Sometimes I do well, other times I do not do well at all. What I'm referring to applies to all areas of my life: as a father, husband, student, minister, etc. This week I have been feeling that I have not been doing very well in many areas. As I look back, I retrace the steps of lost opportunities and conversations that did not result as I would have wished. I see the obvious tests that I failed and cringe with regret.

Why does God choose such a weak vessel as me to do his work? His goals would be so much more easily accomplished if he did them through someone else, or maybe if he just intervened in some miraculous way. Yet he has chosen this jar of clay to bear a great treasure. I just don't get it.

It's so easy to just suppose that the good I do is a result of grace, and the wrong I do is a result of my own flesh. But I think that is a simplistic way of assesing the situation. Can my own success be in fact a work of the flesh? Can my failure be a working of grace? It's all a mystery. The problem comes when I try to grade my performance based on the immediate results. I have no comprehension of eternity, of the eternal consequences of my actions.

I know some people who, feeling that they have really "blown it" in life, think that God will not use them until they fix whatever is wrong. In their eyes, they are resisting blessing while they remain slaves to the flesh. But can anyone who believes in the victorious resurrection of Christ really be a slave to the flesh? Are we not free from the conviction of the law? We now live to fulfill the law, not to be judged by it. The law is no longer our standard, rather it is the description of who we really are. What was broken has been fixed. Yet we stubbornly insist that it has not.

When I become only more aware of just how "claylike" my jar is, I must remember that it is the contents that matter, and not the container.

Can an action be considered moral if it is done only out of duty or obligation? According to Kantian ethics, the answer to this question is "yes." The morality of an action is based on its universal applicability. Moral acts may not make moral people, but that is not the point. It is merely the action that matters.

So if we help people out of duty, but do not truly care about them, are we then justified in a moral sense? I think that our modern conceptions may tell us that we are. We live with a sense of duality, a dichotomy of being and doing, faith and reason, spirit and body. God tells us to love our neighbor, so we act in loving ways toward our neighbor. We do not, in reality, want to love our neighbor, especially our neighbors that are not up to our standards. But to fulfill the duty, we act in ways that seem to demonstrate love.

I have trouble with morally justifying this type of thinking. If we act out of duty, let's take a look at the real motivation behind it -- fear. We would not act out of duty if the duty was not there. But since we have the duty, we fulfill it in order to avoid negative consequences. The real question should be, what would you do if you were not bound by duty to do so?

But yet, as Christians, are we not free from duty in the legal sense? True, we have a duty to love. But this is not based on fear, because "there is no fear in love...perfect love casts out all fear" (1 John 4:18). So if we love our neighbor only out of duty, are we not attempting to justify ourselves by our own righteousness under the law?

The question then remains, how do I love my neighbor when it is against my human nature? How can this love be made real when all that I am opposes it? We may say that we love the sinner and hate the sin, but we blur this line far too often.

Sorry I haven't written anything in so long. School just started, and I was also finishing up an online ethics class. This leaves little time for pontification, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, today I am thinking about joy. Joy is something that we read about and hear about in church quite a bit, but I don't think we really know what it means. When we hear the word "joy" we automatically associate it with happiness. And in turn, when I try to define happiness I come up with the following observation: happiness is generally an emotional state based on favorable circumstances. Maybe this is a narrow definition, but as far as most of us experience happiness, I think this is pretty accurate.

But how does the Bible use the word "joy?" In Nehemiah 8:10 the people of Israel are told that "the joy of the Lord is your strength." This is interesting, because this exhortation came after a reading of the law. The remnant had just returned from exile. They were facing problems on all sides. The people were being harassed by foreigners that had settled the land in their absence. Even the wealthy Israelites were exploiting the poor ones by charging interest on loans for land. Ezra and Nehemiah had called the assembly for a reading of the law as a sort of reorientation for the community. When the people heard the law, the Bible tells us that they wept.

Why were they so unhappy? Probably because the reality of the situation caught up with them. They had lost their entitlement to the land because of their apostasy. They probably were reminded that God had warned them before about the terrible consequences of breaking the covenant. The law likely reminded them of the presence of God among the people, something that had been symbolized by a temple that now lay in ruins. The people became keenly aware of their separation from God.

And yet, Ezra and Nehemiah tell the people not to weep, but to celebrate. Any why? Because "the joy of the Lord is your strength." Notice that this is not the joy of the people, it is the joy of the Lord. There was no joy inherent in the situation. The circumstance, in their perception, lacked any redeeming features that would lead to happiness. But they did not have to look within themselves or their situation to find joy. The joy they sought came, like grace, directly from God.

I think that we have a limited comprehension of the true nature of joy. It is not mere emotion, but a character trait descriptive of the character of God; indeed, it is also a fruit of the Spirit. When we try to manufacture joy out of our circumstances we often come up short. It may similar to trying to manufacture righteousness.