“Fear not! That is the first and last commandment of faith.”
“Fear not”
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Beautiful faith
From the iMonk; below is an excerpt, but I recommend you read the whole thing.
At age 23, Doc was deer hunting with a friend when he slipped and fell into a direct shot. The shot entered the back of his head and came out under his eye. The picture- which he didn’t show- is of a man with a massive head wound, obviously affected the brain, vision and mobility.
He shouldn’t have survived, but he did. Multiple surgeries and major expenses followed, but God supplied his physical, financial and emotional needs. He not only lived, he walked and was able to return to a normal life.
Now blind and deaf on one side, with immobility because of brain damage, he met and married another hospital patient. She had MS.
After ten years of caring for her, Lori, Doc’s first wife died. In the midst of grief, his pastor directed him toward Bible college, and he took the opportunity. Three years later he was graduating and married again to his current wife. Now both serve with us.
When I hear this kind of story, it is almost more than I can take. My faith is small and my tolerance for pain and loss is low. Questions of suffering and loss are not easy for me to contemplate. What would I do? Would God keep me? Would I despair, quit, abandon faith?
And here is Doc. Standing in front of our students, saying again and again that God is good. His suffering and loss can’t be measured, but his faith has grown every step of the way. In his gentle, Minnesota accent, he says over and over, “God is good. I’m so thankful.”
What is a testimony like Doc’s worth in this world? Maybe nothing to some. Maybe a priceless amount to others. I do not know. What I do know is that Doc is untroubled by the problem of evil. He is untroubled by the questions of theodicy. He doesn’t know the answers of the philosophers. If he has thought about the objections of the atheists, it was long ago. He isn’t a Calvinist and he won’t be lecturing on the comforts of various theories of God’s Will. He’s simple. He is, today, a grateful man.
Doc is the work of God in a world of absurd suffering. Whatever has been taken from him has not left him empty and bitter. He is full of the love of God, and bitterness is nowhere to be seen or heard.
Emphasis mine.
The honesty of Jesus
Now when Jesus saw a crowd around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another of the disciples said to him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”
– Matthew 8:19-22
It is common to read this passage in Matthew 8 and think that Jesus is somehow being harsh.
I’m realizing, more and more, that what Jesus is being here is honest. He is not telling the scribe to give up on the idea of following him; he is, rather, telling him “OK, but keep in mind that if you truly follow me, you will be homeless, as I am homeless.”
He is not telling the other disciple not to follow him. This disciple wanted to bury his father, and it’s been noted in several commentaries that this may not have meant that his father was dead. It may have meant that he wanted to wait until his father died; then he’d be free to follow.
He was saying “I want to follow you Jesus, just not yet”.
Sometimes I fear that “I want to follow you Jesus, just not yet” is the story of my life. But I digress: Jesus is just being honest with this fellow. Jesus is always honest; there is not a whiff of the salesman in Jesus, there is not a trace of the confidence man, there is no bait and switch, there isn’t any “stretch” in the truth of Jesus’ marketing of what it means to be a disciple. Because Jesus doesn’t “market” at all, he just tells the truth. What he is saying here is “if you want to follow me, you need to follow me now.”
Don’t you love that about Jesus? He tells us, plainly, what we’re getting ourselves into.
May we be boat-leaving, plow-leaving, net-abandoning right-now followers of Jesus.
Now.
[Note: this was cross-posted over at the HNW GAP Singles blog]
Balance: Heavenly minded, earthly good
“Don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good”
Have you ever heard that statement before? I have. In the past, I have assumed it referred to people who thought only of the sweet by and by to the exclusion of the duties and callings of this life. But I didn’t think much more of it, and I didn’t really know anyone I’d put in that category.
Recently our pastor used that phrase in a Sunday morning message. He followed it up with a quizzical look and this statement: “I’ve never known anyone too heavenly minded”.
He has a point – particularly in this country, where we’re so inundated with the bright, sparkly things of this world and where teachings on heaven and hell in our churches are few and far between. What brings this to mind is what I’m seeing as a resurgence, writ large, of the tension between heavenly minded and earthly good in current church debates, and primarily in the emergent conversation.
Here is the point and accusation being made in that conversation: Jesus came to inaugurate his Kingdom on earth, to fix the mess we’re in, and to overcome the Roman empire with a new kind of reign based on God’s ways, so that God’s will will be done “on earth as it is in heaven”. Unfortunately, the argument goes, all we’re concerned about in modern evangelicalism is “getting people saved” so that they can go to heaven and avoid hell. Evangelicals care too much about heaven, to the exclusion of this present world and all its troubles, for which they do very little.
While I think that representation is a bit of a caricature, I can see that there’s some truth in it. But the corrective being suggested seems, to me at least, to just be another fling off the other side of the horse. The books coming out, for instance, on the emergent side of the aisle seem to be paying short shrift to eternity. Their message: the church is too heavenly minded. We need to start being some earthly good.
And, in this way at least, they’re right: there are clear Biblical commands toward earthly goodness, and we are all as believers compelled by Christ’s love to love our neighbors, to do good to those around us, to meet the earthly needs of the least of these. And the reason we are to be this way is very simple: to glorify our Father in heaven.
I find myself tangled in yet another false dichotomy when it is suggested (or inferred) that earthly goodness and heavenly mindedness cannot coexist, and it makes me wonder if theologies built upon a foundation of our efforts to solve the world’s problems are theologies that, deep down, don’t really believe in eternity. Because if eternity is true, this life really is a vapor, a wisp, one blade of grass in a vast field.
If we are to be earthly good (and I believe we are), we are to be that way for God’s glory, and because, to paraphrase a recent, popular movie, what we do today echoes in eternity.
If eternity is true (and I believe it is), how much does the weight of it overwhelm day to day concerns? And how much does the need for each person on earth to heed the call of Jesus to repent and believe overwhelm all other issues in this life? These questions become rhetorical when you consider that in a snap of the fingers, we’ll be gone, and eternity will be what remains.
I believe that balance is a very important aspect of our faith, and I would like to see more of a balance, in my life, in the teachings of the church, and in the current in-family debates in Christendom, between heavenly mindedness and earthly goodness. May we never lose site of the enormity of eternity, and the glorious and frightening prospect that it has for us and for our neighbor. In the light of this, may we serve our neighbor, in Jesus’ name, as we would want to be served, doing God’s will on earth as it is done in heaven, for the glory of the Father.
I’ll leave you with a C.S. Lewis quote that sums up what I’m trying to say exceptionally well:
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Corrections and wisdom requested
It’s not often that I post anything theological when the subject is something as difficult to understand as some of Christ’s words in Matthew 5. Well, tonight I wrote three posts on the subject, as I prepare to teach Matthew 5:17-48 in the GAP class tomorrow.
I highly covet any expansion, correction, and enlightenment any of you can offer on what I have written in these three posts. And not just before tomorrow, but anytime.
What’s a Christian to do with the Old Testament law? Part 1
What’s a Christian to do with the Old Testament law? Part 2
What’s a Christian to do with the Old Testament law? Part 3 (the Law of Christ)
Thanks.
What’s a Christian to do with the Old Testament law? Part 1
“The Sermon on the Mount is probably the best-known part of the teaching of Jesus, though arguably it is the least understood, and certainly it is the least obeyed” – John Stott (from The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, InterVarsity Press, 1978, p. 15.)
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
– Matthew 5:17-20
Sometimes, when preparing to teach the GAP, I foolishly think “I’m up to this”. The good news about the Sermon on the Mount is that I don’t hold any illusions about my qualifications to teach on it. Nearly every statement Christ makes in this sermon is a conundrum to me. When I read with open eyes and heart the words of Jesus, I find myself scandalized. So much of my life fails to line up with his words, and so many of his words don’t match my preconceived notions of what being a Christian is all about.
The good news here, again, is that I know that if Jesus and I aren’t lined up, I’m the crooked one.
Take this statement: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Now, that’s quite a statement, isn’t it?
Yet, I’m so glad Jesus said it! In that one statement Christ affirms the witness of the Old Testament about himself, and he begins lifting the fog that often surrounds my reading of the first five books of the Bible. Jesus lived in a time of great piety surrounding the Old Testament law, the Torah. And he was often accused, by the Jewish religious leaders, of ignoring or setting aside the law, which they held so dear.
And in my day I find myself confused when reading the Torah (don’t you?). How many of us read, for instance, Leviticus for pleasure?
We don’t get it. And the religious leaders didn’t get Jesus. He didn’t come to abolish God’s word. How could he? He is the Word!
No, Jesus has come to fulfill the law. He is the fulfillment, the end point of what the Old Testament was getting at. In his perfect life and atoning death he fulfilled what Moses and the prophets wrote about, commanded, and hungered for. Emmanuel, God with us, here to usher in a new age, a new Kingdom, a new way to be human.
And it only makes sense that Matthew would report Jesus’ words regarding the fulfillment of the law in himself. One of the main purposes of Matthew’s gospel is to show how Christ fulfilled the Law and the Prophets. Do a search sometime on the word “fulfill” in Matthew using your favorite Bible software or Bible website. Over and over you read “All this took place to fulfill . . .” and “that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled . . .”. By my rough count, there are fifteen such statements in Matthew. Jesus is the fulfillment!
Read Leviticus, and the other OT books of the law, with Jesus in mind and the seemingly dead regulations, sacrifices and symbols begin to sparkle with life. It’s all about him. Jesus is the firm foundation upon which the Bible must be read, to understand it and to live it.
Of course, knowing that doesn’t mean that Jesus’ statements in Matthew 5 are crystal clear to me. I still struggle with them. And I know I’m not alone.
I’ll write more on this in a later post.
[Note: this was cross-posted on the HNW Gap Singles site]
Upgrade to Beta 2
I upgraded the blog to Bloo Beta 2 tonight. So far (sort of) so good. This is a pre-release build and I’ve only found one problem at this point: the Bloogroll Posts aren’t rendering quite viagra 100mg right.
I’ve turned them off for now while I dope this out.
Watch me for the changes . . .
Update: Fixed!
Some thoughts on Lewis’ The Great Divorce
It’s nice to see that Mark of GospelDrivenLife is back home from his “fishing” vacation.
He read C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce several times while he was gone, and provides some excellent insight, excerpted below:
Lewis says up front that this book is a fantasy, a dream. It is not theology, per se. No, there are no bus rides from hell to heaven. No, the damned are not met by the saved as they get off the bus and they are not persuaded to remain in heaven by them. But the imaginative dialogue serves more purposes than can be served by mere prose. Art and poetry have a place in the teaching of truth — and this book is art and poetic as well. He develops a few things so very well.
First, Lewis unmasks the dismal pettiness of sin. Whether in the bickering folk in line for the bus, or the image of hell ever expanding as people fight with each other, or the portrayal of pride, or apostasy, or self-righteousness, or manipulation, or lust — Lewis manages to make real that sin is a perversion of who we were made to be. There is nothing pretty about sin. It deforms and ultimately shrivels the soul that it owns, turns the grumbler into a mere grumble. There is nothing beautiful about sin.
Second, Lewis shows the abounding joy of heaven. At every point in the book, even when offering correction, the “bright people” are full of delight. The theme of the delights of drinking truth, seeing God, forgetting the past in a massive awareness of grace, ending all past feuds at the feet of the Savior, and the transformation of earthly appetites into glorious desires leading to God — these are developed in the succession of events in a way that makes me thirst for that great day.
Third, Lewis sees heaven as the sanctification of our full humanity, not a denial of it. The characters in the presence of God, sinless and free, are not less human for their purity but more so – and the damned are feeble beings, unable to walk across the grass because it pains the soles of their feet. They are mere shadows. Some, as they refuse to heed the embracing call of glory, actually disappear. A man captured by lust yields to the killing of this red lizard upon his shoulder — and the lust, now dead, is raised as a fierce and beautiful stallion. The guide later comments that if lust redeemed becomes a stallion, what would the purified love of a parent for a child become?
Well said. As Mark later states: “If the joys of heaven are at all what Lewis describes, it certainly brings to life the glory of God, the greatness of our salvation, and the promise of Jude ‘faultless in his presence with exceeding joy.'”
I recommend you go read the whole thing. Actually, go read The Great Divorce first, if you haven’t already. Then go read the whole thing. 🙂
God scares me
This may seem like a strange title for a post.
But it’s true. I said this to the GAP class last week as we were reading through Joel 2, because it contains a hair-raising description of the Day of the Lord. And now I’m reading through Joel 3.
Multitudes, multitudes,
in the valley of decision!
For the day of the Lord is near
in the valley of decision.
The sun and the moon are darkened,
and the stars withdraw their shining.
The Lord roars from Zion,
and utters his voice from Jerusalem,
and the heavens and the earth quake.
But the Lord is a refuge to his people,
a stronghold to the people of Israel.– Joel 3:14-16 (ESV)
Now, when I say “scares”, I don’t mean that I love him less (in as far as I’m capable, wretch that I am, of loving him at all). Humanly speaking, fear is too often mixed with hatred. But not this fear. God possesses the ferocity of a mighty warrior, protecting his city, and he is the mightiest One of all. No one can stand before him. He scares me, but I’m so thankful to be standing behind him, under his protection.
I have often in the past explained away the word “fear” in the Bible as “awe”. “We’re not to be afraid of God,” I’d state, “rather, it is a reverential awe.” I think I was woefully mistaken. I honestly don’t know, but I’m beginning to think that maybe “fear” is the right translation after all! And it’s a good fear – it drives me to love him more, because it makes his grace that much more amazing.
Our God is mighty, and scary, and powerful, and he is very, very able to save us to the uttermost. Our Lord roars from Zion! And I’m just barely grasping all of this.
Praise him forever!
You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
– Psalm 22:23 (ESV)
“Lord, to whom shall we go?”
After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
– John 6:66-69 (ESV)
This thought hit me today: what would I do without the Lord?
Serious question, that. I’ve been a Christian for over half my life and in many ways I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have this hope within me. I follow him, many times unsurely, often unfaithfully, yet he goes before me, ever faithful, and his light is the only real light there is, in a world of phantoms and illusions.
I wonder what other people do who don’t have Jesus in their life. What do they chase? Could someone looking at my life see that I chase that which the world doesn’t know or understand?
The band Rush once sang:
A cell of awareness
Imperfect, and incomplete
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that’s far too fleet
Those words are a great picture of life under the sun, viewed through the eyes of an honest unbeliever. The fortune hunt is what most of the world goes after. I know I get sucked into it too; there are so many glittering prizes out there.
Some people taste the Lord, they see that he is good, and yet they still walk away. I can think of some right now who, either temporarily or permanently, have left a life of service to Jesus and the joy that they knew to chase after other things. And, don’t let anyone fool you, “other things” definitely can hold one’s attention. They can bring happiness, even temporal security and fulfillment, no matter what anyone says.
But – man! – I just don’t see how other things can compare to Jesus!
Jesus asks “Do you want to go away as well?”
No way. How could I, Lord? You have the words of eternal life!