Category: Christian Life Page 4 of 9

David Brooks in a NY Times column late last year made mention of a man he’s come to know from Nairobi’s famous Kibera slum. Kennedy Odede is a survivor of terrible deprivation who now is joyfully doing notable good works there.

Odebe’s story is one of poverty and loss and abuse and gangs and crime, a list of things that singularly would have overwhelmed and destroyed many. But Odede says this:

While I didn’t have food, couldn’t go to school, or when I was the victim or witness of violence, I tried to appreciate things like the sunrise — something that everyone in the world shares and can find joy in no matter if you are rich or poor. Seeing the sunrise was always healing for me, it was a new day, and it was a beauty to behold.

Sometime after reading that I was running as the sun came up and realized that even how we look at something as commonplace as the rising of the sun (or other ordinary events) is really a product of our faith. If one’s faith excludes God, then one can only look at the sun as the product of the regularity of natural forces. It cannot be seen as a gift, for there is no giver. It is the fortuitous product of those natural forces which in other combinations produce death and disease, mudslides and hurricanes, earthquakes and fires. The sun becomes a symbol of hope only through eyes that are informed by faith.

Christians are just as likely as any to see the sunrise, or other events, no differently than the naturalist or atheist sees them: as, perhaps, solely the product of natural forces or as the fruit of our own hard work, forgetting that all good gifts, whether great or small, come from the hand of God.

We can only be moved to gratitude if we acknowledge a giver. But the thing about a give is that he who gives has the power to take away what he has given. If the food on my table is the product of my hard work, and God only the symbolic source, then my thanks to him is tokenism. If on the other hand I know that the food I cherish is something that he could, if he chose to do so, withhold, only then do I genuinely see it as a gift for which I am grateful.

If what we have is only the necessary outcome of natural events, there is no one to thank, no one to credit, and therefore no one to hope in for anything future. We can only thank someone, only be moved to worship someone, whom we know can also take it away what he freely gives.

My point here is not to answer all the questions that swirl around those times of God’s absence and the pain of loss and suffering. Faith is challenged in many complicated ways and I don’t have answers. My point is rather for us to realize that the more we deprive God of control of our lives and of the natural world, the less hope we will have in him. The ‘smaller’ our God, the less power the rising sun will have to stir our hope for the day that comes.

The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. (Job 1:21)

After our third child was born we thought our family had found its natural limit. That was before we discovered there were ways to have children AFTER the wife has a total hysterectomy.

After the fifth was born and hauled home in our VW Vanagon, I joked that the proper translation of Psalm 127:5 was ‘blessed is the man whose Vanagon is full of them’. And suddenly, there was a sixth and an eight passenger van.

I joked. For many, this verse is no joking matter. It us the centerpiece of disappointing controversy and deep sorrow. And it is the psalm I preached on this past Sunday.

Psalm 127 can be dicey territory for a preacher. A friend knowing that I was heading into ‘quiver-full’ territory emailed me, “I hate that quiver-full verse. I cringe every time I read it.” It’s no wonder she would. An entire industry of guilt has arisen around it.

In the sermon (which you can hear here when it is posted) I did not address directly the ‘have-as-many-babies-as-you-can’ corruption of the psalm that some have made popular. I was not avoiding it. It’s just that this is NOT what the psalm is about. The psalm is about the rest that comes to those who belong to God, which makes the guilt inducing application of the psalm particularly troublesome to me. Along the way, I made these interpretive points:

1. Just because a text mentions a thing does not mean that the text is about that thing.
2. This psalm is about blessing, not command.
3. This psalm is not about how we do a thing, but how we view a thing.

The application of the psalm is in verse 2: God grants rest. He grants rest through his justifying us in Christ. In Christ, we are blessed. In him we find sleep without restlessness because what matters most to the wandering soul is to know he has a home and that he is at peace with God.

The fallen human impulse is to seek to justify ourselves, to seek to make ourselves somehow worthy in the eyes of those who matter to us: parents, employers, friends, the world, God. We find what matters to those we wish to please, and we try to provide the success, talent, looks, money, houses, children, or whatever else is the currency of justification in order to gain the acceptance we crave. But that is all vain – for what matters is not what we do but who we are, and we are, through Christ, his. Rest only comes when we embrace that. That is what the psalm is about.

The reference to children in this psalm is not the application of it, but an illustration of the point that the things we think we produce to earn favor we can never produce. They, like success, security, and whatever else we crave, are a gift from his hand. This passage is NOT about children. It is about rest, relief from the agony of self-justification.

We are told that children are a blessing and that it is therefore imperative that genuinely godly people not do anything that would limit the blessing of God. That is the guilt trip mapped out for couples who consider limiting the size of their families.

Of course children are a blessing. So are, in this psalm, houses and security. So are, elsewhere, food on the table and crops in the field. We set limits on blessings all the time. We are not animals acting upon impulse and bound by biology. We are men and women created in the image of God. We have wisdom; we understand prudence.

A large or small family is not an emblem of godliness in either direction. Every couple must exercise wisdom and prudence in these decisions, and they are best made with good counsel in a healthy community. I will in fact remind couples who are making these decisions to think carefully about the anti-child bias of our culture that we as Christians easily imbibe. But there is no biblical mandate commanding every or any couple to have as many kids as the wife’s body can produce.

To impose one vision of ‘the good-life’ and to invoke spurious biblical justification for it is deeply irresponsible. It causes people who love Jesus and who want with every fiber of their being to glorify him in every area of their lives, like my friend, to battle a guilt they need never feel.

That a psalm written to encourage rest becomes ‘cringe-full’ multiplies the tragedy. I want to reclaim this psalm for the exhausted who need rest. That would be just about all of us.

I rarely have opportunity to read all that’s being conflicted on the internet, much less to comment on it, even when it is within my own ‘tribe’. So, though I can’t speak in any way to the actual content fueling the public breakup between Tullian Tchividjian and The Gospel Coalition, I can commend Tchividjian for his reflective and gracious public apology for some of what has happened. You can read that here.

You need be aware of none of this, however, to learn something about the nature of apology and the asking of forgiveness. A few notes seem worth making.

1) When we sin publicly, we need to confess that sin publicly. When our offense to a person is public, a private confession of that sin is not sufficient. It should be made publicly if at all possible. If I sin against my wife in front of my children, I need to ask her forgiveness in front of my children, not just privately to her. If I read this correctly, this is Tchividjian’s spirit in this post. That is commendable.

2) The Westminster Confession of Faith has a quaint and memorable turn of phrase in speaking of repentance. It says that a mere general repentance is not sufficient, but that we should repent of “particular sins particularly”. If I say something that ridicules my wife’s intelligence, it is not sufficient to later tell her, “I’m sorry I’m such an ass.” Such is probably appropriate, but I should also ask her specifically to forgive me for specifically the words I spoke or the actions I performed that offended her. Anything else is not owning the sin.

It’s here that I think Tchividjian is wanting to go, but is having a hard time going in the space of his post. There is much general repentance (“I’m such an ass.”) but not much repentance for particular sins particularly.

3) There is a huge difference between saying, “I’m sorry” and asking for forgiveness. To ask for forgiveness requires me to identify what I’ve done to poison or hurt a relationship. To apologize may be to no more than express regret over the status of the relationship. To tell my wife that I’m sorry that what I did upset her is, in a sense, to put the blame on her for getting upset at me. But it does not have the healing power of my saying, “I failed to love you well by leaving the window of your car rolled down in the rain and I need you to forgive me for that.”

I hear a lot of “I’m sorry” in this post. I want to hear more “Please forgive me for __________.”

I don’t want these observations to take away from the tone and spirit and intention of Tchividjian’s post. I don’t question his heart; I don’t question his desire for genuine reconciliation. And I reflect on how his words carry far greater grace than many I’ve spoken over the years. I see him reaching out to seek peace as far as it depends on him.

I just know that what he is doing is hard, hard for me, hard for him, and hard for us all. I don’t bring this to light to criticize a brother. I bring it to light so that all of us might further reconciliation in our less than public worlds by owning our sin and humbly seeking the grace of forgiveness from those we offend.

Thoughts this week have been driven by a desire to see the hope of Christ rekindled in those for whom it has burned dimly, that as we come to the celebration of Easter we might indeed be renewed in the joy of life given by the life of Him raised from the grave.

These thoughts lead me to a post made a couple of years ago. I repost it here for the sake of those who struggle. Some have found it helpful. I trust others might as well.

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Prone to self-pity, I told my wife the other day that I must like despair like some like ice cream since I indulge so often. But though our thoughts may be trained to flow down well-worn channels, we are never meant to stay there.

My Bible reading plan for the other morning had me reading the book of Lamentations. This is by no means the first place I’d go to or recommend going to when one is feeling the weight of life, and I had little hope of the morning’s reading bringing much comfort.

But the prophet Jeremiah, the book’s reluctant author, has been nicknamed ‘the weeping prophet’ not because he curled up in a useless puddle in the face of the affairs of life, but because he gave expression to the frustrations that life brought to him. He took those frustrations to the One whom he believed to be the source of life.

He wrote as the city of Jerusalem fell apart around him under a Babylonian siege. That siege, Jeremiah had repeatedly pointed out, was the judgment of God upon the squishy, superficial spirituality of Israel. God had had enough and was bringing his promised judgment.

As I sat in “Dr. Jeremiah’s” couch, he showed me that affliction and sin all mixed up and confounded can drag one from freedom to bondage.

“She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.” (1:1)

He showed me as well that it is okay to trace this to its source.

“…because the LORD has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions.” (1:5)

The cause may be my sin, but the source of the affliction is and always will be God. It does not help to try to sidestep God’s sovereignty when we are suffering. In fact, it is appropriate to give full vent to how this makes us feel.

“The Lord has swallowed up without mercy all the habitations of Jacob….” (2:2)

It seems wrong to accuse God of acting “without mercy”, but when that is the way it feels, that is what we need to say. But in Jeremiah I see as well one who, giving vent to bitter honesty, cannot remain at the place of bitter honesty. That is the case with any who truly know God. Yes speaking with such honesty is good, but we must at some point emerge elsewhere.

“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (3:22, 23)

I want to live in that verse, but I often don’t. I think that one of the reasons public worship is so important is that being with God’s people under the ministry of God’s word is a place where, if even for a brief moment, God can move us from the despair of 2:2 to the affirmation of 3:22, 23.

But we want to be there always, not just for a brief moment, we protest from Dr. Jeremiah’s couch. He knows that. But he also knows that in God’s wisdom there is ordained a time for everything under heaven, and for some times we must wait.

“The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.” (3:25, 26)

Waiting is something foreign to me and to many others. Waiting is not what spoiled and soft children are prone to practice. But waiting, nevertheless, is what God demands.

It does not take one long to realize that the afflictions facing the Israelites and observed and experienced by Jeremiah were far worse than those faced by the readers of this blog (both of us). Nevertheless, ours FEEL as real and as painful and the hard place for all of us is to wait quietly. Quiet waiting is a far better place than quiet (or noisy) desperation.

And so Dr. Jeremiah dismisses us from his office with a prayer purged of complaint and focused as it ought to be.

“Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old….” (5:21)

The ellipses can be used to hide things to make the text say what I want it to say. Many writers hide behind abbreviated texts. Here note that I have dropped an important qualifier from the text.

“…unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us.’

What Jeremiah could only sense is what we know to be fact – that we may trust in one who was utterly rejected for us, so that we might know that God would never remain exceedingly angry with us.

With that hope we leave our appointment with this soul doctor. And the good thing is that his consultation was free.

In the car today I heard someone say on the radio with regard to the cardinals gathering in Rome to elect a new pope, “This is the most important thing these cardinals will ever do.”

And I wondered about that.

I understand the context and what the quoted meant to convey. But I wondered if he or they really believe that. These cardinals were no doubt once ordinary parish priests doing ordinary parish work. Is the work of electing a pope more momentous than what pastors perform in their own parish environments every day? Something tells me that it is not.

I rather suspect that the most important thing that any of us ever may do will not be known to us. Perhaps that word idly but fitly spoken settles upon another like an “apple of gold in a setting of silver.” (Proverbs 25:11) Perhaps that act of hospitality easily carried out by us sets a guest thinking about Jesus. We can’t know the importance of our acts.

A college professor changed the tenor and direction of my life by listening to me one day and then recommending a good book. Probably not the most important thing he ever did, but something of great importance in my life and something the impact of which he could never have imagined.

As I said, I suspect that the most important things that we do in our lives are never quite known to us but come about not because we have achieved a place of prominence but because while being faithful in our callings God opens up a door of influence.

And we may never know what he will do with that faithfulness.

Community groups at the church I pastor are looking this year at the stories of various biblical characters, thinking through them in the light of our own stories. It is a dual purposed vision of engaging scripture as well as coming to know one another better. It has generally worked very well.

This past Sunday, the group of which I’m a part considered Genesis 37. Genesis 37 introduces us to Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph and his relationships with his father and siblings. Dysfunction does not seem to be a strong enough word to describe this family. Eventually things fall apart so terribly that his brothers decide not to kill Joseph, which was their first impulse, but to sell him into slavery.

I’m not sure too many families are dealing with their dysfunction that way, but I think we all can identify with family life falling short of what we might imagine as an ideal.

We were asked then to consider what we learn about God from the passage. Our general answer was either “nothing” or “he’s absent”. But then it was argued that he was not absent, though he is not mentioned in the chapter. It was pointed out that in Genesis 50, when all was resolved, that Joseph is able to see God’s hand in the whole mess as moving purposefully through his life and the lives of his brothers.

But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Genesis 50:19, 20)

This was true, others of us argued, but we are not being asked what we learn about God from chapter 50, but what we learn about him in chapter 37. We found it terribly frustrating to try to make sense of chapter 37 without being given recourse to the later chapters.

And then it struck me that this is the very thing that works frustration into our own lives.

We see the dysfunction in our families or churches or work environments. We see the miserable state of our lives. And we can make sense of none of it. We want to see purpose, but we see only sorrow. But that is because we are by our human limitations constrained to see only the present. We are stuck in Chapter 37 where God seems absent. But perhaps one day we will be able to peruse our own “Chapter 50” which will give meaning to our Chapter 37 life.

And if we take Biblical teaching to heart, we can be encouraged to wait with patience. We can be assured that God is at work, purposefully, even when his work is not seen. We can know that we rest in the palm of his hands. We can know that he who began a good work in us, will not leave us unfinished on the potters wheel. We can know that he who raised his Son from the dead is intent on restoring all things and removing all sorrow. We can know that it will make sense one day.

We are simply (!) encouraged to wait. Waiting is hard. Our lives often feel Genesis 37-ish. But waiting is softened by the promise of Genesis 50. And for that we should be grateful.