Archives For grace

For the Weary Christian

June 3, 2013

It’s been a few months of feeling discouraged and one of the effects of that is I simply don’t want to write for you. I don’t want to write at all, but I especially don’t want to write for you. I don’t want to be found out, so to speak. I don’t want the world to know my first love feels likes seconds and my *gospel wakefulness feels tired. I don’t want you to know I’ve been struggling with condemnation, fear, insecurity, uncertainty, and weariness. I am ashamed of those feelings—especially because I know they are anti-gospel and they are born in me as a result of not reveling in Godward affections.

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Tonight I was remembering some of the things that set my soul free a few years ago. Not the sermons or books specifically, but the realizations:

1. I am the younger brother AND the older brother. I hate restrictions and I love approval, I hate poverty and love lavish attention.

2. God is not more or less interested in me because of my legalism or licentiousness: His provision is the same for both.

3. The gospel doesn’t only carry the power to save me, but also sanctify and sustain me.

4. I cannot put God in my debt by being good, holy, or faithful enough.

5. All my righteous acts are like filthy rags.

6. God is not beholden to my view of Him. My concept of good is not His definition of good. My ideal of His faithfulness is not His attribute of faithfulness.

7. Man’s approval is impossible to attain. God’s approval is completely wrapped up in His Son.

8. God is not surprised by my lack of faith or my abundance of faith, by my questions or my fears, by my pride or my sin. On the threshold of His kingdom He will not deny access to me because I didn’t understand an aspect of theology or walk in complete faith in certain areas.

9. The Holy Spirit is not tapping His toe waiting for my faith to be big enough or my ear to be tuned. He dwells in me, empowering me to accomplish everything God has ordained for me to accomplish with every gift He formed me to have before the foundation of the world.

10. God is for my joy. He is most glorified when I am most satisfied in Him. My complete confidence and joy in the Holy Spirit, through the finished work of the Son, to the honor of the Father, brings the triune God glory.

It was encouraging for me to simply write these things out, and so I thought I’d share them with you. Perhaps you’re struggling too, or perhaps you’ve never experienced gospel wakefulness, and these points will help you along that way. Either way, I hope you’re encouraged. Also, I suggest you take a few minutes to write out what the gospel means to you, or has shown you. Even just to remind truths or clarify errors in your thinking.

*Gospel Wakefulness is not my term, but Jared Wilson’s . Jared wrote a book by the same title, but he has also written extensively on it on his blog Gospel Driven Church. Jared is one of the most Godward gazing people I know. His blog has been a constant source of encouragement in the past few years and I recommend every one of his books with full assurance you will be encouraged. Seriously, buy his books. All of ‘em.

In abiding, balance, faith, fear, gospel, grace, gratitude, identity, joy, life
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Reflections on a Year of Accidental Seminary

May 31, 2013

We just completed the pilot year of a hybrid-seminary-discipleship-program at my church. We were the guinea pigs—emphasis on the guinea because nothing makes you feel smaller than subsisting on an average of five hours of sleep a night for ten months while simultaneously realizing you are just not as smart as you think you are.

Aside from reading and homework assignments, inclusion in this program required we:

Be covenant members at our church
Be serving in lay or official ministry at our church
Not show up even a minute late to classes each day (This one had consequences with embarrassing results—so much for sola gratia here…)

Going into the program I thought:

Getting up at 4:30am won’t be that bad, plus it’ll train me to wake up that early every morning: think of what I could do with an extra three hours awake on my off days!?

This much Bible reading will be the most concerted effort I’ll have ever made to read straight through scripture. That can’t be a bad thing.

Studying some key books inductively sounds on one hand exhausting (won’t we get tired of the same book?) and on the other hand thrilling (18 weeks in the book of Romans? Yes, please.).

On this side of the program, here are some reflections:

My enthusiasm for rising early waned quickly because I am a morning person. However, my morning-person mornings break with sunshine, yes? Lacking sunshine I am apparently not a morning person. I desperately missed regular mornings at home, reading quietly over my morning coffee.

At the beginning of the program we were encouraged to read devotionally (the Bible as well as supplemental texts) instead of academically. However, the volume of required reading was so far out of my normal reading style, that I struggled to read it devotionally at all. I had to change the way I read, which wasn’t a bad thing, and it helped me step back from the texts to see a more holistic picture.

I need sleep. I tried to do everything I normally do, plus this program (including the extra commute it added to my day), and do it on minimal sleep. I hit March and realized I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that I was doing too much, it was that I was doing it on not enough sleep. My relationships have suffered, my work suffered, my writing projects suffered, and my soul suffered under the guilt of what I wasn’t able to do. Looking back, it would have been worth it for me to move closer to my church for this year simply to save on the amount of driving I had to do in the morning.

One section of the program required the students to teach through the book of Psalms. Rising early on those mornings was pure joy. To hear my fellow students wrestle with a text, the Lord, and their testimony every morning was a recipe for worship. We couldn’t help but worship.

The most healing section of the program for me was studying the book of Acts inductively. I have a lot of baggage from that book and going through it start to finish was so completely complete. We studied it historically, geographically, theologically, and spiritually. It’s a beautiful book.

The most challenging section of the program for me personally were theology classes. Every week I learned of more misconceptions and errors in my thinking and understanding of theology. This was challenging and relieving. We’re all theologians, but we don’t all have good theology.

The most rewarding aspect of the program was the opportunity to walk alongside about 30 other individuals (most of whom I knew or knew of already) who deeply loved Jesus, His Church, and His word. These were people who were chosen to pilot the program, who would give their all, and who were actively serving others. Coming together each morning and just extolling the name of Jesus together, shouldering burdens with one another, praying for one another, laughing, questioning, and wrestling with texts, theology, verbiage, and life together was a deep blessing for me personally. I don’t know that there will be another opportunity in my life to walk alongside men and women of such caliber so closely for ten months.

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As we finished our last class the other day, reflecting on what went well and offering feedback for future years of the program, I couldn’t help but just reflect on what the Lord has done in my life in ten years. Ten years ago I participated in a similar program (though less rigorous) at my church in New York. It was the first real discipleship I’d ever experienced and the men who taught those classes shaped so much of my formative thinking in regard to theology and the word of God. Walking through this experience, ten years later, lent such perspective to what the Lord has done in me in a decade. He has been good to me. 

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In abiding, discipline, grace, life, reading, spiritual growth, theology, Uncategorized
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Perfect Provision, Perfect Protection

April 29, 2013

No one has to be convinced that something went wrong somewhere in the bodies and beauty department. Stand in a grocery aisle and figure out how to beat those pesky inches, woo your disinterested man, and find more perfect clothes for perfect bodies.

Something has gone wrong. So where?

It was at a tree. A food laden tree. Something good, beautiful, and delectable gone horribly wrong.

(Will Deutsch)

It began at the beginning of beginnings, Genesis, where food was made, food was eaten, and where all of our food issues began.

Strange, isn’t it, that one of our principles struggles is still there? With food?

We starve from it, binge on it, measure it out, disgust ourselves with it, pride ourselves on it, obsess over recipes, and TIVO our favorite cooking shows. Rarely do we see food as the perfect provision and perfect protection that it was designed to be. Provided for our health; protection from death.

God created food: a perfect provision for His creation. Then He clearly defined it as right or wrong: a perfect protection for his children. He set up His boundaries, endlessly good ones that felt good too, until they bumped up against the one ‘don’t’ rule: don’t eat of this tree.

Yet this is the tree from which they ate. First the woman and then the man.

Ignoring the plenty and subversively skirting the mandate by a subtle legalism, “God says don’t eat of it AND don’t touch it,” she fell the boundaries that God so lovingly placed on her and him and all of us.

Don’t we do this too? Don’t we see the plenty and choose instead the smaller portion, the lesser good? We add to the boundaries given. Sinking deeply into diets or delectable feasts, feeling helpless against the siren call that is food.

God calls out: Where are you? And we hide, behind exercise, behind enhancement, behind extra weight. We hide.

We hide because it is easier to hide than to be known. We’ve eaten off the tree of knowledge and now we think we know.

Yet still He seeks us. Pursues us. Finds us, shivering and scratching under the weight of man-made garments and expectations. I’m there. Are you too?

And all this because we added to what God said. He gave good boundaries and we made them smaller and tighter, thinking that more rules will keep us safer. God has said don’t eat of the fruit, but we think that it’s safer to just not touch it at all?

This is our great sin. This is our great fall. We add to what God has said and the boundaries become cages. We imagine He is a harsher God than He is.

We eat the fruit thinking it will make us like God and really all it does is make us into our own god. And we are powerless gods, always trying to find things to bulk us, beautify us, fix us.

All the while He is still giving perfect provision and perfect protection. The second time was in a much less beautiful environment. Dark, though midday, the place of the skull. A broken, bleeding, and bruised man. He is saying it is finished and we can hardly believe it is true.

So we are still adding to it. Principles. Practices. Helping God, we think, with clearer expectations on His people and on us. Don’t eat it, we say, or touch it. Or surely you will die.

The truth is that we are finished. Perfect in Christ’s eyes and through His provision. Nothing can be added or removed from you to make you more of who you’re intended to be in Christ.

He looks on you and sees clean, pure, perfect righteousness and beauty.

In abiding, balance, beauty, discipline, grace, identity, joy, life
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Did God Grow Tired?

March 25, 2013

We know Jacob, the one who wrestled with God, because flannel-graphs and coloring books told us the story of a man who went toe to toe, head over head with the Almighty. We know God wins, because God always wins, but it was Jacob who showed determination: I won’t let go until you bless me.

Would the Almighty have let go first if Jacob hadn’t said so?

I ask myself this often. How much does my determination result in what God considers a blessing?

I ask it that way on purpose because what I consider a blessing might not be what God considers a blessing.

God blessed him, yes. Changed his name, yes, but touched things that felt right, knocked them out of place so that they were right. And left him with a limp.

I wonder if this was the blessing Jacob thought he would get. I wonder if walking with a limp for the rest of his life was the sort of reward he wanted for pressing in, doing battle with God.

Here’s what I pause on this morning: When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.

Did God grow tired? Did He sigh in frustration as He finally did the only thing He could do to make the man stop? I worry about that. I worry that God grows tired of me. That He is tired of my pestering, my asking. That He wearies of me when I am driving, walking, laying, talking, and there are prayers punctuating my breathing “Help me. Don’t leave me. Show me.” I worry that God will knock something out of joint, leave me with a limp. I worry that the tightrope I am trying to walk, careful, measured steps that guard me from being ungrateful or a badgering witness, I worry that God will finally knock me off completely.

And I know He will not. I know He is Father and He is good, but it doesn’t stop the wrestling, or the worrying. Sometimes I wonder if the wrestle or the worry is in itself the limp with which I walk.

You and I and all of us, we walk with limps. Probably so accustomed to the limp that we barely recognize it anymore, it is the way we walk, slowly, painfully, determined, though seemingly normal, for us. But a limp is only proof that we have wrestled and He has won.

‘Tis all in vain to hold thy tongue,
Or touch the hollow of my thigh:
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go,
Till I thy name, thy nature know.

Charles Wesley

What limp are you walking with today? Is it an Ebenezer? Your “thus far?” Or do you feel debilitated by your limp?

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In abiding, glory, grace, seasons
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Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire?

March 20, 2013

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Before a polygraph can be performed, the test-giver asks a series of questions to which he knows the answers to ascertain a baseline. Therefore, when a lie is given, it’s clear because the needle spikes amidst the truth. Everyone has a different baseline, and some people can BS the lie detector, but it’s a rare one who can.

The reason I’m giving you a brief lesson in polygraphy is because what I see across the board in the blogosphere is a lot of people citing spikes as norms (on every side in every issue)—and it’s not helpful.

I think if we were to more often consider a holistic picture of any movement (political, spiritual, etc.) we would not only find a more holistic argument for their views—founded or not—and, which is more, we would find people. We would find individuals who care deeply about their issues and often times have deeply personal reasons for caring about them. I’m not arguing that every position should be considered viable, but every person ought to be considered, particularly by Christians, whose ministry is one of reconciliation—namely the reconciliation of man to God.

Recently I’ve been cited as being part of the Young Restless Reformed corner of the Church. True or not is beside the point (if you have a problem with that, reread the former paragraph). One common pushback on the YRR is that they only listen to like-minded individuals and only call out in public those who disagree. However, if you, like the polygraph giver, would observe the baseline truths of what God is doing there, you’d find they’re actively involved in calling out their own brothers and sisters where error occurs. I know my email inbox has been filled with an equal amount of caution and encouragement—and I’m fully prepared for more public responses as my readership grows.

A perfect example of good discourse on this currently is the current amiable conversation between Thabiti Anyabwile and Doug Wilson—on a very polarizing issue—on their blogs. It’s been a pleasure to watch a disagreement play out between brothers with good-will and gospel focus.

If you find yourself citing spikes and rushing to share the latest drama from any particular corner of the internet, a word of caution: establish a baseline first; find every reason to think the very best of individuals you’re planning on slandering or sharing information about, and then press near to the Holy Spirit for He ushers us into all truth (Jn. 14:26)

(This actually wasn’t written in response to the accusations leveled at me from the former post, just thoughts that have been rolling around in my noggin for a while.)

In balance, community, gospel, gospel in community, grace, theology, time, writing
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