The reverse nature of the Kingdom
A great post on spiritual formation by J.R. Woodward:
A while back I was trying to fix a drawer. I came to that one screw I had to get loose, and the more I worked to loosen that screw the tighter it seemed to get. A carpenter friend of mine was visiting me and saw my dilemma. He looked for a moment or two and said, “Oh, this has a left-handed thread. It’s a reverse screw. You have to tighten or loosen it going in the opposite direction.” I’m thinking, it took me 10 years to find out how screws work, and now they change the rules on me?
There’s a sense in which Spiritual Formation is kind of like a reverse screw. Everything in the culture that seems right, in the Scripture, comes out wrong. The way up is the way down. The way to spiritual wealth is to acknowledge your spiritual poverty. The way to live is to die. The way to rule is to serve. I mean, the screw just doesn’t work right. It’s out of place.
But unless we understand the reverse nature of the screw, we will never be the people that God is longing for us to become.
