Keys to the Kingdom

The city of Jericho was the home of a prostitute named Rahab. Her story in the Old Testament is one of amazing faith and backbone. Rahab‘s life shows God’s mercy and loving nature in using the less than perfect, the unlikely, and the improper to accomplish His purposes. God still loves to empower ordinary people to fulfill His extraordinary divine plans. With the exception of her family, Rahab chose to leave everything and every idol behind. Because of her spunk and newly-found trust in the Israelites’ God, she eventually became an ancestor of king David and King Jesus.

If it’s been awhile, you may want to re-read Rahab’s intriguing story in the book of Joshua, chapters 2 and 6. I love the verse where she helped the Israelite spies escape from her home: “Then she let them down by a rope through the window, for her house was built into the city wall, so that she lived in the wall” (Joshua 2:15 ESV). I found nine other translations confirming that she lived in the wall. Here’s a couple: “She resided within the wall itself” NRS. “She dwelt in the wall” RSV.

We believers are hidden with Christ in God. I like “in God” because that’s as good as it gets. “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:2,3 ESV). When the men from various caravan routes crisscrossed at Jericho, they told news of a multitude of Israelites. This swarm of people had a God unlike any idol Rahab knew about. She  heard how the one and only true God miraculously dried up the Red Sea and gave astonishing  victory in their battles, which caused the Canaanites’ hearts to melt with no spirit to fight.   Rahab made up her mind to cast her lot with God’s people. When she lived in the wall, she chose to risk her life by protecting the two Israelite spies. Before Jericho was destroyed, she actually switched from living in a wall to living in the God of all.    

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-6 NKJV). Since believers are seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, we can enter into rest and peace in our spirit and soul while here on earth.

Ike Davis and Ray Heady put their musical heads together and penned the classic song, “In the Shelter of His Arms. The tune and lyrics came to my mind as I thought about Rahab living in the wall, and how blessed it is to exchange a stone wall for the loving arms of Jesus.  “When my soul was disturbed with sorrow and my heart was broken with sin; Jesus opened His arms of mercy and tenderly took me in. There is peace in the time of trouble. There is peace in the midst of the storm. There is peace, though the world be raging, in the shelter of His arms.”

If you ever feel like you’re beating your head against a wall, just turn around and you’ll find Jesus standing there with His arms open wide.

The Key: Don’t live in a wall when you can choose to live victoriously in Christ Jesus.

A common misunderstanding of what makes a country or jurisdiction economically successful is the belief that it relies primarily on an abundance of natural resources and money to invest; “It takes money to make money,” the saying goes.  The explosive economic prosperity generated by the United States of American (“USA”) is often attributed to the rich natural resources available to our founders.

One only has to consider that the natives of this land occupied it for centuries and did not come close to generating the economic success that this relatively new nation did in our first 200 years of existence.  They had access to the plentiful resources long before the first immigrants set foot here.  What made the difference?  The answer is knowledge.

Successful businesses rely on knowledge that gives birth to innovation and popular products and services.  A person or group of people with a knowledge base experiment until they come up with new way to meet the needs of their customers; they build a better mouse trap.

I remember attending a technology seminar in 1991, and a presenter told the large audience that in the near future, each of us would carry around phones with us and have individual phone numbers. How could this be?  I did not have a vision for it.  The cell phone has replaced land lines, long distance service, local telephone companies, answering machines, GPS devices and more.  The inventors that imagined the cell phone built on decades of previous knowledge bases, and envisioned what was possible and what people wanted.

The USA became the most prosperous nation in human history because of this explosion of knowledge and innovation, unleashed by unprecedented personal freedom, private property rights, and the belief that people are capable of governing themselves without a controlling central authority.  Totalitarian monarchs or emperors had ruled nations in all the years of human history prior, squelching freedom and economic prosperity.

Then why is the economic engine of this great nation slowing down?  Because of the erosion of freedom which suppresses knowledge and innovation.  We are gradually headed down the European road which has embraced a utopian vision of a risk-free society.  Entrepreneurs and innovators sometimes fail and people lose money.  Socialist nations try to take the risk out of the business cycle by tightening their grip on economic activity through regulation and fiscal and monetary policy, and the USA is following suit.  When businesses spend an enormous amount of time complying with regulation rather than innovating, the quest for knowledge is inhibited and business activity slows down.  This has the unintended consequence of impacting small businesses disproportionately. Large corporations have the resources to hire compliance experts and lawyers to help them understand complicated laws and defend themselves against regulatory overreach.

As a nation and a community, let us continue to invest in education and the knowledge base of our young people.  Let us drop this notion that a central government can create a utopia for all of its citizens.  Let us continue to give businesses the freedom to innovate and sometimes fail.  In the end, it will mean more prosperity for a broader spectrum of our people.

For six days Dave and I had driven our mini-van in Mexico and never noticed that our floor mats were not ours.  These were thin and shredded in spots—clearly not the nice, thick ones we had paid extra for when we purchased the vehicle four years ago.

The only explanation was they had been replaced at the car wash—one we frequent regularly—the previous week.  Dave had gone alone and had sat outside under an umbrella while attendants dried our car.  When he checked their work, he noticed the shiny dashboard and nice buffing job on the car’s exterior but paid no attention to the floor.

Predictably, Hubby relied on his “I speaka no Spanish” excuse. “We need to go back there, Patty,” he said, “and you need to tell them that they gave us the wrong floor mats.”  Thanks to Google translate, that was no problema.  I explained to the manager what had happened.  He took our floor mats, walked to the back of the store and returned with others we didn’t recognize.  I understood a few words like “tomorrow” and “10:00” and “check the cameras,” so the next morning, I drove back to the carwash.  This time I was told to wait until Gabriel, a senior manager, met me there.  Perhaps he and I would look at the cameras together?

Gabriel spoke little English, but when I questioned the cameras, he said—at least, I think he said—that the security company had the code to view the tapes, and it was impossible to reach the people who worked there.  Hmmm.  He asked to look inside my mini-van. Since they had failed to remove the mat in the trunk of our vehicle, he could see the quality of the ones we were missing.  He assured me that there were three stores in Mazatlán that “probably” carried them.

They didn’t, but Gabriel’s subsequent text was a pleasant surprise.  If I came by the car wash at noon the next day, they would give me $140 in U.S. dollars.  I told Dave that he needed to go with me because I probably was going to be abducted and tortured, but he told me that he had confidence I could handle myself just fine.                                                                                       I mean, how sweet is that?

The fact that I am writing this article tells you nothing happened to me.  I drove up, the manager handed me the cash, apologized, and I drove home.  When I shared my story with a girlfriend who lives in Mazatlán, she said that the same thing happened to her husband on three different occasions. Three times?  I mean, one time was enough.  Never again will I get into my vehicle at a car wash without looking at my floor mats…and after reading this article, you probably won’t either.

Not a life-and-death matter, of course, and this one was resolved, but it reminded me of another area where I take things for granted…and sometimes not even three times is sufficient to get my attention.  In Hebrews 2:1, Paul warns us of such danger: We must pay closer attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. Paul is not talking to those who never accept Jesus as their Lord; he is talking to Christians who don’t learn their lesson the first time and heed the little things that then cause them problems.

One Sunday on the golf course instead of at church turns into weekends of buddy- time. One time talking behind the boss’s back starts a rumor mill that won’t be stopped.   One peek at a porn sight leads to an addiction that ruins a marriage. One excuse after another finding no time to read the Bible or talk with God causes a faith to back-slide

Not paying attention to floor mats is not the end of the world.  Not paying attention to our faith, however?  That’s an entirely different story.