruby’s side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over a cliff, and they were both killed instantly. I asked my congregation: Was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great passion, namely, to be spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ – even two decades after most of their American counterparts had retired to throw  away their lives on trifles. No, that is not a tragedy. That is a glory. These lives were not wasted. And these lives were not lost. “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).

Americans spend billions of dollars every year trying to live a life like Michael Gartner’s father. Can you imagine him standing before Jesus on the great Day of Judgment and telling God, “I walked instead of going to church.” Or “I never drove a car and didn’t let my wife make left-hand turns.”

What will you say when you stand before Him?

Please, don’t hold this man’s life up as something to be emulated. His life was a waste. His one and only, precious life was a waste because he refused to know Jesus. Please don’t waste your life like this man. Please!

Here’s why.

As long as I’ve been typing (or “keyboarding” as my kids call it) I’ve used my right hand to hit the first digit of the year. I took my first typing class in 81. In 83 I took my first computer class in high school. When I went to college I spent a lot of time on a keyboard typing computer programs and term papers. Every time I entered the year, I went to the 8 with my middle finger.

In the 90s I worked at three different companies and always had a computer for drafting and CAD design work. Moving from 89 to 90 wasn’t a big deal at all; each digit was just one position to the right. It was the same scenario going from 99 to 00; just one digit over to the right.

Now along comes the dreaded 10.

For nearly 30 years, I’ve been going to my right to type the year. Now I need to go to my left and it is a radical change of a long, long-time habit.

Though this typing change is trivial in comparison, I think there are parallels between this and Jesus’ words to Nicodemus about being born anew in John 3:3. Nicodemus didn’t understand how anyone could be born again – it just didn’t make sense to his worldly, works-based mind. But Jesus was talking about a change, a radical change that goes all the way back to the beginning stages of life and learning. Nicodemus had to first unlearn what he had learned and then relearn the way of the Gospel. This is why Jesus said we must be like little children. My youngest daughter had no trouble going from typing 09 to typing 10 because she’s been typing for less than a year.

The older we get and the longer we cling to our traditions, the harder it is make the changes that Jesus demands. I have family that were born and raised in the Roman church and they thoroughly believe that they can’t change. Not that they won’t change, but that they absolutely can not change.

Making even small changes in our lives is difficult; how much more so the big changes that require us to start all over again. Every time I struggle to use the smallest finger of my left hand to hit the 1 instead of using my right ring finger to hit the 0 I’m going to think about what it means to be born anew. 2 Corinthians 5:17

* Yes. I know that the decade doesn’t end until December 31 of 10, but typing 11 will be way easier than typing 10 and my point would be lost if I waited a year to publish this.