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The French Reformer John Calvin famously observed that the human heart is a factory of idols.

He’s right, of course. We are prodigious in our ability to produce idols. We can make idols out of anything, and the better the thing is to begin with – love of family, love of country, desire for success in ministry – the more difficult it is to detect and the more deadly its effects.

But why is this so? Why are we so adept at setting up a created thing in the place of God – looking to a created thing for our identity, our protection, our provision? I think there are three reasons:

1. Human culture: bent toward idolatry
 
If everyone around you is an idolater, idolatry seems normal, and you’re an oddball if you’re not playing along. Idolatry is so deeply embedded in our customs that anyone who declines to participate is an outsider.

The business world often expects leaders to sacrifice their families on the altar of corporate success. Some coaches expect their athletes to focus all their attention on training and conditioning, regardless of what that focus does to their studies, their family life, or their time with God’s people in worship.

And the love of money is so deeply embedded in our culture that the title of the game show could stand as a rhetorical question, suggesting its own answer: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Everyone does! Who wouldn’t want to be a millionaire?

From where most of us stand, wealth looks like the ultimate answer to our problems, and the desire for money can easily take on the proportions of idolatry. I have used this simple four-step thought experiment to help people see how short-sighted this idolatry of money is. Try it for yourself:

1. Identify the three biggest problems in your life right now. 
2. Imagine that you just came into a gigantic windfall. You will never have to worry about money again for the rest of your life. 
3. How many of those top three problems were solved by the windfall?
4. One more question: Now that you are independently wealthy, what new problems must you deal with? What does this new wealth do to your relationships with your friends and your family? What new responsibilities does this wealth now press on you?

It’s not hard to understand why Paul said that the toxic yearning for the status and self-sufficiency that come with wealth – the love of money – is the root of all kinds of evil (2 Tim. 6:10).

2. My habits: bent toward idolatry

Here’s where it gets personal. Idolatry is so deeply ingrained in my habits that I commit idolatry routinely, without even realizing it. I would love to blame the influence of my culture, but I ratify my culture’s idolatry every time I bow my heart to my own idols. And that bowing has become part of my routine, both in my inner life and in my behavior.

This means that for the Spirit to break me free from these deadly habits, He must first draw my attention to the fact that my rebellion has become customary. It is, of course, unpleasant to be made aware that some ordinary part of my mindset is actually a token of my rebellion against the Almighty. But that is what it takes to break my idolatrous habits.

3. My own heart: steeped in idolatry

Here’s the bad news. Even if my culture didn’t influence me toward idolatry, even if my habits hadn’t become contaminated with idolatry, Calvin was right: my heart has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to create new idols all by itself. Thanks to the DNA mutation introduced into the human condition by Adam and Eve, I have a natural tendency to generate idols without any assistance from the outside.

With all this working against me – my culture, my habits, my own wicked heart – can I ever hope to break free from the idolatry that is so deeply embedded in my life?

Here’s the good news: the Spirit has committed Himself to rooting out our idols and cleansing our hearts. The process is painstaking, sometimes tedious, never smooth and linear. Toppling the idols in my heart is a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back process. But God’s Spirit knows what He’s doing. He has made it His mission to shut down the idol factory in my heart, demolish the idol-making machinery, and renovate my interior life so that it can be used as a cathedral dedicated to the worship of the Almighty.

The Apostle John closed his first letter with this simple command: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). Thanks be to God that I don’t have to do all this on my own. Persevere.

It would be difficult for us to imagine the powerful emotions that must have churned in the hearts of the women who came to the tomb that Sunday morning. They were devastated at the loss of their friend and master, and they were mourning the death of all their dreams for the Kingdom he had announced.

And now, as they discover the empty tomb, they must endure still another shock. Surely in that moment they felt genuine fear, a terror of the unknown: they simply had no categories to explain what they found. What could this possibly mean?

Our Western, scientific mindset doesn’t like to admit there are things beyond our understanding, forces beyond our control. It is true that we have comprehended and mastered many powerful forces. Fire can be terrifying, but we have harnessed the power of fire to propel our vehicles, and in them we move about without fear. Electricity can be deadly, but I am calmly utilizing the power of electricity to write these words.

But we must realize that the Resurrection of Jesus isn’t like the power of fire and electricity; the power of the Resurrection is a power we cannot quantify and control. The Resurrection is not just a matter of history and theology, a factoid we can safely file away; the transcendent power of the Resurrection has implications for the way we live our lives right now.

1. The Resurrection means that history has been turned inside out.

New Testament scholar NT Wright says we need to understand what happened that first Easter morning as a kind of invasion. In the Resurrection of Christ, the glorious future Kingdom came crashing into our broken and ruined world:

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming from the future into the present. The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don’t know when it will arrive and partly because at present we have only images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still. Our task in the present is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second. – NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

In other words, thanks to the Resurrection, we no longer have the option of living as if we cannot know the outcome of the great war between God and His enemies: in the Resurrection we see the outcome foretold. And we need no longer live in uncertainty and anxiety about how things will turn out: Christ has disabled the power of sin and death.

2. Our wonder at the Resurrection is essential for our spiritual formation.

It’s easy to misconstrue the Resurrection as a kind of finale to the sufferings of Jesus, a happy ending to an otherwise heartbreaking story. Jesus suffered and died, and his friends were sad. Then he rose from the grave and they were happy.

But that shallow view emasculates the Resurrection. If we can think of the Resurrection without awe and wonder, we don’t really understand what happened that day.
Eugene Peterson, translator of the popular Message paraphrase, says that a right understanding of the Resurrection infuses our spiritual formation with wonder:

If Jesus’ resurrection is at the center of our spiritual formation—which I’m convinced it is—then this sense of wonder is a big part of what is going on. Without wonder, we approach spiritual formation as a self-help project. We employ techniques. We analyze gifts and potentialities. We set goals. We assess progress. Spiritual formation is reduced to cosmetics.

Peterson is right: when I in my hubris drift away from wonder at what God has done in Christ, I reduce my spiritual life to a checklist to be accomplished. A checklist I can manage, but God has not called me to a manageable life; He has called me to trust Him and obey Him beyond my capacity, just like a child lost in wonder.

So what does the Resurrection mean?

It means far more than an exclamation point on the life of Jesus. The Resurrection was the asteroid-strike that transfigured human history. It was the day Wonder and Glory crashed into our world and overturned the powers of heaven and earth.

This means that I cannot live my life as if Jesus hadn’t risen.

He shattered the chains of death and hell. And that changes everything.

If this graphic looks familiar, it’s because I wrote about this sign a few weeks ago. My grandson Roman must read these seventeen words each time he visits our house. By now, of course, he has memorized them, and he rattles them off in a rapid staccato. I don’t expect him to comprehend and cherish these words yet – that is the work of a lifetime – but I believe that someday he will see what they mean, and they will take his breath away.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I sat around the dinner table with Roman and his parents to talk about these seventeen words. I asked my impromptu focus group which of the three clauses resonates most with them and which, if any, seems difficult to grasp intuitively.

They agreed that it is the last clause – “I don’t need to prove myself” – that is most difficult to grasp. Same here. I feel that I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove myself, so although I believe that the third statement is true, it doesn’t usually feel true for me. There’s a cognitive dissonance here.

As I’ve pondered our discussion of these three clauses, I realized that they constitute a kind of equation or syllogism. You could picture the relationship between the clauses this way:

Or, to use the language of logic, we can see the three clauses as an if-then statement:

This dependence of the last clause on the first two tells me something: If I’m struggling to believe the last clause, it’s because I’m a little shaky on one or both of the first two. Either I’m not sure this is my Father’s world or I’m not sure that I’m His beloved.

I wrote last week about getting God’s truth from my head to my heart.
 
We’re intuitively aware of this divide between head and heart. Daily life has a way of revealing the gap between our aspirational theology and our actual. We all have an aspirational theology, a set of principles we believe to be true even though we don’t fully understand or appreciate them; things we believe because we know we’re supposed to believe them. These are the truths that we grasp intellectually, but they have not yet sunk down into our soul so that they pervade and inform our unconscious assumptions.

These two vital truths – God’s sovereign rule over all things and His unceasing affection for me – are an example of aspirational theology: they are easy to say but difficult to fully grasp, easy to understand with my head but difficult to comprehend with my heart.

I wrote last week about two ways to move God’s truth from head to heart: rehearsal (reflection and meditation) and suffering. A friend commented that for her, it is her relationship with God that makes His truth a matter of the heart.

I think my friend is onto something.

When I feel that I must prove myself, that’s a clue that I must go back to rehearse those first two clauses: “This is my Father’s world” and especially “I am His beloved.” If I can get that right – if I can get those two precious truths down into the center of my being where I can cherish them – only then can I believe that I have nothing to prove.

We sang about this as children: “Jesus loves me. This I know,” but we surely couldn’t understand it then. Comprehending the vast love of God for His beloved – His unrelenting affection for me – is itself the work of a lifetime, the work of several eternities, in fact. I have often said that the New Jerusalem will be populated by the community of the astonished: we will all wonder what we are doing there. I will wonder how someone like me could come to dwell in a place like that, at home with the Holy One of Israel.

This then is the main task for any believer, to move ever deeper in appreciating God’s great and unsearchable affection for His own. We’re going to spend eternity amazed at the love of our Father, and the Gospel invites us to revel in that wonder right now.

Persevere.

Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash

We often hear that our faith does us no good if it’s all in our head and not in our hearts, and we don’t disagree. No one likes to live with the cognitive dissonance of the mind and the heart being out of alignment.

But what does it mean for our faith to be in our hearts, and how do we get it from head to heart?

The “heart” is a biblical term for the center of our being, the place where our real identity and decision-making reside. When our mind and our passions align with our will, have internalized our values; we are “acting from the heart.”

But we know that it’s easy to go through the motions, to disengage internally so that our hearts are disconnected from our minds. We know truth that we don’t own, truth that hasn’t yet soaked in.

There are several ways that our faith can make its way into our hearts. Here are two:

1. Our faith moves from our head to our heart by rehearsal.

This is what our spiritual forebears understood in the days before writing and books hijacked learning. I know, that sounds harsh, especially coming from a booklover like me. But as inefficient as it might seem from our perspective (especially in the digital age), the ancients’ oral culture had some huge advantages. They learned not by reading but by memorizing and reciting. Hebrew schoolboys were expected to commit the entire Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) to memory. Hebrew scholars could cite specific phrases from the Scriptures by memory, without the aid of books or devices.

Our ancient forebears knew God’s promise to Joshua: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it” Josh 1:8). They knew the great Psalm 119, that monumental celebration (176 verses!) of the beauty and value of Scripture; the word “heart” appears fifteen times in that psalm. Centuries before print and digital resources made it possible to personally possess the Scripture, the psalmist understood how to hide God’s Word in his heart, to cherish it and feed on it in his mind. This constant hearing and reciting of Scripture meant that God’s Word could find its way from their heads to their hearts.

It was by no means certain that the men who memorized Scripture had a heart for God: Jesus’ most implacable enemies were the scribes and Pharisees, men who knew the Scripture inside out. But the negative example of the scribes and Pharisees doesn’t give us an excuse jump to the convenient conclusion that committing God’s Word is fruitless. Especially in our distracted age, filling our minds with God’s Word is one of the best ways to move His truth from our heads to our hearts.

2. But there is another means God sometimes uses to move His truth from our heads to our hearts.

I was talking with a young man about this question of how God moves His truth into our hearts. I asked him what his experience had been, and his answer surprised me. He told me that God had used suffering to imbed His truth in his heart.

That was a wise answer. God sometimes must use suffering to disturb our complacency. Suffering has a way of prompting us to reevaluate our assumptions about ourselves, about our priorities, about the work of God in our lives. Suffering often has a clarifying effect on us.

Anyone who has walked with God for a long time can point to a time when God used suffering to do something in his life that could be done no other way, and when we see in retrospect how deeply we benefited from our troubles, we can even be thankful for our sorrows.

This means that when we are in the testing fire, one way we can pray is to ask God to make clear to us what He wants to teach us through it, knowing (as the old saying goes) that when God has His people in the furnace, He keeps His eye on the clock and His hand on the thermostat: He never leaves us in the fire longer than need be, and He uses only as much difficulty as is necessary to accomplish His wise and good purposes for our lives.

You can see that there is no simple or easy path from head to heart.

Rehearsal requires discipline and perseverance through tedium; suffering calls for courage and a deepening trust in God in the midst of suffering. Of the two, of course, we would choose rehearsal over suffering, and it may well be that the more we employ the former, the less we’ll need the latter.

The good news is that God will not be satisfied to leave us where we are. His Spirit is constantly about the task of our sanctification. This is His project, and He has promised that He will carry it through to completion: “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6).

Until that Day comes, let’s persevere in making real what we already know.

It's odd, sometimes, where a new thought can strike you.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee, is not the place where you would expect to have an epiphany, but I noticed something there once while I was eating lunch at a restaurant on a balcony overlooking the street.

The city of Gatlinburg is a thriving combination of free enterprise and hillbilly chic - a city built on the notion that people will drive for hours to spend lots of money for Elvis memorabilia, a glimpse at the famous Batmobile of the 1960s TV series, a dazzling collection of holographs, Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not displays, a miniature golf-course with “fifty live bunnies running loose on the course,” video arcades, air-brush T-shirts, and Smoky Mountain bric-a-brac shops by the dozen. The atmosphere of the city’s main drag is so carnival-like that an ordinary drugstore in the middle of town seems like a relic from another time and place.

I was eating lunch on a balcony overlooking the busy main street of the little city. From my perch above the sidewalk, the thronging avenue seemed even more bizarre, with pedestrians streaming down both sides of the street, all looking for the next attraction to absorb their attention.

As my gaze wandered over the sight, I was startled to notice a cemetery on a grassy hill behind the row of shops across the street. Invisible to everyone below me, the sunny little graveyard stood silent vigil over the shoppers, waiting patiently for each in his turn to leave the busy avenue and return to the dust.

The two images were a study in jarring contrast.

The quiet, grassy hillside with its little headstones served as an understated reminder of our common, inevitable destiny, while the street below thronged with life, enthusiasm, and imagination. Somehow, the sight of the graveyard gave a sense of ludicrous irrelevance to all of the activity below.

I did not come away from that experience with the sense that the Gatlinburg experiences of our lives are somehow immoral or even that they are wasteful and frivolous.

But I did decide that whatever I do in Gatlinburg ought to make sense not just from where I stand now, here on the street, but also from the long view from the hill as well.

The Gatlinburg cemetery was a warning against short-sightedness.

In Jesus’ parable, the rich farmer is condemned not because he had a bumper crop and built new barns, but because he was so very short-sighted. “Thou fool, this day shall thy soul be required of thee.” In all his calculations, the wealthy landowner failed to take into account his own mortality. His viewpoint was limited to his immediate prospects, and he did not notice the yawning mouth of the grave beneath his next step.

It is, of course, equally short-sighted to live in the graveyard.

We have all contemplated how we might spend this day if it were our last on earth, but we know we cannot really spend each day in such a mindset (perpetually saying farewell to loved ones, never going to school or to work). Our dilemma is that we must invest our mound of minutes simultaneously as if each were the final moment (because it well could be) but also as if we had thousands of moments left in our lives (because we probably do).
Our assignment is to occupy each moment so that if our Summons should come, we might lay down our work or our play and turn to meet our Maker without regret.

God give us wisdom to remember the view from the hill even while we walk the streets.

Persevere.

I had an epiphany recently.

I am Moses.

Not the Moses parting the Red Sea.

Not the Moses facing down the power of Egypt, smiting the Nile so that it turns to blood. Not the Moses calling down the hordes of locusts.

No, I am the Moses balking at his calling, filled with misgivings and overflowing with excuses, pretty sure I’m not up to the task.

I think Charlton (Heston) and Cecil (B DeMille) have done us a disservice, portraying Moses as the bold and unflinching leader of his people. DeMille’s much-awarded 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, portrays a showdown between two powerful personalities, Charlton’s Moses and Yul Brynner’s Pharaoh. There was a lot of machismo, both men glaring at each other, neither willing to back down.

But the picture we get of Moses in Scripture is not so intrepid.
 
And it’s not just at the burning bush but throughout the rest of his story: Scripture shows us a picture of Moses as frustrated and anxious, often stretched to the breaking point.

I could never be Charlton Heston’s version of Moses. For one thing, I don’t have that jaw line. Or his cheekbones.

More importantly, I don’t have that swagger or that molten intensity.

The Moses that resonates with me is the one we see in Scripture, the man who knew he was in over his head and found it so often necessary to cry out to God for His help.

So I have a new mantra: “I am Moses.”

Am I feeling overwhelmed because I don’t have the wisdom to address the complex needs of ministry in our rapidly changing culture?

No worries. I am Moses.

He didn’t have what it takes, either, and he knew it. And that awareness drove him to his knees before God.

Do I feel that no amount of experience will ever gain for me the competence and confidence I see in others?

This is not a problem because I am Moses.

There is an old saying that Moses spent forty years thinking he was somebody, forty years realizing he was a nobody, and forty years seeing what God could do with a nobody.

Like Moses, my confidence doesn’t lie in my abilities, nor in my intentions, not even in my potential. My confidence is anchored in the One who called me and has promised to go with me.

When I am overwhelmed (and I often am), I remind myself that I am Moses.

Persevere.

Discipleship Weekly will take a break next week.

It was the probing question God asked Moses at the burning bush. And it is the question each of us must answer in our own dealings with God and His people.

Moses was eighty years old when God called him from that burning bush. It started out well enough; God told Moses that He had heard the cries of His people in bondage in Egypt, where the entire nation had been enslaved. God said that He was going to deliver His people from their slavery in Egypt and take them to the Land He had promised to their fathers.

This all sounded good to Moses, until God told him how He would deliver His people.

“Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10).

Then Moses protests.

And he whines.

For several paragraphs Moses tries to get away from God’s call on his life. Moses has good reason to doubt that God could use him. He’s knows that he has a checkered past: First a prince and then a fugitive of Egypt and now, an eighty-year-old shepherd, Moses has every reason to believe that his useful days are behind him.

Finally, God asks him the defining question, the same question He’s asking each of us: “The Lord said to him, ‘What is that in your hand?’” (Exodus 4:2).

What Moses has in his hand is his staff. He has no idea why that was significant. He has no idea that God will use that staff to perform miracles in Pharaoh’s court to astound the Egyptians. He has no idea God would use his long-honed skills as a shepherd to spend the next forty years herding the people of God toward that Promised Land. He has no idea that God has been preparing him for this moment for the first eighty years of his life.

That is the question each of us must hear from God: “What is that in your hand?”

What gifts and skills and passions has God invested in you? How have your background and experience equipped you to serve God and His people and the people around you? There is not just one answer to that question; there are many answers for all of us. And if we want to answer God’s question, we need to give it careful thought. Until we’ve listened to the question, reflected on it, and answered it, we will struggle finding a sense of purpose.

We suffer from tunnel-vision in this matter. We imagine that God can use only a narrow range of gifts and talents. If we can’t sing or teach or lead from the front, we assume that we can’t be of much use to God. That’s because we are so aware of the gifts of the people who are in front, we don’t see how much work goes on behind the scenes.

God has gifted His people to serve in a marvelous variety of ways.

• I’m a good listener. I can hear not just what people are saying but also what they mean. I’m good at reading people and reading between the lines of what they are saying to get at the heart of their real concerns. I’m naturally empathetic and feel other people’s pain.
• I’m good with my hands. If it’s broken, I can usually figure out a way to repair it. And I love working with my hands. And I love to help people by using those gifts. 
• I’m a good organizer and planner. I can foresee details and implications that don’t occur to most people until it’s too late. And I love organizing and arranging and tidying up. I love to help people with this sort of thing.

You get the idea. It’s not just the up-front talent that is useful to God. God gives gifted people to His church to serve His people. And the variety of those gifts is nothing short of astonishing. Moses had every reason to suppose that his useful days were behind him because of his age and his dubious legal status. But all along God was using all of that to prepare his man for the task.

There’s great joy in discovering the natural and spiritual gifts God has given you and employing them in His service.

But there’s another question that we must all answer together: What gifts and passions and skills do we possess as a body to serve and bless our community?

Patterson Park Church is a group of gifted, skilled, highly competent people who have a lot to offer. While we use those gifts to serve one another, we also must consider how we can use our gifts to serve the people around us.

If we were only to begin with our local partners, we would find many opportunities to help serve our community. Below are listed some of the local ministries PPC supports. Many of our people are already involved in serving in these ministries.

Click on a link to find out how you can use your gifts to serve. Just in this short list, you can find ways to

• befriend lonely international students (International Friendships)
• help tell children about Jesus (Child Evangelism Fellowship)
• minister to homeless people and people with substance-abuse problems (Gospel Mission, One Bistro, and the Life Enrichment Center)
• provide support and encouragement to women in crisis pregnancies so that they can find viable alternatives to abortion (Miami Valley Women’s Center)
• work with athletes (Athletes in Action)

This is just a start. There are other local ministries that our people are already involved in.

So this is the question each of us must ask ourselves and all of us must ask ourselves together: What is in our hand?

What background, experiences, skills, and talents has God entrusted to us to serve one another and serve our neighbors?

Let’s give that question careful thought.

Let’s discern what is in our hand.

And let’s get to work.

Next time: another meditation on Moses: “I Am Moses: How Charlton and Cecil Have Misled Us”

If you want to learn more about your unique spiritual gifting, you can take an online spiritual gift survey to discover more about what gifts are in your hand.

When we read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, we forget the lengthy timespans that are involved. We see the highlights, those moments when God moves to change the trajectory of events, but we don’t see the long periods in between those moments.

We see God promise old man Abraham that he and his elderly wife Sarah will bear a son. It was ten years before that promise was fulfilled (during which Abraham and Sarah concocted their own plan to help God).

We see Joseph thrown into prison on false charges. There he interprets the dreams of two other prisoners. Joseph knows that one of them will soon be released and asks that he will mention him to the pharaoh (Gen 40:14-15). That prisoner is released, but he forgets to say anything about Joseph.

Then the next chapter begins with the words “two years later” (Gen 41:1). Those were surely long years for Joseph.

And when the seventy members of Jacob’s clan make their way down to Egypt, they have no way of knowing that it would be four centuries before their descendants are able to return to the Land promised to their fathers!

And through it all, God is playing the long game. He doesn’t lose the thread of the narrative; He is patiently working out His plans over lifetimes, generations, centuries, millennia.

Our task is to find our role in God’s grand storyline and play it well. As I heard it said once: “You can be the main character in your own little story, or you can play your role in God’s Grand Story.”

I think there are three things we need to remember as we discover and play our part in God’s Grand Narrative:

1. I don’t need to know the Big Picture to be obedient in the moment.

“The World’s Last Night,” CS Lewis’ essay on the Second Coming, speaks to the importance of playing our role, despite our ignorance: “We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows…. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely.”

In the swirling vortex of our cultural moment, it is easy for me to lose track of this singular constant: God has called me to be obedient, regardless of how it will make me look, regardless of the result, regardless of my feelings in the moment.

I must obey regardless of whether I understand why I must obey.

2. God will provide all the resources I need to play my role, but He won’t provide resources for me to play someone else’s role.

Someone once observed that God will be sure to equip His people for the tasks He lays out for them: “Where He guides, He provides.” If God has called me to a work, He will ensure that I have what I need to accomplish that work: the gifts, the connections, the finances, the support. But if I veer out of my lane, taking on responsibilities that He has assigned to others, I cannot expect Him to supply the resources I need.

My task is to identify my role and to play it well. This means that I cannot let vanity and jealousy undermine my ministry motives. I may wish that God had equipped me with different gifts so that I could undertake different responsibilities, but I have no business second-guessing God’s ministry assignments.

3. I must not see setbacks as final.

Since God is playing the long game, and since He knows what He’s doing, I need not fear that a setback, no matter how catastrophic, is the end. He knew about all the pitfalls long before He sent me on mission. And His plan expertly weaves the setbacks into the grand tapestry that will turn out to be beautiful once it is finished.

Setbacks, then, are actually intriguing: how has God planned to use this discouraging moment to accomplish His wise and good purposes? This catastrophe didn’t take Him by surprise, and He will still have His way, regardless of how it looks in the moment. In fact, if I could see the entire plan from beginning to end, I would enthusiastically endorse this turn of events as the best possible path toward achieving His goals.

I don’t know where you are in your own role in God’s Story.

You may be in one of the long lulls where it seems He has lost track of your whereabouts and He isn’t listening to your prayers.

Or you may be in the middle of a crisis where you wonder how God could possibly be involved in the middle of such heartache.

Regardless of your situation, remember Whom you serve: the Eternal, the Great I Am, the one for whom a thousand years are like a day. Regardless of your feelings right now, remember that you are destined for glory, you are moving toward a day when you see all God’s enemies vanquished, when He makes all things right.

In the meantime, He is using your present moment – with its tedium, its heartache, its uncertainty – to move you and your work toward a glorious finale.

So you can play your role with confidence, not in yourself but in the wisdom of the One who called you, the One who wrote the ideal script for your role, the One who has prepared you to play it well.

Persevere.

In a recent post I introduced two vital questions that function as the operating system of Christian life and thought. It is as we contemplate these two questions that we grow in our understanding of who Jesus is and what God has given us in Christ.

Those two underlying and inter-related matters inform every other concern in our spiritual lives. Growing in our faith means growing in our understanding of these two questions:

1. What does the Gospel mean?

2. What does the Gospel call for us to do?

The Gospel is the Good News about what Christ has done on our behalf: Jesus invaded human history, lived and taught about the Kingdom, died in our place, rose again, and will return. It is good news – very good news, in fact – that the Gospel is about what Christ has already done, not about what I’m supposed to do.

In a recent post we explored what the Gospel means for us. What the Gospel means in the life of this believer is that I am an adopted child of God and other believers are my spiritual siblings. The Gospel means that God is constantly working to make right what is wrong in my character. The Gospel means that someday God will make all things right not only my life but also in our life together and the even in the natural order.

I want to think now about what the Gospel calls us to do.
 
When I put my faith in Jesus to save me, I also follow Christ as Lord. He said so himself when He asked this very reasonable question: “Why do you call me ‘Lord’ when you don’t do what I say?” (Luke 6:46). We must never overlook the fact that the Gospel carries with it a set of built-in expectations of an adopted son or daughter in the household of God.

So what then does the Gospel call us to do? Let’s start with the obvious one, something that Jesus reiterated even in His model prayer:

1. The Gospel calls me to forgive my offender.

If I am a Christ-follower, I cannot look at forgiveness as some kind of optional extra credit for high achievers. Forgiving others is a nonnegotiable ethical implication of the Gospel.

It was the only part of His model prayer that Jesus felt He needed to emphasize. You remember Jesus’s startling words: “…forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors…. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:12, 14-15).

Forgiving people who offend me is part and parcel of receiving God’s forgiveness. I simply don’t have the option of receiving the grace of God with one open hand and refusing to extend grace to my offender with the other closed fist.

Please don’t misunderstand. This is not about the distortions that are often confused with forgiveness: acting as if nothing had happened or unconditionally restoring trust and affection. Forgiveness has a more modest ambition, though it is still difficult. Forgiveness is about letting go of my right to retaliate, it is about not wishing ill on those who have hurt me.

Sometimes relationships are broken so deeply that reconciliation is actually impossible. But if I am a Christ-follower, forgiveness on my part is nonnegotiable.

The Gospel means that I, the offender, stand forgiven before God, so it calls me to forgive my own offenders.

2. The Gospel calls me to persevere.

If I am a Christ-follower, if I have embraced the Gospel, it is always too soon to give up.
 
The Gospel isn’t just about what Christ has done in the past (dying for my sins and rising again), it’s also about what God is doing in Christ now and in the future. What God is doing now in Christ is just as important as what He has already done: He is gathering a people for Himself, the great multitude John saw in his vision surrounding the throne and singing their praises.

Here’s how John describes that glorious moment:

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.’” (Rev 7:9-12, ESV).

The Good News, the Gospel, is that in Christ, God is building His people toward that future.

In fact, it is the future-orientation of the Gospel that makes it so compelling. Jesus didn’t die merely to restore the status quo. God has promised to make all things new, and Jesus’s death on my behalf means that I don’t get left out of that cosmic renewal of all things. God’s Spirit is constantly about the task of remaking me from the inside, preparing me be a glad participant in that joyous multitude that John saw.

This means that it’s always too soon to give up on myself, notwithstanding my three-steps-forward-two-steps-back progress in becoming like Jesus. And it’s always too soon to give up on what God is doing in someone else’s life, no matter how long and deep his or her struggle and rebellion.

I think this is one of the main things God wants us to get from the biblical accounts of His working with His people – with Abraham, with Moses, with David, with the Jewish people: God is always patiently playing the long game. The Gospel both means that I can and requires that I must put my trust in God, even when the present situation is seemingly beyond hope.

3. The Gospel calls me to give up my old schemes for managing my sin and guilt.
 
Before Jesus saved me, I used a wide variety of methods to manage my sin: I rationalized, I compared, I shifted blame. And my personal favorite: I minimized (I never actually “lied,” though I was occasionally guilty of using a “terminological inexactitude.”)

But the Gospel means that I don’t need to do that anymore. Because of Jesus, I can confess my sin to God and to others whom I have offended. In fact, the Gospel doesn’t just make it possible for me to deal with my sin differently; it requires that I deal with my sin differently.

When I resort to those old techniques of sin management, I am living as if I were still a fearful slave to sin. The Gospel requires that I abandon all those old ways and bring my sins and failures to my Father, trusting in His abiding and steadfast love.

The Good News about Jesus carries with it implications about the way I live my life.
 
The Gospel is the Good News that God redeems me out of slavery to sin and makes me His adopted child. My new status in the household of God brings with it not only privileges but also expectations. I am no longer a slave. Now I begin learning how to act like a child of the King.

But there’s even more good news: the Gospel also means that God’s Spirit is at work in my heart making it easier for me to behave like His child. I am thankful not only for what the Good News about Jesus means but also for the new kind of life He is shaping in me: forgiving as I’ve been forgiven, persevering even when I’m discouraged, bringing my failures to Him instead of hiding them.

Some years ago our elders were dealing with a painful, delicate situation. As I thought about the dilemma we were facing as brothers in Christ and leaders of our fellowship, I realized there were two questions that ought to be at the forefront of our considerations:

1. What does the Gospel mean in this situation?

2. What does the Gospel call for us to do in this situation?

I’ve been thinking about those two questions since then, and I’m beginning to realize that these two questions serve as the “operating system” for the thought life of a growing Christ-follower. The core of Christian faith and practice, the rumination that runs in the background of a healthy Christian spirituality, is the life-long process of understanding these two questions and slowly discovering the implications that they bring with them.

The Gospel is the glorious Good News about who Jesus is and what He has done for us.

Jesus is God’s Son who invaded human history, lived and taught about the Kingdom, died in the place of us sinners, rose from the dead, and is coming again. It is that Good News that casts a bright shadow over everything we think about and everything we do in the Christian life. Everything we think about springs from that Good News, and everything we do is in response to that Good News.

For the Apostle Paul, the Gospel was the explosion that turned his life upside down. So it should come as no surprise that these two questions about the Gospel frame all of Paul’s epistles. He usually devotes the first part of his letters to the first question, “What does the Gospel mean?”

In the opening chapters of his letters, Paul usually explores the vast and astonishing implications of the Gospel for the way we think; the way we make sense of life; the way we understand who God is, who Jesus is, what God has given us in Christ, and who we are in Christ.

It is only after he has laid that groundwork – after he has explored the joyous implications of the Gospel – that Paul turns to ethical exhortations. There’s usually a turning point in Paul’s letters where he says something like this: “In light of what God has given us in Christ, here’s how we ought to respond.”

So I’ve been thinking this week about what that first question means, what a Gospel-focus means in various situations. It has been a fruitful exercise to consider, for instance…

1. What does the Gospel mean when believers are in conflict with one another?

The Gospel means that my conflict with another brother or sister in Christ is a conflict between adopted siblings who will live in the Kingdom together forever. It means that the brother or sister whose behavior is outrageously offensive to me is someone for whom Christ died, someone whose grievous sins God has forgiven, someone God loves more than any other dad could ever love his kids.

The Gospel means that I simply don’t have the option of letting unresolved conflict become the toxic weed of bitterness in my heart, contaminating my relationship with someone whom God so loves, someone for whom Christ suffered so greatly and so willingly.

2. What does the Gospel mean when catastrophe turns life upside down and hope seems to be lost?

The Gospel means that God is always at work, even in the darkest and most bewildering situation. I’ve long believed that we must discipline ourselves to contemplate questions about suffering in the shadow of the Cross, in that moment when all hope was lost and Jesus the Messiah was dead, the apparent victim of Jewish betrayal and Roman brutality. If God’s plan to bless the world included that unspeakable tragedy, I must not think the tragedy I’m facing is outside His control and plan. He’s at work even in this, and He knows what He’s doing.

The Gospel also means that this is not all there is. Jesus’s miracles during His time on earth and especially His resurrection from the dead all point to the Day when He will return and set all things right. The same Jesus who promised He would rise from the dead promised He would return; I must hold on to that promise.

It is when I am forgetful of all this, when I have lost my Gospel-focus, that I am tempted to despair, I am tempted to look at the world through dung-colored glasses.

Contemplating the significance of the Gospel is a deep well of life-changing implications.

It will take me literally the rest of my life to think this through. One of the wonders of the next life will be our becoming aware of the cascading implications of the Gospel as we see more clearly what God has given us in Christ.

Our homework, then, is to continue along these lines. There are plenty of other questions we can consider:

•What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean in the way I interact with people who don’t know Christ?

•What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean when I am deeply grieved over my own sin?

•What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean in the way I pray?

•What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean in the way I read the Bible?

•What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean when I feel lonely?

•What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean when my children rebel? When they suffer?

What other situations call for a Gospel-focus? What does the Gospel mean in those situations?

In a future post we’ll explore the other question: “What does the Gospel call us to do?”

Until then, persevere.

This is the sign I ask our eleven-year-old grandson to read aloud every time he comes to the house. “This is my Father’s world, and I am His beloved, so I don’t need to prove myself.” I want every clause of that long sentence to settle into his heart and his mind, I want that gravy to soak into the bread for him.

“This is my Father’s world.”

This is the opening line in the famous hymn. The opening stanza goes on to say what I want to happen in my grandson’s heart: “This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought.” I want him (and me, and my wife and our children, and our fellowship) not just to know that we walk about in our Father’s world but to find rest in that knowledge.

When world events seem to spin out of control, I can be tempted to forget that this is my Father’s world; I might wonder if the world belongs to the handful of powerful men and women who have their hands on the wheel, steering us toward disaster.

But then I remember: “This is my Father’s world.” Big sigh of relief.

“…and I am His beloved.”

I am the one in whom He takes such great delight. I love how the ancient Hebrew prophet Zephaniah puts it: “Yahweh your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zeph 3:17).

We’ve all been at the children’s choir concert where the anxious little one scans the audience looking for the familiar face of her parents and then her face beams with delight when she sees them. I can take great pleasure and find great security in the knowledge that the One who created this vast and wonderful world has a great fondness for me.

Because I am His beloved, nothing else can trouble me.

“…so I don’t need to prove myself.”

Because all of that is true, I can rest in the knowledge that I am not in a life-long audition to earn His approval. I am His beloved not because I’ve behaved myself, not even because my intentions are good; in fact, not for anything I’ve done or intended to do. When He looks at me, He sees not my sin and guilt but the perfect righteousness of His Son, in whom He is “well pleased” (as He said Himself more than once).

Knowing I don’t need to prove myself takes the pressure off. I don’t need to worry about what others think of me, nor do I need to worry about what I think of myself. He delights in me, so everything else is details.

My grandson reads the words on the sign with all the thoughtfulness and enthusiasm that all boys his age read words aloud: not much. But I tell him that some day these words will explode in his heart, and he’ll never be able to see himself or our world or his Father the same way.

“This is my Father’s world, and I am His beloved, so I don’t need to prove myself.”

Let us persevere in saying and believing that.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Over the past week, my wife and I had some time away. The cabin where we stayed is like a time capsule from the 1990s. There is no cell service there, and there is no wi-fi. This means long, quiet hours to fill without distraction. Of course we watched DVDs, but we also assembled a jigsaw puzzle, a devilishly difficult Noah’s Ark puzzle.

I was behind the door when they were handing out whatever skill is needed for working jigsaw puzzles. I can spend an hour laboring over the pieces and come away with only two connections. It is frustrating and tedious work, leading me to a kind of despair.

As I examined a particular piece, I even wondered if it belonged in this puzzle at all. I couldn’t see how it fit into the design. My wife, whom God has blessed with abundant puzzle-solving skills, explained that you must examine the entire picture to find where a particular piece fits in. The better you understand that big picture, the easier it is to envision where each piece belongs.

We all have those moments when we’re holding a piece of the puzzle – a setback or complication or even a tragedy – and we cannot imagine how such a thing could fit into God’s wise and good plan for our welfare and His glory. What’s different in the life of faith is we cannot envision the big picture; we don’t have a clear idea what the overall pattern will look like when all is complete.

But what we do know is that there is a Pattern, and it is exquisite, and that we will be not just satisfied but also delighted when we can see it in its completion. We know that all the pieces are necessary, even the apparently ugly and perplexing ones. We know also that there are no missing pieces.

There is a turning point in jigsaw puzzles, when the puzzle is almost complete and you realize that all you need to do is find places for the final few pieces. In the same way, the longer we walk with God, the more we can see the Pattern emerge. At the end of his long ordeal, Joseph was able to tell his brothers that even their treachery fit into a pattern for good, what they “intended for evil, God intended for good, the saving of many lives” (Gen 50:20).

You may be holding a puzzle piece that perplexes you right now, but don’t despair. Your Father knows exactly what He’s doing. All the pieces – even the dark and confusing ones – will fit together into a glorious Design that will give you great satisfaction and give the Designer great glory.

Persevere.
Paul Pyle

Photo by Anne Spratt on Unsplash

For many people, the Christmas season evokes warm memories of family and tradition. Even people who are hard and cynical sometimes become soft and tender at the thought of fond Christmas memories. Christmas traditions invite us to go back to the wonder of childhood, and we revel in those memories.

But not all people feel this way about Christmas.

For some people, the Christmas season brings back sharp and painful memories. For them, even the thought of carols and the feasts and time with loved ones opens up old wounds. They may not say it out loud because they don’t want to spoil the mood for everyone else, but it’s “Bah, humbug!” under their breath. Their pain is too deep.

For others, Christmas is bittersweet. Along with the warm and cheerful sentiments of the season, Christmas is also a painful reminder of loved ones who are gone from this world and will never again be part of those warm family scenes. And for those people, especially soon after they are bereaved, it is inconceivable that they could ever reconstitute the joy they once knew at Christmas.

But what if Christmas isn’t about nostalgia after all?

What if there’s something in the story of the birth of the Christ Child that is richer and deeper than our splendid traditions? When Paul wrote to the church in Philippi about the coming of Christ, he didn’t speak in nostalgic and sentimental terms. He struck a stirring, triumphant note, singing not only about Christ’s first coming as a baby but also about the Good News of His ultimate victory and glory:

Though he was in the form of God,

he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,

but he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant,

being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to the point of death,

even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him

and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

(from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi)

Scholars think that his soaring rhetoric in his letter was a well-known Christian hymn. When he quotes these lovely words about Christ’s humility in becoming a man and submitting himself to death, and when he trumpets the news of His glorious triumph over death in his Resurrection from the dead, Paul is singing!

In God’s invasion of human history, Paul wants us to see not just His gracious humility but also His glorious triumph over the powers of death and hell. In other words, the Good News we celebrate at Christmas is not that we will overcome because of our virtue. It’s not even about how we will triumph because of our good intentions.

The Good News is not about our victory at all; it is about how Jesus has already won the victory.

His triumph over the power of sin and death is Good News that makes the birth of our Savior a cause for celebration, even when we are in pain, even when we are sad, even when we fail. We can celebrate because we know that in our long battle with sin and death, the outcome is no longer in question.

Because the King has triumphed, we can persevere.

(There will be no Discipleship Weekly post for the next two weeks. Have a blessed Christmas.)

Image by Freepik

I love Christmas music. As far as I’m concerned, Christmas music is some of the most beautiful music we hear all year, and I want to enjoy it as much and as soon as it is seemly.

Which means – you guessed it – we are one of those families. The rule in our house is that we begin listening to Christmas music as soon as the World Series is over. Yes, that’s right. That means that sometimes we begin listening to Christmas music before Halloween. The moment the final out is recorded in the last game, we dig out the old Christmas CDs and plunge back into the world of shepherds, angels, wise men, and the Baby with Mary and Joseph.

I have long believed that these gorgeous carols are not just lovely and nostalgic, they are also a rich source of good theology. I love the carols of Christmas. But I noticed something about the carols.
 
Sometimes Christmas carols make me sad.

Not the Christmas songs that have nothing to do with Christmas or Jesus. I don’t mind the light and fun-loving side of Christmas, “Winter Wonderland” and “Jingle Bells” and even “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.” Sure, it’s sad that those popular songs miss the point altogether. I’m talking about another, deeper kind of sadness. I’m talking about the fact that for millions of people, hearing Christmas carols is as close to the Gospel as they’ll ever get. It is sad beyond telling that people think that because they get misty-eyed singing “Silent Night,” they’re good with God.

I remember seeing a video of a “Hallelujah Chorus” flash-mob at a major shopping mall in Philadelphia. (You can see the video here, or do a YouTube search for “Macy's Hallelujah Chorus Philadelphia”). Unbeknownst to the throngs of shoppers, hundreds of trained vocalists had infiltrated the vast floor in the middle of the mall. The shoppers heard the opening notes of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” and they were suddenly transfixed as they found themselves in the middle of a performance of Handel’s masterpiece.

No one was prepared for this. Everyone stopped what they were doing to take it all in. Phones came out to record the moment, people sang along. As the last notes echoed in the vast space, you could hear thunderous applause and cheering. It was a magical moment.

But I cannot watch that video and see that moment without great sorrow. How many of those people actually knew and loved and worshiped the God about whom they sang, the “King of kings and Lord of lords” who would “reign for ever and ever”? How many of them would someday face God and realize, too late, that they never knew God and now would face Him as Judge, utterly without hope?

For most people – including many of the people we know and love – the Christmas carols are as close as they will ever come to actually knowing and loving Jesus.
 
What an unspeakable tragedy if year after year they should come so close to hearing the Good News of what God has given us in Christ and yet never actually hear the Gospel!

This season, when you hear the carols, press past the nostalgia so you can pray for your friends, neighbors, and loved ones who don’t know Jesus. Pray that God will break through the haze of nostalgia to speak by His Spirit to their hearts, that He will awaken a desire that sentiment and tradition cannot satisfy.

And look for opportunities to talk about Christmas with your friends who don’t know Jesus. It could be that this Christmas season might be the beginning of their own spiritual awakening. And God could use you to open that conversation in their lives.

Persevere.

Photo by Quan Jing on Unsplash

I was cleaning up some spilled oatmeal in the microwave oven the other day, and I had an epiphany. I know, not exactly a burning bush locale, but that’s where it happened.

As I was cleaning up the oatmeal that spilled over when I made my breakfast, I decided just to go all out and clean the entire inside of the oven. It was a small task, but I knew that it would encourage my wife.

I’m a natural-born people-pleaser, so I must admit that my motives were mixed. As I wiped down the inside of the oven, I knew that my wife would probably notice that the microwave was clean and that she would probably thank me for that small gesture. She would like it that I cleaned the microwave and would say thanks, and I would like it that she said thanks. Win-win.

It made me think about how, in a chicken-and-egg sort of way, this is the way a lot of thriving human relationships work. The giving and receiving of kind words and deeds creates a sort of healthy momentum: the kind word responds to the kind deed, which prompts the next kind word, and so on, back and forth. But as I wiped down the oven, I thought about how this isn’t the way things work in our relationship with God, even though we sometimes imagine that it does.

That momentum of reciprocating kindness that is so healthy in human relationships is toxic in our relationship with God.
 
Why? Because He is not just another human; He is the Holy One of Israel, and it is a fool’s errand to try to gain His approval by our good deeds, to imagine that we could be in the kind of relationship with God that is defined by the exchanging of favors. If God already sees me through the lens of the righteousness of His Son, there’s nothing I can do to make Him love me more… or make Him love me less.

Just think of it: can I, by my obedience and sacrifice, hope to create a better impression on God than His Son has already done in dying for my sins and making me right with Him? Of course not!

Jesus has already put me in a better position with God than I could ever hope to be by my own efforts.
 
God the Father, who looked on as His Son was baptized, pronounced His verdict: “This is My Beloved Son. In him am I well pleased.” As uncomfortable as it makes me to say it, that is precisely what God sees when he looks at me. He doesn’t see my self-righteousness, my sloth, my self-absorption, my lust, my vanity. What He sees when He looks at me is the zeal, selflessness, purity, and humility of His Son; somehow, astonishingly, because of Jesus, the Holy One of Israel is well-pleased with what He sees in me!

I grew up thinking that I was saved by grace, but also that I had to maintain my salvation by my works. I even remember hearing the doctrine of eternal salvation being explained in what I now see as a caricature: “’Once saved, always saved’ means that once you’re saved, you can live however you want.” I knew that wasn’t true, so I threw out the baby with the bathwater and assumed that my salvation somehow depends on my continued good performance.

But it occurred to me the other day that the misrepresentation I had heard was partly true. Jesus’s death and resurrection have ensured that my position as God’s child will never change. It’s just that now that I am a new creature in Christ, my desires have begun to shift. Of course I still have the same old desires and temptations to sin, but now that I belong to Jesus, now that the Spirit has undertaken His gracious, patient sanctifying work, it is literally inconceivable that I could ever be comfortable living in rebellion against my Father.

But if my behavior can’t change my standing before God, why should I bother with good works?
 
Why bother with helping my neighbor or being generous with a suffering brother or telling the truth even when it hurts? After all, God’s opinion of me won’t change regardless of whether I’m helpful or disengaged, whether I’m generous or stingy with my time and resources, whether I’m honest or shady. He still sees the sterling righteousness of Jesus in me no matter how I behave.

Why bother with good works? Surely not to impress God, not to create a good impression on the Almighty, surely not to somehow put Him in my debt.

No, my highest motivation for doing what is good and right is just to say thanks. Standing in the grace that God has shown me in Christ, I can’t reciprocate in kind, I can’t give back to God in proportion to what He has given me.

But I can express my profound gratitude. I can begin now, in this life, to do what I will do forever in eternity: living a life of holy gratitude.

We “exchange” gifts at Christmas, but with what God has given us in Christ, there is no “exchanging” gifts with God, no way to return to Him anything like what He has so graciously given us.
 
We are the rebels invited to sit at the King’s table and enjoy His hospitality. Our part is only to receive and be grateful. Because of the Gospel, because of what God has given me in Christ, I am free to lay aside my schemes for earning His approval, and I can respond to Him freely, out of a heart of gratitude, no longer out of guilt.

This is why the Gospel, the story of God’s gift of His Son, is such very good news.

May the High King of Heaven bless you and yours this Christmas as we remember once again how He changed the trajectory of history – the history of the world, the history of our families, our own personal histories – in the birth of that peasant woman’s first son in Bethlehem.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash

It’s funny how epiphanies can come at the oddest moments, and it’s funny how sensory impressions of the moment can be so distinct decades later. I can still remember it as if it had happened yesterday, even though it happened in a previous century: I was in Dayton, driving south on Wilmington Pike, when it suddenly dawned on me that having grown up in church, learning about the Resurrection of Jesus, trusting Him as my Savior, and being reassured that when this life was over I would be with Him – with all that drummed into me from a young age, I don’t have the same fear of death that hangs over most people.

For people who have no hope in Christ, death’s terrible power lies in the two unanswerable questions it thrusts upon us. These are death’s two fangs.

1. Will there be any life after I draw my last breath? For most in the secularized West, this is not a question: it is an accepted fact that no human consciousness continues after death. All I have to look forward to is the cold, black nothingness of non-existence.

But if there is continued consciousness after death, the second question can be even more terrifying:

2. Will I face any kind of accountability for the way I’ve lived my life? I want to believe that I live in a morally oriented universe where good and evil are significant categories, with real consequences. If there are no meaningful moral categories, human trafficking and working to feed the hungry are morally equivalent actions. This cannot be.

But if I must give an account for my moral actions, how will I be evaluated? Do I have any hope for a good result from that examination?

You can see why I call these questions death’s “two fangs.” The Scripture declares that the answer to both questions is “yes.” Yes, there is something after death, and yes, I must give an account for my life (Heb 9:27). But the Gospel is Good News because of how Jesus has broken both fangs.

In His death, Jesus has broken one of death’s fangs, my fear of shame at my judgment.

His death assures me that when I face accountability for the way I’ve lived my life (and I will), He will be there, His arm around my shoulder. He will declare that He has taken responsibility for all my lust and vanity, my greed and sloth.

His suffering paid the steep price for my sin, and for each of my transgressions, the Firstborn, my dear Brother, will say, “Yes, I paid for that as well.” I love how the hymn puts it: “Mine, mine was the transgression, but Thine the deadly pain.”

In His resurrection, Jesus has broken death’s other fang, the frightening prospect of extinction.
 
He blazed the trail through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He went down and into and through the darkness, and He came out on the other side. The glory of His resurrection assures me not just of existence but also of flourishing after I leave this body behind.

This does not mean that Christians have no fear of death. Of course we fear death. For each of us, death will be an altogether new and terrifying experience, much like passage through the birth canal must be for the baby!

Nor does it mean that we don’t grieve when our loved one passes from this life to the next. Of course we grieve. We must adjust to the sad new reality of the rest of this life without someone who was precious to us.

But this does mean that death’s two fangs – our fear of shame and our terror at the prospect of extinction – both of death’s fangs have been broken by the death and resurrection of our Lord.
 
This is why Paul closes his magnificent discussion of the resurrection of believers on this triumphant note:

Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (1 Cor 15:54-58)

The Apostle was right: Since we know that death’s power has been broken, we must persevere.

Viktor Frankl, 1945

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who famously observed that a man can endure almost any “what” so long as there was a “why.” Frankl was right. As he observed in the Nazi death camps, people ask a lot of questions when their world is crumbling around them. Most of those questions are variations on the themes of “Why?”

It is natural for us to want to connect the dots when we’re in pain. We want to understand why our circumstances have devolved to the point of collapse. We don’t want to think that we live in a cold and pitiless universe where nothing matters and nothing makes sense.

It is good that our suffering presses us to consider these questions.

When we are sailing along blissfully, we aren’t inclined to think deeply about anything. Our problem comes when – like Job, like Naomi and Ruth – we cannot connect the dots. No matter how deeply we think about it, no matter how we approach the question, we cannot arrive at a reason. And then we understand Frankl’s dictum: when we cannot understand why, we are tempted to give up.

But if the Book of Ruth says anything about suffering, it tells us that even when we cannot understand the “why,” there is an answer to our questions. In the story of Ruth, the answer to the question of suffering was not to be found in an explanation but in a person. Naomi and Ruth are never given an explanation for their profound and confounding suffering. But they are given Boaz, their kinsman-redeemer who rescues them from poverty and social shame.

In Boaz we have a lovely picture of our own Kinsman-Redeemer, the Lord Jesus, who gave up His life to rescue us from our own self-induced poverty and shame. Just as Boaz’s first meeting with Ruth pointed forward to a time when she would be fully incorporated into Israel’s covenant community, so Christ’s arrival in our lives is the beginning of our adoption into His family and our ultimate home in Shalom.

Should we ask questions when we find ourselves in distress?
 
Of course we should. We are humans, after all. We are rational creatures for whom it is as natural to wonder as it is for dogs to bark. Our wondering is inevitable, but it will take us astray if it does not take us in the direction of our Creator and King.

Our wondering why may take the form of railing against the Almighty (as Job does, as the psalmists often do), and that is appropriate. But we will find the deepest answers to the question of suffering when we contemplate that question in the shadow of the Cross, where we see God’s gracious provision of our Kinsman-Redeemer, where our “why” resolves in the “who.”

Persevere.
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship

Last week we considered two vital questions that function as the operating system of Christian life and thought. It is as we contemplate these two questions that we grow in our understanding of who Jesus is and what God has given us in Christ.

Those two underlying and inter-related matters inform every other concern in our spiritual lives. Growing in our faith means growing in our understanding of these two questions:

1. What does the Gospel mean?
2. What does the Gospel call for us to do?

The Gospel is the Good News about what Christ has done on our behalf: Jesus invaded human history, lived and taught about the Kingdom, died in our place, rose again, and will return. It is good news – very good news, in fact – that the Gospel is about what Christ has already done, not about what I’m supposed to do.

Last week we explored what the Gospel means for us. What the Gospel means in the life of this believer is that I am an adopted child of God and other believers are my spiritual siblings. The Gospel means that God is constantly working to make right what is wrong in my character. The Gospel means that someday God will make all things right not only in my life but also in our life together and even in the natural order.

Let us think now about what the Gospel calls for us to do.
 
We cannot escape the fact that following Jesus means more than rescue. When I put my faith in Jesus to save me, I also follow Christ as Lord. He said so himself when he asked this very reasonable question: “Why do you call me ‘Lord’ when you don’t do what I say?” (Luke 6:46).

Learning to obey Jesus is a life-long pursuit, and fortunately God’s Spirit is a patient and persistent Teacher. But we must never overlook the fact that the Gospel carries with it a set of built-in expectations of an adopted son or daughter in the household of God.

So what then does the Gospel call for us to do?

1. Let’s start with the obvious one, something that Jesus reiterated even in his model prayer: the Gospel requires that I forgive my offender. If I am a Christ-follower, I cannot look at forgiveness as some kind of optional extra credit for high achievers. Forgiving others is a nonnegotiable ethical implication of the Gospel.

It was the only part of his model prayer that Jesus felt he needed to emphasize. You remember Jesus’s startling words: “…forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors…. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:12, 14-15).

Forgiving people who offend me is part and parcel of receiving God’s forgiveness. I simply don’t have the option of receiving the grace of God with one open hand and refusing to extend grace to my offender with the other closed fist.

Please don’t misunderstand. This is not about the exaggerated distortions that are often confused with forgiveness: acting as if nothing had happened or unconditionally restoring trust and affection. Forgiveness has a more modest ambition, though it is still difficult: forgiveness is about letting go of my right to retaliate, it is about not wishing ill on those who have hurt me.

Sometimes relationships are broken so deeply that reconciliation is impossible. But if I am a Christ-follower, forgiveness on my part is nonnegotiable.

The Gospel means that I, the offender, stand forgiven before God, so it calls for me to forgive before my own offenders.

2. The Gospel calls for me to persevere.

If I am a Christ-follower, if I have embraced the Gospel, it is always too soon to give up.
The Gospel isn’t just about what Christ has done in the past (dying for my sins and rising again), it’s also about what God is doing in Christ now and in the future. What God is doing now in Christ is just as important as what he has already done: He is gathering a people for Himself, the great multitude John saw in his vision surrounding the throne and singing their praises.

The Good News, the Gospel, is that in Christ, God is building His people toward that future. In fact, it is the future-orientation of the Gospel that makes it so compelling. Jesus didn’t die merely to restore the status quo. God has promised to make all things new, and Jesus’s death on my behalf means that I don’t get left out of that cosmic renewal of all things, including my own wicked heart.

This means that it’s always too soon to give up on myself, notwithstanding my three-steps-forward-two-steps-back progress in becoming like Jesus. And it’s always too soon to give up on what God is doing in someone else’s life, no matter how long and deep his or her struggle and rebellion.

You get the picture.
 
The Good News about what Jesus has done for me carries with it implications about the way I live my life. The Gospel is the Good News that God loves me just as I am. He plucks me out of slavery to sin and makes me His adopted child. My new status in the household of God brings with it not only privileges but also expectations. I am no longer a slave. Now I begin learning how to act like a child of the King, a member of His family.

But there’s more good news: the Gospel also means that God’s Spirit is at work in our hearts making it easier for us to behave like His children. Let us persevere as He shapes in us a new kind of life: forgiving as we’ve been forgiven, persevering even when we’re discouraged, bringing our failures to Him instead of hiding them, and loving and caring for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship

Some years ago, our elders were dealing with a painful, delicate situation. As I thought about the dilemma we were facing as brothers in Christ and leaders of our fellowship, I realized there were two questions at the forefront of our considerations:

1. What does the Gospel mean in this situation?

2. What does the Gospel call for us to do in this situation?

I’ve been thinking about those two questions since then, and I’m beginning to realize that these two questions serve as the “operating system” for the thought life of a growing Christ-follower. The core of Christian faith and practice, the rumination that runs in the background of a healthy Christian spirituality, is the life-long process of understanding these two questions and slowly discovering the implications that they bring with them.

The Gospel is the glorious Good News about what God has given us in Christ.

Jesus is God’s Son who invaded human history, lived and taught about the Kingdom, died in the place of us sinners, rose from the dead, and is coming again. It is that Good News that casts a bright shadow over everything we think about and everything we do in the Christian life. Everything we think about springs from that Good News, and everything we do is in response to that Good News.

For the Apostle Paul, the Gospel was the explosion that turned his life upside down. So it should come as no surprise that these two questions about the Gospel frame all of Paul’s epistles. He always – always, not just usually – devotes the first part of his letters to the first question, “What does the Gospel mean?” In the opening chapters of his letters, Paul always explores the vast and astonishing implications of the Gospel for the way we think; the way we make sense of life; the way we understand who God is, who Jesus is, what God has given us in Christ, and who we are in Christ.

It is only after he has laid that groundwork – after he has explored the joyous implications of the Gospel – that Paul turns to ethical exhortations. There’s always a turning point in Paul’s letters where he says something like this: “In light of what God has given us in Christ, here’s how we ought to respond.” So I’ve been thinking about what a Gospel-focus means in various situations. It has been a fruitful exercise to consider:

1. What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean when believers are in conflict with one another?

The Gospel means that my conflict with another brother or sister in Christ is a conflict between adopted siblings who will live in the Kingdom together forever. It means that the brother or sister whose behavior is outrageously offensive to me is someone for whom Christ died, someone whose grievous sins God has forgiven, someone God loves more than any other dad could ever love his kids.

The Gospel means that I simply don’t have the option of letting unresolved conflict become the toxic weed of bitterness in my heart, contaminating my relationship with someone whom God so loves, someone for whom Christ suffered so greatly and so willingly.

2. What does the Gospel (Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and imminent return) mean when catastrophe turns life upside down and hope seems to be lost?

The Gospel means that God is always at work, even in the darkest and most bewildering situation. I’ve long believed that we must discipline ourselves to contemplate questions about suffering in the shadow of the Cross, in that moment when all hope was lost and Jesus the Messiah was dead, the apparent victim of Jewish betrayal and Roman brutality. If God’s plan to bless the world included that unspeakable tragedy, I must not think the tragedy I’m facing is outside His control and plan. He’s at work even in this heartache, and He knows what He’s doing.

The Gospel also means that this is not all there is. Jesus’s miracles during His time on earth and especially His resurrection from the dead all point to the Day when He will return and set all things right. The same Jesus who promised He would rise from the dead promised He would return; I’ve got to hold on to that promise.

It is when I am forgetful of all this, when I have lost my Gospel-focus, that I am tempted to despair, I am tempted to look at the world through dung-colored glasses.

Contemplating the significance of the Gospel is a deep well of life-changing implications.
 
It will take me literally the rest of my life to think this through. And I believe that one of the wonders of the next life will be our becoming aware of the cascading implications of the Gospel as we see more clearly what God has given us in Christ.

There are plenty of other questions we can consider, and it will take us the rest of our lives to think through them:

• What does the Gospel mean in the way I interact with people who don’t know Christ?
• What does the Gospel mean when I am deeply grieved over my own sin?
• What does the Gospel mean in the way I pray?
• What does the Gospel mean in the way I read the Bible?
• What does the Gospel mean when I feel lonely?
• What does the Gospel mean when my children rebel? When they suffer?

What other situations call for a Gospel-focus? What does the Gospel mean in those situations?

In a future post we’ll explore the other question: “What does the Gospel call for us to do?” Until then, persevere.


Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship

Image by freepik

A few years ago, before one of our monthly pastors luncheons, we were told that we would be discussing our prayer lives. That didn’t sound like much fun, so I wrote to Joel, my friend who was organizing the meeting, “Sorry I won’t make it this month. I’ve got another lunch appointment. Besides, talking about my prayer life will only make me feel guilty.”

It was true that I had a schedule conflict. But it wasn’t true that I was sorry that I had a schedule conflict. I was relieved.

Prayer has never been easy for me. I have known for a long time that it is far easier for me to spend an hour in Bible study than it is to spend fifteen minutes in prayer. Why is prayer so hard for me? There are several reasons, of course:

1. Prayer is hard because I feel I’m doing nothing.
 
Prayer is waiting on God, not doing something for God, and that makes prayer seem inefficient. I’ve heard it called “ROI,” return on investment, thinking about time spent in prayer in terms that would resonate with an efficiency expert.

Now that I put it into words, it seems almost blasphemous to suggest that in praying I might be wasting precious time. Still, when I pray there is that nagging sense that I could be doing something more productive.

2. Prayer is hard because my mind wanders so much.

I’ve heard it called “prayer ADHD.” And it’s a real thing, at least for me. Staying focused while I pray is hard work, something I’ve never done well.

This mental meandering contributes to my frustration that I could be doing something more useful (see #1 above).

But the biggest reason prayer is so difficult for me is about my character:

3. Prayer is hard because I am arrogant.
 
When I strip away the self-justifying excuses, I see the real reason prayer is hard: I somehow imagine that I don’t really need to pray, as if prayer is some kind of take-it-or-leave-it extra credit assignment.

But this, of course, is far from the truth.

Whenever Moses faced a crisis, he was down on his face seeking God. Crisis after crisis drove Moses to prayer.

When Nehemiah heard that Jerusalem was in ruins, his countenance fell. When his boss (the king of Persia) noticed his downcast expression and asked what was wrong, Nehemiah had the presence of mind to pray before he answered.

And even Jesus, God in human flesh, committed time to prayer. Once, after a busy day of ministry, Jesus rose the next day before dawn to meet with the Father in prayer.

He prayed all night before naming the Twelve.

And he prayed with such passion in Gethsemane that he sweat droplets of blood.

Moses needed to pray, Nehemiah needed to pray, even Jesus needed to pray. So who do I think I am that I don’t need to pray?

THE REALLY GOOD NEWS ABOUT MY PRAYER LIFE

My friend Joel helped me see that this is another place where I must “preach the gospel to myself.” The Gospel – the good news about Jesus – isn’t about what I have done or what I should do. The Gospel is about what Christ has done for me, what He continues to do on my behalf.

Joel helped me view my struggles with prayer through the lens of the Gospel. He responded graciously to my confession that prayer is hard by reminding me of two precious biblical truths: “Don't feel guilty,” he said. “Jesus is your Priest, and the Spirit prays for you.”

This is good to know, and this is the Gospel I must preach to myself in my struggling prayer life: that Jesus my High Priest pleads before the Father for this workaholic, distracted, arrogant man (Heb 7:25), and the Spirit intercedes for me “with groanings too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).

Persevere.

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Hebrews 13:20-21

This lovely benediction, which closes the letter, speaks a word to us about the kind of God who bids us draw near:

1. When He should have been the God of our destruction, He is the “God of peace.” Notwithstanding our rebellion, His intentions toward us are kind, desiring not our demise but our restoration.
2. He has acted decisively in Christ, giving up His Son to “make worshipers out of rebels” (can’t remember where I first heard that lovely line). Christ is the Good Shepherd who gave His life to save His flock.
3. His intention is not just to rescue us but to set us on a new course of service, so that we, the redeemed ones, may be occupied with doing what pleases Him.

Our rebellion against Him wasn’t mere naughtiness; it was an act of violence against His kindness and generosity. In response, He not only withheld the wrath we have earned, but He has also shown an astonishing kindness we never could earn.

Eternity will not be long enough for us to thank Him.

Persevere
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship

I have never been a big fan of systematic theology. Unlike some friends of mine – men whom I admire, brothers who love to read theological literature – my eyes glaze over when I try to read theology. For me, reading theology is like reading spreadsheets. It all blurs together.

Some people are actually disdainful about doctrine. “Doctrine divides,” they complain. “Why can’t we all just love Jesus?” But doctrine matters precisely because it drills down on essential questions like who Jesus is and why we should love him.

Doctrine is about the bedrock issues of our how we perceive and interpret what we see and experience.
 
Doctrine matters because of how important these key truths are.

This is why we need to have a firm grasp on what we believe. Fuzzy thinking about money or time management has consequences. Procrastination will almost always create problems. Always having “too much month at the end of my money” can bring about real difficulties. But fuzzy thinking about doctrine is a matter of spiritual life and death.

This is why Paul says that helping God’s people grow theologically is one of the primary responsibilities of Christian leaders. He uses a terrifying word picture – babies floundering in the water – to describe what happens when we get stuck in spiritual immaturity because we don’t have a good grasp on doctrine:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Eph 4:11-14, ESV

We cannot afford to be careless in our thinking about God, about our own nature, about our sin, about Jesus, about the Bible. If our doctrine is shaped by the culture or our own life circumstances or (worse yet) social media, we will find ourselves vulnerable to deception and error.

Doctrine operates beneath the surface.

Doctrines are articulated as statements, but they usually operate as unconscious assumptions. They function like an operating system in a computer, always running in the background, controlling the way we think and react. The way we think about these key ideas isn’t usually intentional; we don’t consciously rehearse our views on these matters every day. But we operate on those assumptions all the time.

-- We assume that God is real, actually interested in our well-being, a wise and generous Father; or we assume that He is remote and disinterested.

-- We assume that people are basically good and well-intentioned; or we assume that people are inwardly corrupt and self-serving.

-- We assume that the life of Jesus was the fulcrum on which human history turned and that he’s coming again to make all things right; or we assume that he was only a kind and good teacher, one of the great moralists of history, who showed us how to live more ethically.

This is why we read Scripture, and we sometimes refer to the creeds in our sermons, because we are forgetful. In a culture that always ignores sound doctrine and sometimes attacks it, it is far too easy to give head space to faulty assumptions about God, ourselves, Jesus, the Bible. So, we need to remind ourselves frequently of these key truths, these bedrock doctrines.

Why the asterisk?

Some of you caught the asterisk in the title, after the phrase “why doctrine matters,” and you are wondering what it means. The asterisk is there because of the sad fact that it is possible to be an expert in sound doctrine that doesn’t actually matter.

For doctrine to matter in my life, it must penetrate my heart, it must have an impact on my character and my priorities, particularly on the way I treat people. If I have all the key doctrines locked down but I am arrogant and impatient, my doctrine is no more significant than, as Paul describes it, “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor 13:1).

Social media is full of arrogant, impatient doctrine warriors pounding their gongs and clanging their cymbals, filling the web with their vitriol and taking perverse pleasure in their devastating critiques on the doctrines of other believers. If my doctrine doesn’t make me humble and compassionate, either my doctrine isn’t actually Christian, or I don’t really understand Christian doctrine.

So, yes, doctrine does matter because I need to have a good grasp on what I believe. And because I am forgetful, I need to often remind myself and be reminded of key truths about God, my own heart, Jesus, the Bible.

Someday, in the next life, when we have reached our glorified state, we will see all things clearly, and all the key truths that we have in doctrine will be obvious and self-evident. But for now, we need to remind ourselves, to remember the doctrines, so we don’t forget.


Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship

Image by giselaatje from Pixabay

Back when I taught in a Christian high school, there was a question that puzzled me then and has continued to puzzle me for years. What does spiritual maturity look like in an adolescent? After all, a teen is likely to be immature in nearly every aspect of life. Is it even possible for an emotionally immature person to be spiritually mature?

There was a time when I thought we could discern a teen’s spiritual maturity by the way they talk about their spiritual life, but I have since discarded that metric. We can’t discern a young person’s spiritual maturity by their spiritual talk. They may well be sincere, but they might only be parroting spiritual sentiments they had heard from adults, expressing truths they can’t yet understand.

I was talking to a friend recently about this question. She suggested self-reflection as a measure of spiritual maturity. She was right in one regard: a spiritually mature person should certainly be capable of self-reflection and self-critique. But I pushed back at her definition: the capacity for self-reflection is the mark of an emotionally mature person, but there are many emotionally mature people who have no interest in Jesus. In fact, such a person might have special difficulty responding to the call of the Gospel. Such a well-adjusted person may think of himself as a good person in no need of a Savior.

As I thought about it, I realized that my friend’s suggestion had helped sharpen my question, and it pointed me to the answer I had been looking for.

Emotional maturity shares many characteristics with spiritual maturity: as a person matures spiritually, he or she will grow in self-reflection, empathy, and other traits of emotional maturity, but these are not the only – and certainly not the essential – marks of spiritual maturity.

Spiritual maturity is a deepening love for and trust in Jesus.
 
Can an emotionally immature person be spiritually mature?

Yes. In fact, we all have a friend or family member whose love for God and love for people is radiantly attractive, but he or she is emotionally immature. Because of that combination of emotional immaturity and spiritual maturity, that friend is both exasperating and endearing. With such a person, the indicators of emotional maturity are noticeably absent: there isn’t much self-awareness or self-control or social skill. But to be around him or her is to be in the presence of deep and godly joy and great delight. Anyone who spends any time with such a person will know instantly that he or she loves Jesus and loves people.

You would hope that over time your friend will grow in emotional maturity, that he or she will become more reliable, exercise better self-control, be more aware of the perspectives of others, be more self-reflective. But you also know that your emotionally immature friend is spiritually advanced: he or she trusts and loves Jesus implicitly. Maybe your emotionally immature friend is onto something that we all need to understand: It is love – love for God, love for other people – that is the one essential trait. Everything else is details.

Understanding this distinction between emotional maturity and spiritual maturity is rewriting the playbook for me as a pastor and as a father and grandfather.
 
Our fellowship serves families of children with special needs. As I’ve been thinking about this question, some of those brothers and sisters with special needs have come to mind. What if God has placed them among us to remind us of what is most important? What if their deep, instinctive love for Jesus and their love for others is a reminder that all our other skills are of secondary importance?

As I pray for my adult children, their spouses, and their families, my prayers have begun to focus on this singular matter: that they love and trust Jesus more deeply. Of course I care about their marriages, their parenting, their finances, their physical well-being; but all those are secondary concerns. Regardless of how they are doing in every other respect, what matter most is their interior life with God.
My prayer – for myself, for our four adult children and their spouses and children, for our fellowship – is that our love for Jesus and our trust in Him would grow ever deeper.
Persevere.

Let brotherly love continue.
 
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. 

Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.
 
Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. 

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?” Hebrews 13:1-6

It is typical for New Testament epistles to close with various moral exhortations. In this text the Epistle to the Hebrews touches on five areas, all clustered around the matter of our affections:

• Love for others in the fellowship
• Love for others outside the fellowship
• Love for those in the fellowship who are suffering
• Sexual love in marriage
• Love of money

Someone once observed that if we can get our affections properly aligned, we need not worry about our behavior. That probably over-simplifies, but it’s true that if I love God with all my heart and love my neighbor as I love myself, I can go out and do as I please, because I will always want to honor God and care for my neighbor. This also means that when I am inclined to defy God, it is because my love for Him wanes; and when I want to do ill to my neighbor, it is because my love for my neighbor wanes.

The last exhortation deals with contentment, which is also about my affections: contentment isn’t having what I love but loving what I have.

O Lord, order my affections aright, and so bring honor to Your Name and good to my neighbor!


Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship

I study the Scripture by copying a short text, studying it, then reflecting on it in a journal.

This is the journal entry I used in my recent sermon.

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.”

This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. Hebrews 12:25-29

These words close the main body of the letter. They remind the readers of the contrast between the temporal systems they inhabit and the eternal Kingdom to which they belong.
The world we live in now is akilter; we know enough about Shalom (the rightness of things) and get enough glimpses of Shalom to know two facts:

• This is not as it should be.
• This is not all there is.

 
  
Jesus’ miracles were not just publicity stunts.

He was pointing forward to a time when all that is corrupt and dying would be (to use the words of the text) “shaken,” and only the unshakeable Kingdom would be left standing. In that Kingdom, there is no more illness or corruption or injustice. All will be finally and eternally Shalom.

For our part, for now, we push back against the infecting evil of the current age, knowing that we cannot vanquish it but knowing also that it will not always remain.

The King is coming. As surely as He rose in triumph over the powers of sin and death at His first coming, He will utterly destroy them at His Second Coming.

Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Persevere
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship