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.