by Dennis Gladden, By Green Pastures, ©2025
(Mar. 12, 2025) — Three articles about living parables were all I intended, but two more have been pestering.
One is this post, where I want to explain the reason for this series. In the first three, we have watched God in the Bible enlighten His teaching through daily events. Now, I want to relate a personal living parable that shows His ways don’t change.
The fifth post (and I expect to be the last) will explore this creation as a living parable for the new creation already underway in the Christian and culminating in the new heaven and the new earth. There have been dabs of insight through the years, and this series offers the canvas where I can brush them together.
I expect that post will be lengthy and take some time to write, so I can’t say when I’ll publish it, but hopefully soon. I am anxious to learn how it all comes together and for your feedback.
The biblical pattern becomes personal.
I started this series because I noticed over the years that the Holy Spirit arranged a pattern in the gospels where an event follows or precedes a teaching of Jesus to illuminate it.
What I saw reminded me of our science classes, where time in the lab gave us a chance to put the classroom lesson to the test. What a masterful teacher our Lord is!
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The last two posts presented the pattern, one about Jesus’s revelation, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and the other about His preparing a place in heaven for us.
We could add The Exodus, another storehouse of parables drawn from life as God ushered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to the blessings in The Promised Land.
So, yes, living parables are a mainstay of the Bible.
And also in our daily lives.
I fell in love with Jesus because of one.
First, God wounded me through two questions.
If you knew me in the early 1990s, you would think, rightly, I was prosperous. I had a wife of Proverbs 31 character, two terrific children approaching teenhood, a career in programming that provided for our daily needs and retirement, leadership in our church, a reputation as an able Bible teacher, and studying for the ministry.
Life was good, but I was not—and God set about to wound my pride and self-righteousness.
Old inner conflicts kept arising like Goliath from the dead.
He began with a conversation between Jesus and the disciples. They imagined themselves in heaven and one day asked, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?“
Jesus brought them up short. “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”1
They saw themselves inside the pearly gates, but Jesus checked them, saying, in essence, Be sure you will be in heaven before you worry about what it’s like.
The entrance exam has one question: Have you changed?
The answer is pass/fail: No change, no heaven.
This troubled me. I could think of nothing much about me that was different from my growing up. Old inner conflicts kept arising like Goliath from the dead.
About the same time, the Lord pierced deeper with a Beatitude from Matthew: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.2
Did I have a pure heart?
Had I changed?
The answers disturbed—even frightened—me.
This was the teaching. Then, God used everyday life to drive the lesson home.
I prayed for one-and-done.
By nature, I am passive-aggressive. In light of these scriptures, I began to see this is treacherous, for I would agree to plans I resented and wouldn’t follow up as expected. I left people thinking things were one way while I pursued a different path. I was living by lies.
There were other struggles, and day after day the resilience of my old self nagged. I hungered for relief.
A new concept sweeping data processing at the time stirred a longing. The concept was this: One-and-done. I supported multiple systems where information about our customers could be duplicated or, more often, missing, and we developed elaborate programs to collect and store the common data.
One-and-done became our mantra: Enter a name and address once, for example, and make it available everywhere.
I prayed for one-and-done in my personal life and pestered God, “If I am crucified with Christ, why does my old self keep breathing down my neck? Crucified means dead. It’s a one-time event. Why can’t I be done with it?”
I put my longing into words which I prayed often.
I've washed my hands To make them clean, But the stain is deep, It can't be seen. It's in my heart. Is there anything that can reach inside and give a brand-new start? Lord, wash me, Cleanse me, Make me anew. Make me pure, Make me like You. Lord, You're all that I want to be. Come now, and just now, fill me.
As you have figured out yourself, one-and-done may work in programming, but not in our Christian walk. Israel’s exodus from Egypt is an example. God gave the Promised Land once and for all to the Israelites, but possessing it took their lifetime.
I became discouraged. Overpowered by my ungodly ways, I felt I was playing the hypocrite and more than once entertained quitting my studies and stepping down from my church roles.
There were periods of despair when I commiserated with Job, “Why is light given to him who is in misery, and life to the bitter of soul?“3
Such depths are neither new nor uncommon. St. John of the Cross, a Spanish priest in the 16th century, coined the phrase, Dark Night of the Soul.
I wanted to die.
Read the rest here.