Up way too early. Out of bed, throw on jeans, a belt, a hoodie. All is stealth-mode until I hit the stairs, where the floorboards creak like books that have never been opened.
Turn on the teapot, turn over the quail eggs in the incubator. The light slants sideways through leaves on trees, and at this hour it’s golden like sunset but coming from the opposite direction.
I usually miss this.
The cats yawn and stretch in lazy suspicion, and I hear Kav, our youngest, sneeze in his room. He’s usually the first one up and you don’t sneeze in your sleep, so I peek in and his skinny arms stretch out for me, for a warm hug that comes with a silent grin.
Back in the living room, it feels like forever extends before me. Like hours. I could do anything – clean the house, work on a class, read a couple chapters, bake something special for breakfast.
But really, I make tea and sweep the floor. That’s it.
Because it’s not actually hours that I have, or even a single hour. It feels like it in those first minutes, but this is Sunday, our only early morning of the week. Everyone’s got to get up and moving in forty minutes.
There’s nothing wrong with an extra forty minutes. But the delusions of grandeur threaten to make the found time seem small, insignificant, not enough. They aren’t, though; it’s just that unrealistic expectations take up too much room, crowding out gratitude for what really happens.
It was still bonus time, and quiet space. It’s all gain.
But inflation, as it tends to do, makes it seem like loss.
We have a good thing going, but something subtle sneaks in and steals from it.
Which leads me to the service.
It could be any Sunday morning service. It’s probably most of them, in fact.
But on this particular one, in the middle of amazing worship, I saw a picture in my mind of a 40,000-foot view of the churches of the Valley. It happened during a moment of noticing our congregation leaning into the song – the Spirit-filled singing, the off-the-page adoration of Him – and I felt like in that 40,000-foot view, the Lord was super pleased with our church and several others that morning.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling the Lord’s pleasure on something, by the way.
But in that moment, I also felt pride in our church and the way we were pursuing Him.
And the Holy Spirit very quickly squashed that and corrected me, and said that our leaning toward Him cannot be anything — ANYTHING — about our church or any particular church, or who we are, or our particular style. It can only be about Him.
If it’s about anything else, even (or, especially) in the guise of being about Him when it’s really about us, it’s idolatry.
Look at us, how humble we are, how we’re looking to Jesus, how good we are at holding this fragile bubble of genuine worship— pop! It’s gone as soon as we touch it.
We are not meant to hold this for ourselves. As soon as we’re aware of it, we’ve lost it.
I probably don’t need to tell you how many churches I’ve worshiped in where this kind of pride was just the status quo, part of the air we breathed, even as we were singing that He was the air we breathed.
So hey, let’s talk about Uzzah. We have something in common here.
Uzzah’s story happens in 2 Samuel, right after David is anointed as king over all Israel. David wants to bring the Ark to Jerusalem so he chooses his closest 30,000 friends to help, and here we are in verse 3:
They carried the ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill.
Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the ark of God, and Ahio went in front of the ark.
— 2 Samuel 6:3-4
So the Ark had been in the house of Abinadab, and the reason it was there is a whole other story, but it had been there for twenty years. A long time, at Uzzah’s dad’s house.
So Uzzah was pretty familiar with it. Probably too familiar. He may have felt a sense of entitlement, ownership, and authority over it, as we tend to do with things we feel inflated over due to our proximity to them.
When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen lurched.
The anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him there, and he died there beside the ark of God.
— 2 Samuel 6:6-7
We often read this like, Ohhh, poor Uzzah, he was just helping! Dude, that was harsh. Even David thought so. And, sorry to keep picking on David but this wasn’t the only part of this situation he got wrong, because they weren’t supposed to be carrying the ark on a cart in the first place. They were supposed to carry it with poles, because it was not to be touched.
Uzzah had become so familiar with something sacred of the Lord’s that he thought the Lord needed his help in caring for it. You could argue it was just a sudden reaction and there was no thought involved at all, but you could also argue that our knee-jerk reactions are the tangible result of thoughts we’ve allowed to percolate.
I know the rules, but God needs my help; He’ll make an exception for me.
This is called presumption. A person who knows the rules but wants to see how far they can stretch them or get away with them is often also a person who is neither honest with themselves nor God…nor anyone else.
God knew exactly where Uzzah’s heart was, just as He knows our heart when we make excuses.
That is a sobering, fearful thing, especially in our culture (and even our churches) where we take such pride in our roles, associations, and privileges.
Because if Uzzah can’t get away with this, what does that mean for us?
It means we cannot treat what is holy as something that is common.
Uzzah, instead of being humbled by proximity and stewardship, seems to have made it about himself and became arrogant.
All of Israel had been warned against this:
As for anyone who presumes to disobey the priest appointed to minister there to the Lord your God or the judge, that person shall die. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. All the people will hear and be afraid and will not act presumptuously again.
— Deuteronomy 17:12-13
I don’t know how it works for other people, but for Christians, pride usually sneaks in masked as righteousness: the sneaky humble brag, the fancy prayer, the exaggerated testimony, the subtle judgment of “those people” (whoever they are) that we distance ourselves from, not wanting to be inadvertently associated with. Or the desire to have (or be) the answer for someone, instead of seeking The Answer with them.
Inflated superiority takes up too much room, and crowds out gratitude for who we really are, what we really have privilege to access, and the sacred space we get to live in.
We have the privilege of proximity to so many holy things: His presence. Our families. The gifts we’re endowed with. The hearts of each other.
We have these sacred things but as soon as we get too familiar, we can take them for granted and treat them as common. Our hand closes over instead of staying open, and we begin to act like we are the one to be served, rather than the one serving.
When I’ve looked back honestly (facing all the cringe), I see this in so many of my old ways, and even in recent ways that I just thought were fine. They were so much a part of church culture that I didn’t realize how opposed they were to Kingdom culture, until He confronted me.
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christand be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.
— Philippians 3:8b-9
It is so good to be confronted by Him, when our hands are open to His ways and not close-fisted to ours.
Perfection doesn’t qualify people for ministry; repentance and obedience do. Humility does. Surrender to Him does. These things expand us without inflating us.
Pride is a disqualifier, though often a delayed one. God is so patient with us, giving us so many second chances to see ourselves rightly.
(I wonder how many second chances Uzzah already had?)
One of the things I have learned over decades of intercessory prayer and prophetic ministry is that when you are an intercessor, you pray about things you can’t talk about. God tells you things you can’t talk about, and when you minister, people tell you things you can’t talk about, too.
If you’re an intercessor, you know. It’s not our job to talk; it’s our job to pray, watch, and speak in agreement with God.
He never tells us something to hold over someone else, though. He doesn’t entrust secrets to those who get an ego boost or otherwise abuse them.
And we want to be those He can trust.
He is breaking off pride in our Valley and elsewhere, where we have taken something holy and perverted it into elevating ourselves, our individual churches, or ministries. If we want the spotlight on what we are doing instead of what He is doing (and it must be said, these are often not the same things), we have gravely lost focus.
Let love be genuine;
hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.— Romans 12:9-10
It’s not that He wants us to be nameless or unidentifiable, but that He wants us to be so attentive to Him that we are oblivious to any name we are making for ourselves. This is for our protection.
Live in harmony with one another; do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
— Romans 12:16
Also, it’s not the desire to do something big or significant that’s wrong. There’s nothing wrong with healthy ambition or wild exploits or the desire to accomplish a whole list of things in an hour that you would normally sleep through.
And it’s not wrong to feel the relief or sense of achievement that comes from getting those things done, or from leaving something — or someone — better than you found them.
Making something or someone (even if it’s ourselves) better than before isn’t what’s wrong.
It’s thinking that we are better than [insert name or group here] that’s wrong.
If I’m understanding this right, the only person in the Kingdom I’m better than is myself, yesterday.
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
— Romans 12:3
Don’t miss this: He is right there with you, as He is here with me, at the desk, in the car, in line at the post office, and as we are wandering the aisles in the grocery store, trying to find where they relocated the dairy. He is in the tension-filled meeting, and in the garden where the weeds are threatening to take over.
His presence is right there, the air we breathe, but we will miss Him if we are distracted by our preconceived notions and focused on our superiority masked as righteousness.
This is holy ground. We hold it all with an open hand, because we want to steward it well.
P.S. Along these lines: What does the Bible really say about leadership in the Church? Two theologians — a Hebrew scholar and a Greek scholar — untangle where we’ve often confused man made traditions and assumptions with what the Word (and words) actually say. Important info and perspective here.
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