2010 in Review: The Tireless Shepherd and His Tenacious Grace

Thy goodness has been with me during another year,

leading me though a twisting wilderness,

in retreat helping me to advance,

when beaten back making sure headway.

Thy goodness will be with me in the year ahead;

I hoist sail and draw up anchor, 

with thee as the blessed pilot of my future as of my past.

I bless thee that thou hast veiled my eyes to the waters ahead. 

If thou hast appointed storms of tribulation,

thou wilt be with me in them;

If I have to pass through tempests of persecution and temptation,

I shall not drown;

If I am to die,

I shall see thy face the sooner;

If a painful end is to be my lot,

grant me grace that my faith fail not;

If I am to be cast aside from the service I love,

I can make no stipulation;

Only glorify thyself in me whether in comfort or trial,

as a chosen vessel meet always for thy use.

[From The Valley of Vision, p. 111]

"The Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Exodus 34:14). Not jealous in any maligning way, but in the most perfectly loving way, as a father commands the exclusive respect and honor of his children, or as a husband pursues his wife in love. Yet very much unlike the fathers and husbands of sin-blighted flesh, God's motives are excellently pure. He pursues us and commands our love and obedience and honor righteously. (See more in Spurgeon's excellent 1863 sermon on the subject.)

More than ever before, this year I have experienced this jealousy of Jehovah. From the dreaming spires of an ancient university to the lazy seashore of San Diego and to the mighty Sierras and back again to this strange, offbeat New England home of mine, God has not ceased to pursue me valorously, faithfully. It's frightening and a great comfort all the same to know that there is no place where our God is not completely sovereign, no matter how removed a place seems from the reach of his hand. There is no place where he will not go to accomplish his will and gather up his sheep. He is the tireless shepherd.

The story begins exactly a year ago. When I left for England a few days after New Year's Day, I was still damp from baptism. In December I had been immersed in a pool to signify submission, to display outwardly an inward reality of having died and been raised up again with my Savior. It was an inspiring time, as it is for any baptizand.

I was praying hard and dangerously. After a semester that was less than academically stellar, for instance, I was asking God to reveal to me whether my aspirations to a career as an academic historian were really his will for me. Really, I wanted confirmation; I wanted God to say, Onward, my son! I wanted to hear that any confusions in me were to be disregarded, that of course I was on the right track. I wanted God to sign off on my report card with a half-hearted smile and a supportive-looking wink.

I prayed this for a month or more. The prayer changed over time, without my notice. I realized eventually that I had begun asking God to change my plans if they were not consistent with his will. This was altogether different from requesting a divine rubber-stamp on my status quo. I trembled.

He delivered. In both senses: he heard my prayers (not that I believed he wouldn't), and then delivered me from the plans I had for my life (this is the part I didn't expect--or desire for that matter). This is when the story begins to get really good.

"I want your mind for myself"; "I want you to be my servant"; "I want you to give me your life for my purposes." That's what God started saying to me. "I want you to commit yourself to making me known." Already anxious about a tough, incredibly stressful term in Oxford, these were startling and fearsome words.

But it resonated, too. It hit me on deep, secret planes, in parts of my soul where only God can reach me. "What does that mean exactly?" I asked. "Show me what that means."

Well, he did. At least he showed me what my next step ought to be: "Seminary," he intoned. "I want you to go to seminary." Now this was hard to swallow. Seminary? I pictured the guys I've known who go to seminary. They're hip, cool, strong, deep super-Christians (what does that mean anyway?). In short, they're not typically people like me. Sure, I shared some commonalities with (my perception of) them: the frequenting of Starbucks and other chain coffee joints, the wearing of dark-blue sweaters, the enjoyment of books. But these were all superficial.

"No," I replied to God. "Seminary is not for me. No thanks." My retort was less in the spirit of the question "Who does God think he is?" but rather "Who does God think I am?"

Well, the rest is his story, as they say. Over the course of a few months spent reading intensely in and meditating on his Word, sitting under the powerful preaching at St. Ebbe's Church, and praying for a taste for manna, my opinions were transformed. My heart was changed. It was not merely that I became more comfortable with the idea of committing my life to ministry, or that God was meticulously taking apart my previous identity and desires and plans and replacing them with his own--all of this happened, but it was much more than that.

Paul writes that we will "be transformed by the renewal of [our] mind" (Rom. 12:2). By the renewal of mind--why is that? Why is it the mind that has to be renewed? Why is it in the mind that our whole transformation begins? Why not "the renewal of heart" or "the renewal of soul" or "the renewal of love"? Well, I have no solution to the mystery. But I can say that it's true, that transformation does indeed begin when we submit to his purification and purging and strengthening of our minds. This is what was happening to me. I was feeling God's truth wash over me like a tide that erases the markings in the sand. And in the truth is the grace, is the mercy, is the Cross and the resurrection, the whole sweep of history, the whole plan of God in time, the record of God's trustworthiness toward his people. One can't help but be transformed by such visions.

I was. I am. And it was and is in the sharing of those visions with me that God has implanted and sustains in me a profound and resolute desire to see others be reconciled to him by his Son and edified by his Spirit, to see brothers and sisters glorify and enjoy God forever, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism so pleasantly puts it.

Meanwhile I was having a roller-coaster ride of a time in Oxford. My first term was terrible. I had one tutor, whom I've since named James the Terrible (the tenure of our tutorial gaining in my mental biography the appellation The Jacobean Terror), who was unbearably mean to me. He tried to make my life a living hell, and it worked. And to make matters worse I wasn't meeting any people, gaining no friends. I was going to church but was not involved at all. Misery.

The second term, after a break of several weeks in California, was vastly better. I'd resolved to pray weekly with a friend, join a Bible study at Ebbe's, and try to savor Oxford for what it was and stop complaining. All three, by grace, came to fruition. It was a marvelous two months. Plus, I had a great tutor whose real name I choose to remember her by because she did not merit any cruel renaming like James the Terrible did. Our tutorial focused on the English Reformation. Little did I know how useful that topic would soon be.

Leaving Oxford was not quite bittersweet--it was just plain bitter. I'd grown to enjoy living there and had made some good friends in the process. More exciting yet was the work God had been doing in me while there. He made use of my frailty in a foreign land to teach me life-changing spiritual lessons. Somehow I grew to connect inextricably that good growth and Oxford as a place, thinking it to be heaven on earth. Which I now see is deceptive, since God (and all his goodness and promises and love and power), as I was saying before, follows you wherever you go and does not let you go.

Well, I left Oxford and headed to the wild wild West. I spent the summer nomadically wandering between Phoenix, LA, Tehachapi, and San Diego--and, for a bit of a breather, up to San Francisco and Yosemite at one point. I have a hard time relaxing, and so the summer was tough. I had little to do. That is, little to do besides contemplating my senior year of college and whether I wanted to write a senior thesis.

That was a delightful enough task. Though early in the summer I had settled on one thesis topic, by the end I had chosen something vastly different. I had decided to study Jonathan Edwards, the great New England Puritan preacher and theologian of the 18th century. I had seen how soul-shakingly transformative a study of Edwards had been for my theological hero John Piper, so I imagined I too could and would reap rich rewards from it.

My inkling was right. After a fall semester spent reading widely and deeply about Edwards, and even having the chance to read Edwards himself, I must say, I'm so grateful to God for such a deep well to be drinking from. The next month I'll be working--at fever pitch--to finish a first draft. Next semester I have even more time away from classes to explore the topic and continue writing and editing and, if he wills it, finishing the thesis by April. This has surely been, alongside my call to ministry, one of the Lord's most glorious blessings to me this year.

And coming back to Amherst has been a joy. Though I miss, and probably always shall miss, Oxford, being among friends and my church family is irreplaceably, irrepressibly delightful.

Now I stand on the cusp of another year. I would be a fool to say what is in store as if I know for sure. But there are a few things worth highlighting:

1. I'm leading a weekly small group at my church which is taking us through the Gospel of Luke. This should be a good and fruitful challenge. I will need supernatural wisdom, strength, and insight.
2. As I mentioned already, I'm working to finish my thesis by April. This is a hefty task, and I will be in need of a great amount of grace. I'll also need strength to avoid being swept up in the vanity of year-end senior prizes for theses as well as of the inescapable doling out of Latin honors.
3. I graduate in May. I pray it goes well.
4. After a month spent on the West Coast in June to see two good friends marry (not each other), I'll be coming back to Amherst to live and work for the academic year before applying to seminaries next winter. I will need fortitude, foresight, commitment, and a good dose of reliance on the Lord. 

Jonathan Edwards has taught me to take the time on a regular basis to examine the heart and think back on God's providence and faithfulness and to prepare the heart for what is to come. Consider this my first weak attempt, Jonathan.

As AD 2011 overtakes this small, cold Friday night in this small, cold New England village, I thank and look to the loving Father whose joy is my only strength and know that as he is eternally satisfied I shall be kept eternally strong in him. Thank you, Lord, for your two gifts, my two Comforters, your Holy Son and your Holy Spirit. May I abide in your trinity, and may you abide in me. As Christ is my temple, may this sinful body be your holy dwelling-place and throne, the seat of your rule and reign of truth and grace. May my memory of 2010 be saturated with a supreme thankfulness in you, O Lord, thankful that you are wondrous and able to move mountains, for you have moved me, a mountain of stubbornness and pride, into joyful submission to you. You are the Almighty, the beginning and the end, the never-ending God. To your name be all the glory of this life. Amen.

When the River of Life Floods the Dry Plains of Distant Hearts

A year ago today, or some day immediately before or after this one (I can't quite remember the date), I was submerged in a pool of water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Immersion was the symbol of God's fullness and my wholeness, the sufficiency of Christ crucified and resurrected for me, a desperate sinner--a declaration of a sovereign God's work in me and of my faith response to it.

This morning my church family and I watched as seven spiritual siblings were in the same way ritually put to death and resurrected in a bath of (evidently fairly cold) water. It is a symbol well worth beholding regularly. Seeing the incredible vulnerability of the shivering dunked reminds us of how far we can wander from that reverence.

I had forgotten. I had been wandering. Last night the dams I'd built up to keep the Almighty at bay fell. They had to. It was inevitable. His grace burst through my weak palisades of sin and selfishness. I was overcome. I was overcome by power, by sovereignty, by a flood, by grace irresistible and true and good. My dry haven in the middle of the River of Life, my concocted valley of self, was inundated. I stood for a moment watching it all cave in and the mighty tempest loom above me. I thought to grab my belongings, like an earthquake drill.

But the Father beckoned me out, he grabbed me and plucked me from my flooding space. He took me in his arms. I was limp and weak and ashamed. But I was dry.

In this time of prayer, somewhere up against a tree in the middle of the frigid night, I felt the warmth and comfort and peace of God's Spirit renewing me, purifying, making way for the Lord. That flood was in my heart. That stronghold was there, constructed deep in my soul, a foothold for a rebel.

I soon saw--God revealed to me gently--that so much of the chaos and depression and darkness and sorrow I've been stuck in this season was a means of drawing me in, drawing me out, drawing me near to the Father. Numb and deaf and blind, but now I could see a precious part of the tapestry of his sovereign, eminently good will. The Lord my God loved me--loves me--so much that he has tugged at and pulled on and then torn down this pestilent stronghold, this preserve of sinful obstinacy. He traversed the distance I would not, just as he did in sending Christ to this world--that's what Advent and Christmas are all about!

Well, my Christmas was last night. The gift I opened was an irresistible grace. It was love packaged in a Savior, wrapped in sustaining sufficiency and overwhelming power, sacrifice and justice satisfied. Lord, you are God, you are Love eternal. I have peace, purpose, a promise sealed in the precious blood of Christ.

Jesus, Thy Visible Glory

I'm a walker. I do all my best thinking on the move, wandering down some brambly path in the crunchy autumn forest or in a pale meadow in the summertime. Today I had a few moments between commitments and took a quick walk around campus, taking advantage of the invigorating but thankfully rainless chill. Even in that tiny stroll the Holy Spirit moved in me and caused my work-tired mind and disharmonious heart to see and feel and know a profound reality that I don't think I'd ever really grasped before. Here's how it happened.

It came as I was wondering how I might respond to a question concerning what it means to glorify God in one's life. If a dear saint were to die tomorrow, and I was called upon to eulogize him or her, how would I go about judging whether that life that had just come to an end was a magnification of the Lord's majesty? I wanted to make sure I had gotten straight what that actually entailed.

Glory. Hm. What is God's glory? What's it about? Can we see it? I seemed to fixate on this last question.

So I began to reason. Well, no, of course we can't see his glory. We would be blinded! After all, no one has ever beheld God (1 John 4:12). That is certainly the case in Moses's encounter with God in prayer in Exodus 33:17-20. Pleading for knowledge and wisdom and for the presence of God himself as he leads Israel out of Sinai, Moses asks specifically if God might show him his glory. This elicits an interesting answer from the Lord: "I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name 'The Lord.'" Divine glory here seems to be linked to the fullness of God's goodness and the proclamation of his holy name.

Elsewhere his glory is described similarly though in various ways. In the introduction to Proverb 25, for instance, Solomon declares, "It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out." God's hiddenness might seem to be the focus here, yet I think probably the point is a little deeper: that God's divinity rests in his perfect and sovereign knowledge to which even the greatest among men will never have access, no matter their efforts.

At first, then, I came to a quick conclusion: No, we can't see God's glory. It is beyond us. It is dangerous and mighty. And yet in some ways we can indirectly experience it in God's supreme goodness and in the fame of his name.

But then I realized that while all of this might well be true, this is only a description of what we might call God's invisible glory. Was there by contrast any more visible glory?

Of course! It is Jesus Christ. After all, "he is the radiance of the glory of God" (Heb. 1:3)! In him we can see what we could not before. We can take part in who God is through him. He took on flesh, leaving the heights of heaven, to make manifest and evident to a distanced creation that the Lord God is God, to gather up his flock from among the nations. We have access to the treasures of heaven precisely because he descended to earth and died and was raised from death to set us free. Jesus fulfills all that the prophets foretold; he is that light that shines in the darkness and cannot be overcome (John 1:5). Jesus is God's visible glory.

When we behold the Messiah, we behold glory. When we reflect Christ, we reflect glory. We glorify, we bring glory to God, by surrendering to his supremacy and allowing our lives to be remade in the image of Jesus.

How do you know someone has lived to glorify his Maker? His life makes known the work and splendor and inestimable value of Christ crucified.

Anyway, I learn a lot when I wander. So I will never stop walking. And may they always be walks with Jesus.

O God of my delight,
Thy throne of grace is the pleasure ground of my soul.
Here I obtain mercy in time of need,
here see the smile of thy reconciled face,
here joy pleads the name of Jesus,
here I sharpen the sword of the Spirit,
anoint the shield of faith,
put on the helmet of salvation,
gather manna from thy Word,
am strengthened for each conflict,
nerved for the upward race,
empowered to conquer every foe;
Help me to come to Christ
as the fountain head of descending blessings,
as a wide open flood-gate of mercy.
I marvel at my insensate folly,
that with such enriching favours within my reach
I am slow to extend the hand to take them.
Have mercy upon my deadness for thy name's sake.
Quicken me, stir me, fill me with holy zeal.
Strengthen me that I may cling to thee and not let thee go.
May thy Spirit within me draw all blessings from thy hand.
When I advance not, I backslide.
Let me walk humbly because of good omitted and evil done.
Impress on my mind the shortness of time,
the work to be engaged in,
the account to be rendered,
the nearness of eternity,
the fearful sin of despising they Spirit.
May I never forget that thy eye always sees,
thy ear always hears,
thy recording hand always writes.
May I never give thee rest until Christ is the pulse of my heart;
the spokesman of my lips, the lamp of my feet.

[From The Valley of Vision (Banner of Truth, 2007)]

Bending Beneath the Weight of God's Pursuit

A quick note as I run out the door.

Tolkien, a master of long, epic verse, wrote a short poem parts of which may be familiar to you.

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

The second line of that poem hit me hard today in prayer. I said it over and over to myself, thinking of a few people God has put in my life who seem lost and drowning and distant. My sadness turned to joy as I realized the truth of Tolkien's word. In Exodus 20:5, God tells Israel that he is "a jealous God." And again in the New Testament we hear of God's "divine jealousy" (2 Corinthians 11:2).

O Lord, you pursue us, you follow us, you see your will to completion, and we have no power to resist you. Your grace is irresistible to those you've chosen. Go after those who stray from the flock, for you go after every lost sheep (Luke 15:1-7)! This is our assurance that not all who wander are forever lost to your Kingdom. Let this be, O gracious Father, the succor of our anxieties! You alone are sovereign; you alone are worthy of all the honor, the praise, the wisdom, the power, the glory! Amen.

Man, "Lionhearted and Lamblike"

Are you a lover or a fighter? Well, what if fighting and loving, loving and fighting, are one and the same? What if protection and provision are just two expressions of the same impulse, and to the same end?

Piper takes on this question and more in this sermon (click here), from 2007, on Ephesians 5:21-33. As a good sermon ought to be, it's not only edifying to the mind but challenging to the heart also. What is manhood as God defines it in Christ? Well, here you go.

Giving Up Patchworks for Purity

"The Light of the World,"
William Holman Hunt (1851)

This week I imagined a triumphant, radiant, heavenly Jesus vomiting. And I was in the ejected matter. 

That is deeply troubling on at least two levels. First, I happen to be one of those (normal) folks who finds the topic of throwing up pretty gross. (The moral: Don't call on me to take up mopping duty, OK?) Second, and far more serious, as I imagined Jesus ejecting me, I realized what he was actually doing was rejecting me. That is, or certainly ought to be, the scariest thought we can ever think.

Now I didn't just conjure this up. In Revelation 3:14-22 John tells of his heavenly vision wherein, as a judicial Jesus is calling the churches to account for their imperfections and sins, Christ slams the Laodicean church specifically for being less than fully committed to him (χλιαρός, or literally "tepid"). "I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot," he intones. "Would that you were either cold or hot!" It is unacceptable to him that those who follow him might do it half-heartedly, or with heart and not mind, or with mind but no soul (Deut. 6:5; Luke 10:27). We cannot serve two masters, Jesus tells us; to be on the fence means really that we have not recognized the Christ's full and complete lordship (Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13). So, Jesus says, because the Laodiceans are lukewarm, "neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." (What the ESV translates as "spit out of my mouth" means literally "vomit out of my mouth.")

No one likes lukewarmness. It's sort of like a limp handshake. No one likes receiving that sort of greeting. It signifies to us spinelessness and passivity. How much more, then, does Jesus care about our reception of him! Remember that the Church is Christ's bride (2 Cor. 11:2), and that Christ demands that we as a body be fully committed to him, radiant and blameless in our ways (Eph. 5:25-27). Because probably nothing is so dim and dull and unexciting as an utterly passionless arranged marriage--for eternity.

I don't want to reach heaven's gate to hear Jesus say of me that I did not crave him, that I didn't hunger, that I only gave half of myself over to him. I don't want to finish the race having tried to straddle the fence. We only straddle fences when we can't decide, or we don't want to, or when we want to act like scavengers, like cavaliers, crumb-nibblers, trying to maximize benefits and pleasures by taking from whatever we find. This is the sort of person our culture trains us to be. We don't think of it as being a double agent, or being of two minds, but rather of being eclectic and valuing mixtures. Our impulse is to fashion a spirituality out of bits and pieces, leftovers, scraps that we've collected. We write "found poetry." We make "mosaics." We create lives and beliefs and attitudes that are untidy patchworks, quilts. We think of it as creativity, as if our initiative and craftiness make up for whatever real deficiencies in truth there may be in our result. We're proud of our creations. My quilt's got some Jesus, so I should be fine. Right?

No, says Jesus; not fine. I want all of you, just as I have given all of myself for you.

So how do we avoid being vomited out, ejected and rejected? Paul, grasping the problem, gives us the answer: "I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" (Rom. 12:1). When we allow ourselves to be consecrated to God, as we lose our lives in the pursuit of eternal life, taking up our crosses in imitation of and dedication to our Savior (Luke 9:23-24), we grow in surrender and trust and love and obedience and satisfaction and joy. We make use of our life--and not just the parts we are willing to make use of, but all of it, knowing that not one part of it belongs to us, since every part required ransom by a righteous Redeemer. Knowing that we need God fully seems to lead to being anything but lukewarm. 

Gracious Father in heaven, open our eyes to abundance of your love poured out on Calvary on our behalf in Christ. Open our eyes to the sin within us that weighed on your Son as he hung on a cross dying in our place. And as our eyes are being opened, as we become aware by the convicting power of your Holy Spirit of the great measure of mercy we daily require, I pray that you would give us a passion for offering up all of ourselves to you for sanctification, so that in the end, standing before Jesus, we may be embraced and not spit out. We approach you in your immeasurable holiness only by your grace. Amen.

Knowing Jesus

"But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. 

(James 1:22, 27 ESV)

"Truth visits those who love her, who surrender to her, and this love cannot be without virtue."

(A.-G. Sertillanges)

Our church is working through a book in our midweek small groups that attempts to make clear what "missional discipleship" is. One aspect hit me particularly hard; in fact, it's one that I've encountered before, and it hit me like a ton of bricks then too. That is the notion that knowing is intimately and inextricably linked to doing. Or, to be more radical still, that knowing is doing. That, in terms of discipleship, a passion for truth has to be a passion for holiness. These two are one and the same. Ideally anyway.

To be less abstract, let's flesh out what knowing and doing mean for our purposes. Knowing is thinking, reading, learning, meditating, perceiving and appropriating by the mind. Doing is acting, enacting, working, seeing something to fruition—with hands, feet, bodies.

Each of us is probably disposed to one or the other: "'You have faith and I have works,'" as James jests (2:18). We're all either thinkers or doers. Maybe some of us can juggle both. But even then we often fail to recognize that these two modes ought to be the same mode. It's not enough to just think, or just act, and it's not enough either just to do a little of both.

We know that faith without (good) works is dead (Jas. 2:17). Works "complete" our faith by giving evidence of a heart and mind renewed by the faithful work of Christ in us (2:22). Just knowing the Bible will not get us anywhere, at least not into the Kingdom.

We also know that works without faith are empty and meaningless and do not please God. James implies this, and Paul says so with great enthusiasm (Gal. 3), but Jesus gives us a parable (Luke 18:9-14) that speaks of the fate of those who stake their salvation on being "good people."

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The Pharisee, who represents good works without faith, without the Gospel, not only displeases God, but goes away from the temple unjustified. We should squirm and wriggle with fear at that statement. It's a simple phrase, but in it is contained an eternal consequence—and for the Pharisee it's a devastating consequence indeed. What Jesus is saying is that the Pharisee leaves and is not counted righteous—in short, he must endure the wrath of God because while he may in fact be a "good guy," he has staked his eternity on being merely moral. He does not act out of a grasp of truth, but out of spite, aloofness, to be thought elite and "holy." This does not impress God. He needs, in Jesus' words, to be "humbled." Oh how that should make us tremble!

What to do? James's solution, as cited above, is to be "doers of the Word." Not to the exclusion of being "knowers of the Word," of course. But in doing we go beyond knowing and yet, in the same way, fulfill the knowing. If I know that saving someone who can't swim from drowning in a lake is the right thing to do, but I regularly walk past beggars on the street without even the slightest desire to show them mercy with a gift of spare change (or more), then I probably do not really know anything about self-sacrificial morality. That seems to me to be James's, and ultimately Jesus', message. If you know me, then you will follow me, Jesus seems to say to us; and if you follow me, then you will become like me. Knowing means doing, acting.

So here's the challenge. Consider whether you really act out and act upon what you know of the Gospel. The degree to which you live it out is approximate to how well you know it. 

How well do you really know Jesus?

Transcending Walden; or, Why "Carpe Diem" Will Either Redeem or Destroy You (Part I)

It shouldn't surprise us that New England is the intellectual "bread-basket" of North America. The skies are pierced by the gothic spires and ivory bell-towers of America's most ancient universities. Small, leaf-strewn liberal-arts colleges dot the rolling green hills and fill the air with punchy alma maters.

Besides, New England has been home to many greats whose lives and thoughts have come to define our national identity and, to some extent perhaps, modern Western civilization as a whole. One thinks immediately of Emerson and Thoreau, of course, the juggernaut Transcendentalist divines of Concord. (That we do think of these men first is, I think, no accident. But more on that academic conspiracy some other time.)

From Thoreau we gain some particularly gripping, enduring attitudes. His year-long, nature-worshipping foray into the wilds captured in Walden, now a fairly standard text in courses on nineteenth-century American literature, is arguably the source of our modern notion of Carpe diem! (a phrase borrowed by the  classics-obsessed nineteenth century from Horace). "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," explained Thoreau. 

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

It is clear, both here and elsewhere in his account of his year of self-exile (that was, quite unlike he imagined or intended, punctuated often by visits from friends and devotees), that Thoreau was trying to get to the bottom of a timeless set of questions: What is life? What is the good life? What is life for? Whom is life for?

One might "hastily conclude" that Thoreau was not particularly enamored of the Christian answers to these questions. And one would be absolutely right. But I think there is more to his frustration than his indignant rebellion against the New England Congregational culture that surrounded him. I would bet that Thoreau did not see anyone really "enjoying" life as he thought they ought to. The particulars of such an approach to life need not be explored. The general lack of joy, which he seems to attribute to Christian attitudes, he takes as a challenge, a challenge to seek out how best to savor and relish living. If God is not the solution to lifelong and daily delight, Thoreau seems to say, then there must be another way. That is certainly the pragmatic method.

Immersed as I am in all things thesis,* I can't help but draw a parallel to another, though much less noticeable, presence in the long, tortuous history of New England intellectualism--Jonathan Edwards. I say that he is less prominent because, in the popular imagination at least, he is. The average high-school history teacher would probably not add Edwards to a list of important New England thinkers. And maybe that is not the best or most precise category in which to place him. (In some ways, my thesis seeks to answer that.) Yet in any case we tend to forget that long before Thoreau there was another New England divine who wanted to know how best to live.

"Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live." That is the sixth entry on Edwards's list of resolutions, penned more than a hundred years before Thoreau ever laid a brick on the shore of Walden Pond. Edwards, as early in his life as his teenage years, was profoundly passionate about "sucking the marrow out of life." 

There are sixty-nine other resolutions, in fact, all of which center on one great theme--satisfaction. The difference between Edwards and, say, Thoreau, as it is between the Christian and the humanist (for the lack of a better word), is that Edwards's satisfaction is found in God where Thoreau's is in everything else. This does not mean Edwards does not enjoy simple pleasures--lemonade in the summer, a brisk walk in the fall, time with a book by the fire on a December evening. No, in this regard Edwards, or the Christian generally, is not unique. He is human as Thoreau is human.

The difference is that Thoreau's humanness, or earthliness, suffices for him. He is satisfied in his existence. To savor life is to pursue joy in existence for it's own sake. Thoreau "numbers his days" in much the same way as Edwards does. Yet not for the same reasons or with the same aims. Edwards wants "a heart of wisdom" and looks forward to the day when he will die and enter heaven. Thoreau wants to live a life without regret and fears the day when he will die and turn to dust. The earthly humanist (or Transcendentalist in this case) acts out of the urgency born of the terror of decease. The faithful Christian acts out of the urgency born of the individual purpose and vocation the Lord has granted him to pursue while he "dwells below."

And so it matters why we seize the day.

It matters, after all, why we get up in the morning. Even dogs sleep and wake. What makes us any different if we get out of bed because we're simply no longer tired? See, both the Puritans and the Transcendentalists desired transcendence. Both yearned for a way of life that went beyond the physical to the metaphysical, to the spiritual, but without verging on total reliance upon upon subjective perception. Both were searching for a middle way to live triumphantly and with fulfillment but without lapsing into sensualism or, worse yet, emotionalism. Thoreau and Edwards lived for something beyond themselves, something objective: Thoreau for a Being largely of his own concoction, and Edwards for the God of the Bible.

Indeed it matters for whom we seize the day.

Transcendentalism--which Edgar Allen Poe hilariously called "Frogpondianism" after Boston's fantastical but really very shallow duck pond--is dead. Its vague notions of a mystical, Vedic "Divine Being," though they've metamorphosed, nevertheless persist in (post)modern American spirituality. Ideas stick. And they have histories. New England is the way it is today because of the way it was yesterday. Edwards's sort of Puritanism never had a foothold in much of New England after all. Thoreau's mish-mash mysticism, on the other hand, took hold of the New Englander's imagination with far greater adhesion. Historians can only explain why this is the case to a point, after which we have to admit a degree of impenetrable mystery in the workings of this Divine Being who orders the world.

It matters to you who that Being is. Because who He is has a direct effect on who you are. And who I am. And where and how we can seize the day.

(For good tips on seizing the day for Christ, see Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper. Read it here for free.)


*And please realize that "thesising," as we call it, means my brain is mush and that I'm blogging hastily. So if there are holes here, in logic or in facts, forgive me--and then leave me a comment to let me know that something's fallen through the cracks. Danke.

Homeward Bound, Godward Loosed

I feel new. Not new like a car off the lot. New more like a clean house after the clutter has been cleared away and the moldings scrubbed till they shine. New like a blade of grass awash in the coolness of the faithful morning dew. I feel refreshed, revived, repurposed.

When I think of what it means to repurpose something, I have to admit that my first thought is of something not very pleasant. I imagine a milk crate becoming a crude dorm-room coffee table, or composting. But when God is doing the repurposing, it's really very awesome and beautiful. (OK, well, so is composting. Kind of.)

These past nine months or so since I left the safety and comfort of (the young-adult nursery/New England resort we call) Amherst College have been shot through with the cries and expectation and pangs and power of transformation. I can't claim to know the ways of God, for his ways are so much higher than mine. But I do know that he makes use of certain seasons in our lives to jolt us out of the stupors we fall into, those dazes, those periods of falseness and futility and waste. And jolt me he has.

I began this year confused, maybe even despondent and depressed if I'm being honest with myself. I could feel the gentle rumble of a distant quake, but I couldn't know just what was coming. In December I was baptized, after many years of tarrying a little longer than I expected in a state of doubt and uncertainty about the reality of God in Christ. After my baptism I began to pray in new ways, and I can't be sure why.

I prayed, in short, the prayer it is said Martin Luther prayed in his weakest spiritual moment: "Here I am. Take me, Lord." I added, quite helplessly: "Make use of me, not as I wish, but as you will." Well, prayer makes things happen.

My mental furniture and the rhythms of my heart--pretty quickly--began to change as I prayed these things. In the span of a few weeks I could feel the Holy Spirit clothing me in my nakedness with the promises of the Almighty. I could sense his presence as I for the first time opened God's Word with delight rather than a sense of duty. This delight has only grown. The Lord has revealed himself to me in such majesty that I can really only respond with a constant stream of bleary-eyed praise. I was such an ingrate, a fool, an unregenerate hypocrite, far more reliant on the opinions of others and the fleeting pleasures of the world in all its materiality than on the mercy of the Cross. I was a legalist and didn't know it, seeking to placate a God I didn't understand with mechanical obedience. I was superstitious. My faith was a shipwreck, or maybe it had never set sail to begin with.

Through prayer, fasting, the sharpening iron of friends, the wisdom of faithful shepherds, and the grace of the One whose blood is sufficient, I am new. New in the Colossians 3 sense--"seeking the things above," "putting off my old self and its practices."

Along with the newness of spirit has come an abundance of unexpected gifts and morsels and revelations. Nine months ago I had no clue what to do after I graduate. Now it is one of the clearest things I've ever been made to see by God. Nine months ago, too, I wasn't sure of my identity and values and intentions and goals. All these things have been set straight as well. I am my master's.

I owe so much to the wisdom and passion of John Piper. After discovering his work on Biblical manhood and womanhood (which I highly recommend) in January, I have found myself a kind of kindred spirit in the man as I've explored his rich, deep collection of sermons, seminars, books, and articles. And by kindred I don't mean to compare myself to him in stature, but rather in the ways our minds and hearts seem to work. There is not one thing he has taught me that has not reverberated in the deep, innermost recesses of my soul as faithful clarification of Scriptural truth. Through his ministry, I have discovered what it means to treasure the Cross, to make much of Jesus (a la Jonathan Edwards), to wrestle with paradoxes and "do theology," to be a thinking Christian, to be missional and worshipful, to live out faith unabashedly and radically, to fight sin to the death (a la John Owen). The Lord placed him in my life at a crucial moment, and his teaching and preaching have provided much spiritual fuel over these months, and continue to. Proverbs 23:12 exhorts us to apply our hearts to instruction and our ears to words of knowledge. The Lord showed me to Piper so that I could be obedient to that exhortation in these months away from my "home" in Amherst.

And now I have the blessing of undertaking an honors thesis centered on Jonathan Edwards. I can't begin to express both how hilariously unaware I was of what I was doing when I chose him as my subject and how incredibly thankful I am to God for steering me in his direction nevertheless. I'm now beginning to glimpse the goodness and life-altering spirit of Edwards's meditations on finding one's deepest satisfaction in the Lord. I know that in this, too, my Father has arranged a fitting, faithful, fantastic spiritual mentor and tutor for me this year, someone to guide my thoughts Godward, to show me the delight of his "God-entranced vision of all things."

All in all, though I've written this hastily and recorded my praises and thoughts very imperfectly here (and I hope you'll forgive me), I want to conclude with the image I began with: repurposing. Indeed the Lord chooses whom he desires for his flock, no matter how reckless or frail or surprising a choice--and I am terrific evidence of that. The truth is, it took, and is taking, a huge amount of repurposing to make me the servant my master needs me to be. It has been, and is still, exceedingly humbling to witness how far I needed, and need, to come from who I was--just how much dross needed to be removed--in order to finally see and know God for who he is. The degree of numbness and blindness and deafness is astounding. And the perfect purity the Lord brings to bear on our lives when we finally invite Christ in to reign in us is also astonishing. All I can do is fall down and sing, "Holy, holy, holy!"

More to come. The fall semester is right around the corner. I'm turning it in just days now. I pray that these many months of being made new would stand even in the face of the challenges of work and study and a (small but energetic) social life.

My prayer as I go back is this: Keep me, Lord. Keep me grounded in the realities of grace, of your sovereignty, of my frailty, of the need for accountability, of the loveliness and incomparable beauty of Jesus, of heaven and hell, of eternity and the infinite measure of your love. In keeping me, Father, give me feet to go, hands to give and serve, a mind renewed by your truth, a spirit of freedom, and a profound desire to see you glorified everywhere I am and everywhere I'm not. Amen.

Loving Studying God More than Loving God

A few days ago I posted a video that explored what it means to love loving God more than to love God for who he is. Today I ran across an article, by Carl Trueman, that warns against a similar phenomenon--loving knowing and studying God more than loving him. 

The greatest temptation of a theology student is to assume that what they are studying is the most important thing in the world. Now, I need to be uncharacteristically nuanced at this point: there is a sense, a very deep and true sense, in which theology is the most important thing in the world. It is, after all, reflection upon what God has chosen to reveal to his creatures; and it thus involves the very meaning of existence. In this sense, there is nothing more important than doing theology.

But this is not the whole story. One of the great problems with the study of theology is how quickly it can become the study of theology, rather than the study of theology, that becomes the point. We are all no doubt familiar with the secular mindset which repudiates any notion of certainty in thought; and one of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that intellectual inquiry is rather like trying to get a date with the attractive girl across the road with whom you have secretly fallen in love: the thrill comes more from the chase and the sense of anticipation than it does from actually finding the answer or eliciting agreement to go to the movies.

Read the rest here.

Our פֶּסַח Lamb, Slain

Lately I've been reading through a small, neat, and eminently useful and wise volume titled The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World (Piper & Taylor, eds.). One of the contributors, pastor Voddie Baucham, Jr., has this to say about the stark, unchanging reality of Christ's sacrifice. It struck me.

In days gone by God had been passing over, or overlooking, sins. And some were thinking that this called into question the justice of God: God, how can you claim to be righteous and yet not crush Moses the murderer, or crush Abraham the liar, or crush David the adulterer? How, O God? But in the merciful providence of God there came a day when God the Father crushed and killed his one and only Son in our stead in order to satisfy his wrath, "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:26 ESV). Was that enough for the sins of Adam, Abraham, and Moses? Can you hear the rhetorical questions from Calvary? Was that enough for your sins? Was that enough for you to recognize the supremacy of Christ in truth as it relates to redemption? There was nothing else that could have been done that would have allowed God to be both just and justifier. But in the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ we find a resolution to the question, "How can what is wrong be made right?" . . .

How can what is wrong be made right? The spotless, sinless Lamb of God was crushed, rejected, and killed to pay a debt that he did not owe on behalf of sinners who could never pay him back.

We don't talk about the blood of that Lamb nearly enough, it seems to me. Not once in my many years of childhood Sunday school do I recall ever hearing about Jesus as a slain sacrificial lamb. Maybe that's because children would inevitably squirm at that image. Yet it is so essential to the character of our salvation that passing over it (forgive the unavoidable pun) for the sake of some kind of decency, or because, for adults, it sounds too metaphorical, is to fail utterly to understand just what was at stake and involved in the crucifixion. 

The form of our substitute was in reality paramount. The Lord knew that no amount of pure, white-fleeced animal sacrifices could ever atone for the sins of all mankind, from the first man to the last. Only the Christ could fulfill the role. Only the Anointed One could bear such a massive burden. Only he could achieve the victory. Only his blood could make us "white as snow." In the end, the Lamb of God had to be slain in order to satisfy the perfect, just wrath of God. And that is the reason for our hallelujahs, the reason we gather to worship, the reason there is a church--the center of everything, what holds everything together. I needed a good reminder.

Loving Loving God More than Loving God

Here Piper warns against the tendency (especially of "Reformed types") to idolize the loving of God rather than loving God himself. It's a crucial distinction to make, and one that I have not lived by with much dedication till now. A very valuable warning -- one that hits me with particular force in this season of life.

Summer-Sojourning, and Doing Church American-Style

I sat down in a huge, modern sanctuary this Sabbath morn to find a hymnal in the pew. I was ecstatic. Though there were two large video screens and a drum-set, a few guitars, and some other accoutrements of postmodern American evangelicalism littering the stage of College Avenue Baptist Church, the hymnals were a good sign, I thought to myself.

There was music being played as congregants shuffled in to the massive space, and it was hymnic enough. Ah, but then, a full ten minutes after the supposed 10 a.m. starting time, a loud, booming voice suddenly filled the sanctuary. I squinted to see who it was. The piano player, it turns out. He introduced himself, still sitting at his instrument, as the pastor for worship and creative expression--or something like that.

Uh-oh. They do creative expression, I thought. That scared me a little. I'd found this church through the online directory of Converge Worldwide--the former Baptist General Conference. (Think Piper's Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis.) I figured it was a good way to find a church while I'm summer-sojourning here.

Eying the rather unfriendly family sitting next to me, none of the members of which ever even seemed to consider looking to their left to greet me, I sank into my long stretch of pew space while announcements and other brightly colored slides were projected onto the suspended screens. (For some reason, hardly anyone ever sits near me when I go to a church alone. It must be the fangs.)

The music began right away. Standard modern fare--Hillsong, Chris Tomlin, and the like--and not one invitation to crack open the old hymnals. Odder still was the fact that no one was singing aloud. Over five or six long worship songs I hardly heard a peep from anyone around me. Most stood there looking like zombies, young and old (something I call the Californian condition). There was no Psalm 5:7 or 29:2 kind of worship happening. I consequently felt as though I was singing through a megaphone and tried to quiet myself down.

I started to realize in that moment that in my six months abroad I'd become thoroughly accustomed to the British church experience. Britons are not typically shy in singing, even if their voices tend not to be the most polished or smooth I've heard. They sing with gusto, with full dedication to and comprehension of the words. And, more than this, they sing hymns! Some Tomlin and Redman and Townend are peppered in, but, at least at St. Ebbe's in Oxford, the standard songs were those good, old, solid, meaningful, soul-deep, Psalm-based hymns the church has been singing for centuries.

Back to America, and the music seems so shallow in comparison. God is love, God is mighty to save, Jesus, Jesus--and more apparently empty praise heaped up. I don't mean to sound needlessly judgmental. My point, which I realize I've not yet really made, is that it's far from a meaningless, irrelevant critique. If man is indeed made for worship, then just how man worships is in fact of paramount importance!

This morning the worship seemed less than worshipful. The lead pastor made a good effort in trying to get congregants involved and participating, running through aisles to meet visitors, who were asked to put their hands up. (No, I didn't; I was much too embarrassed.) Yet, despite these earnest efforts, the throngs of worshippers had little to say, little to sing, little to write down during the sermon.

The greatest irony, speaking of the sermon, was that the pastor preached through the passage in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount where he outlines how not to pray and then how to pray. I'm not sure anyone was listening. I looked around to find most people whispering to one another, or sitting still with eyes glazed over as if watching late-night TV. No one seemed to really be desiring God. It was incredibly bizarre. (And no, there's really no happy ending, or some great twist at the end of my story.)

All I can say, as I reflect back on the experience, is that we ought to learn, as culturally American Christians, from our brethren in culturally less hospitable places (like England or, I imagine, any number of distant sites). Where Christianity is less embedded in the fabric of daily life is where Christians are forced to consciously choose faith and choose Christ and choose to be bravely countercultural. As for us,  in the well churched (over-churched?) regions of this strange land, where we are so free from stigma and persecution, we need to remember to one another what it means to give over one's life, wholly and without reserve, to the One who in his sovereignty and grace has chosen to redeem sinful, irredeemable us. If we sang more hymns perhaps we might recall and see more clearly the jagged lines and messy sacrifices involved in faith and begin to notice the folly and unreality of a clean, sanitary, smoothed out, strangely passionless, reverenceless, aweless, Gospel-less evangelical way.

Always reforming, indeed.

Joy, and Hymns

I'm in a college Christian a cappella group, but it took being away from a regular rehearsal schedule and immersion in music throughout the week to realize just how deep and undeniable is the impulse and desire within me--and, I'd say, within all of us--to sing the praises of the Lord.

Aside from my weekly dose of hymns at church here in Oxford, I've discovered a great group called Page CXVI. The first thing that got me interested in them was the story behind their name. Page 116 in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew contains the scene in which Aslan creates Narnia out of nothing with a song. Here's the pertinent excerpt:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction is was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.

So, to my mind, the group already had the Narnia reference going for them. Yet then I began to listen to their two albums, called simply "Hymns I" and "Hymns II." Their stated goal, one they fulfill with great success, in my opinion, is the restoration to prominence of those good, sturdy hymns of old. They accomplish this by setting hymns to a modern beat. At first I wasn't sure I liked that modernity, but it's grown on me, and now, when I hear one of the hymns they've recorded sung in church, I default to singing it a la Page CXVI--which says something about the catchiness and attractiveness of their arrangements!

One of the songs they've recorded is "Joy"--it's not exactly a hymn, but who cares. It's chilling and, at first, a bit confusing. It's a song very obviously about rejoicing, and here it's laden, laced with grief and pain. I didn't quite know what to make of it until I read this (brilliant) explanation.

When I first wrote, or I should say re-wrote, “Joy” I had no idea the
 wave it would make.  I have received countless emails, questions, and
 comments on this one song, several with the similar theme of “she sure 
does not sound joyful to me!” I’ve even had people tell me that they 
did not finish the song but skipped it because it sounded too
 depressing and confused them in contrast to the rest of the Hymns 
record. If perchance you are someone that has not finished the song
 yet please listen through the end. It would be like starting a story 
and never finishing it. 



The first time I played Joy was the night my father passed away.  He 
had a short and painful battle with cancer.  My dad was not perfect
 but he did the best he could with what he had.  A year before he died
 he was diagnosed with dementia.  The day he told me he had cancer he 
said it was a blessing.  To him, cancer was a better way to end his
 story than a mind with no memory of his family or his life.  So as I 
sat at the piano, the only place that felt safe that night to me, the
 weight of loss hit my chest.  I remembered my eyes were blurred with 
tears and I literally began to play the now familiar progression of
 Joy.  I kept cycling through the progression and then, as if it had 
already been written, I began to sing a different melody to a song I 
sang in VBS as a child, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my 
heart…” The truth is that I was terribly and profoundly sad.  The
 reality of grief had not even entirely hit me yet.  But at the same
 moment I had a deep sense of peace.  He was no longer in pain.  He was
 no longer sick.  He was free from all his ailments and restored.
 Although I still miss him, I know that God has weaved redemption 
through death into my father’s story.  That brings me great joy.  It
 was not until grief became a part of my story that I realized that joy
 is not simply an expression, but an attitude and acknowledgment of the 
deep peace of knowing a Savior.

 

I believe it is important as a community that wants to comfort the
 weary we allow space for those who are grieving, suffering, and
 experiencing loss to say, “Hey! I am hurting! I am in pain!”  It is
 okay to give them space to figure out what joy means in that time.  

I now know that you can experience grief and joy simultaneously…and if
 not, that joy can and will come if you allow it to. 

I had Joy written without the ending that is on the record for a
while.  And after I had some time to grieve I remembered the hymn “I t
is Well With My Soul.”  The author of that hymn lost multiple members 
of his immediate family when he wrote those deeply wise words.  It
 seemed appropriate to end “Joy” with this hymn in acknowledgement that
 God brings us peace.  He even brings us joy when it seems and feels
impossible.

Here's the song.

I heartily commend the rest of Page CXVI's music to you. They'll have you dwelling on the wise, comforting, challenging words of some of the greatest hymns ever penned. (If you want to preview some more of their songs first, you can listen to a few here.)

Also, if you're still in a musical mood, see the new music page I've created (under the "A Joyful Noise" tab at the top of the page). 

Radical Giving and the Cross

From B. B. Warfield, a passage that has convicted me more than any other recently:

"Now dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true Vine; you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving. . . 'though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor'. . .

"Objection 1. 'My money is my own.' Answer: Christ might have said, 'My blood is my own, my life is my own'. . . then where should we have been?

"Objection 2. 'The poor are undeserving.' Answer: Christ might have said, 'They are wicked rebels. . . shall I lay down my life for these? I will give to the good angels.' But no, he left the ninety-nine, and came after the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving.

"Objection 3. 'The poor may abuse it.' Answer: Christ might have said the same; yea, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood.

"Oh, my dear Christians! If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'"

[From B. B. Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ (Phila.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1950), 574.]

Be Still, My Soul; or, Learning to Delight in the Lord

"The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."

—Frederick Buechner

A few nights ago, as I laid out my confusions, and my questions, and my frustrations about my future, a good friend reminded me to be waiting on the Lord, to be quiet and patient, to hear His voice. Psalm 27 (v. 14) puts it this way: "Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!"

What a great reminder! I don't consider myself a man of action per se, but restlessness and fear come easily to just about anyone. And especially in times of transition, as the gears start turning, the engine revs, the juices of exhilaration and acceleration surge and you wish God would let you take your foot off the brake.

But for some reason He doesn't. He doesn't give you that breakthrough, that connection, that understanding, that green light. You're stuck in a state of suspended animation. It's a reminder that the Lord we serve is sovereign and not blown about like a leaf by the shifting winds of our petty desires. Thanks be to God that His Kingdom is not a democracy! His work and His timing He has set out and decided. He hears my prayers and gives or holds back according to His will, His plans. As I reflect on the path my life has taken so far, I am so pleased in fact that it is He who holds the reins of time and space and place, and not me, whose judgment is so foolish and short-sighted and vain. The Lord works all things according to His great eternal vision, for His view of eternity is from his position beyond and outside of time. This is just one shade of His complete holiness and perfect sovereignty.

It's in this spirit that Jesus tells us (Matt. 6:34) that we shouldn't be anxious about tomorrow but we ought to instead let tomorrow worry about itself, for "sufficient for the day is its own trouble." And it's in the spirit of this truth laid out by Jesus that Paul later exhorts us (Phil. 4:6), "do not be anxious for anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." I've read these passages many times before, but it's in the moment of anxiety and uncertainty and that gut-wrenching sensation of feeling lost without a map that I am able to understand the meaning of my smallness and God's greatness.

To be honest, I really have no concrete answer as to where I'm meant to go after college. Do I get some Gospel training before going out into the world? Do I go straight into graduate school? If I teach, who am I meant to teach? If I'm meant to proclaim, what and to whom am I meant to proclaim? If I'm meant to stay, where am I meant to stay, and if I'm meant to go, where am I meant to go? This could drive me absolutely bonkers, which it has at times over the past several months. I struggle to know what my calling is, what the Lord is calling me to use my life for, how it is He intends for me to spend my short time here on this planet. For answers I can only wait for God and pray "with thanksgiving" (and how often do I forget that part!) that He alone would be the lamp unto my feet as I stumble through this life a sinner, seeing through a glass darkly.

When I feel powerless I remember Moses as he encounters God at the burning bush. Half believing and half doubting, the erstwhile prince of Egypt asks who it is who speaks to him. Our Almighty God's booming response echoes in my heart even now: "I AM WHO I AM" (Ex. 3:14). Some Hebrew scholars point out that in fact what God says to Moses is more appropriately translated "I shall be that I shall be." The thrust of either translation is this, that the Most High God is beyond our tongue and our language, beyond our mind, beyond our grasp, in the time of Moses, in our time, and forevermore (Rom. 11:33-36). The Lord is mightier than we can comprehend Yet His power does not overwhelm us to the point of incineration because the justice of God, perfect and unyielding, has been satisfied at the Cross. It is Jesus's blood that allows us to stand in God's presence. The clemency through Christ that the Father has granted us—has granted me—is the most precious, most necessary, most radical key to living. "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things."

In the meantime, as I learn to wait and be patient and listen for God to bring clarity to my muddled and darkened thoughts and prayers, the quote I included at the beginning is helping me get some grasp on the road ahead: "The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet." Sometimes I forget what it means to be glad. I associate living with purpose with living begrudgingly. Maybe this is because up until very recently I assumed to be a living sacrifice meant resentfully and bitterly (that is, obligingly) taking up a cross and grunting and eking out life until death brought the comfort of rest. I still do believe the Bible calls us to labor for and in the Kingdom till the end of our lives, but my assumption that service to God is a necessarily unenjoyable enterprise has been dashed to pieces.

This must be a common enough assumption among believers that John Piper begins his massively popular and massively insightful and wise book Desiring God (download it for free) with a preface in which he explains how (at my age) he believed a life lived for God entailed biting the bullet and putting aside delight.  He writes,

When I was in college, I had a vague, pervasive notion that if I did something good because it would make me happy, I would ruin its goodness. I figured that the goodness of my moral action was lessened to the degree that I was motivated by a desire for my own pleasure.... [T]o be motivated by a desire for happiness or pleasure when I volunteered for Christian service or went to church—that seemed selfish, utilitarian, mercenary.

Yet he discovered that this is entirely un-Biblical, that in fact God calls us to find our greatest joy in Him, that in so doing God is most glorified in and through us. Learning through the examples of Blaise Pascal and C. S. Lewis, Piper fast realized the thing that would change his life and mission and ministry forever.

Praising God, the highest calling of humanity and our eternal vocation, did not involve the renunciation, but rather the consummation of the joy I so desired. My old effort to achieve worship with no self-interest in it proved to be a contradiction in terms. God is not worshiped where He is not treasured and enjoyed. Praise is not an alternative to joy, but the expression of joy. Not to enjoy God is to dishonor Him. To say to Him that something else satisfies you more is the opposite of worship. It is sacrilege. 

And so, as I consider what God is calling me to do, I am reminded that joy and delight in Christian service, or as a Christian working in the world, is not undesirable or un-Scriptural, but in fact called-for and the natural result and expression of the sufficiency of God in Christ.

A few nights ago, as I struggled to voice my concerns for the future, that same friend asked bluntly, "Well, what do you enjoy doing?" I couldn't stop smiling as I thought about my answer and told him that it's study and research and the grappling with the problems of thought and interpretation and history that bring me joy. He interrupted me: "Your smile and your joy are the answer to your questions. Don't you see?"

O Lord, may I see the way forward in the light of Your truth, in joy and thanksgiving, in submission, in meditation upon the irrepressible grace You extend through the blood of Christ to the pagans and sinners like me! Be my light and my understanding as I labor to reflect and glorify You as long as you give me breath!

An Update

Blog Update from Gregory Campeau on Vimeo.

It's two weeks--as the British would say, a fortnight--before my return to the lush land of milk, honey, and uncontrollable oil spills. Here's an update.

Subvert the Dominant Paradigm: Hang the "Self" on the Cross

What do you live for? What are you here to do? What do you intend to accomplish on Earth?

Until about a year ago, I had very detailed answers to these questions. All of which focused on me, my desires, my passions, and, ultimately, my own personal glory. I lived to one day make a name for myself, gain the esteem of colleagues, be sought after as an expert, and die having left behind books and articles and lecture halls with my name on them. That was my purpose.

If you had said, Well, how exactly does God fit into that?, I would have had my immediate response ready and aimed: Oh, see, I'll do it all by God's strength. That seemed for a long time to be the right answer as a Christian. I'll do whatever I like, indulge whatever ambition I have, and give all the credit to God like so many of the country music stars do when they receive their accolades at those awards ceremonies. Deep down, though, I'll know that all along it was all my doing--all my success, all my accomplishment: all mine. God was my tool, my means to an end.

Thankfully I see the sham and foolishness and danger in this now, and, more urgently maybe, the wastefulness in it too. My faith was lukewarm for so long, and my understanding so shallow, and I think I liked it that way. Even though I had long-term plans for my life, I never wanted to confront the deepest flaw in all of it, that someday I'd be judged, and I'd have to account for my wasted life. God's glory--whatever that meant--simply had no place in my plans. When I did glimpse other Christians making huge sacrifices in order to serve God and others, I scoffed. What a waste! They're wasting their lives away, I'd think.

My delusion, I know now, was part of that general blindness that living outside of God's truth and wisdom produces. Everything seems to reduce down to the self, to the service of the self, to the expansion and flourishing of the self. The content of my every thought was me. I looked around at my world--a comfortable 21st-century America--and saw vast numbers of Christians doing (or seeming to do) exactly what I proposed for my own life. They went to church, they followed along in the sermon, and the rest of the week they fit in with the rest of the world. They screamed and cursed at crazy drivers in a traffic squeeze, they labored under the burden of debt while continuing to buy new clothes and new cars they didn't need, they spent their evenings watching mindless TV, they looked away in disgust when they passed by beggars, they gossiped, they cut corners, they lived like God wasn't looking, and then put their happy "church faces" back on when the next Sunday rolled around. That is to say, sadly, I didn't see much fruit of the Spirit. This was the slice of "Christendom" that I knew and instinctively sought membership in.

But this was all just stale bread. It's not living for anything, and it's not really life at all. It's animated decease, and it's ghostly. There is superficial churchiness and little faithful, Spirit-led pursuit of righteousness and wisdom. And all indications are that this has become frighteningly widespread in the West, especially in our country. The theory goes: We're a nation of such a blindingly stable privilege and freedom that in the process of growing complacent we've normalized (and gutted) Christianity and made it a safe, conservative, unassuming, friendly bit of polite culture. Yet surely we must see that this is not the faith of Paul, nor the faith of Augustine, nor the faith of Luther or Calvin, nor the faith of Jonathan Edwards, nor the faith of William Wilberforce. This is not a faith that saves us, a life made with radical purpose.

Radical! Yes, radical! Jesus's exceptionally brutal death on the cross and magnificent resurrection are the most radical events ever to have taken place. And we live by them. Or at least we are called to. As Christ is at the center of God's glory and plan, Christ is our life and our purpose. And our selves are to be crucified on the cross with Christ. As we live, the self (which this world tells us is of such significance--think Oprah, think subjectivism, think the American Dream, think rugged individualism, think advertising) dies. Galatians 6:14 puts it this way: "But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world." We have to be purified of the flesh we carry and so be sanctified for a holy, holy, holy God.

There are still some '60s-era hippies around--especially in New England--and their clarion call still remains: Subvert the dominant paradigm, man. (OK, I added the "man" part.) Well, let's take that call and make it our own; let's subvert the Church of Self that Western civilization has been constructing for generations; let's smash the self with all the righteous fury of the iconoclasts! By clinging to the cross, boasting only in the cross, living by it, breathing by it, knowing with life-transforming intensity that it is the only cause of our liberty--this is how we break out of the jail-cell of sin and so free ourselves from the world of flesh and material and mammon. That is the kind of Christian I want to be.

Next time: What this all means in practice in my life (and maybe yours too).

P.S. Piper gives an infinitely deeper, clearer explanation of the bases of radical Christian living in the first few chapters of his book Don't Waste Your Life. Read it, I beg you.

Hunger and Thirst: The Δικαιοσύνη Version

If you're ever feeling particularly proud or wise or righteous, open up to Matthew 5 and sit down to listen to the greatest sermon ever preached.

The Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus never stood at a big wooden pulpit. We've got big wooden pulpits now to signify the glory and greatness and weight of the Word of God. Jesus was the Word and was God. And he needed no pulpit. He seems to have preferred seasides and hills, and I like to think that for Jesus, who had taken part in Creation, sinless nature was preferable to manmade temples. (Ironically, the Byzantines built one such manmade church on top of the mount, and eventually, after that had fallen to the ground, so did the Catholics.)

Anyhow, it's verses two through twelve that have been blowing my mind lately. The Beatitudes. They're standard Sunday school fare, but I know that as a kid I was thinking far more about when I'd get to play with the Matchbox cars on that big urban carpet (remember that?) than about what the Beatitudes really, deeply meant. So meditating on them now has been sort of like reliving Sunday school -- minus the Matchbox cars -- or at least what Sunday school should have been.

Loads could be said about the 'Tudes, and has. Rightly so, because in the Beatitudes we have a very instructive but brief -- and ever so radical -- portrait of what it looks like to live in light of the Gospel. But one in particular has struck me, and that's the one about hunger and thirst.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." (v.6)

Interestingly, the Greek word we usually translate as "blessed" is actually rather closer in original meaning to "happy." Most translators haven't seen fit to distinguish between the two, but consider the Beatitudes rephrased as all beginning with "Happy are..." instead of "Blessed are..."; it strikes the ear differently to know Jesus was speaking more of contentment than of blessing, no?

Moving on, we've got the crux, the hunger and thirst, the emptiness that needs filling. Jars of clay, earthen vessels, that are worthless and without any kind of identity when empty. Really, hunger and thirst are the most human of sensations; they're reminders that our bodies require regular refueling, a kind of natural cadence that takes us to the table three times a day to eat and drink. Jesus says that ideally we ought to feel the same way about righteousness. We should seek it out regularly, and we should feel empty and hollow when we aren't in pursuit of it.

Jesus quotes the following verse from Deuteronomy 8 when he's tempted by Satan: "And he [the God of Israel] humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word [all words] that comes from the mouth of the LORD."

Righteousness is learned by listening to and meditation on those words coming from the mouth of the Lord, his revelation in Scripture; that is what we are to seek in our quest for righteousness. I've been jumping around through the Psalms lately (but jumping in an obsessive way), and I came across the very long, very repetitive, very good Psalm 119. Coincidentally (read: not coincidentally), it also begins with "Blessed are...." The amateur detective inside of me suspects there is a very conscious link between the Beatitudes and this Psalm. At the very least hearing Jesus's sermon draws us back to that Psalm, where we are able to learn more about what a hunger and thirst for righteousness might look like and feel like.

I'd include the entire Psalm 119 here, except that it's a hefty 176 verses long. To condense: It's essentially about loving the Lord's precepts (variously called his word, law, testimonies, commands, commandments, statutes). If "love" paired with "law" seems a strange combination to you, you've got company here. I struggled for awhile with what it means to delight in God's law. The clues, however, are contained in the Psalm. The Psalmist says, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (v.105). And: "You are my hiding place and my shield; I hope in your word" (v.114). I could go on. Though we're tempted to see God's commands and precepts as terrifying (after all, mankind has proved that we can't ever hope to live up to them -- which is the reason for the Messiah in the first place), we see that God's guidelines for living are perfect. Jesus lived by them, and lived by them without fault. God's law is good enough for God, and certainly it is good enough for us.

We're not justified in the day of judgment because of our righteousness (which, by the way, means literally "being the way one ought to be" before God). In fact, there are many people who do not believe in the God of the Psalmist who are in some ways better people than some who do believe. There are meek people who do not believe. There are mourning people who do not believe. There's Gandhi. Righteousness is not the root of our salvation (praise God!), but rather the fruit of our salvation. (John Piper has put it this way. By the way, I think I might name my firstborn John Piper.) We begin to live according to the Beatitudes because we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, not in order to become redeemed. We pursue righteousness because we have been granted salvation by faith, not in order to be granted salvation. Our pursuit is post-salvation, and that pursuit is by prayer and engagement with Scripture. So glad to have worked that out.

Finally, there is the last bit of the hunger-and-thirst Beatitude: the promise. This is Jesus's assurance. Not only will we be blessed (and/or "happy") if we seek after righteousness as we hunger after food and thirst after water, but in the end our seeking will not be in vain. "They shall be satisfied." (In the Greek: "They will be fed.") If we pursue righteousness by meditating on God's Word, seeing the perfect exemplar of righteousness in Jesus himself, we will grow in righteousness. Jesus says later in his sermon, "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you" (7:7). Seek righteousness, and you will find it. For, if sinful man still knows how to give good gifts to his children, "how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (7:11). He is faithful, even if we are not.

These are the things I've been learning lately. Strangely (read: not strangely at all), all these strands of seemingly unrelated things have come together in righteousness of all things. A nudge from the Lord, I'm very sure.

I once felt very proud and very wise and very self-righteous, and then I met the God of the Bible.