Christian Law Enforcement Fellowship Newsletter

July 2011

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love loyalty, and walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8); “What is desirable in a man is that he be found faithful…” (Proverbs 19:22a).

Honor and integrity is venerated in normal society because it is both rare and beautiful. It is rare given that fears and insecurities in nearly every aspect of life drive so many to default toward selfishness, egotism, cynicism and animosity; beautiful because seeing and experiencing them is something akin to a reflection of heaven on earth. Part of God’s image in man is His emplanted eternity in our hearts, that hope and desire to know a beauty we’re driven to embrace in a perplexed and conflicted world. Tragedy, suffering, pain and loss do not occur in a vacume without a hope and sense that this is not what God intended, not what His best concerning us entails. What is attached to such a hope is the spirit God gave us to strive forward into that beauty, the awareness that there is a powerful magic in this world designed to overcome evil with good, a good that can course through our soul to bring about a healing and wholeness that finds the best of times in the worst of times. In the Italian film “Life Is Beautiful,” love and sacrificial resolve work an alchemy that, though not without loss, outlasted the 3rd Reich. The true story of gratitude and forgiveness in “The Hiding Place” brought healing and wholeness to tens of thousands after the war. Hate and resentment are not life-sustaining attitudes. The power of Christ in meekness under the control of humility and compassion craft an engine that shatters the very gates of hell. Honor and integrity are attributes of God’s image that beat within our breast, but under a failed nature which supresses their supremacy, and in our fallenness we become ruled by a lower morality that depresses the power and purpose God designed for us from the beginning. We know we were made for the better, yet fail because we look to ourselves instead of Him.

Ray Pritchard’s book “He’s God - And We’re Not” stesses that what God demands, He also supplies. Indeed, we must look to and be invigorated by His healing and wholeness to be able to aptly reflect Him in character and creed. The “Old Spice” guy consoles men that even though we can’t look like him, we can at least smell like him. In fact, Scripture assures us that when we triumph in Christ, we become the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place (IICor.2:14). Such confidence we can have, not an adequacy in ourselves, but from God, and as servants of a new truth and His covenental love. We become a fragrance of Him in every place, among those whole and those perishing. By reflecting self-sacrificing grace and servanthood toward others we not only smell like but also reflect Him. There is an overarching and fundmental reason we’ve been given life and location and it is a trust that must be recognized and respected for the charge that it is. We can choose to abrogate its responsibility, but such always leads to a day of reckoning and subsequent, certain disaster.

Our life is not our own, and, as Pritchard points out, we cannot approach and attempt to manage life’s legitimate issues with illegitimate, self-centered means. We are not a law unto ourselves and to arrogantly presume divine sovereignty is ludicrous and delusional. We’ve been graced with a calling to fulfill the high honor of reverencing God’s image to a world desperate for the reality of faith in God’s hope and love, and God “longs to be gracious, and waits on high to have compassion” (Is.30:18) on those who have the integrity to acknowledge He is God and they’re not. He is a God of Truth and Justice, and we choose which side of that to be on. We have a rare and beautiful opportunity with our lives to be found faithful. At the heart of it is fearing God instead of life, and realizing His beauty in a soul enlarged by His Spirit with a powerful magic to both smell and look like Him. “The reverence of the Lord leads to life, so that one may sleep satisfied, unaltered by evil” (v.23); “Cease stiving and know that I am God” (Ps.46:10a).

Thank you for your faithful love!