Crippling Crutches

What would you rather have between legs and crutches? What would be your preference between prosthetics and the original limbs?

You see, crutches are there to assist injured legs. Prosthetics are there when the actual limbs are absent or have been rendered useless.

They are not essential to their functionality. They are aids in their restoration.

However, we are wont to many times elevate those same crutches to essentiality through the overuse of the same.

Then they will become more essential to walking than the legs whose injury necessitated their usage.

The result is that we render our legs useless because we insist on using those crutches all the time.

Let me use another illustration.

What are tools?

They are the things we use to work better, faster and neater.

But we must not use them.

In our childhood we built many things, even go carts that we would ride downhill at breakneck speeds without any tools like hammers, saws and chisels.

A stone can do the work of a hammer. A shaped nail can do the work of a chisel. And a panga can do the work of a saw.

A Swahili saying goes something like this

The breakage of a cooking stick does not mean the end of cooking.

I am talking about accessories, useful accessories.

But we can very easily make them idols by thinking that there is no life without them.

Allow me to take us to one such tool.

In Kenya, the cooperative movement is a huge thing and has been growing tremendously.

Initially, it started as a means to bring together a few peasants (my word) together and have them pool together the little moneys they could raise to be able to buy some land since most had been dispossessed by the colonialist and the henchmen who took over from him.

And that served many of them very well.

Then it was developed as a means for employees who were not earning much money to be able to save to be able to purchase things they could not otherwise have accessed through their salaries, especially since banks were more interested with the rich men’s money.

It was also a means to introduce some forced discipline to save money since for most it is impossible to not spend money once it gets into their hands, especially with all those needs around.

Again, it has served that purpose quite well.

Due to those successes (and I have intentionally left out the negatives, which are also many), many people have concluded that the cooperative spirit is the only way to progress.

As such, any few people will unite their purses for whatever purpose since it has worked so well over the years.

Until is has become a religion. Until it has become a god.

You will hear some arguments bordering on blasphemy by advocates of those small cooperatives.

Who will bury you if you are not in a chama? How will you buy furniture or land without membership? How will you get married outside a chama?

In short, we have elevated the crutch above the legs it was meant to help heal. We have completely forgotten that we even have any legs.

And that is idolatry.

I hear people complaining about the constraints and unreasonable demands in those groupings and wonder who forces someone to be in such a group.

And it is in death that they are most powerful as they can then make the most punitive demands.

And nobody dare rebel because they also will need to be buried.

One must give what they are told and not what they can afford.

Reminds me of Jesus telling the person who wanted to follow Him to let the dead bury their own dead.

I heard several such members complaining about all those demands and asked them who decides on who gives what and they responded it was the leaders.

Why then was everybody buying what they had been ordered, yet complaining?

The group has transitioned from being a servant to a master like we talk about electricity or money.

It becomes a very hard taskmaster.

But it doesn’t stop there though for the purposes of this ministry I won’t pursue that direction.

Allow me to look at our faith.

I have for very long been preparing Bible Reading plans for those who think that the Bible cannot be just read since it is ‘too big’.

I have several testimonies of people who have been helped tremendously by those reading plans.

But those reading plans are not the Bible.

It would be very sad if someone stopped reading the Bible because their reading plan got lost because it is just a tool to help a believer establish a consistent discipline of reading the Bible.

That person would have elevated the reading plan to an idol that is detestable to God.

Jesus advised us about the prayer closet. And that closet is a very useful tool in our prayer times.

But it is not prayer.

Otherwise, what would you do if you got into a situation where you are unable to get even a few minutes alone for a week? What would you do if in your travel you get to a place where there is nothing even remotely resembling a prayer closet? Why are we ordered to pray without ceasing?

To some it is a prayer shawl or any similar tool.

If the tool whose purpose it is to elevate your relationship with God blocks the relationship when it is absent, it has stopped being a tool but an idol.

I remember once I lived in a place where the watchman was a Muslim who was very serious on his observations.

When someone would come to him at the time he was going for prayer just beside the gate, he would insult this ‘intruder’ badly so that he allows him to go for his prayers.

From our point we might judge him as being foolish, among other things.

But that is exactly how we look when we convert the tools God has given (we have created) to aid our devotion into absolute essentials.

We have allowed crutches to replace our legs.

That was Christ’s major argument with the spiritual leaders of His time.

From the Sabbath to ceremonial cleansing, He showed them what His Father had in mind when creating those orders.

They were a means but the Jews had made them ends. They were tools but were made the essentials.

But are we any different from those guys?

Haven’t we created even bigger strictures?

I will not even mention devotional materials.

I will not mention Bible Studies.

What guides your worship?

Is it the crutches you have allowed to guide it to the point that they have obliterated the relationship that is primary to that worship?

Will you go back to your first love as Christ ordered the church at Ephesus?

Will you seek to reestablish your relationship with God on His terms without any intermediaries?

Tools are good and useful. Crutches are useful, even essential at the right time.

But they are not the project. They are not the building.

We are the building. Christ is the One building it.

We are the branches even as Christ is the vine.

Let us never forget that simple fact.