In Heaven Even Their Evil Footprints Shall Not Be Known

I’m nearing the final stages of completing a full rough draft for my next book. It’s about how the promise of the return of Christ brings hope to every believer, especially to those who are suffering. Unfortunately, it won’t be for sale until June of 2026.

In the meantime, I wanted to share that the project gave me the blessing of reading over and over the passages in the Bible about the end of everything. I also had the blessing of reading a bunch of good books on the topic. A British pastor named J.C. Ryle has become one of my favorite writers from the past, and I loved his collection of remarks about the hope of heaven.

In one place, he writes about God’s complete removal of the various types of evil from heaven such that “even their footprints will not be known.” What a sweet promise. Here’s the quote in it’s fuller context.

There are many things about heaven revealed in Scripture which I purposely pass over. That it is a prepared place for a prepared people; that all who are found there will be of one mind and of one experience, chosen by the same Father, washed in the same blood of atonement, renewed by the same Spirit; that universal and perfect holiness, love, and knowledge will be the eternal law of the kingdom—all these are ancient things, and I do not mean to dwell on them.

Suffice it to say, that heaven is the eternal presence of everything that can make a saint happy, and the eternal absence of everything that can cause sorrow.

Sickness, and pain, and disease, and death, and poverty, and labor, and money, and care, and ignorance, and misunderstanding, and slander, and lying, and strife, and contention, and quarrels, and envies, and jealousies, and bad tempers, and infidelity, and skepticism, and irreligion, and superstition, and heresy, and schism, and wars, and fightings, and bloodshed, and murders, and law suits—all, all these things shall have no place in heaven.

On earth, in this present time, they may live and flourish. In heaven even their footprints shall not be known. (J.C. Ryle, Heaven: Priceless Encouragements on the Way to our Eternal Home, 8).

* Photo by Anya Smith on Unsplash

The Reason I’m Most Thankful to Have Timothy Keller as One of My Spiritual Fathers

I went through all my seminary education largely oblivious to whatever pastor or author was currently deemed the most popular in evangelicalism—or, conversely, which pastor had most recently done something silly or sinful and thus immediately needed to be talked about by everyone. It’s a great way to go through seminary, and maybe life. Sure, I had a few favorites even in the early years of my ministry training, but they were literally just a few. And none of them, back then, were Timothy Keller.

I only met Dr. Keller once in person. He came to my seminary as a visiting preacher and lecturer. I didn’t really know who he was, even though it was about the same year he was co-founding The Gospel Coalition and lots and lots of other people apparently knew him. That anecdote speaks of my blissful ignorance.

Yet now, some fifteen years later, when I think over his ministry and the blessing he was to me and so many others, I’m thankful that God extruded him to a place of prominence. I’m thankful for books like Counterfeit Gods that gave me the language to name and renounce my idolatry, the language of “a good thing becoming an ultimate thing.” I’m thankful for those in our congregation who became Christians as we led a study through The Prodigal God. And I’m thankful for the textbook Center Church, and the way it prepared our leaders to plant a church in our city. In short, I’m thankful for the publishing and church-planting empire the Lord built through him.

The one-year anniversary of his death was last month. Christianity Today published a reflection I had about his life and what I’m most thankful for. This may come as a surprise. It wasn’t his writing or preaching, despite the above picture being from the bookshelf in my office which prominently features most of his books.

If you’d like to read the post, you can do so here, “Would Tim Keller Care If We Weren’t Still Talking About Him? Probably Not.” Christianity Today used this line as the excerpt for sharing, which I think gets at the point of my article: “For all his greatness, we should most seek to imitate the late pastor’s humility and indifference to fame.” The article also talks about the little-noticed detail of a brown banana peel that sat next to Keller in a famous photograph of him.

I can’t republish the whole article here, but I will include the first three paragraphs below. I’d love for you to read and share the article.

*     *     *

In spring of last year, many of us saw a photo of the late Timothy Keller sitting on a park bench. The photo was used on the cover of Collin Hansen’s biography of Keller, and it circulated around the internet in May when he passed away—on social media, blogs, and even Keller’s personal website.

What most of us didn’t see, however, was the banana peel lying on the bench only a couple feet from Keller. The peel has been cropped from most versions of the photo, and understandably so. Who wants to see an ugly brown bit of organic waste in an author’s photograph?

I confess that if I were a world-famous pastor and best-selling author having my picture taken by a professional photographer, I would most certainly have moved the banana peel before someone took my picture. Who wouldn’t? But Keller didn’t seem to care . . .

To continue reading on Christianity Today’s website, click here.

Thoughts on Coaching Sports as a Christian

It’s been almost twenty years since I was competing in college athletics. Since then I have continued to run and cycle and lift weights and all of that—sometimes more and sometimes less. I was talking with a sports medicine doctor last spring after yet another injury, and he said “weekend warriors” like me make for good job security. I bet we are.

Over the last few years, though, I’ve been more involved in sports as a coach. My children attend a small Christian school, and the school has let me help on several teams. Our track and field season is just about over. We had districts last weekend and had great success. One athlete will compete in states this weekend. Super fun.

Last month The Gospel Coalition was kind to publish some reflections I have about coaching sports as a Christian. The title of the article is, “Christian Coach, Help Athletes Cultivate Rightly Ordered Loves” and engages with a concept developed by Augustine a long time ago. I know that can make for an odd mashup, but I think it works.

I can’t post the whole article here. But I’ll include the first few paragraphs. I’d love for you to click over to the full article, give it a read, and share it with others. Maybe you know a coach who would find it a blessing.

*     *     *

Christian Coach, Help Athletes Cultivate Rightly Ordered Loves

Benjamin Vrbicek, The Gospel Coalition, April 26, 2024 

Track and field athletes want to run fast, jump high, and throw far. I’m a varsity coach at a small Christian school, and I want this for our athletes too. I even want them to win.

This may sound strange, but I hope other schools want to win against us too.

I don’t say this because rivalry draws out better performances, though often it does. I want to coach in a way that cultivates intensity because our effort to win is part of what it means to glorify God in athletics.

Trying to win, however, is only part of glorifying God in sports. And not the biggest part either.

Whether coaches have full-time jobs in athletics or are parent volunteers, they have a wonderful opportunity to cultivate Christian maturity.

A coach can help an athlete rejoice with her teammate even though that teammate beat her in a close race. He can draw out respect for opponents, encouraging harmony with those an athlete is competing against. A coach can cultivate an athlete’s identity in Christ such that she could win the state championship and not become haughty, or tear an ACL and not be devastated.

We could simply call these lessons “coaching,” but this kind of coaching is an opportunity to cultivate what Augustine called “rightly ordered loves.” . . .

* Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

The Too-Many Ways the Lord Is Teaching Me to Number My Days

When I officiate weddings, the brides and grooms always seem young. Yet I keep noticing something in that moment when I ask the father of the bride, “Who gives this young woman away?” and he answers, “Her mother and I.” The fathers and mothers seem to be getting younger and younger.

Of course, they are not getting younger. I’m getting older.

Which means if you are over a certain age, I might owe you an apology. If you are around 65 years old today, I’m sorry. I apologize because if you go back about 15 or 20 years to when you were younger than 50 years old (and I was younger than 30), then I was probably confused about your age. I know it’s not kind to admit, but I probably thought you were already 65 back then. Please forgive me.

This hit me the other day because something at work got me thinking about one of my seminary professors. So, I looked online for his current age. Today he is 68 years old. Today. Something didn’t seem right because 15 years ago I thought he was already 65. How, I wondered, did he only age 3 years over the last 15? Hence the apology.

“In so many more ways than I would like, the Lord has been teaching me to number my days.”

Where am I going with all this? The psalmist asks God, “Teach us to number my days.” He requests this so that we might, “get a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). I haven’t necessarily spent a lot of time asking God to teach me to number my days, and I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily gained a heart of wisdom, even though I hope I’m wiser than I was a decade ago. But I can say this: in so many more ways than I would like, the Lord has been teaching me to number my days.

The other day, for instance, the news app on my phone suggested an article from The Wall Street Journal called “The Age When You Stop Feeling Young.” The subtitle indicated that the oldest millennials (of which I am one) have reached the decade when people often start noticing signs of aging. I couldn’t tell whether the suggestion to read this article was altogether random or my phone was taunting me.

I noticed my age this last summer while our family vacationed at the beach. (Beaches have a way of showing us our age, don’t they?) Our family often plays checkers on vacation, and my oldest daughter beat me, and, no, I didn’t let her win or let her have that triple jump. They both just happened. Also at the beach, my oldest son and I went for several runs, some together and some by ourselves. Whether together or on our own, he always ran faster and usually further. No, I didn’t let him beat me either.

To some extent he ran faster because I’ve had a hip injury hampering my training since the spring. Here also my age shows. I coach a local track team, and I got hurt as I participated in a sprint workout. Since then, I’ve been doing physical therapy off and on. When I showed up for my final session of PT, the receptionist told me I had met my insurance deductible. I’m glad to have my insurance costs reduced, but it made me feel like people probably feel when asked if they want the senior discount. Meeting your insurance deductible is not a prize you want to win.

Soon, when I look at my wedding photos, the father who gave his daughter away will be younger than me.

I could go on and on about getting older, but I suspect that if you were on the receiving end of my apology because you’re older than 65, you already know everything I’m saying—and you could add more stories of your own. And if you’re 25 right now, the more I keep blabbing about the signs of aging, the more you’ll think I am already 65.

“Surely gaining a heart of wisdom must mean more than realizing you can’t outrun your teenagers.”

When Moses asks the Lord, “Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom,” he does not mean, “Lord, help us to list all the ways we feel old, that we might feel bad”—even if numbering our days and listing ways we feel old does have some overlap. Surely gaining a heart of wisdom must mean more than realizing you can’t outrun your teenagers.

Indeed, it does mean more.

When we sing the stanza that asks God to teach us to number our days, we also ask for the blessing of the Lord to serve him with purpose to the end of our days. “Let the favor of the LORD our God be upon us,” we sing. “And establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!” (Ps. 90:17).

As we age, rather than cultivating gloom and apathy, we can pray that whatever God calls us to do, we will do it with joy and vigor. We can ask God to let our extra trips to the doctor remind us that God watches over the lilies and even more so watches over us as the Great Physician. And we can pray that whatever our hands find to do, we can do it with all our might, knowing that our labor in the Lord is not in vain (Eccles. 9:10; 1 Cor. 15:58).

When you feel the signs of aging, are these the kinds of prayers you pray? You can. You and I have a choice. As my phone reminded me, this may be the decade I stop feeling young, but it doesn’t have to be the decade I stop serving the Lord with zeal.

* Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

Moths Have Eaten an Infamous Armstrong Poster

The basement in my home is a dungeon. Construction workers poured the concrete walls over a hundred years ago, and when it rains, the walls leak like an old pirate ship. I store my road bike in the basement, a corner of the dungeon tucked inside a small alcove. During the winter or when it’s really raining, I come inside the leaky dungeon, put my bike on a trainer, and ride for an hour while I stare at the posters on the walls.

I collected most of the posters in college, and one poster catches my attention each time I ride, especially times like right now, for the three weeks in July when a hundred professional riders compete in the two-thousand-mile race called the Tour de France.

The poster is of Lance Armstrong, his famous “What Am I On?” poster. A blurred Armstrong rides along a country road in his iconic Postal uniform on his Trek bicycle frame. The red, white, and blue colors evoke the best of American, even Texan, pride, the ideas that happiness can be pursued and success is democratized to everyone willing to work hard. In the background behind Lance is a white building resembling a country church. Perhaps the church signifies devotion and zeal, even worship. In the upper right-hand corner the poster reads:

This is my body and I can do whatever I want to it, I can push it, study it, tweak it, listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

The poster was actually part of a broader marketing campaign by Nike. A television commercial employed the same brash and polemical wording on the poster to rebuke the early rumors of Lance’s steroid use and blood doping.

As I said, I’ve had this poster since college, and many times as a college athlete, I would look up and think, If I work hard, if I do the work with excellence and effort, passion and devotion, if I put in the six-hour days and I’m smart about it, then I will get ahead. It. Will. Happen.

I did this because, more than just celebrating Armstrong’s work ethic, the poster promised—indeed the “Legend of Lance” promised—similar results to all who had ears to hear. The way the poster shows Lance riding slightly uphill underscores this promise. His skills and determination shined brightest on French mountains, so the climbing posture fits. But the posture also extends the promise of progress to any devoted viewer, any true believer in hard work. You can do this too, it whispers. Armstrong climbed back from cancer by riding his bike uphill six hours a day. What are you on?

Needless to say, that poster looks different to me today than it did in college.

Not only was Lance Armstrong stripped of all seven of the titles he won in the Tour de France, but during that era the governing body of the race has chosen not to award other winners because of such pervasive use of performance-enhancing drugs. Most top riders have confessed to cheating or been credibly accused.

I ponder these realities and see the potential to make what some call a “Jesus juke,” that is, to quickly move from one story—whether a sad or sappy story—to a fairly obvious connection to Jesus, often some sentimental truth. But in all seriousness, the story of Lance and this particular “What Am I On?” poster has often led me to reflect upon Jesus’s words about treasure. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” Jesus said. “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matt. 6:19–20).

The promise, however, offers more than we likely realize at first. God offers forgiveness for cheaters. Instead of standing trial for our failings, God offers to let the death of Christ stand as the public reckoning for wrongs. And here is the real treasure, forgiveness from God and friendship with him that never fades.

I know he’s controversial, but I like Armstrong—not only back in the day when he raced but now. I appreciated the early autobiography It’s Not About the Bike written with Sally Jenkins, and I appreciate now his predictably arrogant hot takes on his podcast The Move. And I can appreciate his recent attempts to engage the conversation of transgenderism in sports, chiefly biological men playing against biological women.

Yet of course I understand the polarization, like on Twitter for instance. The comments under his posts fall almost exclusively in the categories of either “I love you, Lance” or “I hate you.” This is because he’s also hurt people, not only back in the day when he squashed his accusers, but the way his hot takes still cut down others. For all the other falsehoods about Armstrong’s integrity in his that early autobiography, it really was true that it’s not about the bike. Lance is about Lance, then and now.

And I feel this same temptation tug at me, even as I preach and lead a church and love my wife and kids and point others to Jesus. Too often it’s about Benjamin.

So I guess I long for Armstrong to know—as I long for myself and others to know—the treasure of God’s forgiveness and what it means to be caught up in something bigger, indeed Somone bigger, than myself. Because while the promise of the poster has rusted, the promise from Jesus has not and will not.

Finding Jesus at the Nub End of Jared C. Wilson’s Fraying Rope

The guys at the church often tease me about being a fanboy of Jared C. Wilson’s writing. Last year they even took a picture from Wilson’s Instagram page and photoshopped my head into the picture as though I were just hangin’ with my bud. You might even say my relationship with Jared is as his relationship is to actor Mark Ruffalo. I just let the office guys tease me. They know I’m right.

I could mention a few reasons why I appreciate Wilson’s writing. I’ve done that in other blog posts—hence my reputation. This afternoon, I’ll just share one reason. Wilson seems to understand what it means for faith to wear thin and to know what it means to need Jesus, not theoretically but experientially. To say it another way, Wilson knows a Christian’s salvation rests in the strength of Jesus, not in the strength of one’s faith in Jesus. Knowing this difference matters a lot, especially as you suffer. And knowing the difference matters as you commend Jesus to others.

Buy on Amazon

Wilson writes in his book The Gospel According to Satan, “When you get to the end of your rope, there is Jesus” (84). In his writing he doubles back over and over again to this theme of finding hope in God when all around our soul gives way. His words remind me of Paul’s comments about finding hope in God when Paul wondered if he would even live or perhaps if he even wanted to live. “For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia,” Paul writes. “For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.” This is the nub end of Paul’s rope, and he attributes trials of such severity to God’s desire that his children find their strength in him, not in their own ability. “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8–9).

“Until God is your only hope,” Wilson writes in another book, “God will not be your only hope. Utter brokenness is key to gospel wakefulness, because we will not be all-satisfied in Christ until Christ is all we have” (Gospel Wakefulness, 127). This quote comes from a transparent section where Wilson describes a terrible season in life and marriage. I’ll say more about that season in a moment. Wilson continues, “I was groaning in prayer in our guest room, flat on my face, wetting the carpet with tears the moment the Spirit whispered the gospel into my ear. That moment changed everything for me.”

Referencing this same, depression-filled season in another book, he writes, “It’s my conviction that God will not become your only hope until he becomes your only hope” (The Prodigal Church, 212). Wilson writes something similar in his earlier book Gospel Deeps, my personal favorite in the Wilson corpus: “I realized that God would become my only hope when he had become my only hope” (Gospel Deeps, 116). Then, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, Wilson adds, “Let the reader understand.”

I do understand. And the longer I walk with Christ and serve in pastoral ministry, I’m coming to understand better. This is the Christian life—knowing the goodness and grace and sovereignty of God and coming to know it deeper. I’m reminded of the line in the last chapter of Lewis’s The Last Battle, when the faun named Tumnus says to Lucy, “The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”

“Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!”

— Jared C. Wilson

Wilson repeats this theme in his latest book, Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing (Baker Books, 2021). After writing two books about gospel-centered ministry mainly for pastors and church leaders, Wilson returns to writing for a broader Christian audience. While maintaining his faithfulness to biblical, gospel truth, he also writes with an artful, maybe even playful, prose that so many seem to have appreciated in his book The Imperfect Disciple. Love Me Anyway explores the key phrases in the great chapter on love by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, as well as our cultural fascination with love songs.

“It is at the end of your rope that we find Christ is more than enough.” Good writing only infrequently uses exclamation points, reserving them for only those sentences truly deserving. Wilson’s next sentence has one. “And I have come to believe that for a great many of us—if not all of us—Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!” (Love Me Anyway, 129). Later in the book Wilson adds, “I had come to the end of my rope and found there the sufficiency of Christ” (164).

But more than using similar phraseology as in his other books to repeat the theme of finding the strength of Jesus when faith wears thin, in Love Me Anyway Wilson gives his most extended recounting of the season in life which precipitated his wakefulness to the glory of the grace of Jesus Christ. The season brought him to a place of wakefulness not merely to gospel propositions about Jesus but a gospel encounter with Jesus.

Many years ago, as he lived for a long and lonely season in the spare bedroom of his house because his marriage was so poor that his wife didn’t want him in their bedroom, God showed up and began to warm cold hearts. You’ll have to get the book to read it. The details of the story are similar to what he wrote near the end of The Prodigal God, but in Love Me Anyway the story comes with more transparency. Wilson expected the marriage would dissolve, though he prayed it wouldn’t. And with his face wetting the carpet many nights he prayed God could change him.

God did. Because God can. And does. Our God loves to make his power perfect in our weakness and be there for his children when our hands slip from the nub end of our rope.

* Photo by Rui Silvestre on Unsplash

Jesus, Be Big: A Prayer for the New Year

Buy on Amazon

I recently finished reading my friend Kevin Halloran’s new book When Prayer Is a Struggle. He told me about the idea for the book a few years ago over dinner, and I thought, Man, that’s a good idea for a book because when is prayer not a struggle, even for a pastor?

In one of the early chapters, Kevin shares ideas for ordering our prayers, ways to give our prayers a scaffolding, so to speak, on which to hang fresh petitions. I had forgotten about the A-C-T-S method of prayer, where each letter stands for a different theme (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). But I used the method recently to structure a pastoral prayer at church.

To set up the theme of the pastoral prayer, I read from one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors: Jared C. Wilson’s book Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Christ. In the opening paragraph Wilson writes,

My driving conviction in this book is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is big. Like, really big. Ginormous, if you will. And deep. Deep and rich. And beautiful. Multifaceted. Expansive. Powerful. Overwhelming. Mysterious. But vivid, too, and clear. Illuminating. Transforming. And did I mention big? (Gospel Deeps, 17)

Wilson goes on to explain that the church culture that he grew up in would often extend invitations to receive Jesus, whether after preaching or a potluck. These continual invitations unintentionally communicated that the gospel is for unbelievers who might want to begin their Christian life, not for Christians actually living the Christian life. Wilson’s contention in the book is that part of the “bigness of the gospel”—the ginormousness of the gospel, if you will—is the way God intends for us to apply the gospel throughout our Christian life. “Obviously the gospel is the ABCs of salvation,” Wilson writes. “But it is also the A to Z” (2).

If you follow Wilson on social media, you know he often posts before a speaking engagement his prayer, “Jesus, be big.” I think what he means by this prayer is the desire that in our hearts and affections and lives, Jesus would have all the gravity that he really does have.

This is the prayer I want to pray next year for me and my house. And every year.

Adoration

Dear Heavenly Father, we acknowledge that your Son, Jesus Christ, is far bigger than we imagine him to be.

Buy on Amazon

I think of verses such as those in Hebrews 1:1–3 where it says that you have spoken to us finally and definitively through your Son, whom you appointed as the heir of all things, and through whom you also created the world. And how Jesus is the radiance of your glory and the exact imprint of your nature and how Jesus upholds the universe by the word of his power.

I think of what is said in Colossians 1:15–20, that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. And how by Jesus all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—and that all things were created through Jesus and for Jesus. We also read that Jesus is before all things and in him all things hold together. We read of how Jesus is the head of the body, the whole church and every local church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, and in this way, he is preeminent, that is, of first importance. We read of how in Jesus all your fullness was pleased to dwell, and through Jesus you are pleased to reconcile to Jesus all things by the peace that comes through his blood.

And I think of verses like John 1:16 that says from the fullness of Jesus, we receive grace upon grace.

Confession

Father, please forgive us for worshiping a Jesus that is smaller than he really is. We confess that too often other people and worries and fears and dreams occupy in our hearts the place that should only belong to our affections for your Son.

Thanksgiving

Thank you, Father, that you delight to not only hear our prayers but to answer them in ways bigger and better than we could ever imagine.

Supplication

So we ask that as one year closes and a new one begins, you would renew our affection for Jesus and rivet our attention on him. We come to you as those made in your image, but through our sin, we have become weak, wounded, and wayward. Though we do not deserve it, because of your grace and mercy, we ask that you cause us to enjoy the living Jesus in all of life—in this life and the life to come.

We pray all these things in the name of Jesus, which is a way to say that we pray these prayers, not in our authority, but his authority, and we pray these prayers, not according to our will, but his will.

Amen.

* Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Long as the Curse Is Found

Last Christmas my youngest daughter made me a calendar that I hung on my office wall all year long. The other day I noticed that I had reached the final page. That happens. Years come to an end. And so do eras when daughters hand draw calendars for their dads, I thought. It made me sad.

For me, the ending of one year always leads to as many reflections as, if not more reflections than, the beginning of a new one. And the succession of moments that continuously poured like water through my hands as I tried in vain to catch them always seems to lead me toward lament rather than hope. Maybe I’m too morose.

My recent annual performance review encouraged me to have more confidence that not as many good works slip by undone as it often seems to me in the moment. A rain barrel, as it were, positioned by God’s grace, sits under my hands and captures more sacred moments than I realize. As a new year will be here in just a week, maybe I should be more excited about the prospect of catching new moments, a huge cupful of them. After all, a new year with new mercies awaits. How can that not be exciting?

Still, I feel far from being one of those confident souls who seems to have a verse or “a word from the Lord” to identify the upcoming year, some word or another that sparks hope, optimism, and promise. On the first of January I got nothing. Every year.

For the last two years, however, I’ve found a verse from the Lord in retrospect, by accident really—if you believe in accidents.

“A solid chunk of windshield time with the Lord can be cheaper than therapy.”

Sometimes I nibble my way through a Bible memory pack while I commute to church. In both fortunate and unfortunate ways, though, my commute only lasts a few minutes. It’s nice to get back and forth quickly from work, but a solid chunk of windshield time with the Lord can be cheaper than therapy. And because I live less than a mile from our church building, rarely do I make much progress in my Bible memory beyond a few verses, even in those seasons I try to be consistent.

Through all the drama during 2020, I found myself stuck on the memory card with a few verses from Psalm 56. I would mumble the passage to myself as I stopped at the stoplight by the bike shop, took a left at the baseball card shop, drove over the hill and down again to a quick four-way stop before I coasted into my typical parking spot at the back of the church parking lot. “When I am afraid,” I’d say over and over and over again, “I put my trust in you” (56:3). A few more of the verses from Psalm 56 are also printed on the card, but these lines about fear and trust seemed to do the most to calm my anxious heart.

When I got to church, I’d put the car in park, place the memory pack on the floorboard, and go into work, doing what I could do and leaving God to do the rest. When I was afraid, I tried to trust in God.

It worked—not in the short, “screenshot version” of time but in the long, “video reel” version of time. Slowly and steadily the Psalm went in, prayers went up, and perseverance rained down.

Should I call this a verse or a word from the Lord? Well, of course it is a verse from the Lord. But is it a “verse from the Lord” in the common parlance of Christianese? Maybe it was.

That was last year. This year if I had to pick a place my heart has found the most refuge, I’d tell you it’s in the end of Paul’s letter to the church of Galatia: “Let us not grow weary of doing good,” God inspired Paul to write, “for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9). This verse came to my mind the other night before our prayer time at our small group Bible study. I thought mentioning the verse might encourage another member of the group, so I read it to him. But I left that night wondering if the Lord might have a word for me as well, even as I pondered the ways Christians have abused “words from the Lord.”

“Paul gives the admonition to not grow weary, I believe, because the temptation is real.”

Paul gives the admonition to not grow weary, I believe, because the temptation is real. The effort required to do the right deed at the right moment for the right reason will sap your resolve dry. And doing good to my family of eight . . . and church of four hundred with a staff of five . . . and coaching my children’s sports teams . . . and holding a seat on the school board . . . and leading strong in all things and apologizing quickly for my many mistakes . . . and making time to run a few miles and do a few push-ups . . . and maintaining the side-hustle of editing articles and writing words is what I mean when I speak of the moments like water that pour and pour and pour while in vain I try to catch them. 

But, again, the rain barrel of God’s grace catches more than we might expect.

In December, as I sing “Joy to the World,” I find comfort in the lines in the third stanza about how Christ “comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found.” The promise is one of saturation. One day, there will be no square inch of creation not covered with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the earth.

As this year ends, however, I feel like I could tweak just one word from the classic Isaac Watts hymn and catch yet more biblical truth to encourage my heart: Christ comes to make his blessings flow, long as the curse is found. This promise would speak to God’s preservation and our perseverance. God will finish every good work he begins, which means we must not become weary in doing good.

So, dear reader, do not grow weary in your chemotherapy. Do not grow weary in loving a local church that doesn’t seem to love you back. Do not grow weary in praying prayers yet without an answer. Do not grow weary in loving your teenagers. Do not grow weary of coming to church by yourself as a middle-aged single. Do not become weary in keeping supreme in your heart the heaven-born gospel of peace when so many others would encourage you to replace gospel-peace with snark and suspicion.

Do not grow weary because every good deed sowed in obedience to Christ—even the ones sowed with tears—will one day reap a harvest if you do not give up. Continue, in the words of the prophet Hosea, to press on to know the Lord. As you buy new calendars and hang them on office walls, know that there is no date in the next year, or any year, where God is not both sovereign and good. As long as the curse is found, he comes to make his blessings flow. Let us not grow weary in doing good.

Maybe you feel my word from the Lord is a word for more than just me. Don’t worry; it won’t bother me to share. King David and the apostle Paul shared theirs with me.

* Photo by Artin Bakhan on Unsplash

When You Feel Like a Missionary Carrying a Grand Piano: The Importance of Sabbaticals

When people would ask how I was doing, sometimes I’d tell them “fine” or “okay.” On some days I might have even said “great.”

On other days, however, I’d tell people I felt like a tiny pickup truck—maybe an old Chevy S-10 or a Ford Ranger—that had a grand piano plopped down in the truck bed. I didn’t tell everyone this was how I felt, and it certainly wasn’t the first thing I’d mention. But for my close friends and the fellow pastors in my life, who get the real and deeper answers when they ask for them, I told them how tired I was. To be candid, they probably already knew. They could see the fatigue on my face and feel the bumps in my pastoring, the way I’d snap a little too quick when I was criticized or my subtle feelings of indifference about certain church problems. To stay on the same truck metaphor, my shocks and struts were blown. Even little bumps on a smooth road shook the chassis something fierce, as though our church barreled down a dirt road full of potholes.

The reasons for the weariness were obvious. A few years ago, our church lost one of our pastors, which led to a change—an expansion really—in my role. During the months after the other pastor left, forty new people showed up, who wanted to join small groups that didn’t exist yet, with leaders we didn’t have. Meanwhile, I officiated five weddings in two months. Then, I completed my ordination process in our denomination, which required writing a huge paper and undergoing a four-hour oral defense of my theology. Then, three days later, I had a massive shoulder surgery that left me in a sling for a few months, sleeping in a recliner for longer, and undergoing painful, but helpful, physical therapy for longer still.

Meanwhile, we formed a search team to look for a new pastor, which meant we were not only short-staffed but that we had to devote part of each week to reading resumes and doing interviews. The Sunday after our church finally hired a wonderful new pastor, our wave of euphoria crashed when we closed our church for in-person gatherings for thirteen straight weeks because a pandemic was spreading across the world. In other words, I was tired before Covid came in the night to slash our tires.

“I told them ministry hadn’t broken me beyond repair, but I needed help.”

So, I did what I should’ve done sooner with a check engine light on. I asked for help. After one late night elder meeting, I asked all the staff pastors to leave and poured out my heart to our volunteer pastors. I told them ministry hadn’t broken me beyond repair, but I needed help. I told them I was sorry for doing a lousy job of keeping them informed about how I was really doing, sorry for telling them I was “fine” and “okay” when I was neither. And I told them what was really going on in my heart, all the pain and weariness and how my workload affected my health and family. I also told them I needed their help to heal. Either I wasn’t called to be a pastor or I was doing it wrong; there just didn’t seem to be another choice. And yet, I knew I was too close to the problems to tell which it was.

I will be forever grateful for the way our volunteer pastors listened to me that night and prayed for me. The Lord heard our prayers and answered them in ways, as Paul says in Ephesians, beyond what we could have asked or imagined. And so began a year of recovery that climaxed with a three-month sabbatical away from local church ministry.

In the book The Art of Rest, author Adam Mabry writes as a fellow pilgrim-pastor journeying toward true rest, which is challenging to do in a society that’s created an idol of busyness. “In the West,” Mabry writes, “we’ve managed to take something that has in every culture until recently been a vice and, through the magic of repeating a bad idea long enough, have turned it into a virtue!” (29). Throughout the book, Mabry tells readers that he aims to “sell Sabbath rest.” He wants readers to know the how of Sabbath, the why of Sabbath, and the look-how-wonderful-this-is of Sabbath.

I want the same for you, Mr. or Ms. Tired Missionary. I want to sell you on the look-how-wonderful-ness of an extended Sabbath. If you feel like someone placed a piano in the bed of your pickup, and every bump in ministry feels like a sinkhole rather than a pothole, then use whatever spiritual and emotional health you do have and ask for help. As time and money allow, craft a plan for an extended sabbatical or furlough.

And if you are not a missionary but sit on a committee that grants sabbaticals, I urge you to do everything you can to make one happen for those who serve with you. We all know that we should take our vehicles to a mechanic as soon as possible after the check engine light comes on. It doesn’t honor God to drive a vehicle into the ground.

When I got back to church after my sabbatical, as we all might’ve expected, it still feels like our church is barreling down the road too fast, and as the lead pastor, like the grand piano is still inside my truck bed. But this fall, the newly installed shocks and struts that came from several months of rest have made a huge difference. Little bumps now feel like little bumps.

And while I wasn’t even working on it—in fact, while I was resting and not working at all—by the grace of God, the engine in my pickup truck may have even grown a little bit too.

* This post first appeared on the ABWE blog and is shared with permission.

** Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Dear Twitter, I’m Leaving You for My Wife

I might have to walk this decision back, but for now, I’m leaving Twitter.
And Facebook.
And Instagram.  

The latter two accounts were killed more as collateral damage than being directly engaged as enemy combatants.

I suppose it’s probably more accurate to say I’m simply inducing a coma for my social media accounts than it is to say that I’m leaving them or even killing them—but death sounds more dramatic, and dramatic seems to get more attention, so let’s just say I killed them.

I’ll tell you a few of the reasons why I’m quitting Twitter, even though I won’t presume that one guy’s reasons for abandoning Twitter have any interest to you.

Basically, I joined and remained on Twitter for only a handful of reasons. I liked seeing what my friends from around the world were up to, most of whom are fellow pastors. And I liked seeing what my Christian heroes were up to—again, mostly pastors and authors. I also liked having a vague sense of what was going on more broadly in Christianity. Finally, I supposed that being on Twitter helped me share my books and articles. All of these—the friends, the heroes, the news-worthy events, the writing—were beneficial to me, even sources of joy.

But I started to realize that the underbelly of “Christian Pastor Twitter”—you know, all the snark, all the trolling, all the assuming-the-worst, all the myopic nitpicking—might not be the underbelly. The worst part of Twitter might actually be the whole pig—the head, the body, the arms, the legs, the snout, the curly tail, and not just the underbelly. The exception had become the rule. In fairness, Twitter has probably been this way for a good while, but my experience with Twitter had, at least until recently, remained primarily positive.

But then in the middle of March came a string of, what I can only call, insanity.

There was that lousy review of the book Gentle and Lowly. If you missed this, you are better for it. A book reviewer managed to misread an excellent book written by a hero of mine, and the review got people worked up, including me.

Then there was the shooting at the massage parlors in Atlanta, which seemed to cause several social commentators to offer bizarre and irresponsible hot takes. For example, within days of the shootings, some suggested that Christian teaching about sex caused the shooting because the shooter was a member of a church. An article in the New York Times spun it this way. One of my former seminary professors even took the opportunity to slander a thoughtful, biblical organization, saying that the organization had “radicalized” the shooter. That accusation is absurd—and again, slanderous. I know I shouldn’t care as much as I do, but I write for the organization that he slandered, and that organization has blessed me and our church in a thousand tangible ways. It seems wildly reckless to connect with a thick, straight line the worst version of Christian teaching about sex—teaching that would be better labeled as un-Christian teaching—and say that it is because of Christian teaching that women are dead. This connection, at best, is a thin correlation and certainly not causation.

That same week another hero of mine, Collin Hansen, tweeted about what a rough week it had been on social media and included a link to the new book he cowrote about hope. I’m so glad he wrote the book. What person couldn’t use more hope in our anxious age? But when I clicked to see the comments underneath Hansen’s tweet—it seemed to me—people salivated at the opportunity to tear him down. It was like Hansen and The Gospel Coalition, where he works, are the source of all the world’s problems. One person likened Hansen to an arsonist who feigns confusion of a burning house. In other words, you caused the terrible week on social media, so don’t be so perplexed.

Speaking of culpability, I should insert a note here I haven’t mentioned yet. I know that I am culpable for my Twitter feed. The specifics of all the social media algorithms may remain opaque, but the principle is readily known: the more you click, the more you get. And I certainly got. For every doofus Twitter comment I clicked, I got ten more comments in my feed. My eyes were reaping the seeds I had sown with my thumbs. Forgive me, Lord.

This reaping led to more and more reaping. Controversies I didn’t know existed were foisted upon me. And the “news” I had tried to remain vaguely aware of started to become the headlines I’d rather be completely unaware of.  “Beth Moore Leaves the SBC.” “James White Said Something Provocative and Made People Mad.” “Somewhere Someone with White Skin Said Something Racist.”

As an evangelical pastor, I began to feel like each time I opened Twitter, I stood trial for all the dumb things fringe evangelicals had done. To open Twitter was to be prosecuted by the mob. And mobs don’t do nuance well.

It’s not that I don’t care about Beth Moore and the like, but I am a pastor of a church with plenty of our own problems, and all of our church problems I care about far more than the problems I didn’t start and I can’t fix. Indeed, one day I will be held accountable to God, not for whether I engaged in the latest Twitter storm, but whether I loved the sheep of my flock. And while we’re on the subject of divine accountability and moral imperatives, I also have a large family, and they are my first pastoral priority. Each time I turn around, my children grow an inch or two and seem to be one step closer to walking out our front door and onto a college campus. Time flies when you have toddlers and teenagers in the same house.

Rod Dreher argues in his popular book The Benedict Option that Christians should retreat to the places where we can have meaningful influence, to—in a sense—become Benedictine monks on Noah’s ark. Conservative Christians, he would say, must become those who actually have something to conserve (re: godliness) and spend our time conserving it. I read the book a few months ago and found it insightful even if I don’t take his conclusions to be the only, or even the best, option for Christians. But perhaps Dreher’s arguments worked on me more subtly than I realized. Today, I feel content to let the Twitter dumpster fire burn while I retreat to play with my kids and love my wife and pastor my church.

This gets to the real issue. In addition to all the drama, Twitter had become an all-consuming time drain, devouring every bit of my mental rest and human interaction. Do I really need to open Twitter while I walk upstairs to grab my running shoes? Do I need to recheck when I walk down the stairs to see what I missed during the 30 seconds it took to find my shoes? Do I need to check Twitter with one hand and brush my teeth and comb my hair with the other? Do I need to check Twitter as I walk from my car to the office in the morning and then again while I warm my coffee in the office microwave? No, no, no, and no. And more importantly, do I need to multitask when I talk with my wife? Same answer.

When I tweeted that I was leaving Twitter, I wrote that “If you want to reach out to me, send me a text message.” A few days later I checked the comments, and someone had asked, “Do you mean a direct message?” Actually, no. I did mean text message. If you have my cell phone, let’s keep in touch.

So, Dear Twitter, for all these reasons, I’m leaving you for my wife. And for my family. And for my joy. Your tidal wave of trash and the general social media sea of cesspool finally rose so high and crashed so hard on my little island oasis of joy where I visited with my friends and heroes that I’m going to float away.

Maybe one day the violent waters will recede, I’ll get off my ark, and we can be friends again.

* Photo by Jean-Pierre Brungs on Unsplash

Marriage as a Bumper Sticker for the Gospel: A Wedding Reflection

Stories typically have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it’s often not until we know the ending of a story that we realize all that was happening in the beginning, and for that matter, in the middle. When we think about the story of God’s love for the world—what Christians call the gospel—and we reflect upon what that good news story has to do with marriage, we learn something precious about God.

Bumper Stickers

Before we get there, I’ll tell you a story. My first pastorate was in Tucson, Arizona. In Tucson there was one particular, prominent church that gave its attendees bumper stickers with the church’s name and logo on it. I guess I should say that I presume that they gave out the bumper stickers and asked people to put it on their cars, as opposed to simply sending out covert volunteers during the service to slap the stickers on cars in the parking lot. I assume they did not do that. I do think if we had that “ministry” at our church, there would be people who would want to join the team, which is one of several reasons why we don’t.

I would see these bumper stickers all over Tucson. Nearly every time I saw one, I would wish I was privy to a conversation that I was not privy to; I wish I had been in the staff meeting when a leader presented the idea for the bumper stickers.

I imagine it going like this: “So, I have an idea I want to run by you,” says the summer intern. “I’m thinking that the Christians who call our church home, have lives so wonderfully transformed by Jesus, that Jesus is actually influencing the way they drive. In fact, our people drive so courteously, thoughtfully, safely, and law-abidingly, that we should capitalize on their good Christian driving. I think more people will come to our church based on how our people drive if we put our logo on their cars. Let’s have their driving advertise how wonderful it is to come to our church.”

I would have liked to have been in that staff meeting to hear the response. Evidently, they bought the sales pitch.

I’m poking fun at that idea and all of our poor driving, which, whether we are Christians or not, is often not done so courteously and law-abidingly.

But in a real way, God has set up the story of redemption to be a story about marriage. God has chosen—as strange as it might seem to us—to advertise his goodness through the vehicle of marriage. Marriages are to display not merely the couple’s love for each other but God’s love for his bride.

The Beginning

In the beginning of the story of God’s love for his people, God creates a man and a woman in his image. He creates two co-rulers of creation, a King and a Queen if you will, to multiply and have dominion over the earth.

Sometimes when we hear the language in Genesis of having dominion and subduing, we think of carbon footprints and corporations polluting the oceans and so on. In other words, we think of the bad kind of subduing. But in the context, the King called Adam and the Queen called Eve, are to rule the way God was ruling: In each subsequent day of creation, God took raw, unformed material and made it better; he made an environment more and more cultivated and suited to life and beauty. And as Adam and Eve ruled, they were to do the same. God’s intention for their ruling was not just for their benefit but for others too.

Consider the familiar phrase, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). In the story, there’s no mother and no father yet, so what is that about? God is setting up a pattern that he intends to continue after the garden of Eden. It’s a good pattern. God has a grand purpose for marriage, not only for the individual couple but the work of advertising that he’ll do through marriage, if you allow me to use that word advertising.

What we see in the biblical story, however, is that shortly thereafter, Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and everything about everything got hard and ugly. When they fell into sin, Adam’s sin plunged all of us into ten thousand problems, including those in marriage (cf. Romans 5:12–21).

The Middle

And yet, despite all our issues of sin and struggle, in the middle of God’s story, we see that God still chose to liken the joy of marriage and the joy of a bride and groom, to the joy of knowing him. One example of that is from the prophet Isaiah where God likens the joy of being clothed in the garments of salvation to the joy of being decked out on your wedding day.

. . . for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;
    he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress,
    and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. (Isaiah 61:10b)

In the New Testament, which is that part of the Bible written ]after Jesus came to earth, an author says something similar in a letter to a church in a city called Ephesus. But this time the wording is more specific. After quoting the passage from Genesis about a man leaving his father and mother to become one flesh with his wife, the apostle Paul writes, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). Paul sees in marriage an advertising scheme, a way to display to the world how much God loves the world.

Marriage: Not a Job Interview but a Covenant Relationship

For us to make sense of that, we have to understand marriage, not how most people understand it today, but how God intends it to be. Here’s what I mean. It’s common for people to think that marriage is simply a more serious version of dating and living together. But that’s not actually true. Yes, marriage is more serious than dating, but marriage is not just the next level of dating or living together; marriage is a new, special type of relationship. When couples date and, sadly, live together before marriage, that positions the relationship like a job interview that doesn’t end.

However, God considers marriage a covenant relationship, not a consumer relationship or an extended job interview. In marriage, you already have the job. Thus, a covenant relationship is not focused on whether the other person delivers the goods. A covenant relationship is one based on a solemn vow to uphold your end of the agreement regardless of whether the other person does.

And this is why covenant relationships are so beautiful. In a covenant relationship you can be truly known—known in all of your glory, but also known in all of your depravity and shame and failures and insecurities—and not only known but still loved. This is the meaning of unconditional love: truly known and dearly loved.

It’s God’s intention that marriage would be this type of relationship—one not based on what the other person does, but rather, through “better and worse, sickness and health, richer and poorer,” the marriage holds.

God has designed marriage to work this way to display to the world the way he loves people in what Christians call the gospel; the gospel is the heart of Christianity. God doesn’t love us because we always look the way a couple looks on their wedding day, a handsome groom and a beautiful bride. The gospel is the good news that, in Jesus, God has undertaken a rescue mission for his enemies or, we might say, for a faithless bride. It’s good news that God is not interviewing me for the job of being a Christian, as though if I just perform well enough for long enough, well, then he’ll love me. If this is how you experience God, you don’t know him as he desires to be known.

Let me be more specific. The Bible teaches that Jesus lived a perfect life; he was utterly faithful to God his Father and loved him supremely. Then out of love for his Father and us, Jesus went to a cross and died, suffering the ultimate punishment for our sin, not his. Then he rose again, indicating that all punishment for anyone who trusts in Jesus is gone. The posture of God toward his children is now only that of strong, warm covenant love.

This is the mystery that Paul wrote about, the mystery that is no longer a mystery. A pastor once wrote a poem that has a few lines that speak to this. The lines go like this:

. . . marriage, from / the first embrace, is but the small / and faulty echo of a thrall / and union high above . . . (John Piper, “Joseph: Part 4,” Desiring God, December 21, 1997)

Marriages are but a faulty echo of the greater union, the author says, the union of God with his people, the union of Christ the groom with the church, his bride. I think that’s true.

You might ask the question if this is only true of good marriages. It’s not. Even our imperfect marriages testify that there is something greater, something better out there. I’ll explain. When a couple has a rotten season of marriage, or when a person wants to be married but is not married, it’s not usually that they think marriage itself is terrible. They feel disappointment because they hope for better from marriage. To use a metaphor, if I were eating cardboard, I wouldn’t be surprised that it tasted awful; it’s cardboard—of course it tastes bad. But if we were feasting, and the food was rotten and made us sick, we would be frustrated because we know feasting should lead to joy.

And so, the hurt of a sad marriage is compounded because we know, in our heart of hearts, that it was not supposed to be this way. In other words, even our sadness over broken marriages testifies, sometimes as a whisper and sometimes as a shout, that marriages are supposed to be good and that there is more to marriage than a marriage.

The End

Look what God says about marriage in the last book of the Bible, the end of the story.

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
    the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
    and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
    and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
    with fine linen, bright and pure”—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” (Revelation 19:6–9)

As I wrote above, stories typically have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s often not until we know the ending of a story that we realize all that was happening in the beginning, and for that matter, in the middle.

Throughout the biblical story, we get hints of the greater purpose of marriage, which becomes explicit in the book of Revelation. All the joy, all the feasting, all the celebration, all the love, all the “for better’s and for worse’s,” point to the great day of feasting and joy and celebration at what the Bible calls the “marriage supper of the Lamb,” a phrase used twice in this passage to refer to the great feast of the redeemed at the end of time. The Lamb is a way to refer to Jesus, the one who paid for the wedding. Weddings are expensive. I know those who sit on the front row of a wedding know this well. Jesus paid for the great wedding feast with his life. And one day all the forgiven will feast together.

On Christ’s behalf, as a preacher of the gospel, I invite you to that feast. You only need to give God your empty hands and your hungry belly. And he promises to feed you rich food (cf. Isaiah 55:1–3; John 6:35).

Marriages display this gospel, which is why marriage is a high and honorable calling. May God, in his grace, enable the good news of the covenant love of God to be the centerpiece of our marriages. And may our marriages become beautiful bumper stickers pointing people to the fierce and forever love of God.

* Photo from Marc A. Sporys by Unsplash

EVERYDAY FAITHFULNESS by Glenna Marshall (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)

Glenna Marshal, Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World. Wheaton: Crossway, 2020. 176 pages.

Last summer I killed one of the fruit trees in our backyard orchard—not on purpose, of course. I sprayed the Japanese Beetles who munched our harvest and suspect I mixed the concentration of chemicals too high. One particular nectarine tree couldn’t handle it. I had hoped for a resurrection this year, but after the tree lost its leaves in the fall, they never grew back. Now, it’s just a naked trunk and twigs. Like everything in 2020, the damage to the orchard hit harder; a late frost killed the buds on five of the seven remaining trees. Moral of the story: growing food ain’t easy.

Glenna Marshall’s new book, Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World, opens with a different but similar story, the story of a struggling gardener tending a struggling garden. Marshall confesses, “I hated the heat, the bugs, and the incessant need for weeding . . . the weeks of waiting for plants to break through the earth, grow, blossom, and then turn out vegetables.” Then she asks, “I mean, I could just drive to the grocery store and buy some tomatoes, right?” (p. 11–12).

Maybe you can relate to floundering orchards and gardens. I know I’m sympathetic to her question; it would be so much easier to buy fruit and veggies from a store.

Buy on Amazon

Worth noting, however, is the way the writers of the New Testament consistently use the difficult work of farming as a metaphor for Christian spiritual growth, not in spite of the difficulties but because of them. Yes, in today’s world, we have the option to buy tomatoes and nectarines from a store, but we still can’t buy prepackaged Christian maturity. Growth in Christlikeness can’t be outsourced. But the New Testament also reminds us faithful farming reaps a reward (Galatians 6:9).

Everyday Faithfulness is Marshall’s second book. She’s a writer and pastor’s wife in Missouri, and blogs regularly. The book has an introduction and nine chapters exploring what faithfulness and perseverance look like, for example, when life is busy, we doubt God’s promises, and our hearts are cold (chapters 3, 5, and 7). Although Marshall wrote the book primarily for women, I found the book relatable, challenging, and encouraging, especially the chapter on waiting. I appreciated her repeated, simple threefold challenge to pursue God through his word, prayer, and the local church (cf. David Mathis’s book Habits of Grace). Each chapter ends with a short biographical sketch of one of Marshall’s friends who exemplifies the theme of the chapter. I thought these were a nice touch, although a few seemed too short to show the faithfulness lived out, as though we had to take Marshall’s word for it.

Throughout the book, Marshall does not hide her own struggles to follow God in daily faithfulness, whether the struggle to get up early to spend time in God’s word or to occasionally turn off Netflix at night. In one place, as she critiques the desires we all have for low-effort-but-high-yield Christianity, she writes, “I didn’t want to put down slow-growing roots; I wanted to be a chia pet” (p. 41). During one difficult season in life, she tells readers, “I didn’t pick up my Bible for months” (p. 51).

While being honest about the difficulties of daily faithfulness, the book still issues a strong call to follow the Lord, even when life is hard—perhaps especially when life is hard. In this way Everyday Faithfulness shares a similar emphasis with Kevin DeYoung’s book The Hole in our Holiness, showing that the grace of God is not just for past sins; God’s grace also produces daily perseverance. “His yoke is lighter and easier than legalistic rules and false religion,” Marshall writes, “but it doesn’t allow us to roam free from all connection to him. His yoke tethers us to him and pulls us in the direction he leads us” (p. 54). And holding fast to God teaches us the wonderful truth that God “is holding fast to us” (p. 98).

The encouragement to everyday faithfulness reminds me of the line from author Annie Dillard that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Marshall asks, “If we’re not holding on to him now, how can we be sure we’ll be holding on to him later?” (p. 52). In other words, if we want a life of faithfulness, then we must spend our days in faithfulness. Near the end of the book she writes, “Regular habits of drawing near to Christ today keep us aligned with him tomorrow. And tomorrow’s habits of drawing near to him will keep us near to him the next day” (p. 149). Amen and amen.

If God feels distant or trials abound or you can’t seem to slow down enough to hear his voice—if your Christian life feels like a leafless trunk and twigs—reading Everyday Faithfulness might provide the water, sun, and fertilizer you need to begin bearing fruit again.

* Photo by Timotheus Fröbel on Unsplash

Come to Me All Who Have COVID Weariness, and I Will Give You Rest

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30, ESV)

My friend traded his pickup for a new one. I got a good look at it the other night. It’s the kind of truck neighbors peer out the window at as the rumbling engine idles in your driveway. You practically need a stepladder to climb up to the cab. The truck is a “dually,” meaning the rear axle has two massive wheels on each side. The lug nuts on the front wheels have those spikes you see on tractor trailers. The truck is a beast made for towing. I’d say you could chain a redwood to the back, and it would yank out roots seven hundred years deep like I pull a seven-day-old weed. It’s the kind of truck that makes you feel as though you could hitch the St. Louis Arch to the back and drag it like a horseshoe.

Back in the day farmers had a way of hitching oxen together. The wood and rope connecting system was called a yoke, which allowed the full force of two oxen to plow side by side. In parts of the world, farming still proceeds in this way. Two healthy oxen might not budge a redwood, but oxen could work you and me to our death.

Jesus picks up this imagery in his familiar invitation in Matthew 11 to be yoked to him, to have rope and wood harnessed between our neck and his. Jesus promises, however, his yoke is easy and his burden is light. He promises this because, he says, “I am gentle and lowly.” Can you imagine being yoked to my friend’s dually? Nothing about that ride would be gentle.

The encompassing word all grabs my attention. Not some, not a few, not even many, but Jesus invites all who are heavy laden. All who feel hitched to a too powerful pickup, all who feel yoked to the servitude of sin, all who stagger under the weight of weariness, all who have rope burns across their necks and sun-scorched shoulders and arthritic aching knees from plowing, plowing, plowing. All may come to Jesus for rest.

Do you see yourself in the all or is the all only for someone else? As the COVID yoke lies heavy, will you come to Jesus for rest?

Mothers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You who are forced to put the stay in stay-at-home mothers, you may come to him for rest. Children follow you about the house as you run IT support and troubleshoot their iPads and Zoom calls and fix three meals a day with the food you could only get from a long line at the grocery store while wearing a mask.

Fathers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You work from home from when you wake until when you crash. Your family life and hobby life and work life and exercise life and church life ooze together. The compartments that contained the floods of craziness have collapsed. And you want to collapse as well.

Singles, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your social distancing feels more like acute social isolating, and you’re starved for conversation, laughter, and a hug.

Students, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your college dorm room was cooler than your bedroom in your parent’s house. Some of you celebrated your graduation with handmade caps and gowns and no other students or faculty. Others missed prom. Staying motivated to study when the weather warms was already difficult before COVID.

Health care workers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You labor risky hours over those who cough and sneeze and wonder if their fever will break first or them. The friends and family of your patients want to visit the hospital, but they are not permitted. So this familial labor also falls to you: not only must you take vitals and intubate, but you must hold the hand of those in intensive care.

Business owners and those who side-hustle to make ends meet, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your whole life you’ve achieved through your assertiveness, by showing up early and leaving late. Now—for reasons out of your control—you’ve been rendered passive. You can’t forge ahead because you’re not allowed. Now, homebound and without work, you wait for permission. Your spirit has restless leg syndrome.

Teachers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You lecture to a webcam and answer emails and walk the dog and grade papers all from your home classroom, which is far more of a home than a classroom.

The retired and elderly and all with compromised immune systems, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your friends cannot come to see you, and you feel more forgotten than before.

Government officials, will you come to Jesus for rest? Never have you made fewer people happy, and never have you shouldered more responsibility—responsibilities you never asked for or wanted. Weighing lives and livelihoods leaves dark circles under your eyes.

Pastors, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your church needs you. Your family needs you. You give and give and give. Ministry does not stop; it just changes venues. But when Jesus invites all, the all includes those who live to help others.

The flowing current of COVID sadness can drown the strongest swimmer. You might already be gasping for air. If you feel this way, come to Jesus. Pray to him. Read his word. Belong to his church. His grace can tow you from the mire better than any pickup. Come and enjoy the freedom found in being loved by the Savior, not controlled by a harsh slave master.

And if the waves of endless lockdown days break upon you, Jesus also wants you to tell a Christian friend. Send an email right now to a Christian who loves you and doesn’t want to see you succumb to struggle. Your friends probably don’t know how bad you feel; their own dose of quarantine might have made their gaze myopic. So, right now, send an honest text to a friend. Send the text if you feel the yoke of alcohol or porn or pain killers calling to you. Drive to the house of a friend and ask for prayer. Call your doctor if you feel the flood of depression rising.

A verse from an old hymn reads, “Come, ye weary, heavy laden, / lost and ruined by the fall; / if you tarry till you’re better, / you will never come at all.” For over two hundred and fifty years, these lyrics from Joseph Hart’s hymn Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy have extended the invitation of Christ to countless weary congregations. Let the lyrics welcome you today.

You don’t have to come with superior strength for Jesus to help you. You don’t need to come with the dirt under your fingernails manicured. You can come with a COVID haircut. You can come to Christ without makeup and wearing your pjs. It may prick your pride, but you don’t need to be business casual for Christ to help you. All you need is to know your need and the urgency that if you wait until you’re better, you will never come at all.

* Photo by Ana Cernivec on Unsplash

Free Video Series

I made a series of short, free, and confidential videos to help men jumpstart their struggle against pornography. To get the series, click here.

To Lament Is Christian

The language of lament is sprinkled throughout the Bible but tends to show up with high density in the Psalms. Consider Psalm 13 authored by David, which opens with the question “How long, O Lord?” Perhaps not so provocative of a statement. But the next lines ask, “Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? . . . How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? (vv. 1–2). These questions appear more like accusations than interrogatives. You have forgotten me. You have hidden your face from me.

We also read of laments in other parts of Scripture than the Psalms. As he reflects on all the occupational hazards associated with being a prophet, Jeremiah tells God he felt duped into the ministry. “O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived,” he says. “You are stronger than I, and you have prevailed” (20:7). One pastor paraphrased this as, “Lord, you sweet-talked me into the ministry,” not meaning the sweet talk of a lover but of a seducer.

Mark Vroegop notes in his book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy that laments are far more than rants addressed to God, the equivalent of unbridled Facebook outbursts to anyone who will listen, or worse, the vomiting of emotions into the void. Biblical laments are strictly crafted poems and thus have other elements too, most notably what Vroegop describes as “the turn.” The turn is that moment in the psalm when the author moves from expressing his emotions to asking for help and asserting his faith in the goodness and sovereignty of God despite persistent suffering and lingering questions. We see this, for example, in Psalm 13, when after questioning how long God will allow an enemy to be exalted above him, the psalmist turns to declare, “But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation” (v. 5). Though all around his soul gives way, he anchors his hope in God.

This is important because it’s actually this very progression, the progression through words of despair to words of hope, that God is often pleased to bring us from despair to hope, from rage to rest. This is why J.A. Medders calls laments underground tunnels to hope.

Last year I wrote a review of Vroegop’s book for 9Marks, but in the review, I neglected to share one of my favorite aspects of the book: the short, propositional statements he uses to define lament. Over and over he writes, “Lament is ________.” In one place, Vroegop argues that to lament, in the biblical sense of the word, is distinctly Christian. He says this because it takes faith in God to trust him to hear our pain. Giving God the silent treatment, a distinctly un-Christian approach, is saying that God can’t be trusted with honest anger.

Our church is studying the Psalms of Lament throughout Lent, the time leading up to Good Friday and Easter. In preparation for the series, I reread Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy. I’d encourage you to read this excellent book too.

Below is a little taste of most (but not all) of the book’s short, propositional sentences that I love so much.

*     *     *

Lament is how you live between the poles of a hard life and trusting in God’s sovereignty. (p. 21)

Lament is how we bring our sorrow to God. Without lament we won’t know how to process pain. (p.21)

Lament is how Christians grieve. It is how to help hurting people. Lament is how we learn important truths about God and our world. My personal and pastoral experience has convinced me that biblical lament is not only a gift but also a neglected dimension of the Christian life for many twenty-first-century Christians. (p. 21)

Christianity suffers when lament is missing. (p. 21)

But lament is different. The practice of lament—the kind that is biblical, honest, and redemptive—is not as natural for us, because every lament is a prayer. A statement of faith. Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God’s goodness. (p. 26)

To cry is human, but to lament is Christian. (p. 26)

Lament is a prayer in pain that leads to trust. (pp. 28, 158)

You might think lament is the opposite of praise. It isn’t. Instead, lament is a path to praise as we are led through our brokenness and disappointment. (p. 28)

You might think lament is the opposite of praise. (p. 28)

Lament is not a simplistic formula. Instead, lament is the song you sing believing that one day God will answer and restore. Lament invites us to pray through our struggle with a life that is far from perfect. (p. 34)

Lament is a prayer that leads us through personal sorrow and difficult questions into truth that anchors our soul. (p. 34)

Lament is how we learn to live between the poles of a hard life and God’s goodness. (p. 36)

Lament is the language of a people who believe in God’s sovereignty but live in a world with tragedy. (p. 44)

Lament is an expansive prayer language. It can be your companion through a wide spectrum of struggles and challenges. (p. 65)

Lament is how we endure. It is how we trust. It is how we wait. (p. 74)

Lament is not merely an expression of sorrow; it is a memorial. (p. 90)

Lament is a place to learn. (p. 91)

Lament is a journey through the shock and awe of pain. (p. 96)

Lament is the song we sing while living in a world that is under the curse of sin. (p. 99)

Lament is an uncomfortable yet helpful teacher. (p. 100)

Lament is one of the ways that a heart is tuned toward God’s perspective. (p. 103)

Lament is the language of those stumbling in their journey to find mercy in dark clouds. (p. 108)

Lament is a prayer of faith despite your fear. (p. 110)

Lament is the language that moves us from our sorrow toward the truth of God’s promises. (p. 119)

Lament is the language that calls us, as exiles, to uncurl our fingers from our objects of trust. (p. 123)

Lament is the song you sing when divine blessing seems far away. (p. 136)

Lament is the prayer language for these gaps. It tells you where to look and whom to trust when pain and uncertainty hang in the air you breathe. (p. 142)

Lament is the language of a people who know the whole story—the gospel story. (p. 151)

Lament is the historic prayer language for hurting Christians. (p. 159)

Lament is more than a biblical version of the stages of grief (i.e., denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). It invites God’s people on a journey as they turn to God, lay out their complaints, ask for his help, and choose to trust. (p. 160)

Lament is the prayer language for those who are struggling with sadness. (p. 162)

Lament is a means of grace, no matter what trial you face. (p. 170)

Lament is the personal song that expresses our grief while embracing God’s goodness. Everyone has a story. Lament is never a song you set out to sing. (p. 172)

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not naive enough to believe that lament is the single solution for racial tension. There is much work to be done in listening, understanding, addressing injustice, and fostering hope. But I do think lament is a starting point—a place where people from majority and minority backgrounds can meet. (p. 186)

Lament is the bridge between dark clouds and deep mercy. (p. 190)

Lament is the language that helps you believe catastrophe can become eucatastrophe. (p. 192)

Lament is the language of waiting for God’s justice to be accomplished. . . . [L]ament is the way we live with pain beyond belief and divine sovereignty beyond comprehension. (p. 192)

No matter where we are in our journey, lament is a means of mercy. Lament is how you move from no to yes, and from why to who. (p. 194)

* Photo by SamuelMartins on Unsplash

What if Christmas Doesn’t Come from a Store?

Growing up, one of many favorite Christmas memories was watching the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas at my Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We lived in Missouri and they lived in Iowa. It was always such a treat to make the five-hour drive to visit them for presents and sledding and hot chocolate and time with family and Christmas joy.

There’s that classic scene in the movie when the narrator says,

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore.

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.

I quoted that line in a recent sermon. It was my favorite sermon from all of 2019. The sermon comes from Romans 8 and mentions that—in the words of Dr. Seuss—Romans 8 offers more than a little bit more. Romans 8 offers Christians the deeper joy and more gritty triumph of the gospel.

As one year closes and another begins, I’d love to leave you with the encouragement to forsake your sin and live more fully rooted in God’s love for you in Christ. I titled the sermon “The Sons Who Slay Their Sin and Live.” You can read or listen below.

Happy New Year,
Benjamin

*     *     *

The Sons Who Slay Their Sin and Live

Romans 8:12–17
Sermon Series: “Joyful and Triumphant: The Deeper Joy and More Gritty Triumph of Romans 8”
December 8, 2019

The song goes, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” My first pastorate was in Tucson, AZ, and my first day of work was June 1. It started really hot, and for three months it only got hotter. I loved it. But when December came, it never really began to look a lot like Christmas. I didn’t love that. No leaves on the ground, no need for flannel and parkas, no way to cut down your own Christmas tree. Everything that grows in Tucson has needles, but not pine needles. I missed having the signs that told me Christmas was coming.

I don’t know whether you love the Christmas season or not. A pastor named Eric Schumacher recently wrote, “My parents divorced when I was 12. I haven’t had a holiday gathering with both my parents and all my brothers present for 31 years. I probably never will again. It is still incredibly painful every year. And I think I’ll mourn that until the day I die” (Twitter). For some of us, celebrating Christmas is hard because of hard past memories or hard present realities; for others celebrating Christmas is wonderful because of wonderful past memories and wonderful present realities. For most of us, it’s some of both.

My hope during the Advent season here at church is not different than my hope at any other time during the year: to point us to the wonder of the good news of Jesus Christ. We printed a flyer with our Christmas service times on them. I don’t want you to hang it on your fridge. Please give it to a friend, coworker, family member, or neighbor so they can hang it on their fridge. I’ll be preaching the week before Christmas and Christmas Eve, and I’d love to see our church point people to Jesus who don’t often give him much attention.

Scripture Reading

Please turn with me in your Bible’s to the letter we call Romans. It’s in the New Testament, which is the part of the Bible written after Jesus came to earth. It’s a letter written to a church in the city of Rome, a church full of people trying to do what we’re trying to do: make sense of the good news of Jesus for our everyday lives.

We’ll be in chapter 8 right where Pastor Ben left off last week. Follow along with me as I read Romans 8:12–17, and then we’ll pray that God would be our teacher.

12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Prayer

This is God’s Word. Thanks be to God. “Heavenly Father . . .”

Introduction

Pastor Ben and I have said to each other that if you’re a preacher who is going to preach through the letter of Romans, you need to be over fifty years old. That’s only sort of a joke. The theology and complexity of thought are too rich for otherwise. One of my pastor heroes calls Romans 8 the greatest chapter in the greatest letter in the greatest book ever written. In my opinion, that might not be an overstatement. I did add it up, however. Pastor Ben and I and Davis Younts (who is preaching next week) are not over fifty, but between the three of us, we have 106 years, so we thought this might qualify us to attempt to summit Romans 8.

Christians commonly call the season leading up to Christmas, Advent. The word advent means coming or arrival. The advent season allows for focused attention backward on the first advent of Jesus as the man born to die and attention forward to his second advent as the king come to reign. We celebrate Christmas between these two advents, the advent of the man born to die and the king come to reign. But during Advent, while all the faithful come to sing about being “joyful and triumphant” as we adore our savior, sometimes our understanding of Christmas being “joyful and triumphant” can seem merely sentimental and nostalgic—good food and family and friends and presents.

There’s that classic scene in the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas when the narrator says, “And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

I believe Romans 8 offers more than a little bit more. In Romans 8, God calls the faithful to come to adore the deeper joy and the more gritty triumph of Jesus, which is the joy and triumph that will sustain the children of God in a world long in sin and error and pining until the second advent of Jesus. “[I]n all these things,” Paul writes near the end of the chapter, “we are more than conquerors through [Jesus] who loved us” (8:37). The “these things” that we are more than triumphant over include, Paul writes, tribulation and famine, distress and danger (v. 35), which means we have more joy and triumph than can be bought from a store.

As Pastor Ben opened the series last week with the first eleven verses, he held high the gospel of free, undeserved grace Christians receive in the gospel. The opening verse in the chapter and the great theme in his sermon came from v. 1, which reads,

1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

This means that everyone who is “in Christ” has no condemnation from God, not that we don’t deserve condemnation because of our sin but that we have no condemnation because God sent Jesus into the world to take our condemnation for us.

Some of you know that I went through the ordination process this fall. It involved a lengthy oral exam and the writing of a dense theological paper. One of the questions you’re required to answer in the paper asks, “What does it mean that you are in ‘union with Christ?’” This is the theme highlighted in verse one of Romans 8. For those “in Christ,” there is now no condemnation. So what does it mean to be “in Christ”? I wrote in my ordination paper,

Nearly one hundred times in the New Testament we read of believers being in Christ (e.g., 2 Cor 5:17; 1 Pet 5:14). Even more occurrences surface when we include variations of the phrase. In fact, sometimes the biblical authors even speak of Christ being in believers, not just believers being in Christ (Jn 15:4; Col 1:27). Union in Christ covers a range of aspects related to a believer’s salvation.

Simply put, to be in union with Christ is to have your life (now and into eternity) bound together with Christ in such a way that you receive all the saving benefits of the gospel (Col 3:3–4). To put it even more simply, union with Christ is like placing everything good about the gospel into a sack, labeling the sack “in Christ,” and handing it to a believer.

Last week Pastor Ben’s sermon took that sack of blessings, turned it upside down upon our heads, and shook for thirty-five minutes the glories of the gospel into our laps.

But the question hung out there, “What now?” If God has taken away all of our condemnation and corruption through Jesus because we are “in Christ,” do we have anything to do? Our passage this morning answers the question of “What now?” Because of the gospel reality that we are in union with Jesus and thus have no condemnation, in the power of the Spirit of God, Christians now begin to put our sin to death.

1. Put the flesh to death (by the power of the Spirit), vv. 12­­–14

Look with me at it in the words of our passage.

12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

Paul begins with, “so then.” In light of all the treasures of heaven promised to us in the gospel, what are we to do? Answer: We are to put our sin to death in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Paul proclaims that because Jesus has freed us from the prison of sin, we need to not stay in prison any longer. Jesus threw open the prison door, so walk out of prison. Don’t say in bondage. That’s what Paul is saying. And he uses violent language to do so. “For if you live according to the flesh,” he writes in v. 13, “you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” That’s violent language.

A pastor in the seventeenth century named John Owen wrote a book called The Mortification of Sin. I re-read it last year. The famous line in the book says, “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.”

Jesus spoke often about this type of violence against our own sin, the war of the Christian life, the “be killing sin” part of Christianity. I’ll give one example from the gospel of Matthew. Jesus uses deliberate overstatement to make his point.

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:27–32)

Notice that the point of Jesus’s words in Matthew 5 and the words of Paul in Romans 8, do not command us to go on a “sin diet,” like we just sin less and then have some “cheat meals” here and there. God commands us to starve sin, not diet from sin. Christians don’t seek to limit our sin; we do whatever we have to do to eliminate our sin.

And the word “our” in “our sin” is key. Christian, be far more concerned about your greed than the greed of corporate America. Be far more concerned about the sex viewed on your smartphone than the sex filmed in Hollywood. Be far more concerned about the health of your marriage than the cheapening of marriage by our government. God’s view of sin is that of something dangerous, something that robs us of joy and God of his glory. We don’t have this view; sin is something we laugh at and coddle.

There a lot of young people at our church. I love that. I’m not old enough yet to be your father, I could be your older brother. By some accounts and depending on what chart you look at, I’m the oldest millennial, so I don’t like it when people pick on millennials, pick on us. So please hear this as a loving encouragement from a brother who cares: as much as we talk about authenticity, transparency, and brokenness, let us also show one another how much we hate our sin by the war we make against our sin.

When Paul uses the word flesh here doesn’t mean skin and meat and bones but that part of your nature that opposes God. The flesh is at war with God (v. 7). And in the power of the Spirit, we are to slay our sin. Don’t miss that connection with the Spirit. Romans 8 teaches that the Spirit of God in the life of the believer does more than one thing, more than simply telling you that God loves you. Yes, the Spirit of God works in Christians to remind us of all the good we have in the gospel—forgiven, reconciled, adopted. But the Spirit also points out the sinful places in your life that need to die. This isn’t about having a minimum level of holiness before God will love you. Look, I will always love my children. But for us to sit at the dinner table and fellowship with joy, my children can’t be cursing when they think I’m not listening.

The way Satan points out your sin and the way the Spirit of God points out your sin is different. I heard a preacher put it like this once. The condemnation of Satan is ambiguous and broad and hopeless. The conviction brought by the Spirit, however, is focused, narrow, and hopeful. Satan tells you that you’re a loser. That’s ambiguous, broad, and hopeless. If you take your finger and put it in your shoulder and press on it with increasing pressure, that’s like the work of the Spirit, that’s how the conviction of God works. “Do you feel that?” the Spirit asks us. “This particular thing needs to go. Let me help you” he says.

So, in last week’s sermon, Ben told us all the good things we have in the gospel when we are “in Christ.” And this week, we see that being in Christ leads us to run from sin. Let me illustrate last week’s passage and this week’s passage. Let’s just say, you lived in an apartment. A lousy, evil landlord runs the apartment complex, but at first you didn’t know he was evil because he promised you a great place to live. But when it came time to move in, things change. Your rent doubles. Your heat stops working. Your bathroom plumbing breaks. Your electricity cuts in and out. Rats scurry around at night.

So you say, “Mr. Landlord, you promised this, and you promised that, and now it’s different. I want you to fix it.” He says, “Tough.” And every month he proceeds to pound on your door demanding his rent. Oppressing. You can’t leave. You’re a captive.

And then one day, a new owner buys the apartment complex, and he himself becomes the landlord, and he throws the lousy, evil landlord off the property and begins to fix the plumbing and evict the rats and restore everything to its proper place. Thankfulness wells up inside you. However, after the initial euphoria is gone, the old landlord, keeps coming around. He keeps walking with his clipboard around the apartment complex. And he keeps pounding on your door every month. “Pay up. Your rent is due,” he says. “You’re mine. You’re a debtor to me.” Do you know what you say?

You say, “No, Mr. Evil Landlord. I have a new landlord who is kind and wise and powerful and loving and just as he has thrown you off before, so he will do again every time I come to him to ask for his help because he is the great liberator. Security, show this impostor the door.”

That’s last week’s sermon. This week, we’re pressed with the questions of why we would vandalize the newly renovated property, why we are not content with the apartment he gave us, why we get so angry with the other tenants, who, by the way, are all also recipients of his grace.

Church, what in your life needs to die? If that sounds hard to you, it should. But don’t miss the promise. Look again at vv. 13–14.

. . . if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

As you kill your sin, you don’t earn sonship, you display it.

In passing before we go to the next point. Let me mention something about the word “sons” in the phrase “sons of God.” Later in the passage, which I’ll read in a moment, Paul uses the more general “children of God” not just “sons of God.” Those more critical to the Bible might take this to be evidence of patriarchal influence on the Bible. It’s actually the exact opposite.

In the first century, only a son would inherit the full and biggest blessing from the father. So, if Paul had spoken of “daughters of God,” many would have gone, “Well, that’s great, but daughters don’t get it all.” This is why Paul says “sons of God”; it’s not to slight what it means to be a “daughter of God” but to say that if you are a “child of God”—whether a son or daughter—you get the full inheritance of the father. Paul speaks of sons of God to celebrate the beautiful reality of adoption into God’s family, namely, that as a daughter of God, you have equal standing in the father’s house. All the children are sons, even when they are daughters.

2. Live as sons (in the assurance of the Spirit), vv. 15–17

Look with me again at the rest of the verses in our passage.

15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

That word of Abba denotes tenderness and intimacy. I don’t think pastors have been wrong equating Abba with our name Daddy. One pastor said, “I don’t feel respected if my children call me Dr. Ortlund. I feel put off” (Ray Ortlund, “God’s Grace Is Better Than We Think” from Romans 8:12–16,” March 30, 2019). In the same way, my children don’t call me Reverend Vrbicek. They call me Daddy.

In the gospels we read of Jesus one time speaking to his Father as “Abba Father.” Do you know the context? Let me read it to you.

32 And they went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” 33 And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. 34 And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” 35 And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. 36 And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:32–36)

The word Abba was squeezed out of Jesus during his greatest moments of suffering. Think about that. When our savior suffered, that’s when he cries, “Daddy!” That context should inform what we read here in Romans.

In contemporary, western Christianity we often have the assumption that we know our sonship best when we feel the most blessed. That’s not what this passage says, though. I’ll put it like this. We often assume as we stand in some alpine meadow with the sun shining and our bellies full and our bodies strong, we confidently cry out, “I am a child of God.” We’re joyful and triumphant.

But this cry of Abba Father is more like the helpless cry of a scared child in the dark who, rather than trying to find his own way out of the pain and rather than giving up in utter despair, instinctively shouts out “Daddy! Daddy! Are you there?”

That instinctive cry for Dad is not actually according to this passage an instinct but the work of the Spirit within the child of God. This is the deeper joy and gritty triumph of Romans 8.

When I first received my driver’s license in high school I was a pretty bad driver. I admit it. The number of my accidents reached the double digits. Most were at low speed and in parking lots, but one was not. It was an early Saturday morning in the spring. The roads were wet, and before you exit the highway you round a huge curve. The tires on my minivan slipped, the van fishtailed and scraped the guardrail. I stopped in the grass and got out. The headlight on the passenger side dangled like a detached eyeball. It was like someone took a knife in the side of the van and slashed.

I got back in, drove to the exit, and the other two minutes it took to get to the high school parking lot. I parked as far away as I could so no one would see. I was on the way to a track meet and had to catch the bus. In the locker room I called home to tell my father. We didn’t have cell phones. I remember staring at the red brick wall wondering what he would say. “Dad, I messed up,” and told him what happened. His first words were not, “You stupid son. How many times have we told you?” Instead, he said, “Are you okay?”

You can’t manipulate your impulses; they just sort of get squeezed out. When I whispered Daddy, love and care and concern squeezed out. He told me to get on the bus and we’d deal with it later. So I did. On the way out of the school campus, the bus full of my teammates drove by my minivan, and everyone laughed at me. But I knew my father loved me.

Conclusion

After Jesus was resurrected, he had numerous conversations with his disciples. In Luke 24, we read of Jesus speaking about how suffering comes before glory.

44 Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead . . . (Luke 24:44–46)

For Jesus, the truest Son of God, suffering came before glory. This is what Paul says of us too.

16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

If children, then heirs, Paul says. I don’t know what suffering you’re experiencing. I don’t know if you’re in high school, and everyone is laughing at you. I don’t know if slaying your sin is more difficult than you ever could have imagined. I don’t know if your parents divorced when you were twelve, and you’ve never had a Christmas as a complete family since. But I do know, that if you are a child, you are an heir. His inheritance becomes your inheritance. And if you are a child with a full inheritance coming, you can call God, Abba Father whenever you need him.

Prayer

Pray with me as the music team returns to lead us in our final song. Let’s pray . . .

The Doctrine of Christian Living: EFCA Ordination (Part 8 of 11)

For the last few months, I’ve been writing about my ordination process in the Evangelical Free Church of America. If you’d like to read about what the process looks like, check out the first post in the series (here). Throughout the autumn, I’ll occasionally share the remaining sections of my ordination paper, which engages with our denomination’s 10-point statement of faith. This week’s post is from the section on the Christian living. I know these posts are dense. Please hang with me through a few more.

Thank you for the prayers and encouragement along the way,
Benjamin

{Previous posts in this series: God, The Bible, The Human Condition, Jesus, The Work of Christ, The Holy Spirit, The Church}

*     *     *

Christian Living

8. We believe that God’s justifying grace must not be separated from His sanctifying power and purpose. God commands us to love Him supremely and others sacrificially, and to live out our faith with care for one another, compassion toward the poor and justice for the oppressed. With God’s Word, the Spirit’s power, and fervent prayer in Christ’s name, we are to combat the spiritual forces of evil. In obedience to Christ’s commission, we are to make disciples among all people, always bearing witness to the gospel in word and deed.

Speaking in systematic theological terms, sanctification is the process of becoming more and more holy (Jn 17:17; Rm 6:11ff; Eph 2:10; 1 Thes 4:3; Heb 12:1). The Bible closely links “God’s justifying grace” and “His sanctifying power” in this way: God’s action of justification invariably leads to and produces sanctification, a cooperative endeavor by both God and the person. When God justifies a person, the process of change must begin (Jam 2:17–26). This change is not without setbacks, but one day, God will complete what he began (Phil 1:6). Hallelujah. The process of change varies in people: sometimes it seems nearly instantaneous in one specific area of life, and other times change plods along slowly, incrementally—two steps forward, one step back. The Lord surely has his reasons for the relative slowness and rapidity of sanctification, perhaps just fast enough so we trust he’s still working but not so quick that we get cocky. With all of his riches, Jacob’s limp wasn’t a bad thing for him; it assuaged his swagger.

When we say, “live out our faith,” we mean the deepening of a Christian’s trust in the promises of God that leads to increasing, joyful obedience. We can call this “works,” which is what Paul calls it in Ephesians 2:10. Faith alone saves, but the faith that saves never stays stagnant. In fact, Scripture is clear that final salvation requires good works—works produced by grace through faith but works nonetheless (Jn 5:28–29; Rm 8:12–14; Gal 5:21–24; 6:8–10; Heb 10:36; Jam 1:26; 1 Jn 1:7; and many, many others). To just highlight one aspect of our obedience, Christians should do good to everyone but especially those of the household of faith (Gal 6:10), which is not unlike the requirements for eldership which specify that if a person cannot care for his own household, something is wrong.

While all true believers are eternally secure, the feeling of assurance is not static. A believer’s assurance to whether he or she is a genuine believer fluctuates for a host of reasons, and progress in sanctification is one of them. When a believer lives out her faith in humble, joyful obedience, she should be encouraged that she is indeed a believer and that all the promises in the gospel are hers. A Christian in overt disobedience—what the OT sometimes calls high-handed or defiant sins (Num 15:30)—might feel very assured of his own salvation, but we might better label his assurance as false assurance. John addresses the topic of assurance extensively in 1 John 3, in which there seem to be two related components: an ethical part of assurance related to a believer’s obedience and a mystical, spiritual part that comes through the voice of the Spirit (esp. v. 24).

Jesus spoke of the greatest commandment as loving God and the second as loving our neighbor (Mt 22:37–39). We see this pattern reflected in the Decalogue (Ex 20; Dt 5). To love anything more than God, even good things such as one’s family and ministry, involves elevating a good thing to the place of God, which is idolatry. Yet when we love God rightly and preeminently, we will also love the things he loves. And because God’s own passions are committed to the poor and oppressed (Dt 10:18; Ps 140:12; Lk 4:18), the people of God ought to be characterized by these same passions—passions that translate to merciful gospel witness in both word and deed (Dt 15:11; Prov 31:8–9; Amos; Micah 6:8; Mt 23:23). In this way, each local church ought to be an oasis of compassion and an incubator of people zealous for justice as we extend the gospel and make disciples among all people, teaching them to observe all that Jesus commanded (Mt 28:19–20). I spend a significant amount of time discipling men who, Lord willing, will spend their lives discipling others into deeper understanding of what it means to follow God in the home, church, and world—that is, walking with God both when everyone is watching and when no one is watching.

We should not neglect the implications of the gospel’s cosmic aim to restore all things, which includes social order, but neither should we conflate the proclamation of the gospel to simply doing good things. People changed by the gospel will do things like volunteer in a crisis pregnancy center and oppose local laws that might hurt the poor and minorities. Yet the gospel is not volunteering or lobbying, though it produces good works as a tree grows fruit.

Because God calls us to reach all people (1 Thes 3:12), ministry in general and churches in particular will always be messy. Sermons will be too long for some and too short for others. Worship music will be too expressive for some and too stuffy for others. Some will wrongly become dogmatic about secondary matters and squelch fragile unity and opportunities to build bridges. And that’s all just within the church. With all these varying maturities, backgrounds, temperaments, races, ethnicities, and economic statuses, Christians reaching non-Christians will certainly also be messy. It was in the book of Acts. But diverse people rallying around the cross of Christ glorifies God in ways monolithic uniformity does not. For if God has seen fit to unite the two oft-opposed groups of Jew and Gentiles together in one body through the cross, then we should certainly seek the same sort of unity.

When speaking of various types of diversity, it is also helpful to point out what we don’t mean. Sometimes when Christians speak of faith, we mean the faith as in an established body of doctrine (cf. 2 Thes 3:2 in the Greek, hē pistis). Jude wrote about “common salvation” and contending “for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (v. 3). These phrases become meaningless if Christianity were infinitely malleable. Yes, the Christian faith has aspects of mystery, but the Christian faith cannot be all mystery lest there be nothing to call the Christian faith once-for-all-delivered.

In evangelism, discipleship, and the advancement of God’s kingdom, there will always be opposition. Of this we are warned (Mt 10:16ff; 2 Tim 3:12; 1 Pet 5:8). Our ability to discern the exact makeup of the opposition—whether the world, flesh, or devil (1 Jn 2:15–18)—is often difficult. The categories mingle. Yet God has appointed means, or we might say weaponry, for service in the battle. These means are many and varied, but we can correctly subsume them under three larger categories: God’s Word, the Spirit’s power, and prayer in Christ’s name, by which I mean prayer consistent with the will of Christ and prayed in his authority through our union with Christ (2 Cor 10:3–5; Eph 6:11; 2 Tim 4:7).

Discussion Questions (created by the EFCA)

Relationship Between Justifying Grace and Sanctifying Power and Purpose

1.  How do you understand the doctrine of sanctification? How is it related to justification?

2.  What is the purpose and function of “works” in the life of the believer?

3.  What is the relationship between a believer’s sanctification and assurance?

Great Commandment

4.  Why is love for God preeminent and why is this at the heart of understanding the Ten Commandments and is considered the first and greatest commandment of the whole of the Christian life? How does this relate to other gods and idolatry?

5.  How does our preeminent love for God (and God’s prior love of us) serve as the basis for our love for others? Is there an importance to this order?

Living Out Our Faith

6.  Why is it important to distinguish between “the faith” understood as a body of truth and “faith” understood as the way in which one lives, viz. having been justified by faith, we live by faith?

7.  Living out our faith begins with “the household of faith,” which is evidenced in “care for one another.” Why is this important?

8.  What is the biblical teaching of “the poor” and “the oppressed?”

9.  How do you understand the local church’s responsibility and role in the world, particularly ministering with compassion and justice?

Combating Spiritual Forces of Evil

10.  What is spiritual warfare? How should we combat the spiritual forces of evil?

Christ’s Commission to Make Disciples

11.  What is the importance of the command to “make disciples” and what are the God-ordained means of doing that?

12.  The scope of this ministry is “all people.” Support this biblically and explain the importance and practical outworking of this in the local church.

13.  Why is it important to distinguish between the gospel and the entailments of the gospel? How does the gospel relate to deeds of mercy and compassion? What are the implications of equating them (e.g. the social gospel), and what are the implications of creating an absolute disjunction between them?

14.  We are always to bear witness to the gospel in both proclamation (“in word”) and in life (“in deed”)? Give examples of how we can witness to the gospel “in…deed.”

* Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

Pillars of Corrugated Cardboard: Reflections on Ministry from Tony Reinke

Last week Tony Reinke, one of my favorite authors, posted on social media some reflections on Christian ministry (Instagram, Twitter). The theme of his observations is that for Christian ministry to be Christian, it must be about Christ not the minister and ministry.

Reinke didn’t necessarily write to have his comments shared far and wide, but with his permission I wanted to post his reflections here to help them reach a few more people.*

A few thoughts on ministry. As voices for the gospel, we must never allow our ministry output to become our identity, something that gets talked about more and more these days — thankfully —a hard awakening we all need to experience at least once.

But here’s why we need this path in the first place. It’s too easy to allow our “faith” to devolve into a mere expediency, a means to get or maintain ministry prominence. As personal faith wanes, platform and paychecks can prove powerful to prop up a façade for a hollowed heart. Eventually when the job evaporates or the platform declines or the money stops, all semblances of the “faith” will crash, too. Very often this same heart will reflexively turn against the very doctrines, denominations, publishers, etc. once used like duct tape to keep the façade up.

The takeaways:

(1) Don’t be shocked when prominent Christian leaders, who seemed to be so strong and stable for so many years, fall away from major doctrinal convictions or even from the faith itself. Apostasy will increase, not decrease (2 Tim. 4:3–4). And the most inauthentic heart motives for why ministers “believe” can be very complexly masked by a host of worldly perks.

(2) Pray for your leaders. Pray for the authenticity of their doctrine and faith and marriages. Pray that prominent leaders who do fall away, and who maybe are just now confronting the hypocrisy of their own faith, would be restored to Christ through a real and robust faith, a faith that rests on nothing else than the beauty and worth of Christ himself.

(3) For all of us, we must never allow our personal trust in Christ to subtly become replaced by pillars of corrugated cardboard — public affirmation, a paycheck, book sales, or popularity within a movement, church, or organization. We must treasure Christ above all other things, because one day, whether in this life or when we stand before God, all those other things will disappear. And in that moment our faith in Christ will be called on to stand alone, naked, unsupported by popularity or paychecks.

I love this writing. Note the lyricism in “platform and paychecks can prove powerful to prop . . .” and the use of concrete, earthy images like hollowed heart, duct tape, and corrugated cardboard.

But most of all, I appreciate the conviction these thoughts bring. I am in fulltime vocational Christian ministry, which means to some extent my paycheck comes through my performance. That’s not wrong, but it is dangerous for a minister’s soul.

May we all desire most in our hearts what John the Baptist said of Jesus—that “he must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30)—because on the day God unveils forever and we stand stripped of ministry trinkets and public accolades, both of us will: Christ will increase, and we will decrease.

* As I moved Reinke’s words from a tweet to a blog post, I made a few tiny formatting changes.

** Photo by Alfonso Navarro on Unsplash

Related Posts

Enduring Grace: Introduction

My friend Stephen Morefield and I recently published a devotional book, which we titled Enduring Grace: 21 Days with The Apostle Peter. It’s a self-published book mostly for local distribution at our churches. Stephen pastors in Kansas, and I’m in Pennsylvania. But we tried to write the devotional in such a way that it could bless a wider audience. We’ve been praying it does.

Here’s the introduction to the book. We’d love for you to consider picking up a copy.

*     *     *

There were only a handful of people who got a front row view of Jesus’ entire earthly ministry. Of these, perhaps none heard, saw, or experienced more than the fisherman Peter. We speak of disciples as those who follow Jesus, and Peter did that literally—for three years. As Peter followed Jesus, he saw miracles performed, heard truth spoken, and even read what Jesus wrote in the dirt. He studied the Scriptures under Jesus and saw the brilliant white glory of heaven surround Jesus. Peter walked on water after him, shared meals with him, and spoke with men he had raised from the dead. Who wouldn’t want to hear of Peter’s experiences with the Savior?

Buy on Amazon

Not only did Peter share in a wide variety of moments with Jesus, but he also responded to Jesus in a wide variety of ways. With cowardice and cursing, he denied Jesus before the resurrection. Bold and confident, Peter preached Jesus after the resurrection. Up and down, down and up, Peter went. Two steps forward, one step—or sometimes three steps—back, Peter was not a detached observer. He was an intimately growing, struggling, and broken yet redeemed man who learned that the depth of his sin was very deep but that the Savior’s love was deeper still. And through it all, the grace of Jesus toward Peter endured, which means that in the end, by the very same grace, Peter endured. Indeed, no matter where you stand before Jesus at this moment, you should be able to relate to Peter’s story. In our faith and doubt, courage and fear, obedience and failure, growth and stagnation (or even backtracking), Peter’s witness gives us hope that Jesus really is a friend of sinners and mighty to save.

What you’ll find in the rest of these pages is a back and forth journey following the Savior through the eyes of Peter. We’ve grouped themes together as best as we could, but that means the chapters will not strictly follow Peter’s life chronologically. Instead we’ll jump between Peter’s life, which is presented to us in the Gospels and the book of Acts, and his teachings, which we have in the two letters he wrote (1 & 2 Peter). In each chapter you’ll find the Scripture we’ll study for the assigned day, our teaching on that passage, and then relevant application questions to knead the Savior’s grace into all parts of our lives.

Here are a few more things to consider before you start the journey. In an effort to combine style and personality, we, Stephen and Benjamin, have not indicated which chapters we’ve each written. When a particular story necessitates it, we indicate the writer, but otherwise we will allow the prose to blend without distinction.

Now, how to read this book? The structure sets itself up to be read as a 21-day devotional. That being said, you can also slow down and tackle the book at whatever pace suits you. There’s no need to hurry. Likewise, chapters can be grouped together, should you use the book in a Bible study or small group. Whatever method you choose, we do encourage you to slow down enough to read the Scripture before our teaching. It’s difficult to rest in the Savior’s grace while racing from page to page. And resting daily in his grace is a large part of what helps us endure in his grace.

* Photo by Frances Gunn on Unsplash

Enduring Grace: Praise for Tom Reidy

My friend Stephen Morefield and I recently published a devotional book, which we titled Enduring Grace: 21 Days with The Apostle Peter. It’s a self-published book mostly for local distribution at our churches. Stephen pastors in Kansas, and I’m in Pennsylvania. But we tried to write the devotional in such a way that it could bless a wider audience. We’ve been praying it does.

I’ll tell you more about the book next week. This week I want to tell you about Tom Reidy. I dedicated the book to him, writing on the dedication page,

To Tom Reidy,
your prayers and encouragement buoy
my ministry in more ways than I’ll ever know.

We Need More Eulogies

View fullsize

Recently at our church here in Harrisburg, my copastor Jason felt called to another church. As we celebrated the many ways the Lord used him and his family over seven years of ministry, one of our leaders used the phrase “eulogize.” Of course a few jokes ensued that Jason was not dead yet, so the eulogies were premature. . . unless, so the joke went, we knew something Jason did not.

But our leader who did the eulogizing pointed out that to eulogize someone is simply to say in public something nice about another person, and it’s unfortunate in our culture that nearly the only time we do this is after a person has died. So we spent some time praising God for Jason’s ministry.

I’d like to spend some time praising God for Tom Reidy’s ministry. I even wanted to subtitle this post, “A Eulogy for Tom Reidy” rather than “Praise for Tom Reidy” but feared what would happen as people shared this post online. I didn’t want Tom to have to say what Mark Twain once purportedly had to say: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

I also hope that in the process of eulogizing my not-dead friend, I might encourage others of the truth in a verse such as 1 Corinthians 15:58, which says that because Jesus has risen, no labor in the Lord is done in vain. At times you might feel as though resurrection, gospel ministry done for God’s glory was a waste, but it’s never a waste. Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for he has risen—he has risen indeed.

Breakfast Burritos at the Golden Arches

I met Tom twelve years ago at Salem Evangelical Free Church in St. Louis. My wife and I and our young family attended Salem while I studied at Covenant Theological Seminary and worked as an engineer for a construction company.

Tom retired a few years ago, but he spent his whole career working for a large aerospace and defense contractor. I mention this because our first meaningful interaction was related to this. I can’t be certain how the topic came up, but somehow warfare and bombs were discussed in a men’s Bible study. Tom and I seemed to connect well, and we set up a breakfast date at McDonald’s to talk about the ethics of weapons of mass destruction. Tom had “top secret” clearance, so I never really knew much about the specifics of his work. He could have told me, but then he would have had to kill me.

We had dozens and dozens of breakfast burritos over the years, sometimes discussing what it meant to be a Christian employee, sometimes discussing how we might better love our wives and children, sometimes how to better love our church, sometimes what we were learning in the Bible, sometimes a tricky aspect of theology like election and God’s sovereignty, and sometimes—perhaps often—the struggles in our lives. Then we’d pray for each other and head off to work. I can’t know how many days and weeks were altered for the better because of those discussions and prayers, but without any cliché, if we had the eyes of God to see everything, I’m sure those meetings could rightly be called life-changing.

Affirming the Call of God

My first sizable writing project was called, A Short Study of The Bible, Homosexuality, and Culture: Helping Christians Navigate the Issues. The booklet was a 6-week Sunday school for local churches that swelled to 30k words. Tom constantly encouraged me as I wrote. Today, I’d never show the booklet to anyone because the writing is so poor. But yet, Tom encouraged me. He told me to keep working on it. He prayed for me. He didn’t even complain when I taught the study at our church and made seventy-year-old church ladies discuss Lady Gaga’s hit “Born This Way.”

And this highlights a significant theme in Tom’s ministry to me and many others: seeing potential in seedlings.

Enduring Grace

Buy on Amazon

For the last eight years of full-time pastoral ministry, I’m not sure if Tom has skipped listening to a single sermon of mine. I don’t know anyone else who could say that. My wife even occasionally misses my sermons when volunteering in the nursery or when one of our children is sick. But not Tom.

A short email arrives in my inbox every Monday or Tuesday morning the week after I preach telling me what moved him in the sermon. And it’s not just that. Though he lives in St. Louis, he keeps up with our church preaching calendar and knows when I’m up to preach, often sending a text in the middle of the week asking how goes the sermon and what ways he can pray for me. It’s Wednesday morning as I’m editing this paragraph, and he literally just texted me “How’s the sermon coming along?” And my bookshelf at church has at least a dozen books he’s sent me from my favorite authors. It’s fair to say that I know no one like Tom.

I’ve gushed thanksgiving before about Salem Church (here). We even named our youngest child Salem because of the love of Christ we experienced there, which were formative years for my marriage and ministry. But a large part of what made Salem Salem, was Tom. God’s grace to me through Tom has endured in ways I could not have imagined, which is why this book is for him. His labor has not been in vain.

It’s true I need to write more books so I can dedicate them to more people. So many have done so much for me. My parents, wife, and children are yet to have a book dedicated to them. Lord willing, I’ll remedy these oversights in the coming years. But today is about Tom.

Thank you, Tom, for your prayerful, encouragement to me. You and I will never know all the ways you’ve made a difference.

Is It Easy for You to Say “Wait”? MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he’d have just celebrated his ninetieth birthday. But of course he’s not alive. What he lived for got him killed.

I spent some time reflecting on this yesterday, the day we as a nation set apart to remember his legacy and the causes he advanced and those that still linger. I also took some time in the morning to read Letter from a Birmingham Jail, though near the end of the letter King wryly notes his “letter” is closer to a book than a letter because of its length. The title communicates some of the setting of the letter, but it’s also important to know that the letter is a response to several white clergymen, that is, men who, like me, work in full-time ministry.

While in jail, someone gave King the criticism of the clergy, which had been published in a newspaper. King notes in the letter that he seldom took time to respond to criticism because, he writes, “If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work.”

Buy on Amazon

But because of the nature of the criticism and who wrote it, and perhaps because of the time afforded to him in jail, King responded. And what a response it was. Many thoughts from the letter pricked my conscience, but below was one of the more arresting paragraphs. In poignant language, King is responding to the criticism that his actions are not “well-timed” and that, if he could only “wait,” he might have a more sympathetic audience. Yet saying “wait,” as King notes, is pretty easily done by those who “have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.”

I pray that if you have not suffered the disease of segregation—as I certainly have not—King’s words will sober you, as they did to me. I also have a six-year-old daughter, and I can’t imagine telling her she’s not allowed at Hershey Park, the amusement park near my house, because of her skin color.

We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother and are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963)

* Photo by Brian Kraus on Unsplash