Blessed Are The Flexible

In some reading I was doing about the beatitudes I came across an article where the writer was suggested a new beatitude. Jesus didn’t say it, but he did promote it throughout his ministry and it is true: “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.”

It is so easy to become inflexible, isn’t it? For example we can fall easily into the inflexible trap of legalism. Because we care about God’s Word and about Jesus’ commandments, sometimes we write our own set of standards to which people must conform. We end up judging everybody by those standards, even when those standards are based more on tradition than Bible.

Other times it is very easy for us to become set in our ways. This is true not only for individuals, but also for churches. We quickly fall into certain routines, and after we do a thing for a certain period of time, it becomes sacred. The routine becomes the right way. And whenever someone upsets our routine, we don’t like it and there are some that can get very upset about it. Ralph Neighbour wrote a book entitled, “The Seven Last Words Of The Church.” He defined those seven words as, “We never did it that way before.” These are the very words in which inflexibility, the status quo, legalism flourish, grow and maybe are our worst enemy of the relationship between Jesus and his bride .

It's intriguing how that it was said of Paul and his traveling companions that they were the men who “turned the world upside down.” Actually, they turned it right side up. It’s just that people then and now don’t know the difference. What was meant by that saying was that these men stirred up controversy and scandal wherever they went, by what they said and did.

They were following in good footsteps. Jesus did the same. He was a man who stirred up controversy wherever he went. When he confronted religious hypocrisy, he met it head on and called it what it was. When he saw traditions made by man in the name of God, he ridiculed and denounced them publicly. And many who saw it didn’t like it at all. The action of Jesus was new wine in their midst. God was doing something fresh and new. He has always done that throughout the history. There have been various renewals and awakenings, various outpourings and revivals. And when the "bride of Christ" has responded, Father has done a new thing in her midst. When individuals respond, God pours forth His Spirit upon them.

One reason why people write off the "church" today is because the packaged organized religion that is being promoted is just simply not relevant. It no longer speaks with authority or credibility to the issues people are facing. And this pretty much explains to me why the function of most churches is to defend their structures and systems which has left them irrelevant and without a practical life altering message for anyone.

Father’s desire is always to do a new thing in our lives. That's why it seems to me that the most crucial question is to consider how open we are to Father doing a "new" work in our lives. Are you open and flexible enough to receive it?  He desires to deepen our relationship with him and to open doors of opportunity daily into new areas of ministry and service. But in order to do that, we must be willing to get out of the rut of the routine and to do things in a new way. New wine must have new wineskins. How willing am I to allow Jesus to upset the routine in my life in order to bring me to where He wants me to be? He is far less concerned about those traditions we’ve set up than He is about meeting human need.

“Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.” Let me change that a bit: “Blessed are the flexible, for they are pliable in Father’s hands.”