God's Faithfulness, and Proper Uses of Words

This morning in church I was struck again with something that's been a large part of my worship experience since I wandered deep into the Old Testament last year. The thing that keeps coming to my mind is God's faithfulness to His people over the course of many centuries. He has never given up on us, He has continued to love us, all the way from the fall of Adam through Noah and Abraham and Joseph and Moses, through Godly leaders and through unGodly leaders, through our faithfulness and our apostasy, on and on through thousands of years of time, right up to now. God is still faithful to His people. It gets me every time!

Pastor touched a couple of times on the power of words, and he mentioned this passage:

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.
(Matthew 5:21-22 ESV)

In context, Jesus was taking a number of serious transgressions of the Law (lust, divorce, breaking an oath, etc.) and saying that once the deed is done in your heart, it's as sinful as if you had done it for real. In this case, though, Jesus is basically saying that if you speak out to someone in anger, it is tantamount to murdering them. And I got to thinking about my relationship with my kids.

Are there any parents in existence who don't ever get frustrated and angry with their kids? I doubt it! Kids are kids... they haven't learned how to act like adults yet, and they haven't become as emotionally and mentally mature as their parents (hopefully) have, and sometimes we see blossoming in them things that we once struggled with and finally defeated. Emotionally it's like finally clearing your yard of dandelions, and then the next day waking up to see the whole yard yellow again. I certainly know that I've raised my voice to my children in anger before! I try to be very careful when correcting my children, and always tell them that even if they've done something stupid (messing with something that could hurt them, going somewhere dangerous, etc.) it doesn't mean that they are stupid... it means that their actions were stupid, even though they are both very smart kids. But I wonder if raising my voice to them in anger actually really does kill something inside of them. I don't want to be the murderer of any part of my children; I'll be reevaluating how I communicate with them in those kinds of situations. I think God can teach me how to always be someone who heals and reconciles and never someone who kills with my words.

Fire, Light, and God's Way

photo © 2007 Jalal HB | more info (via: Wylio)

Into marvelous light I'm running out of darkness, out of shame
By the cross You are the Truth, You are the Life, You are the Way
(from "Marvelous Light")

This is my prayer in the fire, in weakness or trial or pain:
There is a faith proved of more worth than gold, so refine me, Lord, through the flame
(from "Desert Song")

Tonight during worship we sang several songs (including those quoted above) that described God in terms of "light" and "fire." That's one of my favorite images of God; not only does He illuminate and bring clarity, but He also burns up the bad stuff and purifies us until there's nothing but good stuff left (or, at least we approach that goal more and more as we let Him refine us and root out the messy parts of our lives and personalities). Being purified is usually an uncomfortable process, but when it's over, the result is something much better than what existed before!

My pastor briefly mentioned during worship that we should praise God for answers to prayer even before we see them... the easy example of this is Jericho, where the people shouted victory before the walls fell down. And Pastor said that this way of thinking is totally counter to our way of thinking as human beings, which is true, but it got me thinking: if human beings have one way of seeing something, and God has another way, and they are opposite, which one is the valid way? God's way, of course! God's way is: (1) we ask, (2) we believe His statement that when we ask we will receive, and (3) we begin to celebrate the answer even though it's not here yet. It's like getting word that your Christmas present is on the way by mail. You know you're going to get what you wanted, so why not rejoice? Instead, our "natural" impulse is to wait until we have the answer in our hands before we rejoice. It's like Grandma telling you that that Christmas present is in the mail, and you choosing to be skeptical about whether she is telling you the truth or not. Looked at it that way, which is the truly "natural" attitude to have: the "human being" way, or the "God" way?

Maybe the reason we don't rejoice is because we think that we may not be asking within the parameters of God's will. To solve that problem, we have to get God's Word into our hearts. I'll be posting a short series about the Bible soon; it's so critical to living the life God wants for us that we dig into God's Word! If you don't know if what you're praying is God's will or not, check the Book (which is MUCH easier to do if you already have a good grasp of what it says in there!) and get sure. Then pray according to the Will of God, and REJOICE!

Eternity in our Hearts

I read this the other day and thought it was beautiful:

I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man. (Ecclesiastes 3:10-13 ESV)

We have "eternity in our hearts" because mankind was designed by God for eternity; at the beginning, we were not created able to die, but since the Fall our bodies aren't ready for eternity. Barring Christ's return beforehand, each of our bodies will one day die and decompose. To our bodies, death is natural enough, but to our designed-for-eternity hearts, death is a completely foreign concept. We hate death deep down in our hearts because our hearts were not designed to comprehend death. Maybe that's part of why we cry and grieve even for departed loved ones that we have every reason to believe are in Heaven now. Our bodies can die, and our minds can understand it when it happens, but our hearts just can't accept the idea of death.

The happy ending is that we do have this life, and God intends for us to enjoy it as fully as we can, and accomplish what we can, even in this short lifetime! You will not be able to accomplish before you die everything that God has planned for you... because there's more than one mortal lifetime's worth of it! And then when our hearts finally meet with God in eternity, He'll have our continuing assignments ready and waiting!

Bible in a Year (and a half)

About this time last year, I decided that 2010 was going to be the year that I read all the way through the Bible. As you can see from my blog post on New Year's Day, I had decided to make it through no matter what. It wasn't a "resolution" as much as just a "decision" - I realize that both words mean pretty much the same thing, but to me a "resolution" sounds like something very formal, something that will have consequences if you don't do it, and something you are destined to fail at. A "decision" is just something that means that you're making a simple change in your life; it used to be this way, and now it's another way.

So I'll cut to the chase: I didn't make it all the way through this year. Today I finish the last chapter of Proverbs. There are a few reasons for this; I want to share them, not to excuse or explain myself (it's not like I did anything wrong, after all!), but I'm thinking that if there are other "Bible-in-a-year-failures" reading this, they may be encouraged by this when something happens to them and trips up their schedule!

I was on track for the first couple of months of the year, right on schedule with the plan I had (pretty much arbitrarily) picked out. I was actually reading the Bible text and the study notes from my ESV Study Bible, which was a bit above-and-beyond the whole "reading straight through" thing, but I wanted to make sure I was understanding what I was reading. A book or two into it, I got an NIV Study Bible too, so I started reading the ESV text, then reading the ESV Study Bible notes, then reading the NIV Study Bible notes. It's like my own little mini Bible school! It's particularly interesting when the two sets of study notes have different perspectives on the same topic; it gives me a chance to see two sides of the story and form my own opinions. After a month or so of this, I started noticing that my attitude and outlook was changing. I was being transformed by the Word!

The problem with adding this extra reading on myself is that it made the schedule that much less forgiving. It was harder to catch up when I got behind, and it was harder to decide to do my reading on days when I was tired and knew concentration wouldn't be easy. And then something happened to make it even harder: We had not one, not two, but three deaths in our family, and all were people I was rather close with: my grandfather, my wife's father, and my wife's brother's wife all died within a span of couple of months. Not only did we have traveling, funerals, and visiting with family to take up our attention, but frankly there were nights when my wife and I didn't get an awful lot of sleep. There were weeks at a time this year when I felt fatigued every single day from not enough rest. If that's not enough to throw you off schedule, I don't know what is.

But I can't blame being this behind on only that, because I'll admit it: some nights I just didn't feel like it. Some nights I could have read, and I didn't. So an embarrassing amount of the "behind schedule" came from plain old laziness.

So I didn't read all the way through the Bible this year. But you know what? I read through more than half of it! And if it takes me all next year to read the other half, and if I do it, then I will have read the whole thing! And learned a lot in the process. One year is not a magic number. There's nothing in the Word itself that says you have to read all the way through the whole thing in one year. It's completely arbitrary. But one big thing I learned this year is that if you immerse yourself in the Word for a long enough time, the Word begins to immerse itself in you! My Bible reading this year had an unmistakably positive effect on me, and I expect my reading in the coming year will have a similar positive effect. Actually, I'm pretty excited about getting into the Prophets... that was one of the things I really wanted to get into! I can't wait to dig deep into Isaiah, Jeremiah, the whole bunch of them. And now that I have a grasp on the historical events surrounding them, I should be able to understand them even better!

I definitely, unreservedly recommend a consistent Bible reading regimen for everyone. If you don't read every single day, that's still OK. If you read maybe three or four days a week, it will still transform your life. But if you do want to go all the way through the Bible, there's an abundance of help out there! If you need help figuring out where to start or how to do it, my blog post from New Year's Day 2010 has some help, but this year I've run across some other resources:

• BibleGateway.com has some great Bible reading resources. They even will send you reminders via email, taking you all the way through the whole Bible or just the New Testament in a year. In addition to the email reminders, you can receive reminders via RSS or iCal, or you can just visit the site regularly.
• The ESV Bible site has ten different reading plans you can use.
• If you use YouVersion.com, you have access to a number of reading plans, including entire-Bible plans, partial-Bible plans, topical plans, and lots more... they must have something like 60 different reading schemes. And if you have a smartphone, you can download their phone app and do your daily reading right from your phone! How convenient is that?

In this age of mobile devices and Internet connections in almost every home, there's no reason not to get involved in the Word. Just make a decision to do it! Become a "fan" of the Word (and I'm not talking about Facebook here!) Get interested. Get excited. Get into it! It will change your life!

Christmas Songwriting

This morning we visited another church (we're not leaving our church; my wife's brother was singing at his church so we went to hear!) and I really enjoyed the selection of Christmas carols we sang. There were a number of songs that are traditional, but not on the "I've sung this so many times I'm on auto-pilot" list. There was one song I wasn't familiar with, though, and I was disappointed with the song itself. Almost every rhyme in the song was an awful Christian Christmas song cliche:

earth/birth
life/sacrifice
love/son
name/praise

The music of the song was very stirring, and the themes in the lyrics were terrific, but the songwriting was less than eloquent. I mean, if your craft as an artist isn't any better developed than to plagiarize a rhyme from "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" (but in a much less eloquent way) then the right place for you is in your songwriting room, doing a rewrite. There's more to good songwriting that throwing in all the right buzzwords. I hope I'm not sounding grouchy or snarky, and there are probably lots of people who think that song is the best song ever, but the copyright date on the slide was mid-2000s so it's fairly recent, and my prediction is that it will not stand the test of time. It just didn't particularly say anything that hadn't been said better before.

Christian artists should bring their very best to God. If the song is nothing but a rather weak copy of other songs, then it's not good enough to bring before the King of Kings. Let's bring Jesus Christ only the very best.

Let There Be Peace On Earth

This week I've been thinking again along the lines of this post, although I hadn't really thought of those songs in that context this year. The peace the angels promised the night Jesus was born was not something between individuals or nations (Jesus Himself said that His coming would polarize and divide people), but that peace was a peace between us and God. Because Jesus came, our sins no longer stand between us and the Father. That peace is "on Earth" as long as those who accept Jesus are on Earth. I wish for you an abundance of the peace of God in your heart, not just on Christmas, but always... because of Christmas.

May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. (2 Peter 1:2 ESV)

Three Days

I wonder how Abraham felt as he was walking up that mountain with Isaac? God had spoken directly with him and told him to go, but the Bible never says that God kept speaking to him all the way up there. It was a pretty incredible thing that God had asked Abraham to do; I can't imagine him not having a doubt or two along the way in a journey of over three days. Then again, just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it's not true; the Bible doesn't often tell us the internal dialogue of the characters like modern fiction often does. Usually the Bible reports events as a third person observer.

So we don't really know what Abraham was thinking; we only know that when Isaac asked him what was going on, Abraham said something that was actually a little different from what God had said. Whether he was saying that to deceive Isaac, or whether he had deceived himself, or whether he actually had some revelation from God about the situation over the course of those 3+ days, we don't know. What we do know is that what actually happened in the end resembled what Abraham had said more than what God had said! Figure that one out!

So did Abraham feel some deep-down inner confidence every step of the way? Maybe. The Bible certainly sets him up as a giant of faith, so maybe his confidence was different from mine. But what I know from how my life generally works is that I hear from God, I believe God's words and choose to follow His instructions, but then things don't happen immediately. Things in this lifetime take time. For Abraham it took three days and a little more; often in our lives things can take weeks, months, or even years. And I'll freely admit that during my "three days" (however long those "days" may be), I don't always feel the power of God's instructions and/or promises about my situation. Sometimes I just feel sort of... indifferent.

Does that mean I'm not in faith? You know, I don't think so. I think that as long as I am still on track to do what God has instructed me to do, I'm still acting in faith. Maybe Abraham said what he did to Isaac in order to try to convince himself that everything was going to be okay. After all, all of his hopes and dreams were hinging on Isaac as his only legitimate son. Who knows? What we do know is that Abraham continued to put one foot in front of the other foot, all the way to the mountain where he had been commanded to put all of his dreams for the future to death. And when he got there, God made a way for him.

So maybe I'll just keep walking!