The video feeds from live Gulf cams seem to indicate that efforts to overcome the pressure of escaping oil and gas have a chance of working.
If the pipes, a mile down on the ocean floor, can withstand the stress of offsetting pressure, the oil will stop when it meets its match of the drilling mud “from above.”
Seems like a picture of our broken lives. Until we experience from above a “greater power” than the self-centered forces of our own human nature, the polluting motives of self-centeredness continue (unhindered) to foul everything in and around us.
According to the wisdom of the Bible, our Savior hears our cry of faith and begins the clean-up process in us with a “legal declaration of take over.” He buys us with the price of his son’s suffering and death. He adopts us. Calls us his own. Gives us his Spirit and the promise of eventual restoration and immortality.
For now, however, while declaring us perfectly clean in Christ, he doesn’t make us good.
Instead he uses the pains and losses of life to help us see that we are now like “oil fouled pelicans” that are his. Now, as “his” people, we need him to continue to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
News reports indicate that fouled pelicans shake themselves to fatal exhaustion by trying to shiver and shake off the oil clinging to their feathers.
We can be like that too, until realizing that in order to change (be cleaned up) we need something far more than our own efforts to shake off the pollution.
How does it work? In simplest terms it requires a faith that results in love rather than self-centeredness.
But what does that mean? How can it be broken down into something we can understand?
The truth is that most of the answer we can’t understand. But God gives us glimpses of what, according to the Apostle Peter are critical for us to know and remember. After discovering that his own efforts resulted in a denial of Christ, Peter apparently learned how important it is to work with all our hearts to let God do what only God can do in us (2Peter 1:1-13).
Working with the understanding that God is the source of everything we need, he gives us a way of getting from fouled self-centeredness to love. Peter’s counsel is to work with all of our heart to let God’s Spirit change us through a faith that morphs from (1) desire for something better than our own physical nature (virtue), to (2) spiritual insight (knowledge and transformed mind) which leads to (3) self-control, necessary for (4) perseverance that gives (5) God a chance to center us in himself (godliness). As we discover through this process how much God loves us, it then becomes a real foundation for (6) family affection, and then ultimately (7) a love that shows how radically God is dealing with the pollutions of our self-centeredness. According to Peter this all grows out of a faithfully pursued trust in the power of Christ (2Peter 1:1-13).
If this seems complicated, it’s really as simple as faith/trust in Christ, by which His Spirit leads us through a life-long clean up– resulting increasingly in expressions of real love. Peter apparently grew to the point where he found the wisdom and understanding of how faith works.
As we see how much we need the best minds and cutting edge technology in the world to clean up our Gulf waters, doesn’t it only make sense to let God in his wisdom give us the understanding of what we need to do to let his Spirit clean us—from the inside out.
Thankfully, the result isn’t just a “top-kill” but an experience of real life.
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