Call Me Pasturescott: Recent Episodes
Pasturescott
[7 minutes]
But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.Psalm 52:8
David wrote this only one chapter removed from his confession to God when a broken, sinful man. The chapters aren’t chronological, of course, but their arrangement seems to be, for me at least, by design.
Looking back over the arc of our lives, we can dredge up seasons when we wondered if we’d ever get past our failures. In other seasons, we’ve known the inestimable joy of intimacy with God we never wanted to leave. Hello sanctification.
In Psalm 51 David is the guilty man. In Psalm 52 he is gutted by the crimes of another man — Doeg the Edomite. Doeg brazenly murdered 85 innocent people in cold blood. The slaughtered were priests, together with their wives and children. Their crime? They gave David sanctuary when he was on the run from King Saul. David was beside himself with fury.
“How dare you, Doeg! You will face the wrath of a just God, you dog! You think you’re a big man, all high and mighty, plotting my demise. But it is you who will go down. Me? I’m a green olive tree in God’s house, big boy. You, on the other hand, are kindling for the lake of fire.”
No doubt David was reeling from the news of the priests of Nob and their families. It wasn’t enough for the vile Edomite to kill the priests, he massacred their families too. They died because they all stood with David!
Talk about survivor’s guilt.
selah In the middle of this painful psalm is a Selah. It’s a strange place for a Selah, sure, but David tacks one on.
You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking about what is right. Selah(v3)
Selah.
Catch your breath.
Gather your wits.
Get quiet.
Be still.
John Andrew Bryant has battled mental illness his entire life. His brain never turns off; it is always noisy in there. His affliction is a daily surrender and his dependence upon God for the healing of his mind is evident in his words. John describes finding a “foothold” in those especially stormy times when his brain is firing in all directions.
“What I have in Christ is the simple, painful renunciation of the urges created by my brain, the ability to say no to desires and compulsions that will not just go away. I wish it was more. But that is all it’s been: a foothold in the storm of thought and feelings…that foothold, that boat, that kernel, is not a place where I do something to be okay. It is a place where I don’t. That patient, quiet understanding is the place where I stand with Christ and don’t do anything to make things right or win or be okay. It is the place where I don’t fix, the place where I don’t defend myself, the place where I don’t figure things out, and the place where I don’t know for sure. The place where it is somehow possible to not engage those compulsions. The place I stand with Christ and endure what it feels like to not do those things. The place where I’ve learned to stand with Christ by being quiet.”
A Quiet Mind To Suffer With, p17-18
That is David’s Selah here in the 52nd Psalm. He reminds himself with that Selah that however much evil swirls about him, he is not its victim. He must not surrender to it. Lady Macbeth told her husband to “screw his courage to the sticking place,” and this appears to be what David – albeit righteously – was telling himself to do.
I am tempted to substitute the name Jesus where I see a Selah in scripture. I don’t think it breaks any rules, personally.
My heart is broken. Jesus.
I’m hanging on by a thread. Jesus.
Lord, I don’t understand. Jesus.
My only hope is you. Jesus.
This too shall pass. Jesus.
Once upon a time, twelve men sat for an important gospel meal. The scene was humming with observable tension as it was the last Passover in which Jesus would take part. While he was speaking, John, we are told, leaned against his Messiah’s breast. Although the atmosphere was charged, the beloved disciple anchored himself to the Rock.
Think of Selah, then, as pressing into Jesus. Selah, where you don’t fix or defend or try to figure out. You listen. You wait. You trust. You are still.
Like a tree.
a green olive treeDavid imagines himself in verse 8 as a tree, but not just any tree. He is God’s tree, a temple tree. He was a well-manicured olive tree, not some scrub tree out in the wild. His roots were resolutely screwed into the sticking place of holy soil.
David, consummate lover of nature, appreciated the beautiful trees in Jerusalem. Adorning the temple grounds, no doubt, were flowering olive trees whose aroma misted the air. He knew they provided the oil for worship in the holy place and said “I’m one of those trees.”
Before I’m anything, I’m a worshipper of God. The Lord made me to love him and enjoy him forever. Doegs and Sauls and Goliaths come and go, but I’m rooted in the faithfulness of God.
The thing about olive trees: they are capable of surviving the worst that life can dish out. There’s an olive tree in Crete that is close to 3,000 years old. Believe me, it’s seen some stuff. Paul was shipwrecked by a horrible storm that drove him into the sands of Crete in Acts 27. That tree is still producing olives today.
I’m one of those trees. I’m precious to God. He is invested in protecting me, so I will not be defeated by those who wish ill upon me. The times I’m living in will not get the best of me. I’m living in the Land of Selah.
Let that cruel dog Doeg and his ilk be who they are, they won’t affect me. They can choose evil but I will stay planted here in the garden of the Lord.
What are you going through right now, beloved? What’s got your goat? Who’s oppressing you? That hard thing in your life may be a person, it may be a condition, it may be a situation. Your hardship hurts even more because it’s out of your control and it’s not letting up. I get it.
Step back like David did and see the bigger picture. See a Land called Selah. Can you see it? Now look closer and see a City in that Land called Peace. Picture yourself there, planted in its soil, loved and cherished and protected by God. You may not think so, but you are thriving. It may feel like you’re losing, but God sees olives in you.
Let them cancel you. Let the situation play out. Ignore the lying voices inside your head. Screw your courage to the sticking place and hang your hope on the sure peg of Selah. Hollywood is going to be what it is. Politicians will be who they are. The world and its pleasures are passing away; let them go the way of the dust. Stand your ground, Olive Tree. It’s okay. He’s got this. He’s got you. You’re safe. Just be still, stay rooted, and “trust in his unfailing love” (v8).
Selah, beloved. Jesus.
The post i am a green olive tree appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”Genesis 3:11
[7 minutes]
There is a crisis of information today. No, not the lack of it, because, as we all well know, there are no limits to where we can find whatever we’re looking for whenever we need it. Alexa, how long does it take to boil an egg in the microwave? Hey Siri, what was the primary reason for the downfall of the Roman Empire?
Our appetite for knowledge is appeased through Google, ChatGPT, X, Apple News, Wikipedia, YouTube, Waze, Food Network, Zillow, and a thousand other sources as close to us as our devices. We are glutted with real-time data from every direction.
Suffering from the tyranny of FOMO, we bathe ourselves in digital light, robotically taking in whatever it feeds us — good or bad — for hours on end. Like junkies, our habit is fixed by mainlining content that is killing our souls. The Matrix is changing us from being made in God’s image to beings who slither around on our bellies like snakes.
In the beginning, God was the only source of information. So when the Lord asked Adam, “Who told you?” the latter had to sheepishly admit to going off-script and getting hoodwinked by misinformation.
It all falls apart in Genesis 3. The First Man on planet earth had barely gotten his feet under him before he believed the lie and, tragically, became the lie itself.
who told you God can’t be trusted?
The sin underneath all our sins is to trust the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ.
—Martin Luther
Thanks to the Original Couple, we have embedded inside us the default mechanism to accuse God of being spartanly unfair or cruel. It’s a constant battle for many to quell the urge to instinctively blame God for their misfortunes.
I find it telling that the first book in our Bibles — chronologically, that is — is not Genesis, but Job. Of course Adam and Eve walked the earth long before he did, but Job preceded the writer of Genesis by a long shot. If we can trust the dating of Job, and I believe we can, then it asks the oldest question of all: If God is so good then why do I hurt so badly?
Now you can see why Moses opened the canon with Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. Each of those first five books provides a master class for people who have a background of suffering and struggling to “not go there” when they are tempted to believe the lie that God cannot be trusted:
This is God. This is who he is. This is how he is to be worshiped. This is how he is to be trusted. Yes, bad things happen. We know this all too well! But God is not the villain in our story; he is fighting for us and faithfully planning our blessed future.”
Job fought that same urge and won. Moses had to do battle against the devil’s lie in Midian no doubt, but he overcame and led the people of Israel to leave Egypt and overcome in the wilderness. Those who didn’t make it were those who never got the taste of Egypt’s fruit out of their mouths.
One of my daily follows on X (Twitter) posted this recently and I thought it captured quite well the common struggle of mankind:
What good is the apple when one bite makes your life a living hell?
who told you God made you inferior?In the first page of Holy writ we are told that humans are made in God’s image, in His likeness. By page two, Adam and Eve are no longer satisfied with that and looking for an upgrade.
The present culture has bullied impressionable minds to think they are not enough. Social media influencers, cultural icons, and even medical professionals have convinced an entire generation they are born wrong, look wrong, or believe wrong.
None of it is new. The satan has been using the same tactics to mar the imago dei in us since the beginning. He laughs at our gullibility. He loves to see us stripped of glory and dressed in fig leaves.
Babies are blobs of cells.
Children are an inconvenience.
Old people are a nuisance.
All men are misogynists.
Women are sex objects.
Gender is fluid.
Fathers aren’t necessary.
Families are a capitalistic construct.
We love our labels. Many of our labels serve no other purpose but to depersonalize others and erase the imago dei from their beingness. And the devil laughs.
who told you God was finished with you?Did you think your shame defined you?
Did you think it was over for you?
Did you think you were beyond saving?
Adam and Eve were painfully aware they were now defective. The shine wore off. The original pair were like those brand new cars you drive off the lot that depreciate immediately.
This is why humans “cover” themselves with things that hide their weaknesses.
We become defensive.
We have learned how to hide our wounds to avoid the proper remedy.
We become deceptive.
We have learned to lie and, by so doing, have become the lie itself.
We become destructive.
We will burn down the whole house before admitting we are wrong and coming home.
From that point, once the die is cast, Adam and Eve no longer see the supernatural. They can’t see God, they can only hear him coming. Their souls weren’t the only thing that went dark; their eyes went dark too.
But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.1 Corinthians 2:9-10
But God, in grace, made sure they knew his approach. We are told the very first words after the Fall were spoken by God:
“Where are you?”He came seeking us. There’s grace in those words! Where are you? They imply they were somewhere they should not be but they still mattered enough for God to come looking for them. It’s the same for every human since.
You’ve messed up but you’re not irredeemable.
Your situation is not the end of the story.
We can’t hide too long without having to come out and face the music. It will catch up with us. We will eventually be outed. Better to come forward than die in the dark.
In Christ, we are not pursued like wanted criminals, but like wanted children, or like wanted lovers, because wrath is replaced by desire.
— Rachel Gilson
Don’t allow the voices and narratives of culture shape who you are. It’s fake news. Some of it has just enough truth to make it sound authentic, but it’s still a lie.
Beloved, God is not done with you. Wherever you’re hiding, whatever you’re trying to cover yourself up with to impersonate the imago dei, just stop. You may not see him, but he sees you.
I’m willing to bet you’re hearing his approach in these words. Why are you here? Who told you these lies? Come out, come back, come home. He’s calling you back to truer things than you’ll ever hear out there.
Selah, beloved.
The post who told you? appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
The Dolomites, Photography by Sergio Anotoni
From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed:
lead me to the rock that is higher than I.Psalm 61:2, KJV
[5 minutes]
This time 43 years ago I was meditating on these very words. For days on end I agonized over how they’d become my lived experience.
My “end of the earth” was a college campus in Chattanooga, Tennessee and I was an “overwhelmed” college kid. My desperation owed to the fact I couldn’t find any reason to go on if something didn’t change. My miserable world ran late for an appointment with a giant fork in the road. Meanwhile, there I was, stuck in a mud hole on the side of the road.
Quite suddenly, from nowhere, this verse hit my ear drums like a percussive bomb. Everything shook and shifted. I memorized it. I quoted it. I gnawed on it. I wept over it. I fell asleep with it muttering on my lips. I visited it in my dreams.
It now strikes me as odd that in all of the decades of preaching, I’ve used that scripture as the main text of a sermon perhaps once or twice. And yet, it remains the sun in my existential solar system.
If you pray that God will move your mountain and he doesn’t, assume Christ wants you to climb it instead and see him transfigured.
— Beth Moore
Sometimes we see a mountain and pray that it gets moved. Other times we see one and say — in the spirit of 85-year old Caleb — “Take me there, Lord.” My weary heart was done with ‘making mud-pies in a slum.’* I was now after the Rock that was higher than i.
Since then, I’ve been tempted by lesser things, settled for them, repented of them, and raised my eyes again and again to that mount. I’m still climbing, thanks be to God.
Almost twenty years ago (I remember it well because it was my last hospitalization for pressure sores), a family friend told me she couldn’t shake an image of me from her mind. In that hard season I was as depressed in spirit as a body could be, fighting yet another pressure wound and facing more weeks and months of hospitalization. When the woman asked if she might share an encouraging word, I was only too happy to listen.
I see you as a mountain goat winding around a tall mountain on steady feet. I’m struck by how the feet stay planted even though the path is treacherous. And every time you go around the mountain, you go higher. You are climbing, climbing, ever higher.
Think what you will about visions and mental pictures, but I must say I found it gripping. She hadn’t known about Psalm 61 and its impact on my life, so the image had me transfixed, even more so because of its peculiar timing. My situation was redolent of a frightened Gideon hiding out in the wine-press, told by the Angel he was a mighty man of valor. A sure-footed mountain goat conquering the craggy cliffs? Me? Hospital-bed me?
The timing of God is impeccable. Of course it seemed a bit too “peccable” for Mary and Martha when Jesus finally showed up for their departed brother’s funeral. Our Lord was only fashionably late, turns out. It seems the will of the Almighty was to allow things to play out. This introduced them all to a greater mercy.
Lazarus’s resurrection suddenly planted the idea in their heads that there was no obstacle greater than God’s power! Sickness? Come on, small potatoes. Quieting a storm? Childs play. Walking on water? He could do that in his sleep! But death? Even worse, a fourth-day-body-is-ripe-by-now death? Now we’re talking.
Let the reader understand: there’s nothing quite like a good old-fashioned resurrection to keep you climbing just to see what else God has in store. I’ve been the beneficiary of a thousand and one mercies and so have you. You’ve seen God do things that took your breath away, things that put you flat on your face in worship. So have I.
My sister told me once upon a time she wanted to see me reach heights that few have ever reached. There are countless others who have gone a fair sight higher than I can imagine for myself. By the grace of God, and with his help to give me sure feet, I’m going to keep climbing. I’m tired of pebbles and stones. I want the Rock that is higher than i.
Selah, beloved. Onward and upward!
_________________________________________
*Full quote by C. S. Lewis, “We do not want too much, but too little. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” (The Weight of Glory)
The post the rock that is higher than i appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
[6 minutes]
Feast your eyes a moment on this surprising promise from the Psalms:
The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant.
Psalm 25:14
I’m blessed with a close circle of friends. They know less about me than Sandy but far more than anyone else. They are trusted confidants and counselors; a few know my secret burdens and carry them in their hearts and into their prayer rooms. They know God, God knows them, and they know me.
The psalmist (David) had a friendship with God that would make any of us swoon. A man after God’s own heart, the Lord reminds us more than once. They shared secrets. God knew David’s best and worst moments and David was dialed in to God’s heart like no one else who ever lived. Abraham knew God as a close friend and Moses knew Yahweh face to face. But David was entwined with God’s very heart.
The word “friendship” in the above verse is weighty. In the original it suggests being in one’s inner circle. It describes a relationship in which one feels confident confiding in or telling closely guarded secrets to the other.
Wouldn’t it be something to be the person that God always finds in a crowded room? Picture this: you’re in a place that is buzzing with activity and suddenly He leans in and whispers something that lights up your soul. How cool would that be?
I’m not talking about God playing favorites. It’s just that you’ve proven yourself to be trustworthy and loyal over time and He sees your sincerity. He taps into that. Just as the squeaky wheel gets the oil, the hungry heart get the meal.
One of the proverbs says, “It’s the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to search out a matter.” This is what I’m getting at.
There are forty-eleven ways I could go with this, but I’m focusing on only one today: getting the people of God into the Word of God for the good of their souls and glory of God.
Instagram verses aren’t bad — at all. But they’re crumbs. I don’t mean that negatively, for they do serve a purpose. Bible memes should be used as appetizers for a bigger feast. What I’m talking about is spreading an open Bible on your lap and devouring portions of scripture until one of them spurs a thought that transcends normal ditties. Until God presses in and whispers something sacred into your spirit.
Here now, I’m not imploring us legalistically but rather lovingly. Treating God’s Word as an occasional snack will lead to spiritual emaciation and weakness. There is a famine in the church today and we’ll not fare well within this weird world until we become people whom God finds in a crowded, noisy room, pulls us into Himself, and instructs us.
Isaiah warned us about tromping through the minefields of life without proper intel. He offered a better way when he said,
And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.
Isaiah 30:20-21
Scripture are the very words of the Eternal God. Peter told Jesus the only thing keeping him hanging tough in a fluid world were the words with which the Savior shepherded him. Those jots and tittles were life to the wobbly disciple.
We wonder why we don’t get more out of our Bible reading. It’s awfully dry for our taste. Why isn’t the ink more wet?? Could it be that we aren’t approaching His Word with the desperateness and reverence of Peter? Where else will I find what’s true and real and living?
You’re not going to find it on the back of a cereal box or in a tweet. No celebrity preacher can fill the dearth in your soul. We may get crumbs but we’ll never get change.
Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart.—Jeremiah 15:16
“A joy.” Yeah, that’s it. Let us go to the Word with that on our lips. Make your Word a joy to my heart today, Jesus. Tell me something I don’t know. Amen.
Christian people will attend conventions, plunge into all kinds of Christian work, read many good books about the Bible and Christian living; but they give the Bible itself the most cursory and superficial heed. And it is for this reason that the Bible does not speak to them.
If you would know all the wondrous beauty of a forest glade, you must not be satisfied with passing through it with hasty foot and in company with a troop of merry children whose ringing laughter carries panic into the hearts of thousands of shy living things that, with trembling hearts, keep still in hole and brake and nest. No, you must go alone and sit quietly down on the log of some felled tree and wait. Then the mystery of beauty will begin to unfold itself: the fairy bowers, the mossy glens, the interlacing boughs. Presently a note will sound from yonder bough, as the signal for the outburst of many sweet-voiced choristers, and the woodland will ring with the music of the birds while the squirrel runs up some neighboring tree, and the rabbits come out to feed, and the young foxes play about their holes.
All this is hidden from those who cannot wait. So there are mysteries of glory and beauty in Scripture hidden from the wise and prudent but revealed to babes. There is no book that will so repay time spent over its pages as the Word of God.
If the people who are now perpetually running about to meetings for crumbs of help and comfort, would only stay at home and search their Bibles, there would be more happiness in the Church and more blessing on the world.
– F. B. Meyer
That’s it for now. Hope it helps.
Selah, beloved.
The post secrets between friends appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
[5 minutes]
Sandy and I had an argument on the way home from church recently. I know what you’re thinking: ‘What did she do now?’ Now, now. In her defense all she did was tell me something completely innocent and I responded in an argumentative way.
To bring you up to speed: I’m tired of waiting for a breakthrough. I keep thinking I could nudge it along by just taking the bull by the horns. Because I felt that Sandy was being much too passive (a better person than I would say gracious), I might have deposited my two cents’ worth about not doing the situation any favors by letting it fester. On the Lord’s Day, no less.
Question: Have you ever thought the Almighty needed a little extra help on being a better God and you just so happened to be the right person for the job?
No? Just me?
If there’s a Complaint Dept. in heaven, I’m sure I get the collective eye roll when my name comes up on Caller ID. My prickly side keeps showing up and I can’t seem to stop myself from butting my head against the concrete wall in front of me. Fortunately, there’s a Bible verse for pretty much any wall you’re butting up against. And, since I’m so hard-headed, the Lord saw fit to give me a pair of them the day after I reacted poorly to Sandy.
Aside: I’m pretty sure Jesus keeps certain scriptures holstered for me on just such occasions.
The first Bible verse with which the Lord got my attention is located near the end of Romans:
For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.
Rom. 15:4
Endurance.
What a powerful, necessary word.
Andrée Seu defines “endurance” as “faith with Nikes on.” William Barclay informs us that “endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.” That’s really good.
Paul is rounding out his letter with some holistic encouragement for the diverse gathering of saints in Rome. What’s most on his mind in those final strokes of his literary masterpiece? He tells them to endure. What’s even better, he lets them know in the very next verse (Rom 15:5) that God is a “God of endurance and encouragement.” IOW, we aren’t just counseled to endure, we’re told we get our endurance from God!
When we’ve been hit by the struggle bus, we are promised a bottomless pool of God’s grace from which to draw. Do you see how he puts “endurance” side-by-side with “encouragement” in verse 15? Write this down, beloved:
The Lord never calls us into any hardship without offering his comforting presence and strengthening grace in the midst of it.Endure, Scott, Jesus told me. If you will trust my way and wait for all the pieces to fall together, you will see glory come from it.
I mentioned I have two scriptures to share with you. This one brought it all home for me.
And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?”
Matthew 26:51-54
Jesus’s rebuke of Peter in Gethsemane has more to do with recognizing a spirit of unbelief and rebellion in Peter rather than a righteous defense of an innocent victim. Jesus scolded Peter for trying to play the hero. For God! Such audacity! What nerve! Peter was clearly not happy with the turn of events, so he tried to rewrite the script (v54) all on his own.
Lord, deliver us — deliver me — from #SimonPeterSyndrome.
May we learn the lesson that trying to force God’s hand to move the process along never ends well. Such tactics, as Simon demonstrated, is not heroism, but a form of unbelief. Jesus had already prepared the Twelve three separate times that a night like this was going to happen. When God tells you what must take place, it isn’t up for discussion or a vote.
So, back to that unfortunate turn-of-events on the Sunday at hand. You’ve gotta know I pray over Sandy every day. There is a set prayer that I use, and I never deviate from the script I believe God prompted me to follow. It is very specific. Other prayers are added to it, depending on the day or situation, but the main prayers are ironclad. All of which makes this whole Sunday argument the stupidest thing on earth. I got mad at Sandy FOR DOING THE VERY THINGS I HAVE BEEN PRAYING FOR HER TO LIVE OUT.
Am I the just the dumbest?
I discovered something about that day I fussed at my wife. I learned while I’ve been surrendering ourselves to do and live God’s will in a very hard place, I’ve been holding a sword in my hand. This isn’t the way of Jesus.
When my Bible reading schedule took me to the Romans text, and then the Matthew passage, I heard Jesus, in no uncertain terms say: “Don’t you think I know what I’m doing and can handle matters without your help, thank you very much? Put your sword down.”
Lord, forgive me. Please. Deliver me from Simon Peter syndrome.
How will your will ever get done with me in the way?!?!?
Whew boy. Nailed once again by the Word of the Lord. This is getting to be a habit.
Put down your sword, whatever you’re up against. Endure in the hardship. And be encouraged. It’s a whole lot better — and less bloody — than lopping off ears.
Selah, beloved.
The post put down your sword appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
[7.5 minute read]
For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.
Hebrews 4:12
Two men. One, a former president, fashioned a Bible to his own liking; the other, a French professor, tried to do that but was ultimately pierced through by its unconquerable swordplay and aliveness.
Thomas Jefferson thought the supernatural and miraculous works of Jesus were greatly exaggerated, so he took a razor to them in his New Testament. Once he had trimmed away all but the most core and basic teachings of Jesus, he sat back and sighed, satisfied with his compact version he named The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jefferson Bible, is an 86-page dumbed-down testament of Enlightened Man. It disregards Jesus’s virgin birth, resurrection, and ascension, along with anything else that defied common sense and reason. Or so thought the 77-year old American statesman.
Across the sea, Émile Cailliet was born in Dampierre, France on December 17, 1894. He served in the French armed forces in World War I, and distinguished himself with many degrees from two universities. After coming to America, he served as a professor French literature at the University of Pennsylvania; Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School in California; and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In 1960, he began to teach Christian philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary, in which capacity he continued until his death in 1983.
The following is his remarkable story (in his own words) of coming to faith through the supernatural appeal of the Word of God:
I was born in a small village of France and received an education that was naturalistic to the core. This could possibly have had a great deal to do with the fact that I did not even see a Bible before I reached the age of twenty-three.
To say that this naturalistically inspired education proved of little help through front-line experiences as a lad of twenty in World War I would amount to quite an understatement. When your own buddy – at the time speaking to you of his mother – dies standing in front of you, a bullet in his chest, what use is the sophistry of naturalism? Was there a meaning to it all?
One night a bullet got me, too. An American field ambulance crew saved my life and later the use of a badly shattered arm was restored. After a nine-month stay at the hospital, I was discharged and resumed graduate work.
During my stay at the American hospital, I had married a Scotch-Irish girl whom I had met in Germany on Christmas Eve the year before the war had broken out. She was, and has always remained, a deeply evangelical person. I am ashamed to confess that she must have been hurt to the very core of her being as I made it clear that religion would be taboo in our home. Little did I realize at the time that a militant attitude often betrays an inner turmoil.
I had returned to my books, but they were no longer the same books. Neither was my motivation the same motivation. Reading in literature and philosophy, I found myself probing in depth for meaning. During long night watches in the foxholes, I had in a strange way been longing – I must say it, however queer it may sound – for a book that would understand me.
But I knew of no such book. Now I would in secret prepare one for my own private use. And so, as I went on reading for my courses I would file passages that would speak to my condition, then carefully copy them in a leatherbound pocket book I would always carry with me. The quotations, which I numbered in red ink for easier reference, would mead me as it were from fear and anguish, through a variety of intervening stages, to supreme utterances of release and jubilation.
The day came when I put the finishing touch to “the book that would understand me,” speak to my condition, and help me through life’s happenings. A beautiful, sunny day it was. I went out, sat under a tree, and opened my precious anthology. As I went on reading, however, a growing disappointment came over me. Instead of speaking to my condition, the various passages reminded me of their context, of the circumstances of my labor over their selection.
Then I knew that the whole undertaking would not work, simply because it was of my own making. It carried no strength of persuasion. In a dejected mood, I put the little book back in my pocket.
At that very moment, my wife – who, incidentally, knew nothing of the project on which I had been working – appeared at the gate of the garden, pushing the baby carriage.
It had been a hot afternoon. She had followed the main boulevard only to find it too crowded. So she had turned to a side street which she could not name because we had only recently arrived in town. The cobblestones had shaken the carriage so badly that she had pondered what to do. Whereupon, having spotted a patch of grass beyond a small archway, she had gone in with the baby for a period of rest.
It turned out that the patch of grass led to an outside stone staircase which she had climbed without quite realizing what she was doing. At the top, she had seen a long room, door wide open. So she entered.
At the further end, a white-haired gentleman worked at a desk. He had not become aware of her presence. Looking around, she noticed the carving of a cross. Thus she suddenly realized that this office was a part of a church building – of a Huguenot church edifice hidden away as they all are, even long after the danger of persecution has passed. The venerable-looking gentleman was the pastor.
She walked to his desk and heard herself say, “Have you a Bible in French?”
He smiled and handed over to her a copy, which she eagerly took from his hand; then she walked out with a mixed feeling of both joy and guilt.
As she now stood in front of me, she meant to apologize, but I was no longer listening to her.
“A Bible, you say? Where is it? Show me. I have never seen one before!”
She complied. I literally grabbed the book and rush to my study with it. I opened and “chanced” upon the Beatitudes! I read, and read, and read – now aloud with an indescribable warmth surging within. I could not find words to express my awe and wonder. And suddenly the realization dawned upon me: this was the book that would understand me!
I continued to read deeply into the night, mostly from the Gospels. And lo and behold, as I looked through them, the One of whom they spoke, the One who spoke and acted in them became alive to me.
The providential circumstances amid which the book had found me now made it clear that while it seemed absurd to speak of a book understanding a man, this could be said of the Bible because its pages were animated by the presence of the living God and the power of his mighty acts. To this God I prayed that night, and the God who answered was the same God of whom it was spoken in the book.
(Eternity magazine, July 1974).
The Book of books is alive and powerful. It doesn’t just “understand us,” it enlightens and enlivens us to know God intimately and equips us to thrive in this hard, unyielding world. As H.B. Charles, Jr. put it so well, “It is the will of God to have the Spirit of God use the Word of God to make the children of God look like the Son of God.”
May his Word accomplish its perfect work in you and me today.
Selah, beloved.
The post the book that understands me appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
[4 minute read]
You love justice and hate evil.
Therefore God, your God, has anointed you,
pouring out the oil of joy on you more than on anyone else.
Myrrh, aloes, and cassia perfume your robes.
In ivory palaces the music of strings entertains you.Psalm 45:7-8, NLT
I enjoy laughing. I’m told I have a pretty good laugh and I’ll take it. My male and female friends are some of the funniest people I’ve ever met and they also happen to love Jesus more than anybody I know. Sandy, the life of my party every day, is a hoot to live with; she has lightened my mood so many times I’ve lost count. I love laughing with her.
A couple I pastored years ago enjoyed the way I presented Jesus as being as real – with real emotions – as you and I. They gifted me with a print of the “Laughing Jesus” and it’s still one of my favorite depictions of the Savior rendered by any artist.
Jesus, Man of JoyJesus would be the life of any party. Based on the scripture above, he has more joy than the happiest person in the room. He is delighted (“stringed instruments make you glad” v8) when he hears good music. I think he’d sidle up to the house deejay and suggest a tune and everybody at the party would enthusiastically approve.
There have been many gloomy kings, sad kings, bad kings, and even some mad kings, but few glad kings. David came as close as any with his hymnbook and his harps, but many of David’s great songs are drenched with tears. Jesus will be a happy King—anointed with the oil of gladness above His fellows! His reign will fill the world with sunshine and song.
– John Phillips
Just today I was reading someone encouraging us that reading the psalms wasn’t just reading the words of David or some other Hebrew worshipper. We’re actually given the pleasure of singing along with Jesus much as he sang them with his followers. That hit me in a sweet spot. Singing alongside the Savior!
Sure, there are dirges and choruses in the minor key, but think of the volume of joyous anthems and Hebrew ditties. Picture Jesus, Man of Joy, with head thrown back, belting out hosannas and riffing on bouncy melodies and beaming as he scans the happy faces around the fire, urging them to join in with gusto.
Friends of the BridegroomThe Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard…’ (Matt 11:19)
Far be it from me to miss any party Jesus is attending. My name’s on the list for the Party of parties – the Mother of all parties – that’s coming. You know, the one Psalm 45 alludes to.
There’s always party-poopers, of course. One day the Cold Water Committee showed up to crash a dinner party one of the newly-minted disciples threw for Jesus. Levi invited all his buddies from his former life, raising the ire of the party police. “Why do you eat and drink with such scum?” they demanded to know.
Jesus turned on them:
“The friends of the bridegroom do not fast when He is with them, they celebrate! They don’t fast; they feast!” (Luke 5:34)
Who the prickly pontificates called “scum” Jesus called his “friends.”
It’s gonna be a “Friends-only” Party (FOP) in the New Creation. Jesus will, no doubt, be laughing and singing as he serves us (!!!) and we will marvel at how beautiful and full of joy he is. We are going to feast and dance and laugh until the cows come home. And those kind of cows, my brothers and sisters, they never come home.
See you there if not before, beloved.
‘Til next time,
Selah
The post the life of the party appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
I forgot to include this music video as a benediction to my previous post so I’ll just sit down (!) and write a new post. <Smile> You may recall I referenced the passage in Hebrews that has been ministering to my soul these days, “As things stand right now, we aren’t seeing all things subjected to Christ’s reign, but we see Jesus…” (Heb 2:8,9, my paraphrase). This song has been getting a lot of background play as I wait on the Lord to (how shall I put it?) unburden me from specific burdens I carry daily.
Full disclosure: the biggest burden is me. The unfinished me. The Scott who requires a lot more fine-tuning. Sanctifying. Paul prayed for the Galatians that “Christ would be fully formed in them” (Gal 4:19) and I’ve been asking the Holy Spirit to do the same for myself. It’s been a stretching season, to say the least, but Christ has been an ever-present help through it all. The ironic thing is during this burdensome season I’m also seeing a crazy amount of answered prayer in many other areas.
The Father keeps reminding me of the scene by the seashore in John 21. Jesus tells Peter that he will have a rough but rewarding life of following him, but compels the disciple to trust and follow him anyway. The Master is certainly worthy of it.
Peter turns and considers John for a moment then asks Jesus, “What about John? Is he just going to traipse off to heaven on flowery beds of ease?” Whoamong us hasn’t fretted about our assignments once or twice?
Why don’t they ever seem to struggle?
Why does she always get her way?
Why does everything turn out fine for him?
Why do I always have to take the high road?
Why does John get all the love?
Why, why, why. There’s probably a reason “why” starts to sound like “why-ning.” (Lord, make me/us better.)
This morning Sandy remarked that our journey has often asked more of us than others’ journeys do of them…or so it feels. [Truth bomb: faith > feelings] We know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.
we know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.
Sometimes miracles take time. I just got off the phone with a very dear ministry friend, a faithful reader of this blog, who is in AFib and requires a pacemaker to control his heart function. He was told by more than a few that he would “feel like a new man” with his pacemaker, but, days later, he’s still not feeling it. He’s waiting for a miracle.
No one likes being told to wait. Waiting almost feels like delaying the inevitable the same way a streetwise child hears a parent say “We’ll see.”
In Practicing the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence tells of someone who “would go faster than grace” (she was impatient to become holy) and I hear that same caution in my life today. I’m so eager for God to get everything sorted out I’m not surrendering to his meantime mercy. While we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.
while we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.
God not only has the last word, he has the next-to-last word, too. And all the words that come before that. In a later psalm of David, he praised a God who knew every page of his life, start to finish. How wonderful! This means that the Almighty is just as engaged in every minute of our days (good and bad) as he is committed to our telos (finished product).
Miracles take time sometimes. And sometimes, if we’re being honest, they may never see the light of day — at least not in the way we hoped. There are rebels who adapt to the far country just fine and never come home. Some diseases aren’t cured. Marriages fall apart no matter how often we pray and fast and hope against hope they don’t.
I don’t remember where I heard this, or read it, but I’ll tell it as I remember it. Most of us know that Charles Spurgeon, for much of his life, suffered with deep, dark depression. Sadly, he lived with depression the rest of his life. He saw himself as a lonely lighthouse, beaming the light of the gospel out to the hopeless souls lost at sea, though he himself remained in darkness. Not the darkness of being lost, for he carried the gospel light within him, but the darkness of never being healed from the oppression that plagued him. Even still, he embraced his ministry with gladness, knowing countless others were rescued and set free.
I’ve often prayed to walk again, but I will keep trusting and living onward and upward; I’ve got thousands of other healing stories anyway. I happen to be in the middle of one right now.
Sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades. When I, a permanently disabled man, prayed for a wife, I had no idea how blessed my life would be. My idea of a miracle was to get married at all. God’s miracle was Sandy. Yahtzee!
sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades.
I’ve written about this before, but my lifelong dream was to see the Grand Canyon. It would take a miracle to get me there at all, what with all my health problems and near-death experiences. But God gave me my miracle…and upgraded it to the best road trip ever…with some of our dearest friends…witnessing the grandeur of the canyon after the most beautiful snowfall…a picturesque sunset…dozens of dazzling photographs…and a thousand-and-one other grace-happy moments to relish and treasure.
And all of us born again brothers and sisters. What upgrade did we get? We didn’t just get our sins forgiven; we got eternal life, the indwelling Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ, a new spiritual family, new mercies every morning, ongoing sanctification, answered prayers, hope in our suffering, power for living, grace for dying, a heavenly Father, a heavenly home…and (drum roll) Jesus.
If I may, I’d like to pray for us, knowing a post like this affects us all in varying degrees. Each of us carries the “yes, but not yet” reality like a counterweight to our fixed eternal hope. I’d like to ask God to avert our eyes from the circumstances of our day-to-day burdens to the Living Christ who has overcome.
Father of mercies, we confess that we are often so focused on our predicaments we miss the importance of waiting. We find ourselves in the waiting room once again and ask for grace to prove faithful in this uncomfortable season. All our fountains are in you, Jesus, and we eagerly wait in hope for your promised outcome. It will be glorious, we know, because you are an Artist and everything you do is perfect. May you receive all the glory from us and in us in this season and always. In the name of Jesus, we say Amen.
Selah, beloved.
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istockphoto.com
I’ve begun rereading Philip Yancey’s Disappointment With God (highly recommend). His writing style has always appealed to me but his daring insights catch me out even more. Try this one on for size:
If you read Genesis in one sitting, you cannot help noticing a change in how God related to his people. At first he stayed close by, walking in the garden with them, punishing their individual sins, speaking to them directly, intervening constantly. Even in Abraham’s day he sent extraterrestrial messengers on house calls. By Jacob’s time, however, the messages were far more ambiguous: a mysterious dream about a ladder, a late-night wrestling match. And toward the end of Genesis, a man named Joseph received guidance in the most unexpected ways.
Genesis slows down when it gets to Joseph, and it shows God working mostly behind the scenes. God spoke to Joseph not through angels, but through such means as the dreams of a despotic Egyptian pharaoh…
…But shift for a moment to the perspective of God the parent. Had he deliberately “pulled back” to allow Joseph’s faith to reach a new level of maturity? And could this be why Genesis devotes more space to Joseph than to any other person? Through all his trials, Joseph learned to trust: not that God would prevent hardship, but that he would redeem even the hardship. Choking back tears, Joseph tried to explain his faith to his murderous brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good….
— Philip Yancey, Disappointment With God, 71-72
Yancey really got me thinking about how God goes about his business…and not in the way we would expect. Of course you know this.
For example, the three matriarchs of Israel – Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel – were each affected with some form of barrenness at one time or another. You would think that God, in inventing a new nation, would have the foresight to choose fertile young women who could pop out babies right and left on a whim to launch his people-project. Not so.
God seems to go about his business in less than flashy style, the hard way. A virgin-born baby in a frontier town. Barren matriarchs who are hardly able to eke out a child or two. The runt of the litter as king of the nation. Even in creation, one of the grandest displays of his majestic purposes, God throws out a little at a time: day one, wait, day two, I’m good, day three, that’s enough for now, and so on. Why not fling everything into being all at once in a monumental great big bang?
He scripted a Church that would stymie the gates of hell… and who did he choose as its first adapters? A handful of rough-and-tumble blue collar types; the foolish, weak, and despised. His M.O. was so frighteningly scandalous he picked the Sanhedrin’s favorite hit man to reform and apostle the growing church toward spiritual maturity.
We know God can dazzle (Matt 17:2) but he specializes in the unnerving manner (to us) of plodding and waiting and delaying. He doesn’t do things the conventional way. He’s not in a hurry and he doesn’t do flashy all that often. We want him to call down fire but he wants us to pray for our enemies. Even when he stepped out of character to curse a fig tree, he walked away from it, leaving it intact… until the next day.
He’s liable to tell us that he has big family plans for us so we get busy preparing the nursery only to have it sit empty for a quarter of a century. My ways are higher than your ways, he reminds us. He’s liable to hear that we are sick unto death then wait four days to show up. By then it’s our funeral, not our sick bed.
Jesus shied away from being coronated too soon and, on other occasions, curiously charged his healed followers to keep it between them and their priest. Turns out, he was playing the long game.
I know how disappointment with God can creep in and lead to discouragement. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. You might be there yourself. Yancey dedicated his book “For my brother, who is still disappointed.”
A sorely disillusioned Sarah laughed over the prospect of pregnancy in her well-past-due date, and when she did so, exposed a deep well of hurt inside her. Maybe at sixty-five, she sniffed, but not hardly at ninety. God recognized it at once and spoke a sure word into her void: “Is anything impossible for the Lord…?” (Gen 18:14)
Whatever you’re going through, however difficult it seems, just keep on trusting Jesus. Sometimes we’d like it better if God stopped playing the long game and wrapped things up all nice and tidy. Quick like. Allow me to share something with you that has anchored my soul in these recent days.
“As it is, we do not yet see everything subjected to Him. But we do see Jesus…” (Hebrews 2:8-9, CSB)
Read that again. Slowly. Let your soul bathe in those words.
Here’s the thing that mollifies me today. What does the writer of Hebrews emphasize time and again about what Jesus is doing right now? He’s sitting. He’s not pacing and fidgeting; he’s not wringing his hands worrying over how to turn the tide.
Jesus is sitting down.
On a throne.
Reigning like a boss.
Right now we’re in the disquieting realm of “yes, but not yet.” We just had no idea how long not yet was going to last. But right now Jesus is ruling and reigning and interceding. Imagine: the King of the Universe has our names on his heart day in and day out and is working behind the scenes causing chief cupbearers to suddenly remember, giving dreams to Pharaohs, putting you on a different platform, orchestrating famines in other places to bring hungry families to your doorstep, and reconciling and subjecting all things – and persons – to himself. He’s not just “sitting around,” mind you, he’s quite busy making all things new.
The present seems pretty messed up, if we’re being honest. But if we can manage to squint through the fog and gloom of the present “as it is,” and adjust our focus, we’ll see it all coming together — in Christ Jesus — just as God promised long ago.
Don’t lose hope, dear one, long game notwithstanding; I won’t either. See Jesus and, in the comforting words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Selah, beloved.
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42 years, 255 pages, and dozens of attempts later, it’s done. I’m finally a published author!
Though He Fall: My Journey Through Surrender, Loss, And A Thousand Healings is my testimony of God’s sustaining grace through disability, grief, and a parent’s worst nightmare. Above all, it’s the story of the overwhelming goodness and sustaining grace of God.
Early in the summer, I was pressed, rather than prompted, by the Lord to “finish the book.” It seemed urgent back then, so I laid aside almost all of my other activities and sank myself into the discipline of writing in order to get my story “out there.”
With the generous help and keen eye of some friends, I’m happy to report it’s done. I couldn’t have finished this assignment without Kelli and Tim and Mark and Kim and, of course, Sandy. The book is a whole lot better because of them.
I’m honored to share this project with you and pray you will be given a wider lens through which to see the amazing mercies of God. Indeed, He doeth all things well.
Selah, beloved.
Psalm 37:23,24
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Each year, Sandy chooses a word or phrase that serves as a theme for our holiday season. This year’s word is “merry.” In years’ past, she has displayed “gather” as well as “joy” and “merry and bright” on dishes, pillows, and mementos around the house. One year we basked in “comfort and joy.” I love this tradition. These catchwords and catchphrases are short, relatable, and, yes…incarnational.
The world (much of it, at least) outside our humble little cottage also brands the season by trading greetings that are brought out and dusted off this time of year:
“Merry Christmas.”
“Season’s greetings.”
“Happy holidays.”
”Joyeux Nöel.”
Accordingly, this Holy Advent, I have been struck by the generosity and wonder of another pair of words:
“My people.”
Comfort, comfort my people,”
says your God.Isaiah 40:1
God, the Eternal, Wholly Other, Transcendent, Invisible, Uncreated, Ageless, Divine Creator and Ruler wants it published near and far that He is not too proud to invoke possessive pronouns when referring to us.
My tribe.
My kind of folk.
My home.
When you love someone, don’t you want to be around them? Spend as much time with them as you possibly can? One of the all-time favorite feel-good Christmas standards is the song “I’ll be home for Christmas.” We swoon to that song because it reminds us of people we want near, those whom we love and miss and cannot wait to see.
The nativity story leaves a prominent trail of breadcrumbs that point to just how much God wants to be near us. The Lord appealed to Joseph through his dreams. Angel Gabriel brought big news to a poorly adolescent girl. A holy choir of angels appeared in the visible sky before an audience of lowly shepherds. The Magi were given a very specific roadmap to visit the infant Messiah. God is personable, reachable, and knowable.
The word that startled the slumbering world on that first Christmas was “Emmanuel.” God with us. You can’t get away from the theme…it’s shot all through the nativity story and beyond. (I mean, must we look any further than a Messiah on a cross who looks at His best friend and tells John to take care of His mama when He’s gone?) And that’s how the Almighty Father has planned it. From Mary’s dramatic assent to offering the womb that would carry the Babe of Bethlehem to His taking on human flesh and being swaddled in earthly vestments, the divine imprint upon humankind has taken hold.
As it also says in Hosea,
I will call Not My People, My People,
and she who is Unloved, Beloved.
And it will be in the place where they were told,
you are not my people,
there they will be called sons of the living God.
Romans 9:25,26
The Lord could have called us “subjects” or “bots” or “playthings.” Pets. We could be nothing more than experiments or throwaways to His almightiness. If we didn’t know better, He might be inclined to turn His magnifying glass on our pathetic beingness and take sadistic pleasure in burning us to cinder like ants. But no.
A God who weeps with us, sings over us (like Mary undoubtedly did as she cradled the Christ Child), who covers us with His wings, keeps His promises to us, prays for us, and speaks to us in our dialect, is the God revealed to us in the scriptures. He’s a people Person.
So, this Advent, may God’s “My people” hit you like it hits me and stir inside you the merriment that you are God’s kind of people, proven in the incarnation and His abiding Presence within.
If I may, I’d love to share with you some exciting news. As I intimated in the last post (over five months ago), I have been working on a manuscript, Though He Fall, that has been, technically, over 40 years in the works. I’m pleased to let you know it will be ready to order in the next few days (paperback version only for now). Keep your eye on my blog site for a follow-up post soon which will detail the when and where of the book and how you can order.
Thank you, beloved. You each have been an invaluable part of my journey, and I’m so happy I could share my news with you first. You are my tribe, my people.
Merry Christmas, people of God!
The post words that say ‘advent’ to me…and a bit of other exciting news appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
Rain, rain, go away. Come again, some other day… We sang that tune as children, hoping that rain wouldn’t ruin our summer plans. As adults we hope and pray our family trip to the ballpark won’t be rained out. We won’t mind if there’s a deluge on the way home, but just don’t rain on
The post this too shall pause appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD.Psalm 95:1
Back in the day I was “a singer who happened to preach.” It all started with “The Fire” followed by “Whatever It Takes.” Those were the most requested. Over 10-15 years there were so many others, plus three self-produced albums with several songs I wrote. Songs for Sandy, songs for Graham, songs about my story, but all for Jesus.
One of my favorite audiences were the disabled. They wanted to hear “Home Free.” Tears everywhere. I even got to sing it onstage with Joni a couple times.
Because of my brokenness and disability I gravitated to songs geared for the suffering. Christine Wyrtzen’s album, For Those Who Hurt, struck a chord that has stayed with me to this day.
Does Jesus Care, Tears Are A Language God Understands, Peace In The Midst Of The Storm, just so many. My college friend Kim wrote a song around the time of my accident, God Makes No Mistakes, which I’ve sung a ton of times with Sandy at the keyboard. Pow.er.ful.
Jesus Led Me All The Way. Goodness, I’m waxing nostalgic today. I’ve Never Been Out Of His Care. Oh yeah, that one too.
It wasn’t really a dream of mine to be a “singer who happened to preach” but the other way around. I love to sing but preaching is my calling. Still, I jibe with the occasional tickle to sing to the church again, especially for the wounded ones who weekly (weakly?) sit in our pews. Maybe one more shot at Home Free for my friends at HandiCamp or Christian Overcomers. Perhaps a reunion with Joni. Or a duet of My Savior First Of All* with Sandy.
I suppose what has me musing and all misty about the ministry of song today was a rabbit trail I took in Psalm 95. “Come, let us sing…” The middle verses got me humming a certain Maranatha chorus I heard long ago. You’ll know it too. The first part of the psalm is nostalgic and celebratory. The last refrain reminds us the Church gathered isn’t always a pretty sight.
The truth is we are a wilderness people and when we gather together to worship our Lord, we are worshiping him out of our desert places. Look around next Sunday. Watch the people. No one has it all together. Nobody has arrived.
Many of the people who assemble on Sundays have come through a week out in the wilderness and haven’t fared so well. Some have had seven days of Meribah. Others may have gotten testy with God or they’ve failed in the way and fallen flat on their face. Here and there are those who are losing faith in the whole process. A joyful number have manna on their breath and are just riding that high.
It’s a safe bet no one’s face will shine so brightly they’ll have to cover it. Probably not even your pastor.
Somebody will be there who feels out of place because they come from a lesser tribe, a labeled past. You’ll know them because they barely lift their eyes.
More than one will come with one foot in promise and another in Egypt. Some of those may even have a golden calf still hiding in their closet somewhere.
To your left might be a once-gifted-leader who blew it big time and is just a shell of the man he once was.
There will be a worshipper nearby who remembers all too well the leprosy of her sin. Her friends remember it too.
A great many however, will have stood on the banks of the Sea and seen God make his name famous. They will, as the first verse in the very next chapter says, “Sing to the LORD a new song.” Such are witnesses to the waters being lifted up and pushed aside, making a way for them to pass through on dry land. They can tell you about that day. Some will weep in worship, others will dance and clap. Some will just stand there shaking their head, still in disbelief.
“Come, let us bow worship and bow down…”
So sing we will, with desert sand between our toes, because Jesus came and changed the Story. To that end “A Christian should be an alleluia from head to foot,” said Augustine.
Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, acknowledging his name.
Hebrews 13:15
I want to sing. I want to sing all those songs I mentioned above, but I don’t want to sing to you; I want to sing with you. A choir, no solos. Broken saints, doubting saints, beleaguered, tired, whipped saints, happy saints, all. “Come, let us sing!” Sing with me, will you?
What shall we sing?
P. S. Here’s the song that started it all for me:
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In my Father’s house are many rooms…I am going away to make ready a place for you.
John 14:2
By the time they arrived The Dwelling would be set up.
Numbers 10:21
Its a big big house
With lots and lots of room
“Big House,” Audio Adrenaline
No doubt we are all familiar with the revelation of Jesus in John’s gospel, “In my Father’s house there are many rooms…” Your Bible might read ‘mansions’ or ‘dwelling places.’ Those exciting words conjure up all sorts of images and get us giddy for glory. Big ole mansions for everybody. Streets of gold. Gates of pearl. Pity the person who settles for “a cabin in the corner of glory land.”
I recall in my youth how I stumbled over the translation “rooms” and got sad because I didn’t want another version of my bedroom in heaven. I wanted a big ole house with a big ole yard all to myself!
At 62-years old I think I’m starting to mature. Yours truly was reading from the book of Numbers recently and caught a really cool shadow of our future ingathering to Glory. I camped awhile in chapter ten as the glory-cloud hovered over the text.
And the Kohathites set out, carrying the articles for the sanctuary; the tabernacle was to be set up before they arrived.Numbers 10:21
Let the reader understand. The Kohathites were responsible for the most holy objects in the tabernacle: ark, altar, veil, table, lampstand, etc. Whenever the Israelites camped, before any tents were pitched, the tabernacle was the first thing set up. In went the Koathites, carrying the Sacred Objects.
When Israel decamped, it all happened in reverse, with the tabernacle dissembled and the Sacred Objects carried out first. First in, first out. God was always out in front. Always. It’s a beautiful picture: before any of the tribes arrived, God was in place, waiting for them.
In those days the tabernacle was always moving, always mobile, mile after mile, battle after battle, set up, break down, backward, forward, another day, another long night of the soul, another leg of the journey… starting to sound familiar, fellow temples?
But one beautiful day a permanent house — with rooms (1 Kings 6:2-8; 1 Chron. 9:33; Ezek. 40:5-36) — was built. It suddenly dawned: when Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you,” and in his house are “many rooms” this is the picture of that.
We get caught up in the idea of heavenly “dwelling places” and romanticize about our having “mansions” in gated communities but that is not the picture Jesus was painting. He’s showing us his house is a Temple in which he is its Center. And there we will ABIDE with him, and he will ABIDE with us. Forever.
Soon and very soon the trumpet will sound and every nation, tongue, tribe, and ethnicity, Jew and Gentile, saved in Christ will, in their turn – the dead in Christ first – leave the wilderness behind, enter the wide open gates, and find our home ready.
Come, ye Judah!
Come, ye Issachar!
Come, ye Levites!
Come, Manasseh!
Come, Zebulun!
Reuben and Simeon and Ephraim, Come!
Come along, Benjamin and Asher and Gad!
You too, Dan!
And Naphtali!
Come, Egypt!
And you, Rahab and Babylon, Come!
Philistia and Tyre, yes you!
Come with us, Hobab!
Time out. Who? Hobab? Read on in Numbers 10 and we’re introduced to Moses’s brother-in-law. When Israel was breaking camp after a year-long stay at Sinai, Hobab was going to opt out. Moses wasn’t having it.
“Come with us, brother!” Moses pleaded.
“Nah, I think I’ll just meander back to my people,” Hobab replied.
“Nonsense,” protested Moses. “We need you! We’re your people! There’s room!”
One of my favorite kingdom parables is the story of the Great Banquet. Invitations were sent out to all the Host’s family and friends. From the jump everyone’s intention was to go; it would be the social event of the year! But as the date for the banquet drew near, every last one bailed. Excuses, excuses.
Long story short, the Master of the House was not happy. He instructed the servants to go up and down the alleyways, into the red light district, through Shantytown and all over creation, and “compel them to come.” He stipulated that he wanted his Big House filled.
Come with us, Hobab. We’re going to see the King!
“I want my house teeming with children,” the Lord of the Feast says.
It’s a big house, with lots and lots of room. Rooms galore. Ample space.
Roomy…with a view of Jesus.
Selah, my friend.
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“Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves…”Genesis 11:4
We’ve long believed the people of Genesis 11 wanted to build a tower for themselves to scale the heavens, but that wasn’t it. The Tower of Babel was a ‘stage’ for their god to come down and visit them. Such towers, or ‘ziggurats,’ sat atop temples, providing their god(s) a ‘landing pad’ on which they could descend in grand style.
Trouble was, these were Mesopotamians; they certainly weren’t ‘YHWH’ people. The builders in the text longed for false gods with phony promises. In a similar story the prophets of Ba’al tried to upstage Elijah’s God by building theirs a runway. But guess who didn’t land? Although they wailed and hollered and chanted until they were blue in the face Ba’al never showed up (1 Kings 18:20-29).
Vanity of vanities, these worshipers of Marduk or Inanna or Anu, or whichever gods they could coerce to visit (‘build it and they will come’???), thought a skyscraper might get their attention. Alas, no.
Annnnnnd we keep building our towers. And they keep failing us. Careers, ideologies, reputations, portfolios, fantasies. Towers. Rubble. The Titanic was thought unsinkable. No less than a dozen utopian experiments have failed. Voltaire said within a hundred years of his death Bibles would be obsolete. One hundred years later, Bibles were being published in mass out of his home.
name above all namesA word about the phrase “make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4). In ancient thought it meant to create a ‘legacy.’ These ziggurat-builders wanted something lasting for their children and their children’s children. Nothing wrong with that, right?
Even us modern folk can justify our ambitions to be for the good of our children and our species. But in all our construction are we ignoring the Chief Cornerstone? Do our kids see us representing the Name above all names or is our handprint all they can see?
These Mesopotamians hoped to erect a Shining City on a Hill for their race. Trouble was, it was the WRONG CITY. There’s a reason we call it the Tower of Babel. Babel is about empire-building and man-exalting.
The gospel reverses all that. God wants to build a house, a CITY, a nation for US, for his people. We have nothing to offer him but ourselves in worship of his majesty.
Now I saw no temple in the city, because the Lord God—the All-Powerful —and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, because the glory of God lights it up, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their grandeur into it. Its gates will never be closed during the day (and there will be no night there). They will bring the grandeur and the wealth of the nations into it, but nothing ritually unclean will ever enter into it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or practices falsehood, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
Revelation 21:22-27
We live for the glory of the King. We are not here to build a legacy, much less “a name” for ourselves. Rich Mullins, the prophet-minstrel reckoned himself “an arrow pointing to heaven.” He said,
“If my life is motivated by ambition to leave a legacy, what I’ll probably leave as a legacy is ambition. But if my life is motivated by the power of the Spirit in me—if I live with the awareness of the indwelling Christ, if I allow his presence to guide my actions, to guide my motives, those sorts of things. . . . That’s the only time I think we really leave a great legacy.”
— Rich Mullins
That’s our legacy, too. We are ziggurats made of clay (2 Cor 4:7), “tent-temples” groaning for our release from this world that we might enter his.
Shinar people, to their great misfortune, set their aim for earth and got nothing out of the deal. No personal deity, no lasting city, no enduring legacy.
a ‘ziggurat’ named abramIn the very next chapter, lo and behold, there was a visit from Deity! The Supreme God found a landing pad in a nobody named Abram and said I want to make your name great for My glory. God had plans to give him a people, a City, a nation, and himself!
Now that’s a legacy!
Father Abraham looked out his tent one day and saw what God was up to. He witnessed in a billion points of shimmering light a family of arrows each pointing to and worshiping the Almighty.
Like him, let us live out our days “looking forward to that City with solid foundations of which God himself is both architect and builder” (Heb 11:10). Ziggurats of Zion. Arrows until eternity.
Selah, fellow arrows. Until the Day!
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I call out to you, “Violence!”But you do not deliver!Habakkuk 1:2
Two Fridays ago was meant to be when 9-year old Evelyn Dieckhaus was to sing “What a Wonderful World” in a play at her Nashville school. Instead, her life was cut short by a bullet from an AR-15 carried by a young woman with a demonic grudge.
A bullied thirteen year old Indiana boy recently ended his life. Before committing suicide he left a video in which he named his tormentors. They made fun of his size, his haircut, and his clothes. The seventh grader dreamed of playing for the St. Louis Cardinals someday. Tragically, all he leaves behind is a void.
Why do you force me to witness injustice?Why do you put up with wrongdoing?Habakkuk 1:3
In the Netherlands, a television show had transgendered adults appearing naked in front of an audience of impressionable children. Unashamedly exposed, each expressed to the 10- to 12-year olds how “euphoric” they felt about their sex change surgeries. Grooming and pedophilia aren’t even masked anymore.
You are too just to tolerate evil;you are unable to condone wrongdoing.So why do you put up with such treacherous people?Habakkuk 1:13
Habakkuk speaks for all of us. How much news do we need to watch before we say, “Make it make sense, Lord!” Just when I think it’s safe to open up Twitter, I find myself needing to log off for my own emotional health.
Habakkuk, like us, reacted to the news cycle of his day. And, like many of us, he wasn’t exactly subtle with his objections:
- HOW LONG, LORD? (v2)
- YOU DON’T LISTEN! (v2)
- YOU DON’T DELIVER! (v2)
- WHY? (v3)
- WHY DO YOU PUT UP WITH THESE PEOPLE? (v13)
- WHY DO YOU SAY NOTHING? (v13)
- ARE YOU GOING TO LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS FOREVER? (v17)
I can sing about a heavenly home and enjoy for a moment the stirrings it evokes, but a land in the “sweet by-and-by” feels a long stretch of road and many miles away. I know everything will make sense then, but how do we make sense of things now?
That was Habakkuk’s dilemma. Isaiah, a hundred years before him, lamented, “We wait for light, but see only darkness.”
What hope is there for a young mother who vomits from her second round of chemo or the college coed showering off her sexual assault or a parent standing over the grave of a child who was struck down in a drive-by? Where was God when all of this was happening to me?
In today’s world the inmates are running the asylum. We, on the other hand, are plagued with “headline stress disorder” and weighed down with laments in the key of heavy. Society is twisted and dark and getting darker by the day. A growing number believe the world has long passed its expiration date. Hope, for them, is a folly.
If you stick it out with the young prophet you’ll begin to heal, whatever your situation. While his opening remarks are freighted with anger and frustration, by chapter 2 he sees a glimmer. By the 3rd chapter, the glimmer becomes a fiery sunrise.
I will stand at my watch post; I will remain stationed on the city wall…Habakkuk 2:1
If chapter one asks the question, “WHERE ARE YOU, GOD?” Habakkuk gets his answer in the last verse of chapter two:
the LORD is in his holy temple.Habakkuk 2:20
The smoldering prophet gets this epiphany when he says, “I’m too worked up. I’m going to stop, watch, and listen.” I can’t tell you how many times in my journey I’ve had to take counsel with those words. Habakkuk takes a sabbath day and starts to see and think and, yes, feel differently. By the time our guy closes in prayer (chapter 3) you’re of a mind to start unlacing your shoes.
David saw the same thing. He was battling an inner urge to fly away, to flee, to find a cave and hide from everything and everyone. But he knew a few things about his God: he knew God was eyewitness to all that troubled and provoked David (Psa 11:4) and was on his side (Psa 11:5); he also knew God was “just” (Psa 11:7) and would vindicate and bless David in the end. And while all those destroyers of the foundations (Psa 11:3) suffer brimstone and fire and reap the whirlwind (Psa 11:6), he would gaze upon the beauty of the LORD.
Habakkuk leaves us with two watchwords to aid us in trusting God to make sense of our nonsensical world. He invites us to (1) remain at our post (Hab 2:1-4) and (2) go to our knees (Hab 3:1-16).
“Our post” is the place where we can do the most good in the Kingdom:
- It is where we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor 5:7).
- It is where we hold fast the confession of our hope (Heb 10:23).
- It is where we keep ourselves in the love of God (Jude 21).
“On our knees” is where we confess our reliance on the immutable God who works all things together:
- We trust even when nothing makes sense, but believe through the groaning he holds it all together.
- When God says “the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea,” we say Amen and joy in that truth.
In music theory notes that aren’t part of the harmonic chords in an arrangement are said to create “tension.” To move those notes back into alignment with the whole theme is called “resolution.”
Today’s headlines and clickbaits draw attention to drama that doesn’t belong in the desired intent of God’s Story. Nevertheless God knows how to bring resolution from the tension. He’s done it before; he’ll do it again.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
—Frederick Buechner
Good and bad. Horrifying and glorifying. Take it all…and put it in God’s great hands.
Selah, beloved. Peace. Be still.
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little children, guard yourself from idols.1 John 5:21
Content my soul in you O Christ,
who alone are sufficient to my longings.
When my heart is beset by wheedling desire for what it does not have, remind me, sweet Jesus, that I have no right to a thing, simply because it exists.
The perpetual allure of new innovation does not negate the call to faithfully steward those resources you have temporarily entrusted to my keeping.
Guard my heart therefore against idols of silicon and circuitry enticing with slick-veneered promises of
a more sophisticated and upgraded lifestyle.
Content my soul in you, O Christ, who alone are sufficient to my longings.
In such moments of technological temptation, when I might justify to myself the reasonableness of a costly purchase, speak louder, O Lord, than the voice of my self-serving thoughts.
If there is no real need for, or true wisdom in, the purchase of a new technology, service, or application, then let me be content with fewer options,
slower speeds,
smaller memory,
less diversion,
less gadgetry.
Let me be content, O Lord, with what I truly need to accomplish the necessary tasks before me.
Nay, let me be content with nothing but thee.
O Christ who alone art sufficient to my longings, I would be your trusted servant, at liberty to employ and to enjoy all things at my disposal, without being owned by any of them—using technologies to further good ends, while never seeking them as ends in themselves.
For it is not the advance of digital platforms that will usher in your kingdom, but the work of your Spirit in the world, and in the hearts and lives of your people.
Content my soul therefore in you, O Christ, who alone are sufficient to my longings.
Amen.
— taken from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1, A Liturgy For Those Who Covet The Latest Technology, 163-4
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God springs into action.His enemies scatter;his adversaries run from him.As smoke is driven away by the wind, so you drive them away.As wax melts before fire,so the wicked are destroyed before God.But the godly are happy;they rejoice before Godand are overcome with joy.Psalms 68:1-3, NET
The Goliath you’re facing day in and day out, the one that’s been harassing and intimidating you, rattling your cage and kicking sand in your face? That devil is still ‘God’s devil.’ (Martin Luther)
To the army of Israel, Goliath looked huge from a far distance, but David discovered that he was just a scalp on his belt up close. Even the champion’s arsenal fit quite nicely on David’s mantle.
Psalm 68 is a victory psalm. It’s ten stanzas of battle hymns and rah-rah emotion. The writer, presumed to be David, is electrified by God’s feats on the field of battle. He recalls how the ark once went out with the armies of Israel and every time the enemy was soundly defeated. Now he’s bringing the ark home.
The Bible tells us God is our rear guard. A soldier might say he has our “six.” He goes before us. He covers us. Beneath are his everlasting arms holding us up. Everywhere you look God is … there.
he fights for youMaybe the devil is having his way in your life. It seems so. The preponderance of evidence says so. But take heart, believer; your Lord, the God of the angel armies, is orchestrating his doom.
My young godson, Maddox, wants to know if the devil is stronger than we are. With all the principalities and powers and rulers of darkness at his disposal, we are not a matchfor him in ourselves. But he’s not greater and stronger than our God. When we trust the God of heaven, and take our strength from him, the devil is no match for us!
You are the apple of God’s eye (Deut 32:9-10; Psa 17:8), a stone on his breastplate; your name is engraved on his palm (Isa 49:16). As a benefactor of the blessing of Abraham, the Lord God Almighty is your shield and reward.
Early in our ministry I did a lot of singing. A few of you know that Sandy and I recorded three albums of music and I wrote a few of the songs. One of them, Encourage Yourself in the Lord, is based on 1 Sam 30:6. Years ago I was blessed to share it in a conference where Joni Earekson Tada was speaking.
He fights for you
He lifts up the fallen
And he cares for you
He meets all your needs
He wants you to rest in his promises
And yearns for you
To trust and obey
So encourage yourself in the Lord, my friend
Encourage yourself in the Lord!
There’s a whole story about how the sound guy didn’t cue the accompaniment track correctly and started it in the middle of the song. I was completely lost, humiliated, and ready to stone the sound guy. But I digress.
The point is God fights for you when things happening to you are out of your control. The devil will have his “Pyrrhic” victories here and there; that’s not in dispute. The truth of it is better than the shame of it. God is working even your defeats into triumphs and your failures into glories.
if the devil’s been defeated, why am I getting beat up?Good question, that. Goliath, vanquished forever, is still out here intimidating and spewing curses on the Church. He’s defeated, yes, but still he roars.
What he cannot do is unsave you. He can lie to you but he can’t lie to Jesus. He can’t separate you from the love of God. He can boast but he can’t back it up. He can beat you today but he can’t defeat you ultimately. He isn’t more powerful than the God who is in you.He’s been de-fanged and de-clawed. Neutered. The Christ of the Cross has crushed his head. Whatever you’re facing, God stands between you and it. At times it’s difficult to see the Lord when there’s nothing but smoke and blackness of night, but he’s there all right, an imposing pillar of fire. The enemy doesn’t have a snowball’s chance with God on your side.
The devil is still God’s devil. You think he’s running amuck in your life when he’s really on a leash held by Christ. He can’t do a thing to you without the Almighty’s permission. The enemy intends evil, but your Savior Lord intends good.
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
Romans 16:20, CEB
The God of the angel armies rides on the clouds. Jesus walks on the waves, the Spirit follows with resurrection power. Believe me, nothing can overcome you. You are safe. But not only safe; in Christ, you are victorious. God’s plan is for you to be overcome…with joy.
I pray you are overcome today.
Selah, beloved.
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The Road to Emmaus, artwork by Daniel Bonnell
C. S. Lewis identified many of us as “ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job.”
Today is a struggle job for me. I went through my prayers this morning with monotone indifference. The reading of the Word was like a dried up fountain. I think I just need to get alone and have a good cry.
Very little is working out the way Sandy and I hoped (expected?) 333 days ago. Today feels like a slog through muck in heavy boots and an overfilled backpack. If I didn’t feel the need to preserve an iota of dignity I’d be tempted to throw my head back and scream, but I’ll best keep that to myself here in the library.
When I left the house this morning I said barely ten words to Sandy, telling her, “Headed to the library. I love you.” How I longed for some quiet and introspection. I need to process; I need to think; I need to write.
Before heading out I grabbed the recent Plough Quarterly that arrived in yesterday’s mail and have it open before me now. The theme for the issue is, “PAIN & PASSION.” What a coincidence.
One of the opening articles features a Dominican order of Sisters who offer palliative care to dying patients in NYC. Here’s what got me: the older Sisters advise the newbies that (1) their ministry is just that; it requires they first attend to their own souls in Christ before they can love and offer mercy to their patients. And, (2), never forget that all their patients are terminal; the Sisters are there to lovingly prepare them for the next world.
Those same pieces of advice will do good for me today, if I pay heed. I can’t rise above this unless I receive the love of Jesus and trust him, first and foremost; and next I must resign to the dictum, once again, that I am not made for this world.
A page over, a pastor who lost his 22-year old to an aggressive form of lymphoma cancer wrote about his desperate search for solace against the backdrop of stupefying loss:
It was a tremendous relief to realize that we [he and his wife] are not strong people; we are plain, ordinary people. And if we need to cry, then cry. If we need to grieve, then grieve. Do it hard and deeply, and then move on.
Randall Gauger, In Search of Solace
That’s good counsel. I think I’ll cry.
Yours truly has spent some time this week with three people: N. T. Wright and a pair of disgruntled disciples on the road away from Jerusalem. Wright captures their mood with,
“They had been traveling up a road they thought was leading to freedom, and it turned out to be a cul-de-sac.”
N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus
The thing is, the Emmaus Road disciples were having their debate after Jesus rose from the dead! They’d heard rumors about a Missing Body and certain women having visions, but instead of staying back and investigating they slogged their way home.
Jesus was alive. The apex of redemptive history has just happened. The Blessed Hope of Mankind is risen! And they are grousing about how nothing has worked out the way it was promised.
(Note to self…)
About here is where I need to do some Soul Talk. I don’t mind that you’re here, but if you’ll excuse me: Soul, why are you downcast? Why are you in turmoil? Has Jesus not Risen?
Bring me your sorrow, and watch for the sunrise of the resurrection. Yes, truly there comes always a resurrection – a morning when hope is reborn and life finds new beginning. Wait for it as tulip bulbs anticipate the spring. The rarest blooms are enhanced by the coldness of winter…Your God is your maker. He is your defender. And He is mighty to save. Yes, He is not only mighty to save from sin, but He is mighty to save from despair, from sorrow, from disappointment, from regret, from remorse, from self-castigation, and from the hot, blinding tears of rebellion against fateful circumstances.
Francis J. Roberts, Come Away, My Beloved
These two, perhaps husband and wife (I think they were), mourned the loss of hope. But, just then, a Man joined them in their walk of sorrow. Jesus was a Stranger to them but he gave both something they could carry the rest of their way home. The Resurrected One granted them their own resurrection. Did not our hearts burn within us?
I’m on the struggle bus today but I’ll be fine. My heart will live to burn again another day. Today I cry; tonight I’ll still be His. He’s resurrected my tired bones before and he’ll do it 10,000 more times before I get home. What I have is terminal; what he has is eternal.
Amen.
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In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord seated on a high, elevated throne. The hem of his robe filled the temple.Isaiah 6:1
I heard another Christian Recording Artist do it. Belting out the last word of a lyric, she made “me” sound like “mehhhh!” I know it’s a stylized vocalization but I hear it more and more.
“Peace, peace over mehhhhhh!”
Which has got me thinking.
About Isaiah.
And “woe is me.”
And how we’ve gotten more ‘meh’ about ourselves. Allow me to share a personal testimony:
In a recent prayer journal entry I devoted pages to sentences starting with the words, “I wish I wasn’t…” For instance, “I wish I wasn’t critical.” “I wish I wasn’t overly sensitive.” “I wish I wasn’t self-absorbed.” On and on it went, each confession going deeper into the soil of my soul.
“I wish I wasn’t jealous.”
his robe filled the templeI often confess my sins to Jesus when I’m journaling but this was especially brutal. I’d been giving myself a pass too often when it came to sins of flesh and spirit and ya boy needed a “come to Jesus meeting ” if you get my drift.
“I wish I wasn’t offendable.”
Isaiah 6 says the prophet got a house call. While he was praying in the Temple one day his eyes were turned toward a heavenly scene where he saw God enthroned, high and lifted up. It’s interesting that the part of God he saw was his hind parts. You probably recall that Moses was shown something quite similar.
“The hem of his robe,” the Bible has it.
During Isaiah’s time kings of Assyria were renowned for removing the train of the robe of a conquered rival king and attaching it to the train of his own robe. The longer the train the more impressive was his dynasty.
When Isaiah looked up and saw the heavens opened before him he saw the Almighty’s robe with a train of every rival king, kingdom, principality, power, and ruler of darkness behind him!
No rivals.
Here are these awesomely holy and sinless creatures and they couldn’t stand to be naked and exposed before the Almighty God. Isaiah must surely have thought, “If they are this guarded in his presence, how can I stand to do so?”
“I wish I was a better friend.”
“I wish I didn’t need affirmation.”
“I wish I wasn’t prideful.”
Isaiah was caught red-handed. No, he wasn’t doing something wicked or immoral. He was praying. God found him in a place of depression over the death of the king, his friend, Uzziah. Under Uzziah’s rule Judah experienced great peace and prosperity.
Assyria was a rising world power and Jerusalem was in its sights. Isaiah was worried. So God flashed him the hem of his robe and said, “Prophet! You miss your King, your friend Uzziah? You worship me with your lips but your heart is elsewhere…”
First the hem, now the Voice. God‘s voice thundered and shook the heavens: WHOM SHALL I SEND? WHO WILL GO FOR US? ENOUGH TIME HAS BEEN SPENT LOITERING AND GRIEVING OVER WHAT IS NOT, YOU MUST WITNESS TO WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN!
I said, “Woe to me! I am destroyed, for my lips are contaminated by sin, and I live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin. My eyes have seen the king, the LORD of Heaven’s Armies.”Isaiah 6:5
It was absolutely vital to the mission of God to call his man…and absolutely vital to his cause that his man be rightly ready. God wanted sanctified lips to preach his message and Isaiah said, “Here am I, send me!”
a new look at an old wordAs a man of the new covenant, I know that Jesus took on himself my Ultimate Woe, my curse, my judgment. When I speak the word woe today, it is not a word that makes me fear condemnation. It leads me to repentance.
Woe is me, but saved am I. I am covered in the righteousness of Christ.
Paul said, “Woe is me if I don’t preach the gospel!” So heavy was the burden of God on him to preach the gospel with clarity and courage, he didn’t want to fail God and — likewise — those he was called to bless with the good news of the Kingdom.
We meh ourselves too much. Forgive that person? Meh. I know I shouldn’t get angry… Meh. It was just a small lie. Meh. My social media account isn’t my idol! Meh. I’ve gotten lazy in the Lord. Meh. I know I should trust the Lord instead of worry but… Meh. Repent? Meh. Call to say I’m sorry? Meh. I know I gossip, but…Meh.
Meh, meh, meh. You notice what’s mostly in that word? Me.
I cannot wait until all my “I wish I wasn’t…” confessions — and there will be more — are final, done, kaput. The train of my robe is so long I keep tripping over myself. Lord, have mercy. Shake the foundations. Finish the work in me.
Lord, haste the Day. Get the glory.
Here am I.
Selah, amen.
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Have you ever seen someone in pain who’s not handling it well? I know you have and I have too. It’s not pretty is it? They can become bitter. Sometimes they get angry and strike. For many, pain becomes their identity.
Last time I posted I shared from the life of Joseph. I’m tempted to do the same with this post because so much of his story fits inside this theme. In his stead I’ll share a brief glimpse into his father, Jacob.
There was a day in his life when a blood-soaked garment was brought to him by his sons. “He’s gone, Dad. Joseph’s dead, mauled by a lion.” Jacob was inconsolable.
Jacob knew pain. Think back to his wedding night. Recall the entire saga of Esau? Does his divinely dislocated hip ring any bells? Consider the twenty hard years of labor in Paddan-aram (interestingly, the verb associated with the place suggests this was where Jacob was ‘ransomed’; a necessary length of time for Old Jacob to meet New Jacob).
Because of these things, perhaps, Jacob had a fixation with death and trouble. He carried his pain with him into every season and well inside his old age. There’s another grievous pain he bore but I’ll get to that if time permits.
Any of those things would cause many a man or woman to go running for the hills. God won’t give you more than you can bear?
Please.
Say that to Jacob with a straight face.
The worst of times are not the last of times.
— John Piper
lamentLament is one of those words that sounds too religious for us regular folk. But we cannot move forward without it. This is why so many get stuck in the dry docks of dismay.
Jacob lost 22 years of his life as the consequence of his sons’ great sins against Joseph, Tamar, and the men of Shechem. He is often seen sitting with his grief and unhealthy preoccupation with death.*
*Gen 37:35; 42:36; 42:38: 44:22, 27-29; 30-31; 45:28; 46:31
One of my regrets about life after my accident is that I didn’t take necessary time to grieve all that was taken from me. In the ensuing years I was often asked “Do you get bitter?” I replied, “No, never once.” And that was the truth.
Did I lament my loss? I did…eventually. TBH, I still lament. Something is wrong with this picture. My disability is not part of the new creation. Jesus wept at Lazarus’ tomb because it didn’t…belong. It stinks. It hurts. How long, O God?
I love how lament is described by an Anglican priest:
Lament is what happens when the promises of God collide with the reality of our lives, and we express that collision and call on God to harmonise the two.
— Revd Dr. Alastair McKay, St. Martin-in-the-field
The thing about lament, biblically understood, is that it always — always — leads to praise. To lament is to actively pursue God in the midst of your sorrow. It may be a long time coming but you eventually get there. Jacob spent 22 years locked inside his bereavement. Would he recover?
I’m a big fan of the minor key and the book of Job. My friends know how much I love a gloomy, overcast day. Barry Manilow’s saddest ballads were my favorite songs in high school and college. Don’t hate me, I’m still fragile about that.
I’ve been through some stuff in my life, but I don’t ever recall a time when I’ve just wanted to pack it all in and jump ship. I scrolled through my twitter feed the other day and came across this share from a pastor I found quite enlightening:
That’s good. And painfully true.
Jacob is a case study in not dealing well with your hurt. You can’t tell me that his solemnity and despair didn’t rub off on his children. I imagine Judah or Simeon wondered aloud from time to time if they’d ever be more than a painful burr in their dad’s soul. Perhaps Reuben felt the scorn of being Leah’s son and that was all he could ever bring to the table.
But then there was a famine in the land. (Pay close attention to Gen 43:14)
It changed everything.
lessons learnedThere came a day when Jacob got some news: his boy was alive! I’ve imagined how awesome it would be if I woke up tomorrow morning to see Graham at the foot of our bed! To realize it had all been a very bad dream. When I read of Jacob’s exhilaration, I feel that deep in my core.
Jacob had enjoyed Joseph for seventeen years in Hebron (Gen 37:2), and now he would get to enjoy Joseph for seventeen years in Egypt (Gen 47:28).At 130 years of age Jacob made peace with his pain. In a long blessing over Joseph he invoked the name El Shaddai at the start and finished with Elohim at the close. Happy is the life that begins and ends with God!
Long before David called God his Faithful Shepherd, Jacob beat him to it. Jacob was the first person in Scripture to say that God “has been my shepherd all my life.” That sounds like a man at peace.
“I am about to die, BUT GOD…”“But God.”
May this be your confession by his mercy and grace.
Allow me this one final splurge. Before you click away, I’d like to share the song whose lyric inspired the title of this post. Sandy chose this song as part of worship for Graham’s funeral. Yes, I said that. Funeral worship. We’ll see him again. Maybe not here, but when our lament has finished its course.
Amen.
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Should anyone’s life illustrate the maxim, “If God brought you to it, he’ll bring you through it” it’s Joseph. Very much against his will Joseph was “brought down to Egypt.” But it would not be the end of the story. Faithful Joseph, as you know, went from the pits to a palace and became the vice-ruler in Egypt!
I’ve been thinking about Joseph a lot these days. His brothers contemplated murdering him, and then they settled for the lesser crime of trafficking him into slavery. By the providence of God he finds himself in a rather favorable arrangement. That all blows up when his sex-starved employer’s wife falsely accuses him of attempted rape.
All this and Joseph is still only 17 years old.
His employer explodes and throws him in prison. Even still, Joseph conducts himself in such a way that impresses the warden and is given special privileges. If he thought his good conduct might gain him an early release, however, Joseph, now in his 20s, had another thing coming. Literally.
This is the life of young Joseph. Misunderstanding. Betrayal. Mistreatment. Injustice. One thing after another, and still more after that. Thirteen l o n g years.
All of it, every last bit of it, was intended to get Joseph next to the ruler of Egypt where he could be positioned to do greater good in the world. Talk about earning a promotion!
Could you handle that assignment?
After all he had to endure, Joseph grabbed hold of his God and clung to him for dear life. There are quite a few sterling moments to draw out of his testimony, but I want to highlight just this one:
Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I had a dream, and there is no one who can interpret it. But I have heard about you, that you can interpret dreams.” Joseph replied to Pharaoh, “It is not within my power, but God will speak concerning the welfare of Pharaoh.”What startles me about this is that Joseph, in spite of everything, still believed God was all-powerful and he was motivated to do good. There doesn’t seem to be a shred of bitterness in him. Joseph still believed there was a divine plan at work and God was using his story of faith to bless others.
Fellow struggler, trust God down there in your Egypt. There is a way forward even though you wake up to the same thing day after day. You think this is it, this is all, just grit your teeth and bear it. I assure you there’s a plan in the mind of God and it is good.
One thing you don’t see Joseph doing — quite remarkably — is playing the victim. He shows us if we can thrive in and rise to the level of excellence in our adversity, by the grace of God, we will be overcomers. It may take 13 years (Joseph) or 20 years (Jacob) or 25 years (Abraham & Sarah) or 40 years (Moses), or however long, but you won’t find a better alternative than to
TRUST
GOD’S
PLAN.
I must hasten. In studying the travails of Joseph I want to leave you with two immutable truths:
1. it’s always right to do good even if you don’t see a reward for itI get it; everything about this makes you want to scream. Where’s the justice? The equity? You wonder why you have to smile and take it. Do right though the stars fall, I once heard. Keep your hand to the plow, Jesus said. Don’t do right for right’s sake, Paul said, do right for Jesus’s sake.
To that end I read this aloud from my prayer book this morning:
I would serve in imitation of you, who poured out your life for me. I would serve knowing that your Spirit is ever at work in the lives of those I serve, ever calling, ever drawing, ever seeking to soften hearts encased in fear and disappointment and anger and idolatry. So let my kindnesses and sacrifice fall like warm shafts of sunlight on icy ground.
I cannot know the end of another person’s story… So let me be content to minister regardless of visible outcomes, trusting that the small mercies I extend will be woven into the larger theme of redemption at work in the lives of others, as you woo them to yourself…
Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1, p. 158
2. God’s favor will find you even in your darkest trialOkay. If we’re being honest, none of us is going to be a ruler over a nation. We probably won’t get our story published; this post won’t go viral. But is that what it’s about anyway? Could we (hear me out) say amen to God even if we knew nothing would change?
I leave you with this. At the end of his grave injustices, Joseph got married and raised a family. I beg you to read about that here. The names of those two boys, Manasseh and Ephraim, tell quite a story. Your homework is to study their meanings. What I’ll say about it is this: Joseph married an Egyptian bride, but their sons bore Hebrew names.
That tells me Joseph wanted to remember his journey. None of it was a mistake. Not a single year was wasted. Even in Egypt, Joseph’s God was faithful, his trials were necessary, and the outcome was favorable. I have a feeling if Joseph never got out of that prison, never sat on a throne, never had a family, he’d still say
“It’s not me, it’s God.”Joseph lived to be 110. He learned to love Egypt but his hope was in the home country. He wanted to go home. That’s all that matters in the end. When you’re finished with me in Egypt, Lord, take me home.
Hey, beloved of God, if he brought you to it he’ll bring you through it. He gave you the assignment; he must be pretty certain you will come through to the other side to tell your story. And what a story you’ll have.
Selah.
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What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about God?
Jesus told a story that is clearly about God the Father. In the story there are two villains, a younger brother and an elder. While the older brother stews in his self righteousness the younger son repents of his many reproaches and heads back with tail tucked. In the story we are surprised to find the Father running to meet him.
Imagine: God, with robe gathered, feet flying, running!
There’s another place in the sacred text where I’m caught off guard by God. We know about his communication skills but how many knew God could sing?
In Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, we find Aslan singing the world of Narnia into being:
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing…Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once…One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world…All the time the Voice went on singing…The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.
—C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Collier), pp. 98-99.
I am in a season right now where my most challenging obstacle is not disability. I confess it’s gotten the better of me on those especially trying days, but God faithfully meets me in his Word and whispers, “I’m for you, child; stay the course. Trust that I’m up to something good here.” Those words quiet me.
God doesn’t just speak, however. Sometimes he sings. Elihu told Job of a God who “gives songs in the night.” I know of such a God. I’ve heard his night songs echoing softly in my mind when I thought I was out of my mind, lost and forgotten.
The Almighty has been singing a long time. Twenty-five centuries ago Zephaniah, great-great grandson of Hezekiah, said, while God “quiets” us by his love (‘ahava’, e.g., Song of Songs 2:4), he also anthems over us and silences the roar inside our hearts.
The LORD your God is among you;He is mighty to save.He will rejoice over you with gladness;He will quiet you with His love;He will rejoice over you with singing.Zephaniah 3:17
The Hebrew text reads, “he exults over you with loud singing.” Great peals of thunder ring out from the bellows of God’s voice when soothing words won’t do. The NLT fashions it, “He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.”
How very cool is that? When we are cowed by the dissonance of our skewed culture, our Heavenly Father starts singing, and when he sings all the noise fades into the background.
The people God sings over are so beleaguered they want to quit. They’re flat-out exhausted from battling the insufferable. All they can hear are the “slurs and taunts of Moab”; the “pure speech” of Zion’s completely drowned out. God’s whispers do them little good; they need him to SHOUT his love in their ears.
That’s the beauty of Zephaniah 3:17. The word we get isn’t “lullaby”; of course there’s a time when a lullaby is appropriate. I love when the Holy Spirit quietly sings over me, calming me with his sweet reveries.
But sometimes we need reveille! Life can get so messed up we need a victory song. We need God to ROAR with assurance that all this is under Aslan’s massive paw. That’s the idea in this text. Sometimes he quiets us with love, sometimes he rejuvenates us with a victory chorus.
God is so happy in the love he bears to his people that he breaks the eternal silence, and sun and moon and stars with astonishment hear God chanting a hymn of joy.
—Charles Spurgeon
The older I get, the quieter I get. And the quieter I am, the better I’m positioned to hear the still, small Voice, so familiar, so intimate. But there are times I need an anthem, not a sonnet. God’s playlist always seems to give me just what I need in any given moment.
How about you? Are you greatly bothered by the noise in your life? Can you hear your Father in heaven sing over you? Or is the tumult drowning out the truth you need to hear? I pray the Lord of the Dance surprises you with his playlist in coming days. May God grace you with his joyous reveille and surround you with songs of deliverance.
Selah, indeed.
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Most of you know I was blessed to draw a line through a big item on my bucket list last year. There we were, Sandy and I, road trippin’ with two best friends, Alan and Kelli, across the southern U.S. Target: Grand Canyon.
I could do a huge photo dump of some of our grandest shared memories, but I’ll spare you that. Instead, I’ll leave you with two or three snapshots that practically tell the whole epic story.
I’ve been told by veteran visitors of the GC that the funnest part is to go with someone who has never been before. Then just stand back as they approach the rim and watch their expression. I was the one being watched that day and I’m pretty sure I followed the first-timer script.
But that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about this guy:
I probably took over a hundred photos during those eight or so hours at the southern rim. There are better shots than this, but this one is a sermon in itself.
This dude walked out on nature’s platform and, quite eloquently, turned it into a pulpit. He was an orator facing an Audience of One; I just so happened to be in the wings, eavesdropping.
As I watched, he stood there a few moments, hands in pockets, taking it all in. He may have sighed, I don’t know (I didn’t have my long lens with me). Keeping my finger on the trigger, I spied through the camera’s viewfinder thinking it made a pretty good photo on its own.
I snapped off a couple shots.
Then, slowly, he pulled one hand out of his pocket and raised a lone finger toward the sky. His face turned upward and looked where he was pointing. Like so:
I didn’t see him again the rest of the day. But I have to tell you, his actions out there in the cold sunshine, atop the canyon, moved me to the core. I got chills. The photo still does it to me.
It was a miracle we got to see the Grand Canyon at all. It had snowed to beat the band the day before — all day long. Visibility, zero. Wind gusts, treacherous. The roads to the canyon were impassable; it wasn’t until the very early morning hours they were reopened. This was the only day we could visit; the next day we would set out on our long return drive to Georgia.
Think of what we would’ve missed. Yes, the Grand Canyon. Of course, that. But we would’ve also missed a guy out on a ledge at the Grand Canyon experiencing God in the moment.
There was another guy at the Grand Canyon that day. He, too, was lifting a hand skyward but in his upraised hand was … a cell phone.
Dude was crazy. Far out on an outcropping of rock firing off selfies from all angles, he kept backing up, not paying attention to his six. There was a harrowing moment when I thought the Canyon might claim another life.
Guy #1 was pointing at the heavens that day, yielding worship to the Almighty Creator. Around the same time, Guy #2 was focusing on himself, playing fast and loose with gravity. There’s a sermon in there if you care to try.
Scroll back up to Guy #1 and see how small he is in the frame. He’s miniaturized by his surroundings. What is man that thou art mindful of him? indeed. Amid a selfie-obsessed generation, be Guy #1; he knows who he is and whose he is.
To that end, he permutates into an arrow, pointing away from himself, and directs his whole being heavenward. If we could see into the other realm we might witness the heavens opened and a whole host of beings ascending and descending, glorifying God and praising.
We are all starved for the glory of God, not self. No one goes to the Grand Canyon to increase self-esteem. Why do we go? Because there is greater healing for the soul in beholding splendor than there is in beholding self.
— John Piper
Here’s an idea: why not pause right now and lift a finger into the air and aim your praise at the Savior. Offer up humble thanks that he’s put you where he wants you, in frame, where you can testify to an eavesdropping world that Jesus isn’t just part of the Story, he’s the whole Point of the Story.
Selah, beloved. Oh, and here’s one final photo from that day at the canyon:
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Resting Ships by Paul Klee
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
Genesis 6:8
There was once a man named Noah. When he was born, his dad looked at him and said, “Finally, some hope. My son, a comfort to my soul.” The lad was born into a world ripe for judgment and Lamech thought his boy might be its savior. Evidently Noah’s pop was given some sense of his son’s divine purpose, but, unfortunately, his world was beyond saving.
I’ve listened to some parents of young children — and grandparents — who are uneasy about the world in which their children and grands will grow up. I totally get it.
A writer-father of a newborn shared his own angst and worry over the world his child would face:
[A]mong the excitement and wonder I feel at his progression are other emotions: worry, guilt, fear. And, overwhelmingly, grief. Because I know that the closer this child comes to thinking and understanding and communicating complex ideas, the faster he approaches the Moment when he will discover something that I wish with all my heart he never had to know: that his mother and I brought him into existence on a world that is dying.”
Time magazine offered an article a few months ago, titled, “Raising Kids When The World Is Ending.”
Here’s a headline for you:
“But understand this, that in the last days difficult times will come.”2 Timothy 3:1
“Difficult” is a tad benign. The word Paul uses is more like “fierce.” Two verses down he says the last days are “savage.” Read the whole list. It mirrors almost exactly the condition of the world in Genesis 6. Uh oh. Seems we’ve seen this movie before.
Just today I read that nearly every House Democrat in the U.S. voted against a bill requiring medical attention for any baby born alive after a botched abortion. You can’t get much more evil than that.
Is there any comfort for us? Who can rest in these dark days?
Early one morning I woke up thinking about Genesis 6:8. “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” Taken in context, it’s a beautiful word of comfort for any who are barely treading water.
Has your world become oppressive? Exhausting? Unbearable? That was Lamech’s world. Even as the surrounding culture was submerged in evil, he traced a sliver of hope in the tiny feet and wiggling fingers of a baby. Raging against the dying of the light he defiantly branded his son Noah.
Noah sounds in the native tongue like “comfort” and derives from a word meaning “rest.” Later when we read about his now-famous ark “resting” on Mount Ararat as the floodwaters receded, it literally says the boat “Noahed” there.
It’s in Genesis 6:8 where “grace” shows up for the first time. God’s eyes swept the whole of humanity and, everywhere he looked, saw violence, ruin, and debauchery. Then his eyes rested on his man of rest and hope sprang anew.
Putting aside the hot mess of modern global culture, let’s turn our sights toward our private worlds. What words would you use to describe your life in these days? Turbulent? Unpredictable? Challenging? Scary?
Perhaps enduring fits you better. Or overcoming. I’ve been telling all my friends of late how sanctifying this season of my life has been.
In one midrash (rabbinical teaching), Noah’s wife is Naamah, the root of which primarily means to be pleasant, but also has the connotation of melody and of singing. It may not be sacred teaching, but it is cool to think about.
How wonderful to imagine Noah enjoying the company of his sweet bride, a pleasant soul, singing and humming her melodies in their home. Perhaps Noah stressed over the calling put on him (build a boat in the desert!) and needed his wife’s songs to minister rest to his troubled heart.
I guess you know where I’m going with this. Sandy has been the melody to my lyrics, especially of late. I’m grateful to have her as my helpmate; she exhibits dignified grace daily. I am a better man with her in my corner.
If Genesis 6:8 teaches anything, it tells us there is a supernatural rest and empowering grace available to those who by faith trace their spiritual lineage through Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and all the way through to Christ.
As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be ever until the end: God has a rest for his people. Lamech pinned his hopes on God’s rest. Noah carried God’s rest in his heart. I pray the same for us. I pray for your children that their faith would be embedded in Christ and they would know his rest in their futures. May we be carried by his rest and rise above the black waters of death through divine grace.
I pray for my friends, Lord, as well as Sandy and me, for your carrying rest on this day and in all the days ahead. May we rise above the chaos and advance towards your new creation by your empowering grace, O Christ. In Jesus’s name, amen.
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After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,
Hallelujah!
Revelation 19:1
“Hallelujah” appears twenty-four times in the Bible. Only four of those times is it found in the New Testament and Revelation 19 lays claim to those. Think of that for a moment. The first time the word “hallelujah“ shows up in the New Testament is at the very end.
One could imagine a hefty hallelujah following the huge buildup in the previous 256 chapters of gospel and epistle. Like the swelling of a musical piece to its finale, ‘hallelujah’ hits just the right note.
I spent a little time grousing to the Lord this morning about unanswered prayers. After finishing out my little pity party, I opened the Word and picked up where I left off yesterday. The first words I saw are what you just read in the quote-box above.
For the 247th time this year, I mentally threw my hands up and said, “Okay, God, I get it. You win.”
I’m sure you can’t relate to that at all.
Laura Story sang about such things in her single, “Blessings.”
What if my greatest disappointments
Or the aching of this life
Is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can’t satisfy
And what if trials of this life
The rain, the storms, the hardest nights
Are Your mercies in disguise?—Laura Story, Blessings © Capitol Christian Music Group, Capitol CMG Publishing
If you’re out here struggling against unanswered prayers, hard labors, injustices, and dark nights of the soul, don’t lose hope. We’ll all sing “hallelujah” when all is said and done. Few are fortunate to get vindication in this life; most have to wait till it gets nearer to the end of the book.
Let’s say it again — louder — for the people in the back:
Once more they cried out,
Hallelujah!
Revelation 19:3
Amen. Boy do I feel that.
This “hallelujah” is for all whose theology is outpacing their doxology. For everyone who lived righteously and didn’t receive their reward in life but were rather hated and jeered and despised, this hallelujah belongs to you.
It’s for all the smoldering wicks and bruised reeds. The ones Paul Simon called “the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.” It’s for the publican at the door of the temple who can’t possibly know he’s been justified until the book comes out.
For every parent who trained up their children in the way they should go but whose child departed from it anyway, this is your hallelujah.
For the followers of Christ who were promised they could “reign in this life” but were crushed by it instead, you get this hallelujah too.
Those who prayed and believed for healing in this life but you still had to carry it like a thorn in your side anyway, your hallelujah is coming.
For every survivor of rape and physical and sexual abuse who was told to keep quiet about it ‘for the good of the church,’ or, worse, not believed, this hallelujah belongs to you.
To the saintly ones who’ve been silenced, canceled, vilified, and shown the door by the mob, here’s your hallelujah.
When you opted rather to bless than retaliate, God sees you and invites you to own this hallelujah. All who were crushed by oppression but held to Jesus anyway can take your place in the choir. To the one who seemed to have the devil on your back all the way to heaven, this hallelujah’s especially for you.
Spoiler alert for those still not sure about how it ends:
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
Revelation 21:4,5
The page is turning; we’re getting closer to the end of the book. 2023 fidgets around the corner. For those who have made Jesus their Life in spite of every human reason not to, perhaps this is this year we finally get our hallelujah.
Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.
I’ll close out with the video to Laura Story’s song I referenced earlier. Hallelujah is not found in the lyrics, but it expresses a hallelujah heart better than anything I could say.
So for now I’ll be waiting to sing that Most Holy Hallelujah with you in that off-in-the-distance-yet-to-be Day when all the dots finally connect and all those unanswered prayers make perfect sense,
Pasture
Laura Story, BlessingsThe post finally, a hallelujah appeared first on Call Me Pasturescott.
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.
Luke 1:41
This verse gets me. An unborn child leaping with the news of Jesus. Dancing before his Messiah! And there was cause to dance. The King of kings entered the world in real time.
A millennium earlier King David stripped down to his pajamas and danced before the Ark and here John does the same thing in his birthday suit. Another dance would prove his undoing, yes, but let’s be real. When just a baby, long before that wretched affair with dancing Salome, John cut a rug for Jesus in his mama’s womb.
The reactions of the people of the first Christmas varied then as they do today. John is but one example.
Joseph feared.
Mary wondered.
Elizabeth blessed.
The innkeeper dismissed.
The city slept.
Anna waited.
Simeon prophesied.
Shepherds worshipped.
Herod raged.
John danced.Recently I was struck by a re-reading of the Christmas story about a choir of angels suddenly erupting in song over the fields of Palestine. What grabbed my attention was the nature and ministry of angels. They never act contrary to the will of God, but always in concert with the Almighty.
They were singing. They were celebrating. They were excited. It occurred to me that the angels were exhibiting on earth the same atmosphere present in heaven. I believe it’s safe to say God was deep in his cups of joy over the whole affair.
We should, first, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breath and depth and richness.
— Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
When Jesus told of a single sinner being converted he said the reaction in heaven was a party. Here’s how our Savior phrased it: “I am saying to you, joy arises in the presence of the angels of God” (Wuest). Did you catch that? Read it again. “In the presence of the angels of God.” Jesus paints a vivid picture of the Father’s joy.
John Piper said, “It is good to have a happy King.” The leaders of today are anything but happy. They are conflicted, narcissistic, frightened, aloof, dishonest, boorish. But the God of the universe is a happy King. His cup runneth over with joy!
That same joy touched John. The very moment the tiny prophet-in-utero was made aware of the Messiah being inches away, heaven’s ecstasy crashed into his amniotic sac. He was struck as if by a bolt of lightning and jumped for joy. Such was the force of celebration that his own mother felt its aftershock.
“Christians ought to be celebrating constantly. We are to be preoccupied with parties, banquets, feasts, and merriment. We are to give ourselves over to veritable orgies of joy because we’ve been liberated from the fear of life and the fear of death. We are to attract people to the church quite literally by the fun there is in being a Christian.”
—Robert Hotchkins, theologian, University of Chicago
In the earliest part of the 20th century, a guest speaker was invited to address the graduates of a college in Massachusetts. Before the ceremony, the speaker, Henry van Dyke, spent some time celebrating God’s joy in creating the Berkshire mountains. He was inspired to jot down some lyrics to which perfectly fit with Beethoven’s famous tune, “Ode to Joy.”
I find the third verse most appropriate this morning:
Thou art giving and forgiving,
Ever blessing, ever blest,
Wellspring of the joy of living,
Ocean depth of happy rest!
Thou our Father, Christ our Brother,
All who live in love are Thine;
Teach us how to love each other,
Lift us to the joy divine.
This Christmas weekend, I just wanted to remind you that our Father is a Giver of Joy because he is full of joy. As you gather with family and friends, may you offer up laughter and share the happiness of heaven. And, by all means, if so disposed, dance for joy in your pajamas.
Selah, beloved, and the merriest of Christmases!
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The death of a beloved is an amputation.
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
There’s a 10-foot tall Christmas tree in Tustin, California for families who grieve the loss of their children to addiction. It’s put there yearly by Solace of Hope, a family support group for grieving parents. The tree is filled with ornaments and photos of the many lives lost far too soon to the damnable plague of opioids.
Alan Berkowitz and his wife Kathy lost their 26-year old son to heroin six years ago.
The toughest part for my wife and me is Christmas morning. Now it’s just the two of us. We get up and have coffee. And, well, it’s kind of hollow.”
Sandy and I share that isolating grief with the Berkowitz’s. Our Graham also became an ‘ornament on a tree’ nine Christmases ago at twenty-four. He had just completed a few months in rehab and we were happily working on getting him a flight home from Minnesota. On December 16th, word reached us he would not be coming home.
Our Christmases can still feel hollow for us too. More’s the pity because Sandy loves Christmas like no other day of the year. She can decorate to beat the band and transform any house or apartment into a glowing hearthfire of peace on earth. Fittingly, she’s a Christmas Day baby, but each year her birthday is eclipsed by a lingering shadow of grief.
I was streaming the first episode of a murder mystery which was mostly meh until the chief detective said something I immediately put in my notes app. Offering comfort to the victim’s teenage daughter he said,
“grief is love with no place to go.”For parents like us who have lost a child at Christmas, we totally get that.
While many associate Christmas with “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,” (even better in Linus voice) others are further down in the Luke narrative. There’s the headline we all know and love, but then there’s the fine print:
And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (AND A SWORD WILL PIERCE THROUGH YOUR OWN SOUL ALSO), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.
Luke 2:34-35 (emphasis mine)
Way to bury the lede, Luke!
Years ago many older hymns were passed down through oral/auditory tradition. The First Noel is one of them, which is why The Cornish Songbook (1929), printed the first stanza as:
O well, O well, the Angels did say
To shepherds there in the fields did lay;
Late in the night a-folding their sheep,
A winter’s night, both cold and bleak.
O well, O well, O well, O well,
Born is the King of Israel.
The season of noël is, for some, a painful ordeal. From the Latin ‘natale,’ meaning “birth,” Noël feels like anything but.For a myriad of reasons, not only loss, it instills dread and invites depression. Scrooge’s dark night of the soul resonates more deeply than his Christmas morning grace awakening in some.
His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom
—Aragorn, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien
Sandy and I fight the good fight yearly to not get cheated out of Christmas. She still decorates and I still play the music. She wraps gifts in upscale department store fashion and I don’t. We make sure to see the lights, watch White Christmas, and sit graveside with our boy on Christmas Eve.
The two of us have found our safest place to be is with each other. We don’t do big family gatherings on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We prefer our holidays quieter. It’s worked for us nine straight years and we don’t plan to change.
If the manger means anything, it means the Savior swaddles our sorrows. Slowly, over channels of time, the comforted begin to realize their bandwidth for moving through the hard days has increased. The sword pierces a little less. You can surprise yourself by having the wherewithal to do stuff again.
Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, our Wisdom from heaven, has gifted us with a deeper Noël. Even in the midst of our bleak midwinter, and as a hurting world moans in unrequited protest, our grief becomes love that suddenly finds a place to go.
Joyeux Noël, beloved.
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Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
1 Corinthians 3:16
Christmas is nearly upon us. We can be certain we will be treated to all forms of ‘baby Jesus in a stable’ scenes and meditations (mine included). While a barn may have housed the babe of Bethlehem, it will not do to accommodate a reigning King.
That’s you and me, friend. We are God’s house. For better or for worse, Jesus makes his abode in us.
The cave or lean-to in which Jesus was born gives a certain charm to the incarnation narrative but is quickly discarded for a house when the Magi show up.
Here’s a question: does our life say ‘barn’ or ‘temple’? Maybe we think we’ve got a dream house going on when really we’re just unstable structures built on sand.
Early on the tabernacle of God was a mobile tent. It sufficed for a time, but it really bothered David.“Here I am inside a cathedral, while God is out there in a cardboard box!” he groused. David intended to do something about it, but God gently withstood him. We know the reason why, of course, but I think that story reveals something about how we approach life.
Put simply, we aren’t meant for this world. We are called to something more permanent, ever more glorious. Like David, we should be bothered. There should be in us a “holy restlessness” until God gets all that he rightly owns. Us. His temples.
In one gospel story, Peter and his boys had just watched a rich young ruler foolishly walk away from Christ, unwilling to liquidate his assets for the kingdom. What just happened, they wondered.
The disciples couldn’t believe what they were hearing, but Jesus kept on: “You can’t imagine how difficult. I’d say it’s easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for the rich to get into God’s kingdom.”
That set the disciples back on their heels. “Then who has any chance at all?” they asked.Mark 10:24-26, The Message
The disciples were dumbstruck. They’d been brainwashed to believe since birth that the rich and powerful were fast-tracked into God’s kingdom. Jesus upended that heresy by exposing the hypocrisy of the religious elite. That those (air-quote) other guys (end air-quote) wouldn’t gain entry they understood.
But this guy wasn’t a hypocrite. He wasn’t combative. He was sincere, respectful, even desperate. I mean, he actually ran up to Jesus and fell to his knees! If that’s not an altar call I don’t know what is.
Only he went away lost, owned by his wealth. Eugene Peterson helpfully writes, “His possessions were his millstone strangling the very life from his soul – that is why Jesus touched on the topic of what he owned. ‘It’s killing you man, it’s owning you!’”
The young aristocrat preferred his bigger barn portfolio to the Savior of the world.
Characteristically, Peter just had to inject himself into the uncomfortable silence.
See, we have left everything and followed you.
Mark 10:28, ESV
Except…
…much of what Peter and the others thought to be important was not really so, and that what they thought to be of no importance was often of great significance before God.”
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p. 121
If you’re out here just doing stuff to get reimbursed, rewarded, or recognized — even in the name of Jesus — forget it. That stuff’s just gonna get burned up.
Praise God, we know how the disciples’ story ends. Their faith in — and obedience to — Christ made their lives a fit habitation for King Jesus. They certainly did their share of slumming from time to time, but in the end they were temples.
One day we shall thank God we built with enduring material. It is so easy to let up here and there and work in a little wood or stubble, but blessed is the man (and woman) who will not substitute even the good for the best.
—Vance Havner
Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale scholar and historian of religion, observed:
Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?
—Quoted from The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard, p. 12
Setting aside the meta narrative of human history for a second, let’s address it on a more cellular level:
how much of ‘Jesus’ will be left in us when the fire purges from us everything that is not him?That’s really the question. Are our respective ‘inns’ so crowded all we can offer Jesus is a mucked-out stable? Is he worthy of more?
As I’m writing this, I’m listening to the pounding of hammers on the other side of the house. For the past 251 days (yes I’m counting!) we’ve been temporarily lodging in a converted garage without a single window. All that pounding and sawing and drilling is sweet music to our ears; it means we will be moving into a spacious suite of rooms with plenty of windows through which the Florida sun can shine all the live long day!
You might say our living situation is a metaphor. I don’t want my life to be a garage without windows. I want to be a wide-open, well-lit, fully-accessible house for my Jesus.
Selah, beloved. Until next time.
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If you’re at all familiar with the sitcom Friends, you know Chandler. The likable character, played by Matthew Perry, captured fans’ hearts through his youthful innocence and memorable lines. But his celebrity cost him dearly. Opioids and alcohol have very nearly done him in. In the opening lines of his memoir he writes, “I should be dead.”
The price tag on his trying to get sober has topped $9 million. Tragically, he has yet to find salvation in either drugs or their prevention.
In his recently-released memoir, 53-year old Perry confides to the reader:
That beatific moment is something I still seek. . . . I want that connection to something bigger than me because I’m convinced it’s the only thing that will truly save my life. I don’t want to die. I’m scared to die.
Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir
The “big terrible thing” in Matthew Perry‘s life might be substance abuse, but his heart-twisting confession reveals an even more terrible thing. How awful it must be to be so close to the door of salvation and not be able to find the door knob.Not Chandler Bing, I thought. God, send a gospel preacher to him! Who has his ear? Who could tell him about the healing love of Jesus? But then: maybe he has heard it and didn’t choose Door Jesus. If so, well that’s a whole other “big terrible thing.”
What is needed here is a Christmas miracle.
The Christmas story is set against the background of night. Joseph was visited by an angel in the night. The shepherds watched their flocks by night. Mary and Joseph welcomed their little bundle into the world in the middle of the night.
But, suddenly, like the opening verses of our Bibles, there was light. And it was good.
Recently, I discovered that the tiny book of Haggai casts some of that light. Looking at it in a certain way, one might catch a glint of Christmas cheer.
Let’s take a look.
Haggai preached three short sermons to the people of God over three months, but he was given yet a fourth — really a sermonette — for a single individual. At the beginning of what is now our traditional Christmas week, Haggai gave Zerubbabel a gift-wrapped message from heaven.
I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms. I am about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations…On that day, declares the LORD of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel my servant, the son of Shealtiel, declares the LORD, and make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, declares the LORD of hosts.
Haggai 2:21-23
“Your ministry isn’t finished quite yet, Haggai. I have one more sermon for you to preach. It’s a sermon for a specific person. Go to him and let him hear the gospel of grace.”
That guy’s name is Zerubbabel, meaning “birthed in Babylon.”
What a beautiful story of grace. Like Zerubbabel, we each come into the world, citizens of ‘Babylon,’ steeped in sin. God’s mercy finds us there and gives us a new story, a new identity, a new home.
God called a man, whose name means “festival,” to go and cheer up a man who’s wearing all the weight of Babylon on his soul.
In this Christmas season, is the Lord perhaps sending you to someone who needs some good news? Could you possibly be their own personal angel at Christmas?
Sandy and I have a friend on social media. I’ll call her Cindy. Cindy has been our prayer warrior for years. Recently she entered a contest online hoping to win an expensive winter sweater. Turns out, she won the sweater. She shared the good news with us immediately.
I’ll be honest the last week or so have really been difficult! I can feel the black cloud of deep, dark depression settling in like it does every year at the holidays!! I’ve been praying & pleading that this year it not happen! That this year the holidays would be different! I’m trying so hard to be joyful & happy!! To believe they will be different!! To not let the depression settle in again! This win really helped!! I wanted that sweater so badly!! I hope that doesn’t sound crazy! It was like a hug from Jesus! Telling me it’s going to be alright!!
I shot off a message to her right away:
This doesn’t sound the least bit crazy! Anything that comes into your life that we can turn into praise to our Father is a gift from heaven. You know that “every good and perfect gift is from above, from the Father of lights” — even sweaters! This beautiful sweater delights your heavenly Father even more than it brings happiness to you. The Father knows how much you needed this win! He is for you, he is for you, he is FOR you!
Someone you might know is secretly afraid of dying. The stink of Babylon is on them and they need to hear it’s not their destiny. He or she needs to hear that God wants to shake their world in a good way.In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Matthew Perry self-diagnosed his soul’s great wound:
I have a never-ending need for attention, but it’s never the right kind of attention. It didn’t work. It didn’t fix that hole in me…
Do you have an incurable wound on your soul? Do you know someone who thinks — or you think — they are beyond salvation?
If Christmas tells us anything, it says GOD IS LOVE. He’s in a festive spirit and is eager to give you himself. People may fail you but he’s a true “Friend.” If you’re crying while everyone else is caroling, the Savior is sitting in that corner with you and whispering,
I’ve chosen you. You are a jeweled ring on my finger. I’ll never pawn you or throw you away. You are mine. Just watch and see what I’ll do. It’ll be epic.
Selah, beloved of God. I hope this has been a welcome message to you in this season of Advent. If I can pray for you, don’t hesitate to email me.
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If you googled Charles Templeton you would read about a gentleman who traveled with Billy Graham in his early years of ministry. People called them the ‘Gold Dust Twins,’ a term meaning they were inseparable and untiring in the work of evangelism. While the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1946 dubbed Templeton among the
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I was reading an ‘anti-abortion’ scripture passage, when the Holy Spirit jostled my heart. A sudden parting of a curtain allowed me a peek inside a gospel mystery. In a quick instant my spiritual astigmatism vanished and I understood why God won’t march with the pro-abortion crowd. Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,the
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In Eugene Peterson’s classic, A Long Obedience In The Same Direction, he writes of a time when he needed to sharpen the blade on his lawnmower. He got the biggest wrench he could find and worked on that nut but it wouldn’t loosen. Then he got a long length of pipe to add leverage to
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I want to open with a story, but it’s not mine to tell. It is an intensely personal story for Sandy and I needed to ask her permission before sharing it. She felt it was right and agreed. I’m grateful she did. One word from your lips will be sweeter to us and more full
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Y’all remember when “sloppy wet kiss” was sung in churches a good many years ago? Thank the kind Lord for Crowder’s good save with “unforeseen kiss.” It’s way more proper for the Sunday morning crowd. In the opening act of Ephesians, Paul starts off with a love sonnet from heaven. It’s like a kiss we
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Do you seek great things for yourself?Seek them not.Jeremiah 45:5 Jeremiah’s sidekick, Baruch, is plotting his next move. He’s stood faithfully beside Judah’s wildly unsuccessful prophet, but now he’s tiring of unpopular ministry. Compounding his misery, he’s got a brother playing for the other side, faring well among the ruling class. That brother, also a
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Is anyone among you suffering? Is anyone cheerful? Is anyone among you sick? James 4 Hey James, how about, Is anyone just plain sick and tired? Have any of you felt like it doesn’t matter, you don’t matter, nobody cares, so what’s the point? Have you ever thought about walking away because your faith journey
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I come to worship you, Lord. I desperately need it, but I’m having a hard time getting my head in a right place. “Nothing in my hands I bring”? Hardly. I come with wounds and weariness. There are stains on my soul. Battle stains. ‘I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for
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My apologies for the recent post, “A Little Wine For Your Troubles” re-publishing three or four times. Turns out it was a software (faulty plug-in) issue. I pray the issue is fixed. Anarghya Kumari at Bluehost.com (my webhost) was very capable in assisting in the issue. Unfortunately, several of you commented on the subsequent re-postings
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Today I’m braving a huge ask of the Father.
letitwine.com I find myself emboldened to do it based on a morning reading from one of the ancient prophets. No doubt we’re all familiar with the famous verse where the Father invites Jeremiah to,
Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.
Jeremiah 33:3, ESV
As happens so many times (for you too, I’d wager), I had just unrolled on the Lord a heavy burden before turning to the Word. In short order I sensed the Spirit opening to me the Father’s heart in the very place I was reading.
Here I found my Ebenezer.*
The Lord challenged Jeremiah to do something bold, mind-stretching, and unthinkable. He invited the prophet to ‘accost’ him with a demand (that’s the Hebrew sense of the word); to open his mouth and throw up on the Almighty all that was in his heart.
Don’t hold back, my son, he commanded. So I’m not.
If you set the passage in its context you’ll find this is part of an ongoing dialogue between Potentate and prophet. In verse one we see the call for holy boldness is embedded in the “second” of three separate promises made to Jeremiah.
The first promise comes in the previous chapter:
Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “I am the Lord, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?…”
Jeremiah 32:26-27, NIV
I’m not going to tell you what I’m asking of the Father but I can tell you the huge favor I’m regurgitating on him is not for me but for another. This person needs a miracle and they needed it yesterday.
Courtesy, iStock images “Is anything too hard for Me?” The answer, we already know in our hearts, is no. Nothing is outside or beyond him. When life gives you lemons, God makes us a pitcher of lemonade. Or wine, as the next promise elucidates.
The second promise is sweet to the palate. God tells Jeremiah to “call out,” unload upon, barrage the Almighty with his request.
You mean it, Lord? Jeremiah must have wondered.
“I most definitely do…and what’s more, when you do it, I’ll take you down to My wine cellar and produce the finest vintage* you can imagine!”*
We have the promise that (whatever we ask) the Father won’t ridicule us or tell us we’re stupid. He’s never in a “condescending” mood toward his trusting children. Ask, he tells us. Go ahead, he proffers. I dare you. I want you to “blow up my feed.”
What a picture. We share with him an agony of soul and he responds by placing a glass of his choicest wine in our hands. What does it mean? It means we have royal access to his vault and whatever burdens we bring are met with heavenly vintage.
Wine is often code for “joy” in the scriptures. Rest assured, beloved, your Father trades in joy and he means to get you in the same mood and mindset he’s in.
I said there are three promises given Jeremiah (and by extension, US too, as each can be borne up by scripture) in this running dialogue. The third promise reads this way:
…keep watching! I will restore this city and heal the wounds of My people. I will lavish them with peace and stability.
Jeremiah 33:6, Voice
Restore.
Heal.
Lavish.
Jeremiah was weeping for the City. He longed to see the wicked removed and the holy shine come back. He was sick of the lies and deception from the most powerful voices and wanted them muted. He yearned to see all wrongs righted and a Righteous Day return.
God said, Keep your eyes on the City. It’s still MY City. You’ll be tempted to lose hope but I have plans for My City. Keep watching. You’ll see it in due time if you don’t lose faith. Today I am arming myself with this trio of promises and storming the throne room. I’m asking God to uphold the cause of a wounded soul and restoring to them all the years the locusts have ravaged. I have something very specific in mind. And bold. I believe it’s a righteous ask. Amen.
And, as Paul counseled Timothy, I invite you to drink some wine for what’s ailing you. Perhaps leave a “pray with me” or a “pray for me” (nothing more need be shared) in the comments?
In any case, I pray for him to restore, heal, and lavish Himself for you in your great hour of need.
Selah, beloved.
*Ebenezer means ‘Stone of help’
“hidden” is synonymous with ‘inaccessible’ but the Hebrew adds the wonderful nuance of ‘vintage’ (as in grapes)
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I am struck by this sledgehammer of words that careened off the page in the direction of my heart: “The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.”—Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, 135 Thank you, Father; I rather needed that. So much
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Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:15-5:4
Fellow pilgrim, follower of Christ, brother and sister in the faith, we are not built for this world. We are made for the next.
Paul invites us to GROAN over our situation. He puts us in a chapel with a soft organ playing “Abide With Me” and “I Come To The Garden Alone” in the background.
Candles flicker in the stifling air.
Grim-faced pallbearers line the front pew and fellow mourners flank us on every side.
He sets us in front of an open casket; we look inside and see…ourselves.
This life has taken its toll on us and we see the effect of it in our corpses. We mourn. Lament. Groan.
Reality hits us:
We are not made for this world.
C.S. Lewis wrote in ‘Mere Christianity’,
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
Paul tells us the most natural thing for us to do is GROAN.
We’re not alone, either. Romans informs us even creation feels deep pangs of anxiety and later in the same chapter, that the Holy Spirit himself groans wordless prayers in his intercessions for us.
“Jesus knows all about our struggles,
He will guide till the day is done,
There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,
No not one; no not one”
It might surprise us to turn around inside that funeral chapel and see who the mourners are. Trees and mountains, seas and forests, flowers and soil, stars and planets. Each weeping alongside the broken-hearted saints who long for release from the pain of this earth.
Nightbirde A young 30-something singer/songwriter known to her fans as “Nightbirde” experienced career-ending cancer in her lungs, spine, and liver. The pain of her battle with cancer is found in these words she penned last March, nearly a year ago:
“After the doctor told me I was dying, and after the man I married said he didn’t love me anymore, I chased a miracle in California and sixteen weeks later, I got it. The cancer was gone. But when my brain caught up with it all, something broke. I later found out that all the tragedy at once had caused a physical head trauma, and my brain was sending false signals of excruciating pain and panic.
I spent three months propped against the wall. On nights that I could not sleep, I laid in the tub like an insect, staring at my reflection in the shower knob. I vomited until I was hollow. I rolled up under my robe on the tile. The bathroom floor became my place to hide, where I could scream and be ugly; where I could sob and spit and eventually doze off, happy to be asleep, even with my head on the toilet.”
Then she courageously added,
“Call me cursed, call me lost, call me scorned. But that’s not all. Call me chosen, blessed, sought-after. Call me the one who God whispers his secrets to. I am the one whose belly is filled with loaves of mercy that were hidden for me. Even on days when I’m not so sick, sometimes I go lay on the mat in the afternoon light to listen for Him. I know it sounds crazy, and I can’t really explain it, but God is in there—even now. I have heard it said that some people can’t see God because they won’t look low enough, and it’s true. If you can’t see him, look lower. God is on the bathroom floor.”
Nightbirde | Facebook | Fair Use Nightbirde died last month.
Did you hear her groaning? This precious girl, blessed with singing talent and promised a future? Her candle snuffed out. Her song tragically morphed into her obituary.
Nightbirde groaned, but found in her groaning on the bathroom floor that God was there.
God groans when we hurt Nightbirde included this paragraph in her brief ‘memoir’:**
Call me bitter if you want to—that’s fair. Count me among the angry, the cynical, the offended, the hardened. But count me also among the friends of God. For I have seen Him in rare form. I have felt His exhale, laid in His shadow, squinted to read the message He wrote for me in the grout: “I’m sad too.”
—Nightbirde, ‘God is on the Bathroom Floor, March 9, 2021
Our Lord promised us in Isaiah 63:9 “when we suffer, He suffers.”
Mary and Martha groaned because their brother was gone. Jesus visited them in their sorrow… and what did he do?
He GROANED.
Before “Jesus wept,” he groaned. “He was deeply moved” (ESV) is, quite literally, “He was angered in spirit and troubled himself.” The word describes a warhorse snorting and stomping its hoof, itching to charge into the fray and face the enemy.
Sometimes our suffering, or seeing another suffer, makes us just plain mad.
Jesus knew that anger.
Our Savior doesn’t just “feel your pain.” He also hates it. He hates what it does to you. Yes he knows the long game, that every eye will be dried one day and there will be no more pain, but he also meets us in our moment with mercy and justice on the bathroom floor.
God is on your side in the groaning The Lord is with you when your spouse leaves you for another; he’s with you in the doctor’s office when she tells you the bad news, the worst news. The Father’s with you at the bottom of a cliff. He’s with you when you’ve cried yourself to sleep over your prodigal child; and he is with you when your bleeding heart is inside a casket as it’s being lowered into the ground.
I’m spending my mornings reading from the book of Jeremiah.
Just this week I was reading where he felt “deceived” by God. He had just preached a sermon that got him slapped and put in chains and in a very raw and earnest moment he accused God of “deceiving him.”
This word is used throughout the prophecies of Jeremiah. The major “flaw in the system” in Judah was deception and lies and Jeremiah calls it out again and again.
Now, however, he applies it to God.
How could you, God?
Why?
This is unbecoming of you! How dare you! I am your prophet and you are treating me this way?
He threatens to retire. To quit. To just walk away.
But four verses later, he has a change of heart. God meets him in his anguish and gives him a vision. Jeremiah saw in the Spirit that God was with him…and not just as a friend!
Jeremiah saw God as a WARRIOR standing over him, protecting him, shielding him.
A eulogy of no regrets Paul, the officiant, delivers a pitch-perfect eulogy. In our fog of beleaguered sorrow, he waxes pastoral as he answers each of our complaints with gospel hope.
- “Yes, you’re wasting away…but that’s just your ‘tent’; the real you is glorious!”
- “I know these troubles are all you can see; to you they seem impenetrably mountainous. I assure you, God’s love for you is an eternal mountain range and these trials are but dust in the wind.”
- “Beloved child, you can see no end to your groaning, but your Father is wise, loving, and good; BUT YOUR FATHER SEES…AND HE KNOWS; he keeps his eye on the clock and his hand on the thermostat.”
We groan, but don’t give up.
Why?
Because we know a secret.
Paul stacks hyperboles, showing how small our worst trials and troubles are here on earth (as well as our happiest moments) compared to what is being prepared for us in glory.
The day after tomorrow Sandy and I will be venturing out west with friends to see the Grand Canyon. I’ve never seen it. I cannot tell you how excited I am.
Even so,
Pastor Paul tells me I can put that glorious event on one scale — standing on the precipice of the Grand Canyon — then pile on the other side of the scale, higher than the heavens, the Day of my uncovering as I stand in the presence of Jesus.
Now, that’s something for which I really, really, really can’t wait.
I only have one message. I’ve shared it forty years in life, word — and groaning — all across the country. It’s my soulsong, my life verse, my core theology, and my eulogy:
God is God,
God is good,
God is good at being God.
And (don’t forget this),
God is good at being God in all our groaning.
Selah, beloved.
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Today I’m 48 years old.
In the Lord.
It all started on a Sunday in our family room, kneeling in front of the couch. Dad was on his knees beside me. A half-eaten Sunday dinner was cooling on the dining room table…
january 20, 1974 The family, just home from morning worship, was sitting down for a meal of roast and potatoes, and I was all tied up in knots.
About an hour and a half earlier I had a kung fu grip on the back of the pew in front of me and my knuckles were stretched white. I was sitting with my mother a third of the way back on the outside left, facing the platform. Forrest Hills Baptist Church was more packed than normal.
We had a guest speaker that morning, Monroe Parker. I don’t remember too much about the sermon, only that he used scary illustrations about people who died without Jesus. On hospital beds, in car wrecks, every sort of life-shortened tragedy.
It was revival week with the evangelist, so the altar was mostly filled with weepy folk. As the choir started through another verse of Softly and Tenderly, I leaned out into the aisle, still gripping the pew. I chanced a quick look at my mom, who nodded and smiled knowingly, and that was all the motivation I needed to join a trickle of souls to the front.
Ann Plant was an altar worker known well by our family. She met me, saw how miserable I was, and hastily led me to an open spot on the platform steps.
It was already assumed I was saved (I was a really good kid) so she led me in a “rededication of life” prayer. She smiled and hugged me and I went back to my row where mom waited. I forced a smile because I still felt heavy inside. Where was that lightness of step and brightness of spirit I expected?
On the drive home from church, I remember sitting in the backseat between my two sisters. I was very quiet. Positioned with my feet on the hump, I leaned forward and stole glances of my sad self in the rearview mirror. I could see dad‘s eyes occasionally sliding over to meet mine.
Finally, he furrowed his brow and asked if I was okay. I didn’t look okay. It was all so very discomfiting.
For a thirteen year old kid, a trip to a church altar and a vulnerable prayer with an adult should at least earn you some level of peace. Not me. I didn’t feel fixed.
praying with dad Sunday dinner was not in the least bit enjoyable for a boy who liked to eat. I pushed vegetables around the plate with my fork, worrying over stuff like being killed in a car wreck and lost for eternity. Pretty out-there stuff for a thirteen year old.
Midway through the meal dad and I exchanged looks. He saw the misery on my face. I felt lost and told him so. He looked at mom and she said lunch could wait. Rising from his place at the head of the table, dad set down his napkin and pushed away.
“Let’s go into the family room, buddy” he said kindly. “I think I know what you need.”
I followed dad to our sofa and took my place beside him on my knees. There, father and son side by side, settled the matter of my soul once and for all. I started to cry. It felt for all the weight of the world that what we were doing was right. I exhaled all my pent-up breath and answered my dad, phrase by phrase, in the sinner’s prayer.
Two minutes later, we were done. Dad hugged me and told me I was saved and that I shouldn’t doubt it ever again. And honestly, by the good grace of God, I never have.
There’ve been some touch-and-go moments in my life, but, forty-eight years later (and counting!), the testimony holds because Jesus holds me.
This is my story, and this is my song:
a salvation hymn
I love GOD because he listened to me,
listened as I begged for mercy.
He listened so intently
as I laid out my case before him. Death stared me in the face,
hell was hard on my heels.
Up against it, I didn’t know which way to turn;
then I called out to GOD for help:
“Please, GOD!” I cried out.
“Save my life!”
GOD is gracious—it is he who makes things right,
our most compassionate God.
GOD takes the side of the helpless;
when I was at the end of my rope, he saved me.
Psalm 116:1-6, The Message
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©️ Pasturescott “X-mas” was close to a cuss word in the church circles in which I grew up. Borderline sacrilege. People who wished you a “Merry Xmas” weren’t truly Christian; that’s just the way it was.
We saw the ‘X’ as a scheme to rid Christ from the very holiday that celebrated His birth! While there’s still a part of me that thinks it’s true for some, I have recently come to an understanding that there’s something more honorable in play.
The early Church loved the ‘X’ (chi) in ιχθυς (ichthus) or Christ (Χριστός) as it was their shorthand for the Savior.
What in the world is ‘ichthus’?
You’re not going to find it in your Greek New Testament. Ichthus was a ‘code’ word invented by the first-century church to silently confess who they were to one another – at the risk of their lives.
The Greek letters in ichthus make an acrostic:
I (Iesous)
Chi, or X (Christos)
Theta (Theou)
Upsilon (Uios)
Sigma (Sotor)
The letters together spell ‘ichthus’ (ιχθύς) and the five Greek words they represent make this striking declaration:
“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”
Sometimes, when the situation demanded, they shortened it with an ‘X’ or a two-stroke fish outline.
I’m not a ‘fish symbol on the car’ kind of guy but I can certainly truck with the idea behind them. Those emblems, whether on a business sign or the bumper of an automobile, are designed to tell passersby We worship Jesus Christ, (who is) the Son of God, (our) Savior.
So what about the ‘X’? The chi (or ‘X’) is just what you might expect. It has connotations of the cross and was surreptitiously drawn as a sign passed between believers.
Back in those days Christianity was seen as a rogue religion, outlawed by the Roman imperial government. If you were a follower of Christ, there was always the danger of being outed, so Christians (Xians), people of ιχθυς, would use a quick sign (a two-stroke outline of a fish or an ‘X’) to assure another they were safe in their company.
Embrace the ‘Χ’ this Xmas. You can be assured you’re tracing a long history of committed, devoted worshippers of the Christ!
Still uncomfortable? I understand. I still wince a little when I see it spelled that way. Think of it in another way:
- X marks a treasure, and Jesus is certainly the inexhaustible supply of God, our Portion and Prize for eternity
- X marks where you are on a map – that’s what Emmanuel is all about. Imagine yourself ‘here’ and then place an ‘X’ over that spot. He is with you!
Hopefully this Christmas post helps you see what the enemy wants to scandalize, God sanctifies. When I see ‘Xmas’ from here on, I’ll breathe a little easier knowing it really is about Christ…whether the world knows it or not.
Merry Xmas, beloved!
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“How will this be, since I am a virgin?” — Mary, Luke 1:34 FreeBibleImages.com If you know me at all, you know how much I love the writings of the late Eugene Peterson. The man has pastored my soul for decades. In one of his perhaps lesser known works, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, he reminds us the birth of Messiah wasn’t the only miraculous birth in scripture, but it was the only one of its kind.
The eminent pastor turns our attention to pre-Advent scripture to briefly recount five miraculous births God was “critically and intimately involved in…”:
- Abraham and Sarah (Isaac)
- Manoah and unnamed wife (Samson)
- Boaz and Ruth (Obed)
- Elkanah and Hannah (Samuel)
- Zechariah and Elizabeth (John)
And here is how he worshipfully distinguishes the heart-staggering birth of King Jesus from those earlier birth events:
The work of God in the conception and birth of Jesus through Mary is continuous with these five previous “impossible” births, but it is also different…
How so? we wonder.
In the mothers ranging from Sarah to Elizabeth, a barren womb was the impossible condition to overcome; these women very much wanted a child. But in Mary the “impossible” condition is virginity: here there is no yearning for or expectation of a child.
Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, 55-6
Peterson quotes Raymond Brown (The Birth of the Messiah, p314), who opens to us the compelling thought of this being the first and only birth through agency of a human womb in which God took the initiative.
It was all God’s idea!
In Mary’s case, she was a virgin who had no thought of bearing a child at that time. It was unthinkable to her. Maybe someday but not at this stage of her life, and certainly not as an unmarried woman!
Her pregnancy was ALL God’s idea! He wasn’t answering the cry of a barren couple, he was answering
Himself,
His own heart,
His own yearning.
This is the heart of Advent. This is the miracle and mystery of Christmas hope. Here is the gospel: God from the start has sought you, not the other way around. You weren’t even aware of your longing but that God was already at work filling your womb, your inner cry, with his life.
When Mary visited her cousin to tell her the news of her divine pregnancy, Elizabeth called her “Blessed!”
Allow me to put an on this post by pulling from another author I greatly admire. Picking up on Elizabeth’s same exuberant emotion, Brennan Manning applies it to all of us who are caught in the thrall of Christmas grace:
You are blessed! God’s desire is for you. And Jesus is the incarnation of God’s furious longing. He is your supreme Lover. It’s true. You are blessed. Your soul’s winter is over. The snows are over and gone. Flowers are blooming inside of you. The season of joyful songs has come. To you. You are blessed! The love of God is folly. No one is excluded. All (really!) are called to the banquet table. Come, and be filled. You are blessed! You can pray like a child, and enjoy God. You are blessed! Heal, and be healed…Amen. Amen. Amen.
Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God
Selah, blessed and beloved!
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©️ Pasturescott Looking back on this blog, I can spot times where I’ve written angsty at the church or when I’ve made the gospel seem as though it was only for the elite. I’ve written from places of hurt and sadness. There are some lighthearted posts here and there and a whole lot of essays of encouragement. On balance, I’d much rather write about a gospel that is true and gracious. And accessible.
If you drew a line from previous posts that sounded more preachy to where I’ve been ruminating in recent years you’d discover that line marks precisely when Graham passed too soon from this world. He’s my reason for this “new season” of softening.
His story has taken the edge off. How God handled Graham has taught my fingers to dance across the keyboard. I’m not spending as much time these days wringing my hands over the condition of the church, and overly obsessed with matters of who’s in who’s out. I’m still savoring the awe that my boy is with Jesus…and waking up to a gospel of attraction rather than subtraction.
As Christmas approaches I find myself thinking about the key players in the nativity story once again. I suppose it’s because our son was taken eight Decembers ago I’ve been more drawn to the people who shouldn’t be in the cast of Advent but are. People like those shepherds abiding. Imagine these guys making up the first worship team! These were not a romanticized version of herdsman but a rough-and-tumble group of guys. Today, they would be more suited for a biker’s bar than a synagogue. Gamey and course, their arms would sport a collision of tattoos and hard lines from hard lives would crease their faces.
And yet, and yet.
Heaven sang like a choir to this audience of irregulars. Religious folk labeled them unclean. They were unwelcome in their churches because their line of work with sacrificial lambs connected them to manure and flies and death. They had one job: tend the temple sheep until they were needed to spill blood for the people’s sin. This bunch were tough.
And yet…the Light of Christmas Glory built a tabernacle around them.
©️ Pasturescott A friend and I shared breakfast last week and conversation turned to, as it always does, the gospel. I mentioned I was in Isaiah in my daily reading and referenced the prophet’s hard words about an ancient people, the Moabites. But then I discovered something.
A very cool gospel something.
Virtually nowhere in scripture are the Moabites mentioned with any degree of favor. They are the sworn enemies of God’s people from the beginning. So repugnant are they, God makes them pariah in his own sanctuary.
No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever,
Deuteronomy 23:3
You’d be hard-pressed to find anything anywhere in the Bible remotely nice about Moabites. Even Isaiah, the “Christmas” prophet (Isa 7:14, 9:2, 9:6, 11:1) piled on with a plethora of judgments regarding Moab, not mincing words.
And yet. And yet.
[Here’s the very cool gospel part]
I found a lone verse where Moab is given a good ending, just like my boy. Plugging the word “Moab” into my Bible app’s search engine, this text bubbled up:
“Yet I will restore the fortunes of Moab
in days to come,”
declares the Lord.
Here ends the judgment on Moab.
Jeremiah 48:47
Don’t miss that last sentence. “Here ends…judgment.” Precisely because Jesus died for Moabites too is why that promise holds. What was announced to baseborn shepherds on the night of Advent — “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” — applied to a congregation of misfits.
Oh, don’t you remember? Ruth….the Moabite? Right there in Jesus’s genealogy? Jesus Messiah came into this cold earth with some Moabite blood!
Jesus is heir of a line in which flows the blood of the harlot Rahab, and of the rustic Ruth; he is akin to the fallen and to the lowly, and he will show his love even to the poorest and most obscure. I, too, may have a part and lot in him.
Charles Spurgeon, The Gospel of the Kingdom
Shepherds and Moabites, prodigals and lost causes. Christmas is good news for people without a country. The only ones left in the dark are those who ignore the Main Character. He, who was born in a feeding trough, lived homeless, and was buried in a donated grave, came not for the tidied-up but for the beat-down.
I’m weak
fragile
gone in a strong gust
or wave
my bones and soul
break
like dry twigs.
It is possible to lose all
except
the love of God.
The gospel is for the unheard, the counted-out, the ones from whom friends hide their face, the shamed, the losers.
It’s “good news to the poor…liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind”
the disadvantaged
the incarcerated
the disabled
Jesus draws near.
–Quina Aragon, Spoken Word Artist
This post is for anyone out there who has a “Moabite” in their life. Some unlikely candidate for gospel change. You hope, you actually hurt, for their salvation. This could be their last shot and that pains you.
Don’t give up, beloved. Pray that some heavenly visitor, or a choir of singing angels, finds them in some forgotten field on a night they least suspect and draws them in to “join the triumph of the skies.” God can meet them in their isolated bulwarks of hardened flesh. He came all the way from Glory to raid the devil’s domain after all.
Selah, and Merry Christmas to you and yours!
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Image: Freedom Studio/Shutterstock It’s the month of thanks, or, if you’re born anew, a continuation of the theme.
Here I’ll raise mine Ebenezer and join the family sing-a-long. You might want to settle in, mine’s got 153 verses.
It starts with a story. Once upon a Galilee morn, seven disciples crowd into a boat with hopes set high for a good catch. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. All night long and not a single bite. Mind you, these are experienced fishermen and they get nada. Zero. Squat.
Their leader is the most confused. Peter grouses, “What in tarnation is happening here?” He’s known how to do this since a paidíon. This was second nature to him. Must he fail at this too?
The early April morning is suddenly cleaved by a voice from the shore.
“‘Mornin’ lads! Any luck?”
There’s a cute moment embedded in the story: Jesus asks them if they’d had any success through the night. He wants to know if they’ve caught any prosphágion. Don’t anyone tell me Jesus didn’t have a sense of humor. The word he used means a side dish, not the main course. He was trolling them!
“Hey fellas, you got anything to nibble on?”
Groan.
Peter squints through the mist and sees the shape of a man. A hundred yards off, it’s difficult to tell who yon figure is. And yet the Voice sounds familiar…
There’s fish, and then there’s fish “Try your nets on the right side,” the Man on the shore suggests.
“You’ve got to be kid—”
You pretty much know the next bit if you’ve been to Sunday school or raised up in the Word.
The seven knackered disciples throw the nets starboard and look on in amazement as the sea comes alive. The fish practically school themselves right into the nets! The startled men never saw such a haul!
Our narrator, John (aka, “the other disciple”) describes the moment the catch comes in. He chooses the word ichthúos to supplant their fruitless all-nighter. Now, we’re talking game fish, big fish, what you’d serve at a banquet!
WordPress free photo library. Count ‘em. 153. (you best believe fishermen wouldn’t lie about something like that) That’s almost 22 family-sized fish per disciple. And the net didn’t break. Not a single ichthúos was lost!
Tell me, if you were in the boat that morning, what would you do? What other response could there be but to recognize Jesus in the moment and hurdle every obstacle to get to the feet of the Lord? That’s what Peter was thinking too. Casting off restraint, Peter jumps out of the boat.
While Peter doesn’t exactly walk on water, he throws on his tunic over his bare bottom and swims to shore, leaving the great catch behind. Just Jesus, only Jesus, always Jesus.
Charcoal fires What does he find when he gets to shore? Jesus sitting beside a fire of coals and a ready-made breakfast. Pardon the quick side trail, but do you remember when we last saw a charcoal fire? That’s right. Simon Peter stood by one at night, warming his hands, denying he knew the Man Jesus.
Quite niftily, John adds this bit of trivia into the gospel record. Mind you, it’s there for more than just atmosphere. His deft narrator’s eye catches the detail of fire burned down to the coals, owing to the fact the Savior’s been there a long while.
The seaside breakfast tells us Jesus is waiting for us to simply “Come.” Whether we’ve failed, lied, or trampled on his name, the sizzle tells the story. The aroma doesn’t lie. Hear this, beloved: that the fire’s been set in the morning reminds Peter — and us — it’s a brand new day. The veil of that awful night of scandal has been lifted and the mercies of Christ are fresh as the dew.
There’s dying, and there’s living Conversation ensues. There’s a fascinating back-and-forth between Jesus and Peter regarding agapáō and philéō and something about Peter’s not-so-flattering future. But then Jesus looks at the reeling disciple and says, “Walk with me.”
It’s not a metaphorical invitation. Jesus quite literally stands up from the group and motions for Peter to follow. The two start a stroll along the beach, away from the others. We can skip for now the bit about John getting up to follow after and Simon Peter’s protest.
Here’s where I wanted to take you today: I’d wager Jesus wanted to speak life into Peter, privately teaching him about agapáō and feeding sheep and lambs and why charcoal fires and the significance of 153 fish. And a whole lot of other stuff too, perhaps. Cool to think about.
Someone counted all of the encounters Jesus had with individuals in the gospels and came up with the number 153. I haven’t proven that, but I’ll take it on face value. It wouldn’t surprise me if that number were accurate. That’s 153 Jesus stories in the gospels.
Those seven Galileans in that gospel johnboat had 153 gospel stories that day, enough to spend the rest of their lives talking about them and writing about them. Peter, soon-to-be leader of the global spread of the gospel, surely did his share.
How many Jesus stories might you have? I bet you could come up with at least 153. That’s a lot of fish tales!
An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.
A.W. Tozer
Dear reader, I pray you have some breakfast conversations with Jesus in the coming days. I’m going to ask him to lovingly explain some deep stuff to you, marvelous things that equip you for your next assignment. I hope you hear the sizzle and smell the aroma of the fish on the fire. He’s waiting for you now.
I finished John’s gospel in my daily reading yesterday and wrapped up my welling emotions over this final text with a thanksgiving prayer from my journal. Here’s what I wrote, in part:
I’m actually sitting with you this morning … You are the Risen Christ and I’m sitting with you. And you’re listening. You’re reading along with me. I love you, Jesus.
Thank you for my disability. May I use it for your glory today.
Thank you for all my close calls with death and for your Resurrection Life in me. Thank you for all my sicknesses and hospitalizations. You have been faithful and kind to me. You are my shepherd and I follow you in my wheelchair, wherever you lead me. I trust you.
Thank you for the “153” great fish you’ve given me, Father. I seem to always pine for only a handful, a bucketful, of “snack-sized” fish and have never been successful. Thank you for the “haul”, the supernatural “catch”…through my weakness, my inadequacy, my need. Thank you for the charcoal fires and for the already-cooked breakfast I didn’t labor for.
Thank you for inviting me to sit with you and serving (!) me. Bless you, in Your endearingly gracious name. Amen.
Selah and amen.
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I’m dedicating this post to the grandest
of earthly companions,
my wife,
who’s gone everywhere with me
since the start.
Thank you, Gracious Lord,
for the gift of Sandy.
You know how much I needed her.
From South Rim Chamber & Travel public website. Today marks 40 years I’ve been a paraplegic. That’s ten years from ‘Jubilee’ if you’re keeping score, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to party like it’s 2031.
Much of this blog site is dedicated to sharing my journey through disability and how God has faithfully shepherded me through it all. For 40 years I’ve been one of his broken sheep, hind legs dragging, but he has been my Good Shepherd. He coaxes and carries me along, through valley and vale, all the way home.
I’m now in my 60s, a far bleating from 21 when I still had youthful vigor and a ready-to-take-it-on bearing. Now I consider a good day when a Carolina wren or hummingbird comes to the feeder. I do other stuff too, but birds are my party jam these days. And I never tire of it.
We were going on a two-week road trip to the Grand Canyon a few weeks ago but somebody ended up in the hospital. [Me, I’m somebody.] It was going to be a celebration of life, milestones reached, and a long-time dream come true. And then somebody got a kidney stone, went septic, and nearly died. I’m still holding that against him.
©️ Yan Li Anyway, can you imagine a wheelchair on those ridges and cliffs?
Of course we scouted out the park before our proposed departure date, taking special note of the accessible views and attractions but still found them limited. While the national parks system tries to ensure everyone has a memorable time, the fact is there are lots of trails and views which folks with physical limitations can’t experience. Those spots aren’t for the feint of heart, however. Some are downright perilous. The narrow trails and sheer drop-offs are enough to give the most experienced hikers pause. But, oh the payoff!
For four decades I’ve been given views of God’s grace that make me shudder inside. I’ve heard the voice of the Grand Shepherd singing over me as I’ve fed in green pastures, played beside babbling brooks, and softly slumbered by quiet streams.
He’s faithfully stood by and helped to navigate me over treacherous terrain and through starless nights of the soul. I’ve clapped my hands over my mouth — too many times to count — being witness to his magnificent mercies. He’s been so grand to me!
His love is the Grand Canyon and I’m an ‘able-bodied’ man standing on the pinnacle of the South Rim, watching the sun rise every day bringing with it new mercies and fresh grace. He takes me places I’ve never dreamt possible. Tenderly, he’s fed me from rations of sweet manna for forty years. Jesus and me, we’ve crested such heights and plumbed depths so low you’d grow old before your time. He unfolds deep mysteries of sacred spaces and teaches me my life is a miracle. Here is where I need to hit pause. None of this is because I’m special or his favorite. Even this has been all of grace. You’ve read enough of my journey by now to know these forty years have been a gift. I wouldn’t trade a day for anything I might have scripted for myself when i was 21. All praise to him.
Turns out, Sandy and I could’ve gone on the trip anyway as I’d pretty much recovered and begun to feel normal again. But COVID escalations in some of our trip’s plot points, added to my weakened immune system, and we were seeing yellow flags. So we’ve chosen to wait.
Herein lies another lesson of the broken road: disappointments down here remind us we are not supposed to feel entirely at home. The late Clive S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Amen, Clive. The wait will be worth it all. So we wait in faith.
I’m living in Grace Canyon. My disability has been his mercy’s vaccine against a wasted life and I take my daily medicine with, at times, a pinch of salt. Sometimes it can be hard to swallow but it’s always what I need. I trust my Grand Physician. He knows best.
My sister texted me and asked what I’m doing to celebrate 40 years. Here’s what I’ll be doing: dancing on the rim of Mercy Rock and soaring skyward as the God of Grace meets me — yet again — with healing in his wings. Today marks 40 years but it feels more like ‘The Year of Jubilee.’ It’s been quite a trip.
Selah, beloved.
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Crazy times, huh?
Back in the 80s Billy Joel had a hit song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” in which he lyricized his life from 1949 to 1989 through the headlines, some good, mostly bad. His song cited 118 key moments he’d lived through. Again, over a lifetime.
If you’re alive in these strange days, you could add 118 of those kind of moments….in just the last 18 months!
We brave souls who have already weathered 9/11 and the war on terror, have been conscripted to face the bungled Afghanistan pull-out, COVID-19, shelter-in-place, George Floyd, Critical Race Theory, Capitol riots, and cancel culture.
Mix in the perfect storm of $28 trillion national debt, full-term abortion, impeachment, social injustice, racism, human trafficking, police brutality, nationalism, BLM, white supremacy, #MeToo, pronouns, and gender identity.
Talk about piling on.
Of course the disciples of the early 1st century didn’t have the pandora’s box of issues we face in the 21st century but they lived in worrisome times too. They were a conquered people living under the imperial thumb of Rome, and right along with their countrymen they longed for a Savior-Messiah to break into their story.
Over three years, based on the information they had, the disciples believed their hoped-for hero was now standing in their midst. Trouble was, he didn’t quite fit their idea of how such a king should accede to the throne. Here’s how he put it to them:
For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. BUT FIRST HE MUST SUFFER MANY THINGS AND BE REJECTED BY THIS GENERATION.
Luke 17:24-25, ESV
Say what, Jesus?
Talk of lightning and thunder and glory are themes we can get behind. Swooping in and saving the elect and wiping out the wicked? Yes, Lord, more of that, please. Inject it into our veins! But suffering and rejection? AYKM?!?
Jesus wasn’t finished. He went on to paint an even more dire picture of future days saying it wasn’t going to be all roses and rainbows for his followers either. Times would “wax” worse and worse with unimaginable terrors unleashed on an ill-equipped world. It would be thus right up to the end. Matthew’s gospel adds the gut-checking news that only those who “endure to the end will be saved.” Even Jesus wondered aloud, “When the Son of Man returns will he find faith on the earth?”
If you’re bothered by the trajectory of things (“just how bad is it gonna get?”) take heart. Jesus’s band of brothers wondered too.
And you know what Jesus did to settle them? He told them a little story.
A widow, it seems, was the victim of a pyramid scheme and lost her life savings. She heard the circuit judge was coming to town so she went out to have her case adjudicated. To her dismay, the corrupt judge wouldn’t give her the time of day.
Next morning, she got herself dressed and went out the door to where the judge was holding court. Same answer. No, lady, go home.
Next day, same.
And the next.
But she never stopped going as long as Mr. Justice was in town. She was determined to get a hearing. He was going to take her case or, by golly, she was going to die trying.
Unfortunately the pitiful woman was penniless and had nothing to offer the shady judge by way of bribe. Still, she ventured out to the “justice tent” all the same.
This was likely her last chance. The judge could be packed up and gone the next day. This was it. Please, Universe, Higher Being, Whoever, be on my side, she prayed. (We don’t know if the fictional widow was saved.)
That morning, the judge asked who was out there beyond the folds of his tent and his assistant told him the same old lady who’s been coming every day. He shook his head disgustedly.
“Her again?”
He thought about it, then thought about it some more, and then he broke character.
“Send her in,” he said with a sigh.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Well, not without Jesus they didn’t! Which is the point. Try and do life without Jesus, and you’ll end up a pillar of salt or vulture lunch.
So what does the story have to do with being ready for what’s coming? Simply put, readiness requires faith (God is good), faith requires a “just” Jesus (God is wise), and it’s all fueled with the aromatic incense of prayer (God is able).
The people of God “ought always” to pray, Jesus said.
Was this the answer the disciples were hoping for? Probably not, and it’s not usually what we’re inclined to accept. Pray? Come on God, isn’t there something more concrete?
Yeah, he says, there is something more. Pray….and don’t give up!
[Smiley face emoji]
I’m pretty sure Jesus added that enjoinder because he knows the last days will be hard. We’re taking hard, hard, hardhardhard, so much so the elect (the people of God) will shrink and fail and cower and wonder if it’s all worth it. What if he isn’t coming? What if it’s been a trick the whole time?
Jesus hasn’t changed the formula. Methods and styles come and go, the times they get worse then better and ever worse again, but it’s always been a praying people abiding in the shelter of the Almighty who overcome through the worst of times. I hear some of you saying, “That sounds like works, Scott.” I totally get that. Problem is, you consider prayer a task to be done — a human work — rather than a lifelong conversation with God. The praying Jesus is speaking of in verse one can be linked to his question in verse eight.
A “praying people” are a “faithing people.”
So if I stand let me stand on the promise
That you will pull me through
And if I can’t let me fall on the grace
That first brought me to You
And if I sing let me sing for the joy
That has born in me these songs
And if I weep let it be as a man
Who is longing for his home
— Rich Mullins, If I Stand
The praying Jesus is referencing is not suppertime thanks or bedtime rhymes. He’s telling us that our assurance of enduring to the end is our clinging to the Savior (“not give up”) through thick and thin, hard times and lean times, rest and unrest. It is a lifestyle and testimony of trusting Christ to carry us all the way home.
Does the little story really answer the questions and fears of the disciples? On the surface, it seems almost a redirect. On closer inspection, we see it’s exactly what we need to hear.
The widow shows us “praying” is “coming” to our One True Authority. Like her, we are to come faithfully, enduringly, single-mindedly, hopefully, and trustingly. Day after day, all our days, until Jesus comes. This is how we endure to the end.
Unlike the widow, we don’t have an unjust judge in the heavenlies who demands a bribe before coming to our rescue. He doesn’t expect us to “shape up” before he will act in mercy. He doesn’t require us to ‘perform’ some empty ritual of contrition so as to move him to respond. The only prerequisites are neediness and faith.
Each and every morning you wake up, as soon as you say the word “Father…” you can rest assured his eyes are already on you and he’s inviting you into his tent. Beloved, you are on his docket for the day, all day. Go to him. Ask him. Have faith he will hear you and be good to you. [I was blessed to be able to share these thoughts with the generous and loving congregation at West Huntsville Baptist Church recently. If you’d like to view the full video service, simply click here**.]
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Which of these is true:
- Your life is temporal and ultimately lacks meaning and lasting value
- You are imperfect at best so do what you can with what you have
- You were created for a divine purpose and your Heavenly Father will perfect your calling and transform your life into a beautiful work of grace
- Only the really important people can do the really important stuff
If you’ve been paying attention, you picked ‘C.’ As we saw in the last post, Sunday school teachers, lowly monks, maids, wives, sisters, whoever and whatever, can rise to their calling and find their “beautiful works” (καλὸν ἔργον) remembered forever in the logbooks of Glory.
The Lord of heaven pays attention even to the littlest of mites and smallest of lunches…and leaves space for each in his trophy case. He calls them “beautiful.”
As we discussed prior, a “beautiful” work (also Matt 5:16) is something that is selfless, sacrificial, motivated by love, and blesses the heart of God. That’s what a beautiful work is, but what does it do? How does it move the needle?
a “beautiful work” brings a bit of heaven to earth John adds this pleasant detail inside his account of the story: “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” And so it is when we offer anything of loving sacrifice to our little worlds. The echoes of glory reach into that sacred space; the luster of heaven shines where it happens.
The ancient scene before us takes place in a village called “Bethany.” I’ve always thought that name was so lovely, so feminine. It sounds like someone you would want your son to marry. But then you study the name, what it means. You find out it is a combination of two words translated, “house” and “depression.” House of sorrow, if you will.
Now when you see what Mary did that evening, by filling the entire house with the aroma of sweet sacrifice, you begin to understand how “beautiful works” can bring heaven to earth.
In her book, ‘Suffering and the Heart of God,’ Diane Langberg describes a place outside Cairo called “Garbage City.” The streets and roofs of houses are made of compressed garbage and the stench gets in your hair and sticks to your clothes and skin. Rats skitter about your feet. There is no sewage system to wash away the filth.
Garbage mounts and rises to the sky in hills and small mountains. Pass through the streets and they’ll take you to an area about half the size of a football field where trash that can’t be recycled is burned in incinerators. The smell is sickeningly exacerbated; it hangs low and heavy in the air.
But just past all this is an area pristine and clean, with gleaming white walls and floors. “You see a room where woven handbags, rugs, and placemats are displayed,” Langberg writes. “Hanging on the walls of another room are quilted wall hangings, comforters, and pillow covers. Women are there sorting rags according to color and placing them in different baskets. Others work at two looms to create beauty out of the garbage.
If you continue down the steps you will hear the sound of water in large tubs as bags of shredded paper dissolve into pulp. Women in rubber aprons spread the mush into sieves, pull the sieves out of the vats, and stack them into the press where the new paper is drained. The paper is then dried in the sun and cards are made with gold embossing and marbled designs. More beauty created from garbage.
She continues:
There is a Coptic Church in the garbage community that began as a Sunday school nineteen years ago…you will enter one of two cave churches built on this mountain. The larger cave seats 10,000 and rivals the Red Rock amphitheater in Colorado in its dramatic beauty. Thousands of people gather – people whose lives are full of garbage, people who work with garbage, people who smell of garbage – for praise and preaching service. It is beauty in the midst of garbage.
Diane Langberg, Suffering and the Heart of God, 329-ff
a “beautiful work” is borne from the fruit of personal sacrifice When Mary broke the seal of her perfume, Mark described it by using a graphic term, συντρίβω. It means to to crush or strike together; to smash against, like a ship run aground, battered by the waves. That young woman in our story could not, would not bring her Master something that did not come at great cost.
We read in Matthew, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” Instinctively, Mary knew the death of Jesus was close at hand and what did she bring him? Her broken heart. Consequently, that broken-and-spilled-out-sweet-smelling sacrifice filled a house, surrounded by sorrow and depression, with the aroma of resurrection life.
Beloved, whether you are bedbound, homebound, working a third shift job, raising children, supervising workers, answering phones all day, teaching a Sunday school class, living in a childless marriage, fighting off chronic illness, leading presentations at work, standing in front of church congregations and expounding the truths of God’s word each week, blue collar, white collar, or T-shirt and jeans, tenured or part-time, single or hitched, wherever you fall in the spectrum of life, you can spill the goods knowing whatever you do, even if goes unnoticed or criticized, you do it for the applause of heaven.
a “beautiful work” disarms folks and exposes their heart orientation Mary received some startlingly negative feedback after she offered her service. First off, how dare she? and second, what in the world?? Imagine looking to buy something on Amazon and seeing every reviewer giving one star because there was no option for zero. That would be the disciples in the room. Then imagine a single raving review of 5 stars! That would be Jesus.
Side note: sometimes ‘the church gonna church’ but Jesus is the only vote that counts.
2 Cor 2:15-16 tells us we (the people of “good works”) are are an odorous folk who either make people sick to death of us or drawn to the Life of Jesus in us.
Because of Christ, we give off a sweet scent rising to God…
2 Cor 2:15, The Message
Just as Mary discovered, you too will find not everyone will be a fan of your beautiful deeds. Some will assume the worst. You weren’t sincere. You did it to be noticed. You want something in return. I wouldn’t have done it that way…
Do it anyway. Let them question. Let them criticize. So what if you don’t get the result you hoped for. One thing is certain: every “beautiful work” is seen and remembered in heaven.
a “beautiful work” receives the approval of the Master and reaps eternal rewards Which brings us to my favorite, most mind-blowing part of the story:
…wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.
Mark 14:9
The gospel story has been published and preached in thousands of languages, spanning two millennia. Every continent and country has heard the good news in some form….and everywhere it’s been told, this woman’s “good work” has been remembered.
Imagine! Having yourself offered special mention in the gospel story! Having future generations talk about your story being instrumental to the global spread of the gospel!
Astounding!
Hey you. Doubting lamb. God has written you into his great gospel story, too.
You are his masterpiece, created for good works.
You are an aroma of grace.
There is a shine inside of you that only gets out when you realize you are nothing without Christ, eternally indebted to him, and yearn to be “wasted”on him for no other reason than he is your “Why.”
Perhaps your story won’t be mentioned worldwide, but many years from now, your children and your children’s children and their children will point to a photo of you and say, “That’s my grandad. That’s my dad’s great-aunt. They loved Jesus and that’s why I’m a Christian today.” Others will pick through stories of your life and marvel at how you loved and they will be pressed to pick up the mantel and, in so doing, find their “Why” too.
May your story (and mine) always be a story of prodigal love. Selah, beloved.
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“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain
Once upon a time a Sunday school teacher got a burden for a young man in his class and visited the young man at his shop. He told him the good news of the gospel of salvation and that young shoe salesman became one of the great pastors and evangelists of a generation, D.L. Moody.
Now I’m sure that Sunday school teacher accomplished many other things in his life but none more notable than walking into a shoe shop that day.
What an amazing “Why.”
There’s Martin Luther’s memorable “Here I stand, I can do no other” appeal before the Roman Catholic tribunal. Defacing cathedral doors with inflammatory messages might get you in trouble with religious folk but they may be just what is needed to ignite a reformation.
Six centuries later and we all can give thanks today he found his “why” and struck the first match.
At a pastor’s retreat one of the attendees noticed how a woman joyfully cleaned all the rooms each day. On the last day he found her in the bathroom scrubbing one of the toilets and thanked her. “How do you do such degrading work so happily?” he asked. “Oh no,” she relied with a noticeable spark, “I don’t have to do this, I get to do this!”
A beautiful “Why.”
For nearly 40 years I’ve watched my wife minister to me by doing things no wife should ever have to do for her husband. Not long ago I listened in on a phone conversation she was having with a family member. She told my wife, “One of the things I have watched you do over and over is to simply show up. To be there, whenever and wherever you’re needed.”
Her “Why” sings into eternity!
Let’s look at another.
Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is found in several places in the New Testament but in three of the four gospels (Luke shares a different occasion, a different woman, but an uncannily similar act of worship) we find her demonstrating her most notable “Why” the day she walked into the room where Jesus was reclining and poured costly perfume on his feet.
[Read Mark 14:1-9]
Mary’s“beautiful work” was to prepare Messiah for his burial. This is a work belonging only to her. It was a one-of-a-kind act of service in which she endearingly rose to the occasion (or bowed, in her case).
The thought struck me: we can’t do Mary’s noble task of preparing Christ’s body for burial but we can prepare his body for his return (Heb 10:25). Two Marys and Salome went to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus (Mark 16:1), but they found they were too late. Their anointing was not necessary because Christ Jesus was alive. They didn’t need to do Mary’s “beautiful work” because that was a one-off. Instead, they were given a new mandate to pound the ground with the news of the Savior’s resurrection, and every generation of disciples since are compelled to share that same empty-tomb news… with the added good news that he is coming back!
worthy v. worthless A word. Just because we do stuff “in Jesus name” doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll have it memorialized on a building or a park bench in the New Jerusalem. There are “beautiful works” and there are “disposable works.” The difference is the source that drives it. Beautiful works put self on its knees and the body of Christ in the place of honor. Disposable works reverse the emphasis. We can cut our neighbor’s lawn but the minute we subtly draw attention to it on social media (posing next to a push mower, gesturing wiping sweat from our faces but smiling like we just did something special) it’s destined for the brush pile. You do know it’s possible to do some pretty great things in Jesus name and those things be burned up and lost in the end (1 Cor 3:11-15), right?
beautiful waste What Mark does with this beautiful tableau is nothing shy of genius. The anointing at Bethany was actually a week earlier but Mark drops it here because he wants the readers to see the contrast between selfless worship and self-driven religion.
You know how the room reacts to Mary’s “waste of resources.” The Twelve, led by Judas, turn it into a church business meeting and vote against the whole affair. It didn’t make sense to their sensual minds. Judas especially, driven by greed and devilry, thought the whole thing was stupid and consequently showed his true colors.
Where do we next see Judas? That’s right. In the very next paragraph. Mark sets him in the most unflattering light, akin to Iago’s treachery to Desdemona’s innocence. I imagine the good John Mark spitting into his inkwell and gritting his teeth before putting pen to parchment. Gothic overtones. All black, at night, evil intent.
Nothingness.
Waste.
Incidentally, the word “wasted” in verse four is the same word translated “perdition” in John 17:12 with regard to Judas. Mark exposed him as destined for hellfire. It’s a cautionary tale in ALL CAPS for us: any work, act of service, effort, duty, ministry, offering, cause, collaboration, whatever, motivated by greed, self-promotion, self-indulgence, or internal pride, is burnt up and worthless.
Bottom line: if our “Why” isn’t Jesus, there’s no life in it.
In the next post, we’ll explore more deeply the idea of such beautiful, selfless, Mary-scented, Son-approved, life-giving works to the body of Christ and for the glory of God. Judas and his ilk don’t figure into it like this one, so let’s just wash that bad taste from our mouths and focus on a broken jar of perfume and a house infused with a hint of heaven. Mark still has much to say on the matter, so I hope you’ll be back.
Selah, beloved. Until then.
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Scott’s sick. Again.
Scott’s in the hospital. Again.
We need to pray for Scott‘s health. Again.
In recent weeks yet another ambulance crew carried me from my home where once again I brushed up against the cold bosom of death.
Yesterday, glory hallelujah, my wife carried me from the hospital, still alive and well, God having shown himself — again — faithful to deliver me from yet another close call.
Charles Spurgeon said, “He who has been with us in six troubles, will not forsake us in the seventh.”
I’m imagining you through my screen and telling you with all sincerity that there has never been a trial or a problem or tribulation or hardship or difficulty that God has not come through for me and delivered me. It is true his deliverance does not always come at the exact moment or in the exact way I thought, but I have never been forsaken and he has always shown his redemptive purposes in setting me free.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair;
2 Corinthians 4:7-8
Through it all, through everything, he’s shown himself faithful and there’s no end to how grateful and in awe of him I am.
This is my story.
And, yes, this is my song.
I’m praising my Savior all the day long.
For obvious reasons, the book of Job has been a regular read for me. I’ve often turn to its pages to remind myself that God is sovereign through all of my hard times.
When you come to Job 23:14, it reads,
“For he will complete what he appoints for me,
and many such things are in his mind.”
Which could be paraphrased to mean:
“He has many ways to refine us – and He’ll use them anytime, anyway He wants.”
Here’s my story in 6 words:
Broken.
Blessed.
Grieving.
Grateful.
Waiting.
Worshipping.
My suffering was good for me,
because through it I learned your statutes.
Psalm 119:71
David referred to himself as a “broken” man. As bad as that is, he still knew a secret: the word he chose (‘âḇaḏ’) is the same Hebrew word used when God put Adam in His Garden and told him to “tend” it. It’s the picture of breaking up the sod and clods of dirt, using a hoe or rake. Poured into those crevasses and furrows and holes is the fertilizer needed to grow fruit and grain from fertile soil.
David was saying, “He fills my broken places with His Life and I rejoice in my afflictions because I know my dying is my living!”
David recognizes he might be broken, but he’s not a LOST CAUSE. He’s not unfixable, not unredeemable. He has greater value when he submits to the Lord’s plough.
Everything you suffer, all you’ve lost, whatever breaking you’ve endured, is working in you a lush harvest that will bring life to others!
A few years ago, my Sandy had the opportunity to travel with a high school choir to Italy for competition. On one particular off-day they did some sightseeing and visited Venice and “The Bridge of Sighs.”
There’s a long history with this famous place in Venice but the thing that most sticks out is the bridge connects a prison with a palace. Back in the day, the prisoners were led across this bridge after their sentencing in the palace and they would have to look through the narrow windows of the bridge on their last look at freedom. They would “sigh” in sorrow as they were led away in chains to their cell where they would live out the rest of their days.
Your trials feel like a prison. You ask God, “Why am I still single?“ “Why am I depressed?” “Why can’t I ever seem to get a break?” “Why can’t I get past this?” You wonder if he has abandoned you. You question his goodness. Some days you feel as though you’re serving hard time. It’s very much a prison to you.
The Lord invites you to “sigh” and surrender and believe he is going to escort you from your cell and lead you into a palace of blessing. In a way I am still on the prison side of the bridge but, like Paul and Silas, I am singing at midnight… so it feels like I am on the palace side!
Let’s go back to our scripture we considered first.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous…
That tells me trials are a necessary part of our discipleship. That message doesn’t always draw a crowd, but it’s undeniably true. There are so many manys on our journey with Christ. We’re all like broken records.
The Hebrew word “affliction” is often translated in the Old Testament as “evil.” It is also translated “bad.”
“Wicked.”“Mischief.”
Take heart, sisters and brothers; when bad befalls you it comes from an enemy that despises you. This means you are in the safe embrace of Someone who loves you.
Scott’s sick. Again.
We gotta pray for Scott. Again.
Scott’s got another wound.
Trouble for the Mitchells. Again.
James says life is “hole-punched” with trials. Paul said “it is through many hardships we come into the kingdom.” He told the Corinthians he “faces daily pressure” and “anxiety.” David said, “every night I flood my bed with tears; I drenched my couch with my weeping.”
You can’t walk with Christ and not feel the blows. Romans tells us we “died with him” but we also “suffer with with him.”
Paul Miller writes of his daughter Ashley who died at age 42 of stage-4 colon cancer. Before she died Ashley told her bible study group:
“I cannot talk about cancer without talking about Jesus. I cannot talk about my trials without Jesus. I equate it to eating a Reese‘s – Jesus is the chocolate and suffering is the peanut butter – they just go together.”
Paul E. Miller, The J-Curve, 310-11
But wait. The second line of our verse makes the first line worth it: “But the Lord delivers him out of them all.” Peter said even if you’re “grieved by various trials” you can “rejoice” (“dance for joy”) in this: future glory (and oftentimes present) will be much sweeter to you than you can even imagine.
Soon and very soon, the record that’s been skipping and repeating and jumping and scratching will stop and all our agains will be wiped away and his eternal never again will be our forever anthem.
This is our story, this is our unbroken song. Amen.
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